I tried out Tagga.com today and think its a neat little application for creating quick SMS campaigns. You can tag items in the physical world and create badges like the one you see alongside and have people text in a key word for more details. For instance, if you text the word SHISH to 82442 you will get details about my blog. Think about that in terms of a product campaign, a banner ad or even subway ads. I could potentially have a badge like this one on a car or house I'm selling and have people text the keyword to get more details of the product/service.
When you sign up at tagga.com, you can
- Create a standard SMS campaign
- Send any web content instantly to your mobile
- Subscribe to news feeds and get the data on your mobile
- Advertise
- Make money by publishing with tagga tools on your website
- Follow other fellow taggers
This is an interesting concept for retailers, manufacturers to quickly create a campaign and reach out to customers. I also see this as a possible way to advertise my product/service at events/conferences. I could potentially have a link to my product or company profile made available to people using a code they text over to 82442.
Shoppers could also potentially use this service for instant in-store discounts by downloading a discount code at specific time.
Link to TAGGA.COM
Recruiters have been known to mine all information about you via Blogs, Twitters and the other digital footprints that you leave behind. An online identity is a social identity that you establish in online communities. Although some people prefer to use their real names, most Internet users prefer to identify themselves by means of pseudonyms, which reveal varying amounts of personally identifiable information.
In addition to the various sources of information that recruiters (and investigators) have today to tap into your life, I just chanced upon the controversial CriminalSearches.com via LifeHacker. This can be viewed as an invasion of privacy or it could be viewed as an easy way to do background checks. Recruiters could use Office Business Applications based addins to Infopath Forms to automatically retrieve information from this service during the recruitment process.
I recently worked with a leading retailer on helping them automate their employee onboarding processes. While building the proof of concept, I helped digitize their Background Release forms from paper to Infopath. I put in a workflow in place to automatically route the forms through HR if the job candidate indicate prior convictions. Adding the CriminalSearches services would help further automate the process.
Given the malleability of online identities, it is surprising that successful sites (eBay, craigslist) have developed on the Internet that enable two pseudonymous identities to enter into an online transaction.
These sites are faced with the Prisoner's dilemma: the deal can succeed only if the parties are willing to trust each other, but they have no rational basis for doing so.
The solution has been in reputation management systems, such as eBay's feedback system, which record transactions and provide the technical means by which users can rate each others' trustworthiness.
A QR Code is a matrix code or two-dimensional bar code created by Japanese corporation Denso-Wave in 1994. The "QR" is derived from "Quick Response", as the creator intended the code to allow its contents to be decoded at high speed.
The possibilities of using QR Codes are endless: QR Codes could accompany newspaper and magazine ads so that people could scan the code with thier mobile phones and get additional information and videos of the product via their phones. The QR Codes could also be displayed on store shelves so that customers could use their mobile phones to find more information about the product. Billboards, Posters ... the endless are possibilities :)
I decided to experiment with QR Codes and to do this I first installed a QR Code Reading Software onto my phone. I downloaded the software from : QuickMark QR Code Reader. This is a free QR Code Reader and worked great on my Cingular 8525.
I then proceeded to generate a QR Code for my Blog via QR Code Generator. Once I did this I got a QR code for my blog:
To test this I fired up the QR Code Reader on my Mobile Phone and took a picture of the generated QR Code (above) and it worked beautifully. I would love to add this to my business card.
The
Live Product Search beta is a powerful search tool with an exclusive focus on consumer products.
Store Associates in specialty retailers are sometimes challenged in finding quick answers to customer questions about products. They need a quick way to find information. Search capabilities that can be accessed easily using kiosks and mobile devices can make the store associate far more effective. In addition to the documented information there could be a lot of tacit information within the organization that the employee (and hence the customer) could benefit from.
By definition, tacit knowledge is knowledge that people carry in their minds and is, therefore, difficult to access. Tacit knowledge has been found to be a crucial input to the innovation process. An organizations ability to innovate depends on its level of tacit knowledge of how to innovate. Specialized professionals acquire formal knowledge during their education, but to be effective they must acquire tacit knowledge and this is done through some sort of apprenticeship or internship. Collaboration with people is one of the ways to acquire tacit knowledge and collaboration tools can play a very important role. The tools should not only allow you to find relevant people based on their knowledge of specific areas or topics but also be able to connect you with them in a seamless manner. People engage in more effective tacit interactions when organizational structures do not get in the way and when they have the tools to make better decisions and communicate quickly and easily. To encourage more interaction, innovation, and collaboration, organizations need to become more transparent and break down the barriers to effective interactions.
A knowledge management portal based around Microsoft MOSS 2007 suite of products is the easiest way to elevate the importance of people and collaboration over hierarchical structures. People search capabilities in MOSS 2007 allow users to find people not only by department or job title but also by expertise, social distance, and common interests. The blog/wiki capabilities in Sharepoint allow organizations to capture and share some of the tacit knowledge.
Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 helps your organization get more done by providing a platform for sharing information and working together in teams, communities and people-driven processes. Office SharePoint Server is an important part of the overall Microsoft collaboration vision and integrates with other collaborative products to offer a comprehensive infrastructure for working with others.
| • | Empower Teams Through Collaborative Workspaces Microsoft delivers a best-of-breed collaborative infrastructure that gives end users the tools to easily create their own workspaces and share assets across teams, departments, and organizations while maintaining IT control. |
| • | Connect Organizations Through Portals Microsoft will help bring the full insight and data of the organization to the right people at the right time by making it easy to connect people with line-of-business data, experts, and business processes across the organization. |
| • | Enable Communities with Social Computing Tools Microsoft gives organizations the tools to deliver a broad set of social computing capabilities within their existing workspace and portal infrastructure, so end users can more easily harness the collective intelligence of the organization. |
| • | Reduce Cost and Complexity for IT by Using an Integrated Infrastructure, Existing Investments, and an Extensible Architectural Platform The Microsoft collaboration infrastructure leverages existing investments, is extensible, and interoperates with other systems, so organizations can maintain a lower cost of ownership and more easily meet business demands by building a single infrastructure. |
Microblogging tools and Social Networking tools also are great way to tap into the "Wisdom of Crowds". The concept of the "Wisdom of Crowds" is a fundamental building block of a lot of the Web 2.0 services. Many sites like Digg and Wikipedia rely on the concept of crowds being wise. The "Wisdom of Crowds" can help make decisions about which movie to watch, books to read, places to holiday in and for the Retail environment, it helps shoppers make decisions on which product to buy. Tools like Twitter can also help people pose a question to their network (or to anyone who cares to respond) and tap into tacit knowledge.
Interesting White Paper:
Office SharePoint 2007 Document: How to Get the Most Value from Social Computing for Business with Microsoft
I spent the last week in NY speaking at the WWD Retail Leadership Forum on Innovation Process Management.
Among Retailers, innovation traditionally has been a compartmentalized, top-down process run by a small team. In my discussions with retailers at the conference I also found that one of the biggest challenges in the way of Innovation was Legacy. Every company has a legacy. Its the belief that "That which made you great will continue to make you great". The legacy tends to consume a majority of the firms resources. The legacy creates a system that fights off any ideas which are tangential to the legacy. How much time and resource would your management provide you if you had a great idea? As a result of the legacy issues we are seeing more of our customers establish separate processes one for incremental innovation to support the legacy and one for radical innovation.
The rapid spread and high availability of collaborative technologies has changed that model. It is now widely recognized that the next great breakthrough in products, services and processes can come from people anywhere inside or outside an organization. Several organizations including Dell and Starbucks have realized this and created sites and tools to tap into ideas from their customers.
The challenges of innovation are not new. As we look back over the last 90 years of business we see that a mere 2% of companies outperform the market over long periods of time. Innovate or die is a reality.
The tools in itself will not help organizations become innovative. An organizational culture that is focused on innovation and encourages employees to share their ideas will benefit from tools that help streamline the process. The tool should enable:
- Capturing Ideas at any time. An employee should have ready templates or tools (such as Infopath forms or OneNote Templates) to quickly capture an idea.
- Submitting Ideas and Socializing them using tools such as Microsoft Office Sharepoint Server. The tool should also enable people to find information and potential collaborators to work together on refining the idea.
- Take the idea through a workflow process from concept to reality. The Workflow capabilities in Microsoft Office Sharepoint Server support this requirement.
See EPMConnect for more details on this initiative.
Charles Leadbetter on Innovation
Someone once asked me what's the most interesting thing I love about working in Redmond and I have to say that its really the opportunity to work with, mingle and socialize with a gathering of the most interesting and bright people on earth (yeah that sounds downright arrogant but I really dont know how else to put it). Its been 11 years in MS and Ive fed off the energy and enthusiasm of people here and never regretted a single moment. Its a diverse community of people from all over the world living in what used to be and still is a small town. I recently stumbled on Ariels blog "Microspotting" and was once again reminded of why I've enjoyed every moment and still do: its all about the world of amazing and interesting people around me.
There is an interesting trend of companies using microblogging services like Twitter to monitor customer complaints. One example mentioned in the Boston Globe is that of a customer who griped about his HDTV reception via twitter during an NBA playoff and was surprised by a response from Comcast within minutes. Within 24 hours a technician fixed the problem. (Link to article). This is one example of how customer service is changing in an age when a single disgruntled customer can blog a complaint which can soon turn viral. For organizations , this is an opportunity to use the same technology to turn disgruntled customers into raving fans.
Retail Organizations seeking to listen to the voice of its customers should be tuning in to blogs as a means of detecting complaints early and reacting to them before they amplify over the internet. Southwest Airlines tracks Twitter comments and monitors a Facebook group and interacts with bloggers so it can respond in a personal way to complaints. It also uses the service to inform their customers about deals among other things.
One of the ways that retailers can add Social Computing capabilities to their websites is by using the Windows Live Platform. The Windows Live Platform is focused on providing developers and businesses with everything they need to build on top of Windows Live services. Microsoft is providing APIs for core Live services - such as Windows Live Contacts, Windows Live Messenger, Live ID, Search, and Virtual Earth - so that developers can access and use these services in the applications they create. Read More about the Windows Live Platform
In this demo, Chris Mayo, the technical evangelist for Unified Communications (UC) and John Rauschenberger from Clarity Consulting team up to show how developers can customize UC features to hit everything from outgoing calls, IP phone, to smart presence awareness. John also whiteboards how the whole thing works from an architecture perspective.
Demo: Chris Mayo and John Rauschenberger: Programmable Telephony and Presence
Organizations talk a lot about how important their employees are and the contribution they make to overall success. This obviously means that employee retention is one of the key priorities.
To bolster productivity and a more engaged workplace, leaders need to foster a transparent and open environment where employees feel like they are on the inside track, according to the Deloitte 2008 Ethics & Workplace survey.
From the Deloitte Press Release:
"... This year's survey also reveals that there is a strong relationship between greater openness and transparency by leadership and ethical behavior at work. In fact, 84 percent of respondents agree that openness by leadership contributes to a more ethical workplace culture. Moreover, 68 percent said it would create a more values-based organization. ..."
Internal blogs by management can be an excellent way to have transparency in the workplace. Executive blogs can be a means of communicating information through the organization from each Executives perspective and engage employees in discussion and feedback.
Whitepaper: Using Blogs and Wikis in Business
Also read: Stir up you best ideas with a group Sharepoint blog
this !!!
Steve Rosenberg took a table at a restaurant in Nuremberg, Germany - where customers use touchscreen TVs to choose their meal, and all the food is delivered by helter-skelter.
Link to Video
A German supermarket is encouraging customers to scan and ring up their shopping using mobile phones, and check out without the help of a cashier.
It is one of the number of innovations at the new "Future Store" - as Steve Rosenberg discovered when he went along to do his weekly shopping.
Link to Video
Last week I had an opportunity to see Mediacart in action and was pretty impressed by the scenarios that it could empower: quick scan and bag to speed the checkout process (for the retailer this can mean reduced labor costs); display store specials, discounts and coupons; get detailed product information and similar product comparison; access shopping lists from the stores website. For the retailer, the information gathered from cart locations, dwell times and items purchased can be valuable for data mining and prediction.
