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Ping Servers allow users to locate your blog more easily by updating search engines dedicated to blogs.To this end, there are two valuable services that allow you to expand your blog audience. The first is Ping-o-matic. This service is free, very easy to use and connects to many other ping servers and a real time saver. The other place to add your blog url to is the Google Blog Search. Since Google owns Blogger it is highly likely that Goggle is already indexing your site adequately.
Finally, it is good practice to use product or service specific words. Therefore, sales people and colleagues interested in these products or services will find you and want to chat or collaborate with you.
There are a number of services that allow enterprises to monitor what the blogosphere is saying about them, namely Nielsen Buzzmetrics - Blogpulse, Radian 6 - Radian6, Cymphony - Influence 2.0 and Techrigy - SM2. If you are looking for a global player your best bet is Nielsen Buzzmetrics, they have offices around the world.
I highly recommend the book titled Enterprise 2.0 Implementation from authors Newman and Thomas. This book covers not only the technology, but the cultural changes an enterprise must have to implement web 2.0 internally.
Some of the short-term goals an enterprise seeks to attain after implementing web 2.0 is a substantial reduction in intra-company email, greater communication with customers, greater collaboration among employees. Over the long term a company can achieve more product innovation from employee collaboration, improved recruitment faster sales cycles and increased customer retention. p.25-26. In terms of the short term goals, I would add a richer communication experience, because web 2.0 technologies facilitate the use of multi-media. In regards to long term goals an enterprise can also improve service innovation in addition to product innovation. There are several social networking vendors that serve the enterprise such as Awareness, IBM Lotus Connections, Jive Clearspace, Weblingo and Hive Live. p.52-53 & 203. The other option is to try multiple products and only implement the best component from each. For example, Clearspace has terrific Forums and personal profile features. Confluence is great for wikis. One thing that the author fails to mention is the differences between the user experience and the programmers experience. For example, Clearspace Jive software provides terrific user experience, but the backend capabilities are less comprehensive than Atlassian Confluence. The latter provides comprehensive development tools and plugins, but the user interface is much less appealing. In some cases, simply seeing a demo of the product is not enough for evaluating each vendor. The IT department will need to setup a pilot with each vendor and determine the benefits of each product based on the user experience and backend capabilities.At Cisco many vendors are used that provide the same feature sets, but are deployed in different areas of the business. The vendor that achieves the fastest and greatest adoption levels eventually wins the contract to deploy at the enterprise level. However, if there are more than one software solutions with high levels of adoption, then they continue to co-exist at Cisco. Having an SOA framework allows the company to integrate the services of multiple vendors into multiple legacy systems. The enterprise can reap the benefits of solution diversity with strengths and weaknesses playing out for each software solution. Unfortunately, a major drawback is that senior management is unable to see the entire picture rolled-up into one interface, because there are too many software solutions providing different information.
In short, Cisco is successful with its implementation of web 2.0, because it already has the building blocks in place, such as a service-oriented architecture (SOA) allowing legacy systems to inter-operate. The enterprise can create mashups using rich Internet applications (RIAs) and its legacy systems. The SOA allows information from legacy systems to become discoverable greatly increasing the information within them. Another key component is a rich employee directory that connects to web 2.0 applications. For example, a wiki using the teamphoto macro will show an employee photo and also link to the employee directory where LinkedIn style information is stored.
Attaching social information (such as tagging and voting) to existing enterprise data repositories improves the relevancy of information being searched and used. Another key building block to successful web 2.0 implementation is to have a master data set where the user has a single version of the truth from across a diverse set of applications and repositories. p.82
Some of the web standards to achieve this are Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) and Representational State transfer (REST). They allow the systems to become inter-operable and web 2.0 enabled. Another building block needed for successful web 2.0 implementation to to have search 2.0 capability. For example, search 2.0 includes search results with information from blogs, wikis and forums. In addition, the enterprise search has social tagging (folksonomy) added to the search results. Unless the information from blogs wikis and forums is searchable, their value is greatly reduced and user adoption of web 2.0 technologies will inevitably decline. p.81 The authors provide a short list of social bookmarking vendors, namely Scuttle (open-source), Cogenz and Connectbeam.p.142. Other open-source social networking software is available at vivalogo Implementing search 2.0 can be disruptive, because information that was once under tight control can become accessible to all. Therefore, is is a good approach to implement this technology in a phased approach and only target a functional area or division initially. p.114 Using specialized crawlers will allow the marking of information that is deemed too sensitive and remove it from the web 2.0 indexing and authentication. Source
Enterprise 2.0 Implementation, Aaron C. Newman & Jeremy Thomas, McGraw Hill Publ.,2008, ISBN 978-0-07-159160-7.
We are all aware of Amazon's sophisticated product recommendation engine based on a customer's previous behavior. What would happen if Amazon partnered with Google and was able to determine the entire behavior online? Therefore instead of just having data on an individual's purchasing behavior they have insight into their anxieties or dreams based on search patterns? Social networking sites are invading the privacy of their members using a combination of opt-in and/or opt-out principles without oversight. Members of these sites are aware of the attack on their privacy, but many are not.
However, there is a growing number of social networking users that are comfortable with greater openness and are comfortable with sharing their lives online. Some have realized that this information is now accessible to their employers and they sometimes lose hiring opportunities, because some of their personal behaviors displayed online is inappropriate for the employer. This is a growing concern, but for now is left unchecked. My biggest concern is a cataclysmic event, where the invasion and abuse of privacy is done on a large scale and users/consumers generate a backlash that affects all advertisers. A few years ago Google Earth raised some concerns concerning privacy when users of Google Earth could zoom in on people acting inapropriately. Another similar situation will be location awareness that comes with GPS and mobile devices. Today many online advertisers are sending ads that are location specific. This will raise similar ethical concerns as to the advertiser is aware that you are at a ball game when you should be at work. As more and more of our lives are done online, on mobile devices, on IPTV, YouTube and other emerging media, the more advertisers will peer into our lives with greater accuracy and effectiveness.So far, advertisers are experimenting with greater access to behavioral and social data online and creating better targeting. However, there are no checks and balances. The only way to stop an advertiser from abusing the use of personal information online is through grassroots awareness at the customer base of social networking sites. My fear is that it is only a matter of time before an unscrupulous marketer merges social networking information with a Google search and GPS information and create a mega database. Can our governments create a do not call list for an information system with tentacles into all parts of our online lives? Facebook was forced to change its policies regarding its beacon program, because of user backlash. In essence user awareness is what made a difference in the advertisers' behavior. I predict that a growing trend will emerge in the form of new digital privacy protectors. Several non-profit organizations will spring up with the main goal of providing simple social networks that are safe from invasive marketers. People will share their personal information in the form of blogs and videos, but access will be protected and through invitation only. Only non-profits will have the integrity that users seek to share their private information. Online stores will provide access to their products, but personal data will be scrubbed clean before leaving the social network to reach the online retailers. The non-profits will survive with government subsidies or subscription fees or the donation of a large foundation. This new web 2.0 model will occur probably within 10 years, but for the time being the wild west in advertising is upon us.
I recently read a book titled Web 2.0 Heroes from the author Bradley L. Jones. In it the author interviews 20 influential people of Web 2.0 properties. I think the most useful property for the enterprise would be Linked-In. Their vision for the future is very practical an useful for large companies.
They have a two part strategy for using APIs. The first part allows users to access their LinkedIn network anywhere on the web and leverage this information. "On Business Week you'll be able to access your linked-in network, find out who you know in that company or how many degrees away you are from someone you want to know in the company. You'll then be able to take action on that article -- whether you want to do a deal with them, work for them, research them, or whatever it might be. You can find a company insider on anything that's been written." ..."That part of our API approach -- being able to combine publisher's content with Web 2.0 sort of network of people technology that LinkedIn has." p.126
The second part is following Facebook's lead and allowing publishers and developers to create APIs for the LinkedIn platform. They are also talking of using Google's Open Social platform. One that they demo is a merging of LinkedIn profile information with events information in a form of mashup. The mashup will provide information to the user on who is attending the event and if they are part of their LinkedIn network. "It maps out for you, in black and white, what the professional environment looks like -- who is there, who's connected to whom, and shows how you fit into that and how you can make use of that. And it's all databased; and it introduces much more precision into going to something like a conference and getting a lot out of it." p.127
These two API features should be licensed to large companies that are not tech savvy, but have thousands of employees, such as Pfizer, J&J, P&G and Exxon. Most large high-tech companies, such as IBM, Cisco and HP most likely have developed these features in-house or are planning to do so. Many large companies are a microcosm of the internet itself with lots of content to distribute and read and people to interact with globally. Strategically as an acquisition target, I think that Linked-In would be a good fit for the likes of IBM, Yahoo, Google or Cisco just for the intellectual property that Linked-In has developed. The intellectual property would help speed-up in-house development of these features. At the very least, Linked-In should focus on partnering more with large companies and not on focus on providing functionality for corporate recruiters. There is a lot of potential to extend the LinkedIn platform into many different parts of the business such as sales & marketing, customer service and corporate communications.
Source: Web 2.0 heroes, Bradley L. Jones, 2008, Wiley Publishing Inc, p. 273, ISBN 978-0-470-24199-8
Ping Servers allow users to locate your blog more easily by updating search engines dedicated to blogs.
