Audio interview: social applications in a recession

by Josh Bernoff

Jennifer Jones of Marketing Voices inteviewed me for Podtech.net about social applications in a recession.  They featured this on their home page for a while.

I've embedded the Podcast here for your convenience.

Upcoming Forrester Boot Camps

by Charlene Li

You may have noticed that the tag line for this blog has changed – a key goal is to help people do their jobs better, to “win” so to speak with social technologies.

To that end, I thought you’d like to know about a few upcoming boot camps Forrester is running. These events are different from large scale conferences – they are typically 1-2 Forrester analysts with a small group of participants, usually around 20 people. We spend an entire day discussing the strategy and tactics needed to win with new technologies. And I personally love the format because it’s a great way for me to immerse myself in the day to day issues that people are facing.

So here are a few highlights of upcoming boot camps – there is also a complete list of all boot camps being offered. I hope you can join us, and please contact me if you have any questions.

Emerging Interactive Marketing Channels Boot Camp
Wednesday, March 21, 2007 in Cambridge, MA 
Analysts: Brian Haven & Christine Overby

This Boot Camp will introduce new marketing channels and provide techniques for successfully exploring and leveraging the marketing opportunities that each offers. Marketers will learn how to determine if each channel is right for their brand and develop a plan for how to get started.

This Boot Camp will include:
•    Interactive sessions covering how consumers have adopted each channel, how marketers use each channel today, and how to best leverage each to target consumers.
•    Sessions covering rich media (video, podcasting, gaming), user-generated content, social media (social networks, wikis, widgets, tagging, etc.), word-of-mouth marketing, mobile marketing, and others.
•    Examples of how marketers, agencies, and public      relations firms have used these emerging marketing channels.

Social Computing Boot Camp: Tapping Into The Power Of Connect Consumers
Tuesday, April 10, 2007 in Miami, Florida
Analysts: Charlene Li & Brian Haven

New technologies like blogs, social networking, and RSS are changing the media and marketing landscape. This Boot Camp will not only introduce these new tools, it will also move you quickly into being an active participant in social media and marketing. You'll go home with a better understanding of how to use social marketing — and more importantly, a workable plan for what to do today. Marketers will learn when it is appropriate to use these tools, how to overcome internal resistance to deployment, and how to measure the results.

This Boot Camp will include:
•    Interactive sessions on consumer adoption and behaviors toward blogs, RSS, social networking,      word-of-mouth marketing, and podcasting.
•    Examples of how marketers, agencies, and public relations firms have used social marketing — and how to avoid the pitfalls.
•    Hands-on training on how to create blogs and RSS feeds, as well as podcasts. In addition to a      technical overview, the training will include best practices on how to manage the internal process of setting up these social marketing tools.
•    A best practices panel of marketers, agencies, and technology providers.

Blogging Fundamentals: Building A Business Strategy
Friday, April 13, 2007 in Miami, Florida
Analysts: Charlene Li & Brian Haven

Blogs are evolving quickly as a communication medium and influencing the development of communications and marketing strategy. With more than 27 million blogs being written today, it is impossible not to find a niche community that can influence customer perceptions of a brand.

As customers increasingly tune out traditional advertising and turn to new communication channels to fill the void, companies must learn how to join in the conversation. Moreover, besides connecting companies and their customers, blogs are also becoming an invaluable collaboration tool within companies to facilitate knowledge management and cross-functional communications.

This Boot Camp will focus on the fundamentals of blogging from a corporate perspective, helping companies develop a blog strategy and implementation plan, including discussion of policy, technology, and process. It will have a heavy focus on hands-on exercises that will complement in-depth presentations on these issues.

Forrester notes from DEMO 07

My colleague (and book co-author) Josh Bernoff is at DEMO 07 this week covering the happenings there on our book blog. In four different posts, he provides quick reviews (done in real time) of 33 companies. It's quite the feat!!

Some things that caught my eye from Josh's posts (see the individual posts for Josh's take on these companies):

From Post #1: Worklight: Secure RSS for the enterprise that pulls information out of enterprise applications. This sounds very much like what KnowNow does with its RSS/alert service. Josh also saw a product called Reqall from Qtech that turns phone messages into text and delivers it via email. Reminds me of another start-up, Jott that does almost exactly the same thing.

From Post #2: Josh has a short-hand way of thinking about the widgets/gadgets someone can insert into Web pages like MySpace -- he calls it "MySpace furniture" which is very appropriate. I can build and insert these widgets into my page, arrange them to my liking, and invite my "friends" over to check it out.

In one afternoon at DEMO, Josh saw five companies that fits this definition: panjea.tv, Yodio, VUVOX, Splashcast, and MixPro. I've used several Web page widgets like these and while each offering has it's cool, neat spin, I can't help but feel that this is turning quickly into the "me too" category in much the same way that photo sharing sites are variations on the same theme. Just how much traction can any player get?

From Post #3: At the end of the post, Josh raises two questions about new mobile applications like BUZ Interactive and Jyngle:

The main question is 1) are the mobile operators going to allow, encourage, or block any of these, and 2) how will the user determine what's actually useful to him or her?

From Post #4: (As I'm reading the last post from Josh, I have to wonder how he's doing it -- I'm tired just reading his posts!) Lots of good stuff here -- groups get more firepower with CircleUp and Nexo, but I have to wonder if they will be pushed aside once Yahoo! redesigns Yahoo! Groups.

ZoomInfo caught Josh's eye because of it's core and expanded people search capabilities. I've been following ZoomInfo for quite a while and it's good to see them at DEMO (disclosure: I did a Webinar for them last February on the future of online recruitment.)

Lastly, Helium joins players like gather.com, agoravox.fr, and associatedcontent.com to pay contributors of user-generated content for their work, based on how much traffic and advertising views they generate. Helium's twist: it ranks the comments and articles based on what users find the most interesting, relevant, and helpful.

Forrester podcasts -- now playing

Now available -- Forrester podcasts! These free podcasts focus specifically on interactive marketing and feature and feature a series of interviews with analysts and industry leaders who spoke
at our Consumer Forum in October. Note that we are currently testing this new medium and we're trying to figure out what works, what doesn't. So we'd love to get your feedback on them -- either in the comments below or directly to me. And because this is a trial, there's no way to subscribe to the podcasts. Obviously, if Forrester decides to move forward, we'll be adding that capability.

So if you like what you hear, please tell others about them -- the only way we'll get approval to do more of them is if people like you find them helpful.

Note: All of these podcasts (along with greater detail) are available on one page, at www.forrester.com/podcasts/im.

- Humanizing the Digital Experience: These are interviews with speakers from Forrester's Consumer Forum, which took place in October. It features Forrester travel analyst Henry Harteveldt, Forrester customer experience guru  Harley Manning, Jeff Hicks from Crispin Porter + Bogosky, Roger C. Hochschild, COO of Discover Financial Services, and Michelle Peluso, who runs Travelocity. Length 21:00, file size 9.6 MB mp3

- Social Computing: This is an interview between me and my colleague, Shar VanBoskirk, discussing how social computing is changing marketing.  (As you'll hear Shar say, this was done over the phone from my home office, and fortunately, you can't hear my  frequently punching the "mute" button as I'm coughing my lungs out from my cold). Length: 11:19, file size 5.2MB mp3

- Word of Mouth Marketing: Analyst Peter Kim is joined by Dave Balter from BzzAgent, Jon Berry from Keller Fay Group, Sam Decker from Bazaar voice, and Andy Sernovitz from the Word of Mouth Marketing Association. Length: 18:12, file size 8.3MB mp3

- Reinventing the Marketing Organization: This is also an interview that took place at the Consumer Forum and features interviews with Jeff Hicks from Crispin, Porter + Bogosky and Jim Skinner, the CEO of McDonald's, as well as our own analyst, Elana Anderson. Length: 13:00, file size 6.0 MB mp3

- The Changing Interactive Marketing Organization: How can interactive marketing teams integrate and work effectively with other marketing functions? Shar VanBoskirk joins Jim Cuene, director of interactive marketing at General Mills, and Lance Thornswood from Target Corporation to discuss this. Length: 18:21, file size: 8.4MB mp3

- Tapping The Power Of Consumer-Generate Media: Analyst Brian Haven is interviewed by Shar VanBoskirk on how marketers can leverage consumer-generated medial. Length: 14:15, file size: 6.5MB mp3

- Mobile Marketing: One more interview from Shar VanBoskirk -- this time she talks with Charles Golvin, our lead consumer mobile analyst on how mobile marketing is finally coming into its own.

And if you're technology interests run in more of the security and risk management vein (or you know someone who might be interested), check out Forrester this podcast series on these topics at www.forrester.com/podcasts/srm. Just don't ask me what they are talking about, as listening to those podcasts was a humbling experience!

 

Forrester podcasting report - just 1% use podcasts

We just released some new data on podcasting, in a brief “Podcasting Hits The Charts” (available only to clients). Here’s the summary:

Podcasts have hit the mainstream consciousness but have not yet seen widespread use. One-quarter of online consumers express interest in podcasts, with most interested in time-shifting existing radio and Internet radio channels. Companies that are interested in using podcasts for their audio should focus not only on downloads but also on streaming audio as a means to get their content and ads to consumers.

Our survey showed that only 1% of online households in North America regularly download and listen to podcasts. And when you include all of the people who are just interested or have used podcasts, they strongly favor listening to existing content like Internet radio or broadcast radio, not necessarily new content. (And for newspapers thinking about podcasting, putting print stories into audio format just ranked ahead of original content from bloggers) I think this has something to do with 1) original content just isn’t as well known; and 2) existing content benefits from users that simply want to time shift it. (Shameless plug: there’s lots of other demographic and measurement data about podcasting in the brief).

Here’s my personal experience/confession. I subscribe to several podcasts, but eventually winnowed them down to just one, NPR’s On The Media. And frankly, it takes a back seat to my audiobooks which I get from Audible.com. Oh, and I happen to be downloading the NPR podcast on two computers synched to two iPods (a 20GB biggie and my Mini), which is why counting podcast downloads is a dubious way to measure usage.

Which leads me to my skepticism about the adoption and breadth of podcasting – measurement is still really hard to do (there's some light at the end of the tunnel from firms like Podtrac and Podbridge, the latter of which has a way to track listens as well as downloads).  Forrester projects that just 700,000 households in the US in 2006 will use podcasting, and that it will grow to 12.3 million households in the US by 2010. (See Forrester's  "The Future Of Digital Audio" report). Just to give you some context, we expect MP3 adoption to be almost 11 million households in the US this year, and grow to 34.5 million households by 2010. So that means in four years, about a third of those MP3 owners will be listening to podcasts on those devices. Podcasting will get easier and the content will get better, but it will all take time.

So should companies be putting podcasting on the backburner? Hardly. Content that already exists – such as earning calls, training updates, and executive presentations are all excellent fodder for podcasts. Think of us poor analysts who must listen to streamed quarterly calls while chained to our laptops! My caution is that companies shouldn’t be dashing out to create expensive original content for a small audience – unless they gain value from being seen as innovative.

Aside: Here's a great use of podcasts: language instruction. There's a series of Chinese language podcasts at www.chinesepod.com that I've just downloaded (not subscribed to yet) to try out as I'm hoping to brush up my very poor Mandarin. If I like it, I'll probably subscribe to the podcast so that I can get my regular Chinese lesson.

Forrester podcasting report - just 1% use podcasts

We just released some new data on podcasting, in a brief “Podcasting Hits The Charts” (available only to clients). Here’s the summary:

Podcasts have hit the mainstream consciousness but have not yet seen widespread use. One-quarter of online consumers express interest in podcasts, with most interested in time-shifting existing radio and Internet radio channels. Companies that are interested in using podcasts for their audio should focus not only on downloads but also on streaming audio as a means to get their content and ads to consumers.

Our survey showed that only 1% of online households in

North America

regularly download and listen to podcasts. And when you include all of the people who are just interested or have used podcasts, they strongly favor listening to existing content like Internet radio or broadcast radio, not necessarily new content. (And for newspapers thinking about podcasting, putting print stories into audio format just ranked ahead of original content from bloggers) I think this has something to do with 1) original content just isn’t as well known; and 2) existing content benefits from users that simply want to time shift it. (Shameless plug: there’s lots of other demographic and measurement data about podcasting in the brief).

Here’s my personal experience/confession. I subscribe to several podcasts, but eventually winnowed them down to just one, NPR’s On The Media. And frankly, it takes a back seat to my audiobooks which I get from Audible.com. Oh, and I happen to be downloading the NPR podcast on two computers synched to two iPods (a 20GB biggie and my Mini), which is why counting podcast downloads is a dubious way to measure usage.

Which leads me to my skepticism about the adoption and breadth of podcasting – measurement is still really hard to do (there's some light at the end of the tunnel from firms like Podtrac and Podbridge, the latter of which has a way to track listens as well as downloads).  Forrester projects that just 700,000 households in the

US

in 2006 will use podcasting, and that it will grow to 12.3 million households in the

US

by 2010. (See Forrester's  "The Future Of Digital Audio" report). Just to give you some context, we expect MP3 adoption to be almost 11 million households in the

US

this year, and grow to 34.5 million households by 2010. So that means in four years, about a third of those MP3 owners will be listening to podcasts on those devices. Podcasting will get easier and the content will get better, but it will all take time.

So should companies be putting podcasting on the backburner? Hardly. Content that already exists – such as earning calls, training updates, and executive presentations are all excellent fodder for podcasts. Think of us poor analysts who must listen to streamed quarterly calls while chained to our laptops! My caution is that companies shouldn’t be dashing out to create expensive original content for a small audience – unless they gain value from being seen as innovative.

Aside: Here's a great use of podcasts: language instruction. There's a series of Chinese language podcasts at www.chinesepod.com that I've just downloaded (not subscribed to yet) to try out as I'm hoping to brush up my very poor Mandarin. If I like it, I'll probably subscribe to the podcast so that I can get my regular Chinese lesson.

Forrester's Social Computing report

By Charlene Li

We just published a new report, "Social Computing: How Networks Erode Institutional Power, And What To Do About It" (available to clients only, but it's getting some good distribution as I'm getting pinged about it left and right). Here's the Executive Summary:

"Easy connections brought about by cheap devices, modular content, and shared computing resources are having a profound impact on our global economy and social structure. Individuals increasingly take cues from one another rather than from institutional sources like corporations, media outlets, religions, and political bodies. To thrive in an era of Social Computing, companies must abandon top-down management and communication tactics, weave communities into their products and services, use employees and partners as marketers, and become part of a living fabric of brand loyalists."

Forrester defines social computing as "A social structure in which technology puts power in communities, not institutions." We also believe that three tenets define social computing:

1) innovation will shift from top-down to bottom-up;
2) value will shift from ownership to experience; and
3) power will shift from institutions to communities?

Now, this sounds all simplistic and theoretical, but I think there's a great deal of power in the idea of social computing. With full respect to the definition of Web 2.0, I believe that the concept of social computing is the underpinning of much of the pain that companies are feeling around new technologies like blogging and RSS. But as I often stress, it's not about the technologies but about the new relationships that users will form. Technologies will come and go, but the power built on the relationships created by social computing will endure.

To fully appreciate the value of social computing, companies have to let go of control. That means letting customers control the brand if you're a marketer, and it means enabling new enterprise tools that IT can't easily control to attract and support employees with high social computing needs. In many ways, this is the source of the great distress that I routinely hear from corporate managers.

The goal of the report is to be the foundation piece for a key area of research for Forrester. So if you've had a chance to read the report, I'd love to hear what you think of it.

Free Forrester videos on Social Computing -- and much more

I spoke a few weeks ago at Forrester's Consumer Forum event in NYC about how companies can tap into social computing. I've included the links below to the MP3 and video files (they are FREE!!!), along with several other relevant speeches and Q&A that I thought you'd be interested in. I've included a few summaries as well as the lengths. [Note: the videos aren't quite "videos" (at least, not on my connection), but you'll get the slides that accompany the speeches -- and also a view of me "walking" around the stage!]. Also included are interviews with Paul Tagliabue, Commissioner of the NFL, Greg Joswiak, VP of Worldwide Product Marketing for iPod, Apple Computer Digital Home, and Vyomesh Joshi, EVP of the Imaging and Personal Systems Group at HP.

Charlene Li: "Social Computing -- Bubble or Big Deal?" (29 min. 38 sec.)
Find out how companies can tap into new technologies such as blogs, RSS, viral marketing, and podcasting to develop deeper relationships with consumers — including five rules that companies should follow to successfully grow these new relationships.
http://www.cramereventmedia.com/videoviews/videoView.aspx?videoViewID=88

Chris Charron: "Innovating In A Consumer Driven World" (8 min. 43 sec.)
Companies must tap into the power of consumer-to-consumer communication by adopting a "consumer-focused innovation" approach in which consumers play an active role in products, services, experience design, and marketing.
http://www.cramereventmedia.com/videoviews/videoView.aspx?videoViewID=86

Christine Overby: "The Essentials Of Consumer-Driven Innovation" (20 min. 11 sec.)
To turn consumer insights into profits, companies must master "consumer-focused innovation" — in which consumers play an active role in products, services, experience design, and marketing.
http://www.cramereventmedia.com/videoviews/videoView.aspx?videoViewID=87

Paul Tagliabue (NFL): Q&A with George Colony Part 1 of 2 (5 min. 12 sec.)
Tagliabue provides his perspective on emerging content distribution channels like video on-demand, streaming and downloading, and wireless video. He emphasizes the need to experiment broadly, create new product for every channel, and target the offering . . .
http://www.cramereventmedia.com/videoviews/videoView.aspx?videoViewID=89

Paul Tagliabue (NFL) : Q&A with George Colony Part 2 of 2 (4 min 7 sec)
Commenting on the marketing lessons he has learned at the NFL, Tagliabue discusses the need to monitor consumers carefully and regularly — to uncover invisible changes beneath the surface of macro consumer trends — as well as the need to form multiple . . .
http://www.cramereventmedia.com/videoviews/videoView.aspx?videoViewID=90

Greg Joswiak (Apple): Q&A with Josh Bernoff (22 min. 0 sec.)
Joswiak explains how Apple changes the rules of the game. He includes a special emphasis on how Apple taps into customer feedback online and in its stores and then combines those insights with its own technology vision.
http://www.cramereventmedia.com/videoviews/videoView.aspx?videoViewID=91

Vyomesh Joshi, Exec. VP, Imaging and Personal Systems Group, Hewlett-Packard (3 min. 10 sec.)
Hewlett-Packard's Vyomesh Joshi dismisses "convergence" as an unhelpful word and describes HP's four-pronged strategy for what consumers want in their digital home: content, search, personalization, and community.
http://www.cramereventmedia.com/videoviews/videoView.aspx?videoViewID=96

Whirlpool is podcasting

By Charlene Li

I'm at the Forrester Consumer Forum in New York and had dinner with several clients tonight. One of them was Whirlpool's Dan Cooke, manager of interactive marketing. We were chatting about the usual suspects -- RSS, blogs, search -- when Dan casually mentioned that Whirlpool had a podcast.

The podcasts were produced and moderated by Whirlpool's director of customer insight, Audrey Reed-Granger, who has a background in broadcasting. And it shows. What's interesting is the podcasts are focused on family issues and are not centered around Whirlpool products. Moreover, Whirlpool has done no overt promotion of the podcasts, preferring that they be found through word-of-mouth marketing. One charmer: the interview featuring Habitat Families and an interview with the 200,000th recipient of a Habitat For Humanity-built home (Whirlpool supports the non-profit by supplying a refrigerator and range to every Habitat home).

But my favorite feature -- the "coming soon" list of topics to encourage listeners to return for future broadcasts. The one I'm looking forward to the most is "Competitive Parents -- Mommyland Madness". 

Getting Real About Podcast Adoption

While Charlene is enjoying a well deserved break, I'll be tending her blog. Today we have a guest, guest author, Ted Schadler, another colleague on Forrester's Devices, Media and marketing team. (Why does it take three analysts to fill in while Charlene is on vacation?!). Here are Ted's thoughts on the reality of podcasting:

Podcasting feels like the Internet first did: a whole new way of experiencing the world. But at the end of the day, radio is radio and consumers will only listen to things they find valuable. So what will podcasting adoption look like? In Apple’s view of the world, podcasting is radio reinvented -- as long as it runs on an iPod. To the rising tide of podcast hosts, podcasting is better than blogging for becoming famous. To venture capitalists like Kleiner, Perkins Caufield & Byers, Charles River Ventures, and Sequoia Capital, podcasting is a bet on the next big thing. To commercial operators like Clear Channel, it’s yet another channel for selling advertisements.

Each of these groups expects podcasting adoption to mirror Internet adoption with giddily exponential growth. Alas, there is another precedent that all must consider: Push. Push exploded on the scene with Pointcast, landed faddishly on millions of desktops, and then just as quickly died away. (Of course, Push has been rehabilitated as RSS, but Push’s big problem -- content overload -- remains.)

A sober view will acknowledge podcasting coolness -- how else could Dawn and Drew reach beyond Wisconsin? -- but will also consider the fad factor. Like other Internet-enabled things, podcast listening will follow a natural progression: enthusiastic experimentation, disenchanted abandonment, and value-driven adoption.

With podcasting a click away for an iTunes user, it’s easy to experiment. Want to know what Al Franken has to say? Click the subscribe link. Need a Dawn and Drew fix? Click. Want to know about fly fishing, a lonely single’s sex life, life in the Alaskan bush? Click, click, click. This early stage of enthusiastic experimentation is what gets podcasters and investors excited.

But by the dawning of the new year, enthusiastic experimenters will find that most podcasts aren’t worth listening to and even the useful ones pile up unopened in the podcast corner of the hard drive. After all, who has an extra hour a week to listen to a radio show? Disenchanted, consumers will abandon most podcasts.

But somewhere in the midst of the experimentation and abandonment phases, podcasting will become valuable to consumers that want control over radio or access to niche content. Thus, value-driven adoption will characterize the mature phase of podcasting. Based on an historical analysis of Internet radio adoption and a forecast of broadband and MP3 player adoption, Forrester expects 12 million households to be regular podcast listeners by the end of the decade.

Along the way, podcasts will divide into mass-market and niche programming. Startups will aggregate niche programming and battle for audience and advertisers in a quest to be acquired by Yahoo!, MSN, AOL, Live365, or Clear Channel. Mass-market programmers will use podcasting as a feature to attract listeners and advertisers. From where we’re sitting, subscriptions are a non-starter except for Sirius and its Howard Stern show.

Here are more of Ted's research on podcasting.