Web 2.0

Customer feedback management: Is anybody listening?

I recently made my first big purchase — a new vehicle — and I made my mind up pretty much before I entered the showroom floor, thanks to customer feedback I gathered on the Internet. What surprised me when I went to test drive my dream SUV was the lack of customer feedback management being done by the car dealers and makers.

I went to Consumer Reports and Edmunds to compare safety ratings, highway miles per gallon, handling and longevity, but my list of choices was narrowed down much further by comments made at the end of the reviews by current and former drivers.

I was sure I was going to buy one particular SUV but found repeated complaints about its small back window that caused huge blind spots. Another one on my list had a souped-up engine [based on customer feedback] but left the gas tank the same size, leading to another customer complaint that still hasn’t been addressed: frequent fill-ups.

I was overloaded by all the different complaints and accolades made by drivers, but when I asked the salespeople about the customer feedback I read on blogs and reviews I heard “I haven’t heard that” or “No one’s told me that.”

I don’t lay the blame on the salespeople — they might not even be encouraged to look at what people are saying on public forums like blogs, Twitter, Facebook, emails or YouTube.

But who is responsible for customer feedback management? The feet on the street, or management? How do you centralize all this information, and distribute it so front-line employees are on top of what customers are saying and equipped to respond?

Was my experience atypical, or are companies ignoring a channel that may decide what people actually buy? Are they paralyzed by some of the critiques, and choosing to ignore them instead?

This is just the experience I had when looking for an SUV. I won’t even go into how the dealer dropped the ball when it came to rating my buying experience.

Share your thoughts on customer feedback management, or the lack of it — but particularly if you work for a company that does it well. Email me at ctorode@techtarget.com.

UMD CIO Forum highlights the role of IT innovation, Web 2.0 potential

Last week at the University of Maryland’s 10th Annual CIO Forum, a succession of CIOs from the government, health care and publishing industries described how they are harnessing IT innovation with limited resources during the recession. The featured speakers also discussed what they see as the future of Web 2.0 in the business.

Bipin Patel, CIO of ProQuest, spoke to the audience about the ways that Web 2.0 is changing business and usage patterns at his company. As he observed, “the inflection point [for Web 2.0] has been met and passed. The old model of publishing is gone.” So, what has replaced it? “The users themselves – the researchers – are creating information and reacting with each other,” he said. “They are the publishers now.” They’re working collaboratively with their community to identify and feature useful information. As part of his company’s Web 2.0 efforts, Patel’s team has created an online community for graduate students, where they can publish their dissertations for public view. The online community, called GradShare, has been rolled out in about 30 schools.

Premal Shah, formerly of PayPal and now the president of Kiva, offered another example of how to leverage Web 2.0. He described how the “eBay for microfinance,” as he put it, has leveraged Web 2.0 to both sustain innovation and build out features that Kiva’s resources could not provide. Kiva has grown rapidly since its founding and now has made more than $100 million in loans from more than 600,000 people, with 103 microfinance partners globally. Shah said the microcredit model is working, citing a 98% repayment rate for Kiva loans, and that transparency in results is crucial to success. “Imperfect credit is OK, but imperfect data is not OK,” he said. “The donors of the world want transparency.”

”Radical transparency,” in fact, was one of three Web 2.0 principles that Shah listed, along with providing an addictive user experience and crowdsourcing against constraints. Since engineering resources were scarce for IT innovation, Kiva opened up its API to crowdsource development. As a result, Kivadata.org is online. Shah said that Kiva now also has about 500 volunteers that work as “virtual translators,” helping to translate profiles so that their projects can get funded.

Shah also offered advice on growing Web 2.0 communities: identity the influencers and power users. “Cater to your addicts,” said Shah. “Keep short feedback loops.”

Douglas Abel, CIO of Anne Arundel Health System, focused his remarks on how to manage growing demand for health care at a new health care campus in downtown Annapolis. He’s seen success using targeted IT innovation, like bar-coding medicine at the bedside to “check to see if it’s the right patient, right dose.” Now, as electronic healthcare records (EHRs) enter the system, he says the effectiveness of sharing data depends on standards, identifying bad data and avoiding duplicate records. Should his efforts succeed, Bell said that Anne Arundel Health System will be in the top 10% of automated hospitals. “It’s about building an infrastructure that’s patient-centric,” he said, “not venue-centric.”

Web platforms for health care information exchange are growing outside of major hospital systems. David Horrocks, former CIO and president of CRISP, discussed the ways that he’s building out Maryland’s statewide health information exchange and maintaining privacy. CRISP is Maryland’s statewide health information exchange, which moves clinical information electronically among disparate health information systems.

New models for IT innovation in telemedicine also are also emerging. Dr. Sean Khozin presented on Hello Health, a pilot practice in New York that uses a Web-based platform for primary health care. Hello Health requires an in-person initial checkup, after which virtual follow-ups use telemedicine, unified communications and EHRs.

Eureka — Using Twitter to end information overload

An end to information overload may be in sight. Call me late to the party (or perhaps naïve!), but I think I’m starting to make social media work for me, and not in the way you might think.

This is what I’m talking about:

Now if only I could find a way to get my LinkedIn updates, Gmail and other sundry faves from across the Web together in a similar fashion, I’d be even more efficient, informed and responsive than I am now. Yes, really using Twitter “right” (for networking, relationship building and so on) requires more than I’m giving it, but for now this approach fits my reality and my needs. I highly recommend it.

Gen X, not Gen Y, leads adoption of social technologies in workplace

CIOs should look to Generation X, not Generation Y, to be the early adopters of new and social technologies within their organization. Contrary to what you’d think, Generation X workers (roughly those ages 28 to 48) read blogs, participate in discussion forums and wikis and listen to podcasts at work more than Generation Y.

These were just some of the results from Forrester’s Workforce Technographics Survey, released yesterday at their Business Technology Forum in Chicago.

The survey showed that although 59% of the Gen Y (18- to 29-year-old) professionals use social technologies at home, only 14% use them in the workplace. Social media is not as much a generational thing as most people think, according to Ted Schadler, vice president and principal analyst at Forrester.

“Generation X is just better at problem solving and using their experience and authority,” said Schadler, the lead author of the report. “And using social technology to solve a business problem should be the first priority.”

The report surveyed 2,000 information workers — any type of employee who uses a computer or connected device to do his or her job — from companies with 100 or more employees.

One other point that came through was that users were not as advanced in terms of social technologies as we think. Only one in four workers uses instant messaging or Web conferencing, and one in 10 has and uses a smartphone.

So, what does all this information mean to the CIO? This type of quantitative assessment gives CIOs and IT professionals the tools to make better investment decisions. CIOs should apply these findings to benchmark their own technology adoption and satisfaction and develop a measurable strategy for adopting new technology that users want and use, and that will add the most value to the business.

Twitter for business: A help or a hassle at IT conferences?

I’m still reflecting on last week’s MIT Sloan CIO Symposium, where my colleagues and I gathered a lot of good information on CIO leadership, IT outsourcing, health care, CIO innovation and more — and where some of us used Twitter for business to share, in real time, some of what we were hearing.

As I live-Tweeted and followed others via the #MITCIO hash tag, I have to say there were upsides and downsides to using Twitter for business. I’m used to taking extensive notes at conferences, but with live-Tweeting I felt the margin for error was greater — not only for typos, but also for failing to provide crucial context for a quote. And I know that I was more likely to miss that context as I was typing out Tweets – context that I would almost certainly capture when taking notes the old-fashioned way. On the other hand, I gathered a lot of Twitter followers relevant to my work, and now have the opportunity to follow and learn from them, as well.

My colleague Kristen Caretta, who has blogged about the using Twitter as a business tool and live-Tweeted from last week’s Forrester IT Forum, felt the same way.

We did find live-Tweeting to be helpful for capturing and sharing sound bites — but did you?

Here are some of my favorite quotes from the MIT event (with full speaker titles added, since the darn 140-character limit didn’t allow for them as I Tweeted them):

“Just because a CEO carries a BlackBerry, he/she doesn’t necessarily get technology. CIOs must show how investment pays off.” — Jim Champy, chairman of consulting, Perot Systems Corp.

“Innovation is easy — it’s called continual improvement.” Look to process improvement, not big infrastructure change. — Alan Trefler, CEO, Pegasystems

“I don’t see cloud computing as a game changer for big companies. … They have to clean up infrastructure [first].” — Jeanne Ross, director, MIT’s Center for Information Systems Research

Don’t waste recession: “Hopefully, 10 years from now, we’ll look back and call this ‘The Great Restructuring.’” — Erik Brynjolfsson, Schussel professor of management and director of the MIT Center for Digital Business

“We’ve been talking a lot about cloud computing here. Maybe the next big thing is crowd computing.” — Tom Malone, Patrick J. McGovern professor of management and director of the MIT Center for Collective Intelligence

So — do you find these Tweets useful or engaging? Does using Twitter — either as a Tweeter or a follower — enrich your understanding of a conference while you are there? Do you follow individuals’ Twitter feeds or conference hashtags when you’re not in attendance? Or would you rather that we bring you fuller coverage after the fact?

Academics at MIT CIO Symposium advise on innovation, future of IT

CIOs look to the MIT CIO Symposium for information on management, technology and innovation. Those in attendance at the academic panel held in Kresge Auditorium in Cambridge, Mass., enjoyed a healthy helping of all three, as distinguished researchers from MIT’s business centers offered ample insight into how successful organizations leverage technology to increase innovation and profit. Over the course of the hour, the audience heard about the power of collective thinking, the impact of Web 2.0 tools behind the firewall and the methodologies for innovation that have served to differentiate IT giants like Google from their competitors.

[From left to right: Prof. Erik Brynjolfsson, Gary Beach, Prof. Thomas Malone, Dr. Jeanne Ross]

The moderator for the panel, publisher emeritus of CIO magazine Gary Beach, didn’t waste any time, asking each academic what “the next big thing” in IT was. Professor Thomas Malone, Director of MIT’s Center for Collective Intelligence, noted immediately that the “elephant on the table is cloud computing.” In his opinion, “It may well be the next being thing in the hardware progression.” He chose, however, to focus on the power of collective intelligence.

His choice may not be surprising, given his research, but his coinage of the term crowd computing to describe distributed online collective intelligence turned to solving problems drew appreciative chuckles from the crowd. In Malone’s view, the answers of the many, or so-called “wisdom of the crowds,” is a powerful tool for organizations seeking answers to tough questions. Malone noted Twitter and Innocentive as two examples of the concept.

Dr. Jeanne Ross from MIT’s Center for Information Systems Research (CISR) chose to focus on the digitization of organizational resources, stating that in her view, only “about 2% of global companies have nailed the concept of a digitized platform.” She said here are two things IT does well: standardizing and integrating business processes. Organizations of all types will gain the most from their IT investments by focusing in these areas.

Professor Erik Brynjolfsson, author of the forthcoming Wired for Innovation: How Information Technology is Reshaping the Economy, sees opportunity in the downturn. As he noted, “the lion’s share of Fortune 500 companies were founded in earlier economic disruptions.” Brynjolfsson calls today’s recession the “great restructuring.” In that trend, he sees three key elements: Experimentation, measurement and scale

Each of these elements is substantially enabled by innovations in information technology, like A/B testing, Web and data analytics and cloud computing or enterprise resource planning systems. Brynjolfsson provided a bottom-line example of how such methodologies can result in increased profitability, noting that “Yahoo only makes 16% as much per page served as Google with the same underlying technology. Why? Scale.”

Brynjolfsson suggested to the CIOs in the audience that they push for experiments, measure and validate them in order to rapidly adopt the innovation, replicate it and then scale it. “Experiments aren’t an excuse to validate preconceived notions,” Brynjolffsson was quick to note. “That’s the wrong mentality. Leaders must approach experimenting with a genuinely open mind to see what works and what doesn’t.” Brynjolffson offered a CVS case study that he and Harvard Professor Andrew McAfee wrote in 2005 as an example. CVS created a pharmacy service improvement at one test location. Once the new process proved effective, CVS embedded the process into all of its IT system, replicating it to thousands of other locations.

Take his research with McAfee as another example. McAfee hypothesized that companies would become more similar over time as each organization enjoyed the benefits of improvements in information technology. What he and Brynjolfsson found was striking. When you compare leaders with laggards, over the past decade there has been a substantial growth in the gap. From the 1960s through the late 1990s, technology advancements benefited the nation’s companies in roughly the same amount.  Starting in the late 90s, however, there was a discernible shift to higher profitability in the top 25% of the nation’s corporations, particularly in more IT-intensive areas of economy. Increasing performance heterogeneity was a result that appeared to be closely correlated with IT - if not IT itself.

In other words , the results implied that companies were using information technology in a new way after the dot-com bubble, with the top echelon leveraging investments in ways that dramatically accelerated their growth and profitability in the new millennium.

When asked what CIOs and CEOs could invest in now for returns on investment in recessionary times, Brynjolfsson focused on so-called “Enterprise 2.0” technologies. In his view, blogs, wikis and enterprise microblogging quickly allow innovations to be discovered and amplified across the companies.

Black Friday: Shopping (online?) ’til you drop

If you’re reading this on Friday, I’m going to assume you’ve just returned from a harrowing Black Friday shopping experience at your nearest department store or mall. But it’s possible those days of waking up while it’s still dark and dashing off to the closest Kohl’s at 4 a.m. (or earlier) could become a relic of the past.

Online retailers are kicking up their websites in order to promote Black Friday deals, anticipating more visitors who might “map out” their shopping plans. Then, there’s the newer phenomenon known as Cyber Monday, where shoppers might turn online for holiday gifts after shopping ’til they dropped amidst the crowds this weekend.

Online shopping during the holidays (or Black Friday) is nothing new: About 10 years ago, I remember writing a column for my local newspaper about what was then a burgeoning trend. But, now, type Black Friday into Google and you’ll get more than 22 million hits. Clearly, the Web is a new destination for Black Friday shoppers, and beyond - I know I plan to hit up Overstock.com and eBay this holiday season.

According to this article on retailers and Black Friday in the Baltimore Sun, the creator of Blackfriday.info says that his website traffic has doubled in the past year, and he expects 5 million unique visitors this week, more than double the 2 million he received a year ago. The reason? It’s the economy, stupid: Blackfriday.info purveys coupons and Black Friday ads, offering visitors a better shot at bagging an early-morning bargain.

Five million unique visitors in a week, for a site that probably does very little Web traffic the rest of the year? Sounds like somebody must have stepped up his server system in the past year. Check out this post on e-commerce site crashes at the CIO Symmetry blog. (And, for a related story, check out this item on Texas A&M’s Aggies NCAA basketball program, and how the school prepared to handle a spike in traffic when the team played a big game on ESPN.)

I don’t mean to imply that the traditional Black Friday shopping rush is magically going to vanish one of these years. But more and more people are turning to the Web to shop. Especially since it might be tougher for people to part with their hard-earned paychecks this holiday season compared with those past, online retailers must respond with user-friendly websites that make browsing and purchasing a breeze.

Democracy via technology: Obama and the power of Web 2.0

I know I’m not alone in believing that it’s been fascinating to watch this year’s presidential election from a technology perspective. I have to keep up on Web-based advances as part of my job, but the Internet, obviously, is becoming very integral to the way my generation interacts with and learns about the world. When we at SearchCIO.com talk to CIOs about the power of Web 2.0 (and even Web 3.0), the Obama campaign should now be considered a bellwether for the movement.

As The New York Times pointed out, “the Obama campaign sought to understand and harness the Internet (and other forms of so-called new media) to organize supporters and to reach voters who no longer rely primarily on information from newspapers and television. The platforms included YouTube, which did not exist in 2004, and the cell phone text messages that the campaign was sending out to supporters on Monday to remind them to vote.”

And, according to Newsweek, “the Obama campaign’s New Media experts created a computer program that would allow a “flusher” - the term for a volunteer who rounds up nonvoters on Election Day - to know exactly who had, and had not, voted in real time. They dubbed it Project Houdini, because of the way names disappear off the list instantly once people are identified as they wait in line at their local polling station.”

I know I’m convinced by what I witnessed Tuesday. On Facebook, nearly everybody I know had status updates alluding to the election, many of them proclaiming proudly that they had already voted. Facebook had a running app throughout the day tallying the number of Facebookers who said they voted, and it reached more than 5 million. It was even pointed out to me that some election-day freebies many people jumped on, such as free coffee at Starbucks and free ice cream at Ben & Jerry’s, were by and large promoted electronically.

This emphasis on democracy via technology continued throughout the day. I received several texts and emails from friends encouraging me to vote. When Obama’s victory was announced around 11 p.m. EST, another round of text messages streamed in. 

The Obama campaign really seized on the modes of communication that will propel Americans - and particularly young voters - into the future. According to The Guardian out of England, Facebook is more popular than the BBC’s network of sites. I couldn’t find a similar survey in America comparing Facebook with, say, CNN.com, but I wouldn’t be surprised to see similar results.

As the AP points out, there were only a few hundred websites in existence when Bill Clinton assumed the presidency in 1993, and hardly any blogs when George W. Bush became president in 2001. The world has changed, and with it, the electorate has, too. Never again can a viable presidential candidate ignore the power of the Internet in an election.

And, thankfully, we’ve got at least a couple of years before any of them will have to start thinking about it again.

Online video’s next frontier

For all the YouTube addicts out there (myself included), there’s an interesting blog post on NYTimes.com this week about online-video attention spans. According to Saul Hansell, who attended a roundtable this week dedicated to online video, people are watching longer and longer video clips on their computers.

YouTube really kicked things off a couple of years ago. Hulu, which just celebrated its first birthday, served 142 million steams, including full television episodes and shorter clips, to 6.3 million users in September. And on Blip.tv, which aggregates semiprofessional and professional videos, the average length of a program has increased from three to five minutes a year ago to five to seven minutes now, said Mike Hudack, its chief executive.

The possibilities for online video continue to ramp up. I was introduced this week to Gaudi, Google’s experimental audio-indexing site. Gaudi allows users to search for specific phrases in video and presents search results listing the number of times that those words appear in the video. When you click on a video, you’ll even see time stamps noting where, exactly, the word is uttered. Wow. So far, this works with only election-related coverage, but it’s sure to branch out once Google works out any kinks.

So, what does all of this mean to the CIO? For starters, it means taking a fresh look at your company’s online strategy with regard to video. Conventional wisdom has dictated keeping video clips short and snappy so visitors don’t lose interest. However, as Hansell points out, online visitors have the option of perusing sites much like they would a newspaper, skipping items that don’t interest them and poring over those that do.

Is there a product your company would like to promote that is better conveyed through visuals and audio than .jpgs and text? Don’t be afraid to dedicate a good five or 10 minutes to that puppy (provided it’s well-produced), showing off its attributes, showing customers talking about it and demonstrating its uses in action. Yes, you might lose some eyeballs after the first minute or two, but the people who stick around for the full presentation? Probably more likely to be your real customers, anyway.

And when you script these videos, make sure you’re including the keyword phrases for which customers might be searching — it’s good practice and will mean you’re ahead of the game when this audio-indexing thing really takes off.

Three cheers for Web 3.0

Yesterday on SearchCIO.com, we ran a story I wrote about the burgeoning mashup of Web 2.0 technologies into something that’s being called Web 3.0. It’s based on the assumption that the next generation of the Web will require less searching on the part of users as advancing Web 2.0 innovations such as blogs, wikis and social networking forums push desired information straight to them. Check out this definition of Web 3.0 that was overheard in the tech blogosphere.

A friend sent me this article from The New York Times yesterday on a Google e-commerce effort that would allow YouTube users to buy digital goods from Apple’s iTunes store or Amazon.com, which I think is a move toward this Web 3.0 concept.

Remember how exciting it was to search a movie time on the Internet, rather than via the newspaper or a dial-up phone number? Within the next decade, it’s likely you’ll be able do the same search and receive not only movie times but also the locations closest to you, what your friends are seeing, what others in your social network thought of the film and where everybody is going to have dinner afterwards.

One of the speakers at MIT’s EmTech conference referred to Web 3.0 as “frothy,” and compared the “rush of innovation” to that which characterized what I guess we’d now call Web 1.0. It still amazes me what we’re able to find on the Web … it really has changed both my everyday life and the way in which I complete my work.

I’ll give you an example. As I was typing this post, my cell phone rang, and the out-of-area caller ID was a number I didn’t recognize. Before the phone had even stopped ringing, I had already searched the phone number in Google and come across this website that tracks suspicious phone numbers. Within seconds, I could see that several other Boston-area individuals had received calls from this number in the past hour, so I’d like to think I wisely ignored it.

For those interested in some related content, check out the definition of the Semantic Web, which ties into this Web 3.0 philosophy, as well as microformats, an open source data format.

Are you as excited about Web 3.0 as I am? Are these concepts that you are looking to implement into your company’s Web strategy?