continued

Now, the latest evolution of the web adds another dimension to these prior two. Where in the past all you could do was search and read the information you found, now you can collaborate with people and act on the information. Best of all, you can collaborate with others and act on information in real time. Guess what they are calling this? How about Real Time Web, or RTW.

Clever, huh?

Sharing information, searching for information, and now collaborating with others to act on the information… and all in real time. So who cares?

Well, you should, for one.

As some wit said years ago, “Information is power.” When you search for information on Google the results shown are not always up to date. In most cases the results shown are only as current as the last time Google updated their cache for that particular website.

	A Few Useful RTW Collaboration Tools (click on an icon to learn more about each)

The information you see could be current, or then again it might be a week or two old… or even longer. Some of our clients hardly ever change the content on their web pages, and so we set the search engine cache request to 60 days or more. Others don’t even know about this, and so post no instructions at all in the HTML code that makes up their site. For these folks their site will only be resurveyed for changes when Google’s servers get around to it. Who knows when that might be?

Because of this and other factors, the information you see on the web may or may not be up to date and accurate. Stale, old information like this does not represent the RTW web. If information is power, using stale information means you have none.

What does represent the RTW? How about every person over 60's favorite company to hate: Twitter.

Twitter information is as real time as it can get. Not sure about this? Think about the real time reports that flowed from the protesters in Iran, or the reporting of earth quakes in China, tsunamis in Indonesia, and the like. In Thailand during April '10 the "Red Shirts" used Twitter to concentrate their protestors to stymie the Thai Army. Overall, the Twitter "command and control" network the Red Shirts used was far more effective than the billion dollar one the Thai Army depended upon. More than just being a stupid pet trick celebrities use to puff up their image, Twitter has real value for those who know how to use it.

With Twitter you can find information at the instant it is happening. If your company is in the business of selling a product or service that changes in real time, or even near real time, then you need to learn how to use real time information sharing services such as Twitter, Buzz, Reddit, and others. Not sure your company is large enough to benefit from this capability? Think again. Small Is nimble. Being nimble can provide an enormous competitive advantage.

Consider: L.A. is a city so spread out that hardly anyone walks anywhere. Without a car, you can’t even get a decent lunch. Yet while it is spread out, it is also expensive. Paying for lunch in L.A. is the reason why so many Californians took out second mortgages on their homes. No, it wasn’t to buy Toy Haulers and dirt buggies, it was to pay for lunch. Imagine, second mortgages to pay for lunch… we all know where that led… banks failed, Obama got elected, Lloyd Blankfien got skewered by Congress… well, you know the rest of the story.

Given the cost, most L.A. types would rather eat lunch at a food truck than at Bouchon, in Beverly Hills. Fortunately, L.A. invented something known as the gourmet food truck, and so this is possible. Unfortunately, the legislature invented something called ordinances, and so finding a place to park your food truck for more than 10 minutes without getting busted falls somewhere between difficult and next to impossible.

How to get around this? Twitter.

L.A. today is awash with gourmet food trucks… and I mean gourmet. These trucks serve the absolute best of everything you could possibly ask for. One of the best is Kogi BBQ. Korean BBQ at its best, the Kogi people spend 60% of their day skirting the police, and the other 40% dishing out some of the best food this side of Seoul. And it’s all possible because their rabid customers can track where the gourmet truck is via Twitter.

If a mom and pop food truck can pull in millions each year just by combining a food truck with Twitter, why can’t your company? What makes you think that your most valuable customers don’t want to know what you have up your sleeve? Don’t want to be the first to know when you bring something new to the market? Don’t want to be the first in line to hand over their hard earned bucks (or even those they got from a second mortgage) to you for your latest product? Call it viral marketing if you wish, but the fact is it is nothing more than an inspired use of the RTW to increase sales. How big an increase can you get via RTW marketing and selling? Think “inflection point.” That's how big.

Our recommendation? Forget about the naysayers, now is the time for you to gather your sales, product development, customer service, and marketing team together and challenge them to come up with 10 new ways (each) to use RTW to increase sales, revenue, and profits.

Can’t afford the cost of bringing everyone together at the home office? Well then, use Twitter, combined with FriendFeed, to bring those in the field into the very conference room where the rest of your staff will be. With RTW it’s not necessary to physically be where the action is. All that’s needed is to be where the information is… and that’s on the RTW.

To help you get started on this exercise, consider these ideas about how to use the RTW to your company’s benefit:

- Improve Customer Service: Respond to customers in real time, as they complain. One way to do this is to set up a Twitter account that customers can use to file complaints or ask questions, in real time. Assign a few people from your call center to monitor the account, and when a tweet comes in, have them respond to it immediately.

- Increase Sales of Slow Products: Send “VIP” coupon codes to customers that allow them to get 40% off if they act now. If you're a restaurant, give the codes a shelf life of, say, six hours, and restrict their use to walk in customers. If you sell retail goods both in brick and morter stores and over the web, give them a shelf life of a day, and restrict them to your eCommerce web site and/or your walk-in stores. Use an approach like this to increase your business on slow days, or move stale inventory. But be careful. Make sure you only send codes to customers who “opt in” to receive them. Whatever you do, don’t spam your customers via Twitter, or you’ll find them using the same tool to complain about the spam you send. Like every fine tool, there is a good way to use it, and a bad way. If you use RTW tools correctly, your business will bloom. If you don’t, the world of Twitter may bring you to your knees.

- Improve Executive Management & Reporting: Set up an internal company account that allows your first level managers to stay up to date in real time with what is happening across the company. Use it to provide twice daily project or program updates, updates on new client signings, hourly reports on the company’s stock, reports to senior executives on call center call volumes, manufacturing output statistics, daily "dash board" reports… there is no limit to how you can use RTW to keep your staff better informed than they are today.[1]

Does all of this seem like a lot of work for something that just might be a flash in the pan? Perhaps. On one side, yes, it’s true that fully 41% of what passes through Twitter is pointless babble, but that doesn’t mean that is how you must use the service, or that the other elements of the RTW are useless. Consider Dell: Dell announced that $9m of its 2009 sales came directly through Twitter and Facebook. Wouldn’t you like to have an extra $9 million in sales for your company?  

While Twitter has pros and cons to it, the fact is that its value far exceeds what most people use it for, that being the crass and usually tasteless use that seems to be part and parcel of the world of social networking. More to the point, Twitter, and the rest of the RTW tools that are available, show intrinsic value applicable to areas such as education, emergencies, taking polls, protests & politics, public relations, business, fund raising, and many others.

Overall, the trend is clear. Those early adopters who have already embraced the RTW are reaping the rewards as you read this. Whether they are small entrepreneurs like the folks at Kogi BBQ, or the big guys at Dell… they know a good sales trick when they see one.

Look into it. In the mean time, if you need a quick primer on Twitter, read what Wikipedia has to say about it (click the icon). It’s worth your time. When you finish, you will be a believer. Better still, you will know how to use this and other RTW tools to fatten your company’s bottom line.

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[1] Note: If you plan to embrace the RTW in your business, you are going to have to supply your managers with better computers than they now have. Start looking into tablet PCs with GSM mobile capabilities, Smartphones, and UMPCs that support VoIP. The RTW is all about communication, and if you can't communicate, you can't leverage the value of the RTW. 

The Value of RTW Collaboration  

So what’s new with the Internet, you ask?

Lots. I’m sure you have begun to hear the term Web 3.0 being tossed around by all those Internet experts out there. It’s the newest mantra: Web 3.0 this, Web 3.0 that… you hear it so much that we’re actually thinking of adding the phrase to our own Intro Page, that’s how pervasive the trend is. I mean, you can’t fight a popular marketing trend, can you? Eventually we’ll probably give in. For now though, we are going to hold off, if only for principle's sake.

It’s not that we are purists here, it’s just that when everyone attributes their own meaning to a new catch phrase it confuses one and all… most especially the customer. That’s destructive to the industry, and bad for business. As Rush Limbaugh would say, “Words have meaning. If you won’t take the time to learn the real meaning of a word, don’t use it.”

With the term Web 3.0 the problem is that it has no fixed meaning. It’s nothing more than a marketing phrase that some self proclaimed guru dreamed up so that he could claim to have spotted a new trend, and that he was, therefore, an authority on the industry.

Unfortunately, the rest of the industry ran to be the first in line behind him, so that they too could claim to be on the cutting edge of the industry’s advancement. It’s what poorly qualified but eager people do to convince you that they are experts when it comes to Internet stuff. It’s no different than what happened with every other phrase you heard bandied about, from Business Process Re-engineering to Paradigm Shift… people hear the term, think it’s a hot new phrase that’ll help them look smart, latch onto it, and pepper their conversation with it all day long, to the point of nausea.  Why do they do it? So that you will be impressed at how much they know.

I see it daily. A local businessman I know is constantly talking about “cloud computing,” like he knows what the hell he’s talking about. The problem is, he doesn’t have the foggiest idea what cloud computing is, how it's one of six basic forms of computing, what it's five essential characteristics are, how it works, or why it’s good for some forms of computing but not others.

Even so, he's made the term his so much so that he's become the go to guy on the topic of cloud computing.

And so it is with Web 3.0—silly when used by individuals who know not of what they speak, for the industry it’s tragic that this confusion is allowed to exist. The problem is that there are some new things happening in the world of the Internet that could and perhaps should be considered Web 3.0, if only the fraudsters would stop applying the term to everything they do. Whether the industry will clean itself up or not is hard to say.

As for what new things are happening with the internet, consider this:

Collaboration: Referred to more correctly as Real Time Web, it is part of what makes up the real Web 3.0 environment. Collaboration allows you to “Push” information to your customers for those topics they express an interest in.

Think of it as the reverse of “Search.” With Search, your customer defines a Key Word or a series of them, then manually searches for information about that “Topic of Interest.”

With Collaboration the opposite happens: they define a Topic of Interest, you extract from that a set of Key Words, then you do the searching and Push to the customer the information they are seeking. 

Where’s the value in this you ask? If the Topic of Interest listed by the customer includes Key Words that relate to the products or services your company offers, then you just found yourself a new customer. But that’s just the beginning of what RTW can do for you.

Internally, within your company, Collaboration can be used to bring together team members to move a project forward, no matter where they are in the world. All that’s required to do this is to develop a set of metadata for each program/project your company has, where the metadata equates to Topics of Interest with lists of associated Key Words. Then assign staff to the project based on how well their job description and authority level match up with the Key Word list, and voila, you have a project team with the skills needed to tackle the task.

As for how your team can work together to complete the task, that’s where the technology behind RTW comes in. New forms of communication, like Twitter™ and FriendFeed™, can be used to keep everyone on the team fully informed, in real time, as to how the project is going. But that’s just the beginning. More can be done with this technology than just keeping people informed.

Let’s take an example: Suppose your Sales Department needs to present a proposal to a new client in another country and get it signed. And let’s say that Executive Management requires that any changes to the original design be approved by your IT department, that any contract changes be passed in front of and approved by your outside counsel, while any price changes must be approved by the Finance Department. Of course, the Sales crew are in the foreign country, at the customers, and are about to walk into the negotiation room, while the IT folks are holed up back at the Main Office in their cubicles, playing World of Warcraft, your outside counsel is in his office in another city, and your Finance manger is on the golf course.

By setting up a Twitter network that is associated with a FriendFeed group, where both include everyone working on the project, it’s easy to keep all the players in the loop on not only how negotiations are going, but what changes will need to be processed in real time if the contract is to be won during the same day's negotiation session.

Twitter can be used during actual negotiations to keep the team in the loop as to how things are going, while FriendFeed can be used during breaks to assess, modify and approve any required changes in real time. By combining these two forms of RTW technology and applying them in a Web 3.0 mobile web environment, contract negotiations can be kept moving along smoothly and quickly. With any luck your team will have collaborated so well that the deal will be signed before your competition can figure out what's going on behind the closed conference room door.

Simple, huh? And all from a couple of free online services that every 14 year old probably knows how to use better than you do.

Next month we’ll talk more about RTW and how your company can use it to become a market leader. Take the time to come back and read it. If you’re in business to win, then you need to take the time to understand how RTW is going to change the architecture of the web, and how businesses are already beginning to use this new architecture to interact with each other and their customers.

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 Cisco has been a leader in developing robust solutions for enterprise level collaboration. Their Collaboration Architecture has become a standard that many companies, including WebSpecks, use when designing large, integrated Collaboration networks. The graphic at left is taken from the training they offer on their design. Call us if you would like us to explain how it all comes together to result in higher operational efficiency, less cost, and increased sales for your organization.

In our last Blog we talked about what WebSpecks does for a living. In particular, we discussed two forms of Web 2.0 platforms that we develop: i) Customer Activity Management platforms, and ii) Market Creation & Influence Networks. To make the discussion easier, we used as an example one of our clients that has a license to sell Lottery tickets in Brazil. The example is relevant to Web 2.0 solutions, as our client will be using a TCP/IP based enterprise network to offer digital forms of lottery tickets to players, which they will buy and play over their cell phones. Our job is to design and build that network, as well as the supporting software applications, websites, and mobile media messaging system.

The network we developed to support this activity looks as shown below. You can see how simple it is. Simple in design, yes. Powerful in capabilities, much more so.

What exactly does this network do? It allows a company to proactively sell product to a customer, based on that customer’s activity patterns, as discerned from the past, and projected to the present. Note that I said “present,” not future. The phrase is important, as the key value in this platform lies in its ability to project the specific time and moment when a customer will be most inclined to accept an offer to  “buy a product,” based on their past activity. What we are doing then is using past activity patterns to incent present-moment buying decisions.

In the architecture below, you can see how this might happen.

A) Based on a customer’s buying habits as tracked from a Merchant Lottery Ticket Terminal (the arrow marked “1. Customer activity tracking,” in the graphic below), a pattern of lottery ticket play can be determined for each and every customer.