business value & ICT - Telecommunications - Green IT - Orange Business Live blog

• #1. All these online conversations could be dangerous, we'll be losing control": it's true that social media is about employees, clients, partners and members of all kinds of eco systems talking to one another. There is often that perception that these conversations might lead to the disparagement of the brand. Such discussions are often perceived negatively by managers, as if they didn't feel quite sure about how reliable or likable their brand actually is. Hence they fail to assess and nurture brand loyalty through these discussions, although such discussions are often led by volunteers and afficionados. Also, in essence, this is what a brand is all about. A brand is what your clients "say about you when you're not in the room" (probably by Jeff Bezos but the source is unclear and many versions of that quotation exist). And such discussions, good or bad, are bound to happen anyway, for social media (aka web 2.0) has made free expression available to all Internet users. Use social media to harness all these discussions rather than pretending you can prevent them. There are more opportunities than risks associated with it when you think about it. As Intel's Ken Kaplan once declared at a 2008 Blogwell conference in San Jose : "social media is not something to fear but to embrace",
• #2. "Social media is a legal minefield": a good proportion of the managers who are opposed to social media are afraid of the potential risks associated with freeform comments and trackbacks (back links to your site from external blogs/social media sites). The latter are indeed perceived as a means of injecting external content within a company's website and managers are afraid of legal consequences. Yet, to put it in the words of my own lawyer: "a legal advisor's role is not to frighten but to protect. Above all, we are business partners" (I like this guy!). And we did find a solution for our social media initiatives, from a legal point of view: all our blogs and community sites have been placed under a separate legal entity which led us to shift the responsability from the main entity to another. Comments and TrackBack moderation is also a good idea which should not be overseen. The issue in this instance is about prevention, not irrational fears. And don't forget that it's a lot harder to address criticisms in traditional media. Comments can be moderated, unauthorised or - even better - give you an opportunity to respond,
• #3. Online negative buzz monitoring is often on most social media opponents' radar screen too: I am flabbergasted by the ability of certain buzz monitoring software vendors who spread fear about the blogosphere around them to sell their wares. Often, if not always, the so-called Kryptonite Blogstorm example will be quoted. The very title sounds like a legend and indeed it is. The problem is that this example is grossly exaggerated. Traditional media influence can still be a lot more damaging than online media if you don't take care. I can't imagine the New York Times being treated as if it were a social media website. Once again, there is more opportunities than risk in social media (full story about what really happened is available here).
• #4. Managers don't want their employees to be headhunted because of corporate blogging: so I heard one day an Exec tell me that it was out of the question that one of his most prominent consultant be seen on the Internet. I subsequently checked the blogger's name on Google and immediately found him in LinkedIn as well as on his own personal blog. My reaction was then to encourage that blogger to blog for us. At least, now he is devoting his energy and time to promoting our company and its reputation. Besides, he knows that he is a valued employee of ours and that his work is acknowledged. One more reason to stay with us, and not leave!
• #5. "All that Internet stuff is not serious/businesslike, it's just for techies": with Internet usage penetration averaging 70% in the UK (expressed in percentage of the total population, versus 48% in Europe, and the UK being outdone only by the nordics and the Netherlands), this is no longer true. Whereas in the 1990s, people believed that the Internet was made for train-spotters (see that picture taken from a 1996 AOL flyer), it is a sure bet nowadays that most web and social media users will be representative of the overall population. From a marketing point of view, each social media site has its target audiences. Social media is therefore a tool for doing business, as long as you are choosing the right platform for the right geography, population and/or business sector. For instance, facebook is pervasive in the UK but not in France where only top users and IT experts are logged in. LinkedIn is big in the UK but in German-speaking countries, only Xing is used, don't even bother to invite someone on LinkedIn there, it is virtually never used. In France, Viadeo is by far the leading social network, but most IT pundits will want to be seen in LinkedIn and will snub Viadeo users. So this is complex and more segmented than it seems, and I haven't even talked about LinkedIn groups which make it possible for you to target micro populations. Social media definitely is a business tool and a place to start networking and building partnerships,
• #6. "All that social networking stuff is a waste of (my) time": Social networking is often getting media attention but what's in it for business. Should business people allocate time to improve their networking skills on LinkedIn and the likes or should they consider spending more time doing proper business? The fact is that networking is the essence of business. It took me 4 years to build a serious network on LikendIn. What I mean by serious is the careful - not random - selection of new connections through their profile. And I don't just mean people I knew and wanted to reconnect with. My purpose was to expand that network in order to increase the number of opportunities for my business activities. And I can't count the number of opportunities leveraged by such tools, whether it meant presenting my work at a conference, or liaising with my peers, partnering with new companies or even buying new stuff I didn't know anything about before (incidentally, my counterparts must have been able to sell things too in that process). Of course, some of these encounters were irrelevant but I'd rather focus on the positive side of things by just looking at all these interesting opportunities I was able to seize. Each time a new tool appears however, users are faced with the same problem and that is how to build (or re-build) a network of people first, before you can start reaping the benefits of such tools for business. The network of people is condition #1 for anything you do on social media platforms and it can be pretty much time-consuming mainly if you wish to target people one by one rather than inviting them all at random. As a conclusion Social media is not a waste of time unless you let yourself be driven by the tool (time-consuming tools like facebook or Twitter must be managed properly if you don't want them to take up too much of your time). In essence, it's not very different from what we went through at the beginning of the introduction of e-mail in the workplace. Managers started to oppose e-mail because they thought it could be a waste of time for them. But in essence, it was more of a status issue because their personal assistants used to filter all messages.
• #7. "There is no ROI in Social media and corporate blogging in particular": this final counter argument I kept for the end of my list. As is often the case with innovations, sharp criticsms as well as very apt critical analysis of blogging initiatives such as the corporate blog report by Forrester's Josh Bernoff are voiced. At that very time when people think they should give up (Gartner would call that moment the "trough of disillusionment") i.e. when the hype dies away, there appears real opportunities to work on one's ROI and reap the true benefits of the innovation in question (the "plateau of productivity" in Gartner speak). Social media is no exception to that rule. So why bother about Social media now? At times of "inflated expectations" (Gartner again) it's hard to focus on ROI. Now that the crisis is making the ROI a must, here's what we could add to that debate regarding social media in general and Corporate blogging in particular.
  • Firstly the cost of investing in social media is really negligible.
  • Secondly, the effort related to the production of the content within the framework of a blog initiative, for instance, is minimal too. In fact it does exist but it is diluted amongst the contributing experts. Social media is about user-generated content. This means that experts produce the effort as opposed to Internet managers spending vast amounts of our budget to get to the same - or even a slightly less impressive - result. And content does cost a lot of money. With user generated content I save hundreds of thousands of euros every year; what's that for ROI? Saying it's free would be wrong though, but the main cost of it all is change management. And producing content is very expensive.
  • Thirdly, now think about the benefits that we are getting from that effort: more motivated experts, better visibility for our brand, more efficient communications, direct debate between experts, and facilitation of the entire ecosystem, brand awareness and image improvement. The list is endless.
  • At last, when I decided to ask my boss to write for the blog, I definitely solved the ROI issue because he suddenly understood that blogging enabled him to do things which were unthinkable before. What other initiative was available for him to write about his vision on Green IT to the whole world at a push of a button?

As a conclusion, social media offers so many new capabilities that it is worth making the effort to launch an initiative for your enterprise. Pitfalls exist - as with any kind of tool, be it IT or not - but there are ways to circumvent the problems so as to reap more benefits from this new way of communicating, more direct, more open, and geared towards direct open innovation with clients, partners and your ecosystem at large. If you manage to avoid misusing some of these tools and remained focussed on your business objectives, social media can then be a powerful ally to you marketing strategy. And don't forget that rational answers to irrational fears exist too, so that you can focus on looking at the half-full glass of social marketing.

Although powering down PCs has regularly been mentioned by the green lobby over the last few months, analyst firm Gartner has now come up with some substantive figures about how much energy enterprises can save. Gartner reckons that around 31% of worldwide ICT energy usage can be attributed to PCs and associated peripherals and advocates a seven-point plan to manage their energy usage more effectively.

Stephen Kleynhans, research vice president at the firm, says enterprises can no longer view environmental performance of their PC fleets as optional and advocates establishing a plan now to reap the advantages.

It's not just Gartner that is pushing the issue. In a recent blog, Doug Washburn at analyst firm Forrester put forward his own five-point plan which references Energy Star estimates that firms can save between US$25 And US$75 per year by doing so. Washburn also cites the example of AT&T which reckons its will save more than 135m kilowatt hours of electricity by powering down its 300,000 PCs out of work hours.

However, in spite of powering down technology being freely available for most PCs, more than half of enterprises that claim to have green PC programmes in place rely on users powering down their machines or activating power management settings.

Although cloud computing is flavor of the month and lends itself to the straitened economic circumstances for those organizations brave enough to radically rethink their IT architecture, virtualization could be a better bet in the immediate future. Consultancy, McKinsey goes even further and posits the notion that cloud computing savings potentially don't exist and, worse, could end up costing more. Instead, it reckons that focusing on server virtualization is the way forward.

According to its figures, which are based on usage of Amazon's Web Services, outsourcing a typical corporate data centre to the cloud would increase the total cost of data centre functions to US$366 per unit of computing output compared to US$150 per month for a conventional data centre. This is where virtualization comes in. McKinsey thinks server utilization can routinely be boosted by 18% using virtualization and improvements of as much as 35% are possible thereby bringing down the cost of data centre functions even further. Although McKinsey appears to have ignored some of the fringe benefits of cloud computing, such as reduced requirement for on-desk/in-office computing power, it's hard to argue with the figures. McKinsey adds that the cost stratification of cloud computing services is similar to that seen in the mobile phone sector. Namely, you end up paying more to the service provider than the value of the device over time.

I don't think this means that the cloud concept has broken, just that there are readily identifiable savings to be made through increased virtualization and improving utilization rates of existing capacity. To write off cloud computing, you have to subtract from any argument issues such as the increased cost of capital to organizations investing in hardware and software versus the fixed, operational expenditure of the cloud model. To my mind, these figures can still stack up but it is very much a case of horses for courses.

Nevertheless, it is clear that virtualization is having something of a good recession. Analyst firm Gartner reckons the EMEA market for virtualization is likely to be 'very robust' this year and software revenue in the region could rise by 55% this year. Globally, the analyst firm thinks revenue from virtualization software will grow by 43% to hit US$2.7bn - up from US$1.9bn last year.

However, not everyone is unreservedly singing virtualization's praises. Burton Group analyst Jack Santos reckons that some organizations are ignoring the risks of virtualization in a headlong dash to reap its rewards. Santos highlights that few current virtualization tools integrate with general data centre management software such as Tivoli and he expects that to be the case for some time. "Middle East peace, at this stage, will be easier than getting vendors to play," he told Techworld.

Although the recession is being blamed for blighting the uptake of femtocells, several indicators are emerging that suggest the technology has far from missed the boat. Inevitably, enterprise deployments still look to be a long way off as organizations cut back on spending and are increasingly reluctant to invest in bleeding edge technologies. That's understandable since the enterprise applications of femtocells remain unclear and issues such as their appropriateness in comparison to picocells and other indoor coverage solutions continue to be open to debate. Nevertheless, the doom scenario of femtocell technology being consigned to the shelf and forgotten for the foreseeable future seems not to be occurring.

Analysts at ABI Research reckon the slowdown in the uptake of femtocells will be only temporary and, although the firm has revised its estimates downwards to project just under one million shipments this year, senior analyst, Aditya Kaul, has identified that vendors appear to be gearing up for a big push and thinks that femtocells remain attractive because investment can be undertaken in stages and with relatively low entry costs and therefore is easier to justify in the tight financial market.

Other indicators bear ABI's view out. Three mobile communication industry groups have recently announced they have teamed up to create the world's first standard for the deployment and development of femtocells. The 3GPP, the Femto Forum and the Broadband Forum have published a standard that covers network architecture, radio and interference, security, femtocell management and provisioning. It is anticipated that the standard will pave the way for large-scale production of standardized femtocells and enable interoperability between different vendors' access points and femto gateways. Removing the interoperability disconnect currently caused by proprietary systems will be a key step in bringing femtocells to the enterprise.

Further momentum has also been demonstrated by Sony, Toshiba and Qualcomm joining the Femto Forum. Although predominately focused on consumer applications such as embedding femtocells into televisions and set-top boxes, the move will help to raise the profile of femtocells and the involvement of Qualcomm is likely to involve it working to increase volumes and cut costs for chipsets which will also have enterprise applications.

Twitter is garnering more column inches at present than climate change, but not everyone is taking it so seriously. First it was mocked by The Guardian's Aprils Fools story http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2009/apr/01/guardian-twitter-media-technology, which claimed that the doyen of British cognoscenti will cease to print the broadsheet in favour of publishing on solely on Twitter, and now UK internet marketers have signalled that Twitter isn't delivering for business.

A survey by web analytics firm WebTrends http://www.webtrends.com/ found that only 2% of UK businesses have used Twitter as a marketing tool. Email at 46% remains the most popular method of marketing online - and rightly so, as Yann Gourvennec points out in this blog post on email marketing best practice. http://blogs.orange-business.com/live/2009/03/when-to-use-and-not-to-use-e-mail-and-boost-personal-productivity.html

The 300 UK marketers surveyed by WebTrends finds that Twitter is way down the list of tools for getting closer to customers.

So does this mean there is no place for Twitter in business? Of course not - listening to what customers say about you in the Twitterverse is a valuable feedback mechanism. But can, and should companies, use Twitter to broadcast new services, offers and updates? Well approach with care - with the noise level ramping up, the sound of tweets is almost deafening, so companies shouldn't pile into this area. The negative connotations from spamming your followers with endless offers would probably outweigh their benefits. I think that companies with Twitter feeds should limit their communications to essential or very valuable communications. Do you agree?

Although the much-heralded Conficker botnet threat has now passed its 1 April deadline without causing much of a stir, huge concern remains regarding cybercrime and data security. Conficker infected machines did appear to contact an update server but no other activity relating to the infections have been reported. The Sans Institute, which tracks such outbreaks, reported only minor impacts and cited proactive scanning by organizations as one of the causes of the reality not equaling the hype.

Regardless of the Conficker storm in a teacup, cybercrime stakes remain massively high. Security vendor McAfee has reported that companies in the US, UK, Germany, Japan, Brazil, India and Dubai lost US$4.6 billion in intellectual property last year as a consequence of data security breaches. Those companies that lost intellectual property (IP) spent close to US$600 million firefighting the issue and repairing damage. The McAfee study also estimates that global damage from data loss will ultimately top US$1 trillion - coincidentally the sum reckoned at the G20 summit to be required to start fixing the recession.

The issue affects almost everyone with rival vendor, Symantec, reporting that 98% of organizations polled in its 2009 Managed Security in the Enterprise Report have experienced tangible loss as a result of cyber attacks. Of great concern is the fear that the recession will put pressure on security budgets even as the problem continues to proliferate.

Governments are stepping up to the plate, however. In the US, a new bill has been presented to Congress that aims to see mandatory computer security standards imposed on government and private companies that control critical infrastructure in the US. The bill would see the creation of a National Cybersecurity Advisor, who would have powers to shut down power, telephony or environmental supplies if an attack took place.

These vast numbers are sobering and indicate that what has often been thought of as a geeky little problem has quietly mushroomed under the radar into an issue that demands the attention of heads of state as well as heads of IT.