I came across IntenseDebate.com today and am extremely impressed as well as excited about this new service. The service provides blog owners the ability to install a plug-in on their blog which will centralize the storage of blog commenting, streamline comment threading, improve comment moderation, and encourage additional posting.

The problem I run into a lot when reading blogs is while I’d like to take the time to comment, I’m busy, and don’t often want to create a new account to post a simply reply. Plus, when posting in an established community and without “street cred”, it’s hard to feel like you’re adding value to a conversation if you’ve never posted before.

IntenseDebate.com changes this. As an end-user, I now have a centralized account and any blog that uses IntenseDebate.com for their commenting system, I can automatically comment and my profile on IntenseDebate.com will be shown, as well as other posts on other blogs I’ve made via my IntenseDebate.com account. It’s really quite impressive.

I’ll post a few quick comments below to display how it works.

In this post about “Why Gen Y Is Going to Change the Web” from ReadWriteWeb, the following comment was made:

Work Tools Need to Mirror Web Tools: Gen Y will drive adoption of “Enterprise 2.0” products and services. Gen Y in the workplace will not just want, but expect their company to provide them with tools that mirror those they use in their personal lives. If socializing on Facebook helps them get a sale, then they’re not going to understand why they can’t use it at work. For more buckled down companies, if workers aren’t provided with the tools they want, they’re going to be savvy enough to go around I.T.’s back and get their own.

I couldn’t agree more — this thinking (expecting a company to provide tools to mirror tools in personal lives) is already prevalent today in the enterprise and it’s not even specific to Gen-Y’ers.

When users find their own way…IS can’t add value

I have an interesting perspective starting on the marketing side of the business and building up a website from scratch all without the help of IT/IS. The autonomy and flexibility we had to spend on innovation against a marketing budget was considerably different than having to jump through the hoops of IT layers in the enterprise.

Now that I have transitioned to a new role in the IS department, things are slightly different as I find myself combatting the very actions I was deploying when I was in the marketing department — employees working around IT’s back.

You aren’t issued a company cell phone from the model year 2001, so why should the web applications be any different?

I think the Enterprise 2.0 movement will be an important one. As consumers become more web-savvy, so will employees. Enterprise applications and development will need to quickly catch up to the speed of consumer applications and development.

After all, when we get a company-issued cell phones, we don’t expect to have a phone that’s representative of something from 2001. Why should web applications be any different? One may argue that you “don’t fix what’s broken.” While I love that principle, at the same time, a cell phone model from the year 2001 may not be broken, but there’s certainly a more efficient way of doing things today.

Put up roadblocks and employees will work around you

Frustrated employees will find their own ways of doing things and bypassing applications and processes in favor of a more pleasant and easy experience…or they just won’t use the technology at all. IT/IS departments will have a revolt on their hands in the coming years if they don’t begin to adopt consumer-oriented technology and applications.

This blog has a new URL as of 5/15/08. In an effort to have a web address that better aligns with the content of this blog, the new URL is: www.ebusinessblog.org

All old posts and links will automatically forward to the new blog URL. The RSS feed remains unchanged!

-Eric

Sigh. This post claims that branding is irrelevant/dead thanks to search engines and how search is transforming the way in which people research and buy products.

Huh?

I couldn’t disagree more. You can’t honestly tell me that Lamborghini, BMW, Lincoln, and Hyundai (just to name a few random automotive brands) are all on equal playing fields when a consumer searches for “car” on Google. 

The post goes on to talk about the power of SEO and why SEO is not dead. SEO is most certainly not dead and should make for a critical component in your online strategy. His point in trying to prove why SEO is not dead is muddied by the claims of “branding being dead.” Brands don’t matter in certain categories (probably because there’s no clear category leader), but certainly not across the board.

Proper SEO can elevate your brand to the top of the listing for non-branded searches.

They key is creating brand awareness (through advertising, promotion, PR, etc. outside of search engines) and dominating on branded AND non-branded searches for your category. This is done by juggling your SEO work with your SEM campaigns to find the “sweet spot” so SEM can pick up the slack where you lag behind in SEO. Branding then goes onto heavily influence clicks on search engine results.

This type of tunnel-vision thinking is why “online” is still broadly viewed as an IT function.

Flat-out comments like this show the still “techy” and misguided view of some Internet strategists and how marketing and “tech” still quite aren’t aligned — even on established sites such as searchenginewatch.com. Any marketer worth their salt should understand that brands can drive search results. When industry publications and commentary throw out claims like this, it’s difficult to create alignment with a marketing department — especially when marketing should “own” (or at least have visibility to) SEO and SEM strategy.

It’s fairly easy to cost-effectively monitor your brand names and trademarked terms (and anything else you’d like to keep tabs on) using Google’s Blog search RSS feeds (and several other aggregator service RSS feeds). When you don’t have the funds (or a low volume of online/blog conversations pertaining to your brand) for a service like BuzzLogic or BuzzMetrics, it’s about as “grass roots” as you can get.

But what if you want to automatically monitor changes to your competitors’ websites that don’t have feeds built into them?

Page2RSS is the answer.

Page2RSS is a free service which creates an RSS feed out of any URL you enter into the site. Their free service creates a cached version of the page every 4 hours. Simply subscribe to the RSS feed and off you go — be the first to know when your competitors update their homepage, product pages within their sites, and so on.

I had an opportunity to catch up with a friend of mine this evening over drinks/dinner before he and his fiance move off to Colorado to continue building their online startup: foodzie.com. Foodzie is one of 10 very fortunate and well-deserving startups that will receive seed money and mentoring from some of the industry’s finest all thanks to TechStars.

The premise behind foodzie is to provide artisan food producers with the means for selling their products online with minimal investment. On top of that, foodzie will build a community of “foodies” who will have an opportunity for “one stop shopping” online. Their site will be launching soon (presumably in beta after they settle into their new digs in Colorado) and I’m very excited to see how it will take off.

Not being a die-hard “foodie” myself, my wife and I are certainly more of a “mass consumer” at heart as we purchase based on ease and convenience due to our busy schedules. That being said, foodzie presents an opportunity for even non-foodies like us to indulge in the latest in greatest without having to be die-hard foodies. Whenever business models like these come to fruition and take a complex process, make it simple, and bring it to the masses, it is a recipe for success.

It was a great change of pace to talk entrepreneurial strategy — which is a completely different type of discussion than the day-to-day enterprise strategy discussion.

Good luck to Rob and Emily on their venture!

I’m a frequent reader of CIO.com articles — such an invaluable source for eBusiness managers and directors. I’m a big proponent of open source and am finding it to be such a taboo subject within the enterprise. In the article The Challenge of Open Source Presents to CIOs, open source is almost presented as a “problem.” So much of a problem in fact that certain enterprises ban it entirely.

Quick question: Since when it is a bad thing to save money?

Now, I understand it can present challenges from governing the use of open source as it pertains to compliancy issues. However, this is no different than governing the proper licensing of Microsoft products, too. The fact that it’s open source doesn’t make open source a “problem.” If you have problem governing open source utilization, then you have a larger software/infrastructure governance problem.

Just used RedBox DVD Rentals for the first time this evening and what an impressive service:

• DVD rentals for $1.00/day
• Easy-to-use interface
• Online integration (rent online, pick up at your local RedBox location)
• Return the DVD to any RedBox kiosk (not just the one you rented from)
• Slick little DVD dispenser that casually spits out the DVDs in their hard-plastic cases

These are new to our area in Greensboro, NC but I know are popular in the Atlanta area (based on feedback from a few friends who pick up DVDs from the RedBox at their local McDonald’s). And what a business model this must be: Drop a kiosk in the store, feed it new DVDs each week for new releases, and watch the money roll in. I’d love to learn more about their infrastructure and how they keep tabs on the health of the machines.

The user experience on the computer kiosk is well-done, although I wish the system was a little more responsive (i.e. faster). It could use a slightly larger screen to view the DVD titles. These are very minor complaints considering how easy it was to walk up and rent a DVD for the first time. Our main problem the whole time was feeling “rushed” by the other people waiting in line to rent and return their movies!

This post about business processes as a competitive advantage hit home for me (it references a poor experience with an airline — which I’m sure we’re all familiar with). I am often jokingly ridiculed for how often I ask “why?” when evaluating internal business processes and the way data is organized in the enterprise. Quite often the answer is surprisingly, “I don’t know, that’s how it was done before I got here.”

In the link above, the same is true for the airline industry. It’s as if the entire industry was designed for an ideal world where there are no mechanical malfunctions, bad weather, or delays. Contingency planning and business process optimization go such a long way to improving operational efficiency and most importantly, customer satisfaction. Revisiting pre-existing processes is also a great way to find the low-hanging fruit of improvements.

When building any new business process or system, I find that the following question is helpful to ask over and over during the planning phase: Does this process add value for the end-user?

Such a simple question can go a long way to avoiding a situation like in the above post/link.

In a tough economy, advertising dollars are typically the first to go. On the flip side, in a flourishing economy, advertising dollars seem to be readily available without needing much justification or proof that the advertising will pay off. Why is this?

Many advertisers have no methodology for measuring the effectiveness of their ad campaigns. In a flourishing economy, taking risks with a low probability for success is often encouraged in hopes of the big pay-off. In a tough economy, investing in anything (advertising, R&D, etc.) will require a great deal of scrutiny.

At SES NY in ‘06 I attended an invite-only dinner with WebTrends with a group of about a dozen online marketers — some existing clients of WebTrends and some were potential clients they were wining and dining. One of the dinner guests I sat next to was Rex Briggs, co-author of What Sticks.

For anyone who thinks “advertising cannot be measured,” I would recommend reading this book. It covers concepts that online marketers should hold close to their hearts: Test, Learn, Deploy, Repeat. Many traditional marketers are used to deploying large budgets on print and TV advertising with no plan or budget to measure the effectiveness of the ad spend. They excel at developing the creative, but fail miserably when it comes to answering the simple question of “Did it work?” 

In the online world, measuring ad spend becomes somewhat easier with the various tracking technologies (particularly if you sell online). If you can definitively prove how advertising positively impacts sales (directly or indirectly), then you’ll most likely see your ad budgets remain flat in a tough economy, but not entirely eliminated like some marketers are experiencing this year.