Business World

Suaad Sait is co-founder of Workstreamer, a business listening platform that delivers actionable, real-time information to business professionals.

As businesspeople, we now have an unlimited amount of constantly updating information at our fingertips. It holds the promise of great value (and more importantly, profit), but it is also voluminous and fleeting.  Powerful new search engines, newfangled social CRM systems, and a preponderance of social sites and services leave us sitting at desks, feverishly fetching news and updates throughout the day in an attempt to stay up-to-date.

The trick, of course, is making sense of all that data, and putting it in context of what companies — and who exactly at those companies — matter most. Increasingly, we have the palpable desire to turn good data into good decisions and profitable relationships. But how can you take advantage of that tsunami of information without risking death by data? How can everyday businesspeople get value out of these data-heavy services and sources? 

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Relationships Still Rule

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The answer to these questions starts by first acknowledging that it’s the same as it ever was: Business is still all about relationships.  This should be soothing to many for whom the data web is a brave new world. 

The business world still runs on relationships, and data is as much at home at a cocktail hour or on a conference call as it is in a slide deck. The game has not changed much at all. The difference is that today’s business data has put everything in stark relief, at very high resolution. Opportunities and risks have been amplified.

For example, if I notice a partner’s company’s stock surge at the opening of the market and tie it to a news item on quarterly earnings, I can now send a timely congratulatory note and schedule a follow-up meeting to discuss leveraging that momentum for a proposed joint venture.

Or, say I am alerted to an old college friend changing his contact info on a social network, and as a result, track down a few details on his role at a new company. I might subsequently notice via a status update that he is departing for my home city in a few days, and now I can initiate a reconnection and invite him to participate on a panel I’m organizing.

Today’s most actionable business data comes from living and very human sources like social networks, wikis, microblogs, crowdsourced contact directories, collaboratively filtered finance communities, real-time search engines, hyperlocal news sites and more. Managing that data can involve a lot of mixing and matching, comparing and contrasting.

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Relationships Run on Data

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Strategic relationships with colleagues and contacts both create and consume data. In fact, data isn’t cold and impersonal at all — that’s an important misconception to put to rest. Many of your most successful and trusted business relationships now likely run on data.

“Networking” in the traditional sense used to take a lot of time and effort.  But in truth, all networking has ever been is the act of information-gathering — of scouting and collating.  We used to start with an idea of a person we were trying to do business with, without nearly enough relevant information about them. That has changed as a result of the personal data now available via social media sources.

Now, when you finally meet someone in person, or run into them at a conference, the interaction can be immediately more rich and productive precisely because of data — you can get right to the heart of the matter because you’re having a more informed, in-depth conversation that matters.

From crunching data and doing your homework, to finding a path through your existing relationships, to setting up that first meeting with a timely and well-researched missive, the new data-driven way of doing business can be infinitely more productive.

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Conclusion

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Remember the under-the-table note sharing going on in high school? 

Well, imagine having the smartest kid in school organize, prioritize and collect notes for you, no strings attached. That’s the kind of information advantage that is now available to us, through an ever-growing array of new social business tools. And it’s not considered cheating, either.

But even despite all this new data and these new tools, relationships are still the beginning and the end of every business decision. 

There is little doubt that there will be a fundamental overhaul in the skill-set of the average businessperson in the next five years as companies grapple with, and realize the upside of making better use of data, both internally and externally.

Today, the technologies and techniques that were once the exclusive domain of Wall Street analysts and Silicon Valley engineers are finally trickling down to everyday businesspeople.   But no matter how the world has changed, listening is still paramount -– listening to customers, listening to prospects, listening to colleagues, and listening to entire companies –- indeed, listening to data.

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More business resources from Mashable:

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- How Data Will Impact the Way We Do Business
- HOW TO: Make Sure You’re Tracking the Right Data
- 4 Tips for B2B Marketing on Facebook
- What Facebook’s Open Graph Means for Your Business
- HOW TO: Cultivate Your Brand’s Super Users

Image courtesy of iStockphoto, Sportstock, stevecoleccs

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Reviews: Facebook, Twitter, iStockphoto

Tags: business, data, small business, social media, social networking

Kim Polese Receives NCWIT Symons Innovator Award, Announces Departure from SpikeSource —

Last night in Portland, Oregon, the National Center for Women in Information Technology presented Kim Polese with the NCWIT Symons Innovator Award. The award is given annually to an outstanding woman who has successfully built and funded an IT company, in honor of the late Jeannette Symons, founder of Industrious Kid, Zhone Technologies, and Ascend Communications.

Listed in 1997 as one of Time Magazine's "25 Most Influential Americans," Polese has had a long career in Silicon Valley as the CEO of SpikeSource, the co-founder of Marimba, and the original product manager of Java at Sun Microsystems.

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As the CEO of SpikeSource, Polese has been responsible for guiding the company's vision: to make open source safe for the enterprise. Polese sees open source as accelerating innovation and helping "software get better faster." Open source, Polese argues, democratizes software and fosters collaboration, the latter of which is becoming more and more important in the tech and business world.

But while women comprise roughly a quarter of those who work in IT, they make up only 1.5% of those who work in open source. In her acceptance speech last night, Polese remarked that women's underrepresentation in the field - seen in both declining enrollment numbers in computer science degrees as well as in employment figures in the industry - is a threat both to the future of innovation and the future of our economy.

Echoing the work of NCWIT to encourage young girls to pursue careers in technology, Polese contends that the key is to get girls interested in computer science early and to support them in their endeavors throughout their academic and professional careers. "We have enough egos in IT," said Polese, arguing that women entrepreneurs and technologists bring important, but perhaps under-recognized, skills to the table: namely, patience, understanding, and collaboration.

Lucy Sanders, CEO and co-founder of NCWIT, said that in choosing to honor Polese with the Symons Innovator Award, the organization had selected someone who was truly an inspiration to women entrepreneurs and computer scientists. Sanders remarked last night that Polese's work on Java not only "brought the Internet alive," but by giving the product away for free, introduced a "new business model" for software distribution. Polese added that one of the things a skillful entrepreneur must to is to be able to balance creating new technologies with the economic sensibility to find the right business model and the right timing to bring those technologies to market.

Polese says that she enjoys working in the early stages of technology companies, as it is a period of great creativity and excitement. Announcing her resignation today as the CEO of SpikeSource, Polese wouldn't say what her next project would be, but she did say that she enjoys working with tech companies in their early stages, noting that it's a period of great creativity and excitement.

Discuss

Branding has jumped the shark. The meme is stale. Worn out. Post-peak. If branding were a show on Fox, it would be cancelled next week.

I can witness this trend by watching links going to three posts I made last month:

• Brands are Boring,
• Brands are Bull and
• The Unbearable Lightness of Branding

The latest to point this direction is People Aren’t Brands, by one of these guys here (I see no byline) in UKSN, the UK Sports Network. After pointing generously to the second of the posts above, they say,

In the current business world, brands aren’t human beings. They should be, and any social media practitioner worth her salt will be working damn hard with their clients to try and make them more so, but as it stands they are companies, corporate vehicles which are not set up to deal with human error…the kind we are all susceptible to, especially some high profile celebs.

Well, all due respect (and UKSN deserve plenty), brands aren’t people. True, it’s good to humanize companies, turn them inside out, tear down the walls of Fort Business, and otherwise cut out the pro forma BS that tends more commonly to bottle up a company’s humanity than to celebrate and leverage it. But doing that isn’t branding. It’s just good sense.

True, branding is a helpful way to align a company’s distinctions with its identity, or to make it more attractive, memorable and stuff like that. But it matters far less than a well-earned reputation. Consider these statements:

• Nike has a reputation for making good shoes.
• Apple has a reputation for making artful technology.
• Toyota has a reputation for making reliable cars.

Now let’s re-phrase those using the word “brand” instead of “reputation.”

• The Nike brand makes good shoes
• Apple is the brand for artful technology.
• Toyota is the reliable car brand.

Two points there. First, it’s hard to re-phrase reputation as brand, no matter how you put it. Second, branding is not positioning. By that I mean it would be easier to make positioning statements about any of those companies than to make a branding statement.

That’s because brands are nothing but statements. At best they are a well-known and trusted badge, name or both. At worst they’re a paint job, a claim, a rationalization or an aspiration. Branding can help a reputation, but it can’t make one. Real work does that. Accomplishment over time does that.

Consider for a moment the value of Toyota’s reputation as a maker of reliable cars. This reputation was earned over at least five decades. Millions of people have had good experiences with reliable Toyota cars and trucks. That reputation has kept Toyota’s head above water through the trials of the last year, when an endless string of bad news stories about sudden acceleration and other faults have been streaming through the news media. In the tug between bad news and good reputation, branding was a no-show.

Judged by the standards of real branding companies (such as Procter & Gamble, which invented and named the practice), Toyota’s branding work has been mediocre at best. It has created cars with confusing names (Corolla, Corona, Carina, Celica, Crown, Cresta, Cressida) and weird hard-to-pronounce names (Camry, Yaris), and has produced relatively little memorable advertising, considering the size of the company and the quality of its cars. Worse, those Toyotathon ads by local dealers, which ran until the Daily Show’s Toyotathon of Death segment buried them for good, were among the most persistent and annoying pitches of all time. In fact, Toyota dealers in general had relatively bad reputations. The one thing Toyota did well was make reliable cars. Toyota’s reputation persists because it was earned, not just claimed.

Branding is jumping the shark now because on the Net favors reality over bullshit. Saying stuff may get more attention than doing stuff , at least in the short run. But doing stuff is what makes the world work.

The hard thing for social media folks is that they’re still working the Saying Stuff beat while  Doing Stuff is what matters most. Getting companies to do different stuff, or to do the same stuff differently, is hard. Getting companies to do either of those things for long enough to earn a reputation for it is harder still.

But, good luck with that.

Meanwhile here’s how UKSN (in its People Aren’t Brands post) advises companies aligning with sports figures:

Corporates need to let go of the term ‘brand’ and all the connotations it brings when they are working with celebrities. When they hire the celeb, they think that person is now representative of the brand…something which humans can’t do! They can be themselves and if the company is comfortable with whom they are and what they stand for as a human being…then there is value to be derived by association. Expecting the person to fit into the perceived brand of a company is a recipe for (potential) disaster.

All good advice. What makes branding especially difficult in the sports world is that celebrity itself, and the fashions surrounding it, are part of the game. Sports figures endorse, and are endorsed by, “corporates,” and both benefit from each other. This morning I heard that money offered by teams shouldn’t have that much influence on which team LeBron James signs up with next (so long as they’re all within a few million dollars of each other), because he’ll make far more from his corporate affiliations. This is a set of considerations where UKSN knows far more than I do, and where branding of the old P&G sort still matters a great deal.

Sports is a special case. So are fashion and celebrity, and how all three of those overlap.

In most of society, however — including most of the business world — who you are and what you do matter more than how you look and how famous you become. Because who you are and what you do are what make the world a better place. And not just something to talk about.

Pitney Bowes: Business Giant Taps The Cloud in Shift From Software —

The value of cloud computing is reaching another giant of the business world with some help from WeoGeo, an emerging geodata service provider.

Pitney Bowes Business Insight (PBBI) is developing a "Data as a Service" (DaaS) platform that it is calling "Project Miami". The company will use the WeoGeo platform to offer its geodata to Pitney Bowes customers. PBBI will integrate WeoGeo as a SaaS. Project Miami will go live in June.

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Pitney Bowes sees the cloud a rich place to serve its data to clients. But, according to Ventana Research, it took some time to get there. It's a new initiative came to lie after the less than optimum integrations it did in recent acquisitions such as MapInfo.

According to Ventana, Pitney Bowes President Mike Hickey said the company made the shift to a DaaS after a year of discussions with employees and customers.

The new approach is a departure for Pitney Bowes from its focus on software. The new service will provide customers with a range of analytics-based data that will give it the capability to offer customers services such as "location intelligence."

Ventana:

"It is clear that PBBI is making a major step to embrace cloud computing and the software-as-a-service (SaaS) model in which technology tools can be rented and data can be purchased in an online marketplace but how far and fast they can transform is yet not clear. Cloud computing is part of an industry transition to simpler access to applications and services, along with technology infrastructure, that in a traditional enterprise data center would be complicated and expensive to install, configure and maintain."

PBBI is also partnering with Microsoft Bing. Aerial and hybrid imagery will be integrated with street map data.

This is where WeoGeo comes into the story. Geodata needs to be readily available to work with the location intelligence in the PBBI data portfolio.

WeoGeo will provide the geospatial content. According to the PBBI web site, Project Miami Marketplace key features allow the user to browse, view and select the content that fits the needs of their organization.

Before, customers would only see a thumbnail image. Only after getting CD or DVD did the customer get to see the data.

Discuss

21st Century Insurance Hands Media Account to Mindshare — NEW YORK (AdAge.com) -- Auto insurer 21st Century Insurance and Financial Services has shifted its estimated $50 million U.S. media planning and buying account to WPP's Mindshare without a review. The account was previously run by Omnicom Group's Omnicom Media Group.

Verizon's VCast App Store: Good for Consumers, Better for Verizon —

Verizon Wireless prepares to take on the big names in mobile application stores, including Apple and Google, with the launch of their own carrier-specific "Vcast App Store" next week. Here, customers will be able to purchase mobile apps and pay for them on their monthly wireless bill. The store's launch was announced at the recent CTIA conference, where Verizon disclosed the launch date (March 29th) and revealed other details about the store's planned operation. Most notably, the new VCast store has a revenue model that mimics that of Apple's iTunes. Application developers partnering with Verizon keep 70% of the revenue generated from app sales while Verizon keeps the remaining 30% for itself.

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Verizon's VP of marketing John Stratton recently explained in an interview with CNET that Verizon is not trying to compete with the other application stores already out there, but rather partner with them. The store already has one launch partner, RIM, makers of the Blackberry line of smartphones.

Verizon Deals Itself in to the App Store Game

But what do the VCast Store partners get out of the deal? Not revenue it seems. Only developers and Verizon share in that. Instead, the partners simply get access to a wider audience, which in turn supports their own developer community. And more developers means more apps and more apps means better sales. That reasoning may explain why RIM is on board at launch time. Blackberry smartphones, although still a staple in the business world and, interestingly enough, still at the the top of the smartphone OS market in the U.S., don't have the developer community that Apple, Android and even Nokia with their Ovi store do. In fact, recent reports pegged Blackberry's app store size as 4th largest in a lineup that included the top 6 smartphone makers.

At least RIM is aware of this issue. "It's real simple; for this revenue stream to carry on and thrive," explains Jim Balsille, co-CEO of RIM regarding the company's mobile app offerings, "the applications need to be adopted so we can drive more BlackBerry sales. And this makes the carrier a strategic partner."

One-Click App Shopping

In addition to using its own web site to provide an online application store where apps can be purchased, rated and downloaded, app store developers who partner with Verizon will also have access to APIs that allow them to tap into other Verizon services like location-based services and messaging. But the biggest benefit is that Verizon app shoppers, whether accessing the store via the website or mobile phone, don't have to pay for their applications on the spot using a specially created VCast account and associated credit card. Instead, the apps purchased are invoiced on a monthly cycle alongside the minutes used and texts sent on customers' cell phone bills.

For consumers, the benefit is a one-click process for app buying. For Verizon, the benefit is that they've just re-inserted themselves into the revenue stream that is the mobile application market - a market growing so fast, it's expected to reach $17.5 billion by 2012. Unlike AT&T, who gets nothing every time an iPhone application is sold but then has to support the data traffic new apps bring to its network, Verizon hopes to make the mobile app store something that's mutually beneficial to customers and carriers alike.

The VCast application store will launch March 29th. Interested developers can find support and have their questions answered over on the Verizon Developer Community forums.

Discuss

Since the business world today still clings to the relic of eras past known as the business card, and since tapping in those details can be a bit painful, several apps exist to scan cards in with the iPhone 3G's camera. Lex Friedman looks at a quartet of apps, with WorldCard Mobile standing out from the pack.

Adina Levin relates a conversation we had a few weeks ago in San Francisco. She seems to have grasped my ideas on publicy and smoothed them out in a great way:

- Adina Levin, How boundaries are formed in a more transparent world

Last night at the Social Business Tweetup in San Francisco, I had a conversation with Stowe Boyd about new ways boundaries will be constructed in a world of increased transparency. In the personal world and the business world, more is transparent, boundaries are more porous; boundaries continue to exist, and are created in some different ways.

Signal to noise. When constant streams of talk and data are available, the biggest need is for tools and affordances to manage attention and improve signal to noise. This is a difficult design problem – Facebook, for example, has moved away from hard-to-use individual controls, in favor of not-very-useful algorithmic filters.

Social context I talked at the party to someone working on a startup that is providing tools, analogous to Twibes but with different use cases, to make visible ad hoc groups on Twitter. Even in a public stream, people need ways of paying focused attention to sets of other people.

Shared identity creation. Stowe talked about a changing understanding about disclosure – a privacy-focused model imagines the individual as a source of identity information that is shared. An alternative model imagines aspects of identity as being created within the contexts of subcultures. This view of identity formation isn’t new. But thinking about identity in this way in a digital context leads, for example, to different ways of thinking about decentralized profile information. Maybe you don’t make a central profile and share aspects of it, but create aspects of a profile in a subculture context and choose what to aggregate.

Social thickness Even when conversations are publicly visible, not all conversations are socially accessible. There are purely social norms and processes of group formation, with different levels of social ties operating in social context where everyone can nominally see what’s happening. These are enacted at the level of talk and patterns of reply. Social network analysis can see some of this, the sensitive question is to what end, since the social processes are subtle, and algorithmic approaches are unsubtle (think Facebooks’ reminders to get in touch with people who are famous or people you don’t talk to for good reasons.)

Power at the interface Organizations continue to have boundaries. Naive uses of social media put powerless “watchers” at the boundaries – the representative of Citibank who tells me soothing words when Citi blocks my card yet again, because I shop in batches, but has no power to affect their algorithm or their design for transaction verification. Better would be internal collaboration at the boundary, allowing the organization to react with power to signals it watches for.

Stowe has been talking about his take on these trends using the term publicy. The consequences of these trends for business will be discussed at the upcoming Social Business Edge conference on April 19 in New York.

Looks like the outline of a great talk for the conference, Adina.

Brilliant Google Product Policy and Why Buzz Is Wise —

Given how huge Google is and the giant’s reputation in the online business world, it is no wonder that everything that Google chooses to launch as a new product never stays unnoticed and gets tons of coverage in the blogosphere and in traditional media.

The latest addition of Google Buzz is no exception, of course, as the blogosphere could not ignore Google trying to popularize the idea of lifestreaming to millions upon millions of users of Gmail, its wildly popular web-based email service. In fact, I think it will be no exaggeration to guess that for quite a number of web users around the world Gmail is the home page in their browsers, the first thing they see when they head online every day. And who will resist clicking that multi-color icon to check what the Buzz is?

Of course the launch of Google Buzz was accompanied by quite a number of criticizing voices about Google jeopardizing users’ privacy (as if it does not all the time by monitoring what we search for and what our email content is) and copying some of the worst FriendFeed features and for numerous other things that left geeks in the tech blogosphere unhappy.

But happy or not, I think we all should admit that Google will now do to lifestreaming what FriendFeed could never achieve - no matter how much we liked the cozy place to chat to our friends and promote each others’ posts over there. It is evident that the number of Gmail users is disproportionately higher than the number of people who ever heard of FriendFeed at all.

And now Google comes and introduces a FriendFeed of its own - a very simple new service that does not seem to need explanation as much as FriendFeed needed when it was first launched, at least because the geeks can help explaining and because the number of connected sites is so limited that you can’t really get lost even if you try to.

Now that I think about it, I can’t help but admire Google’s product policy: they saw something that seemed to be interesting to a number of people, they saw some potential in the idea and they used one of their flagship products, Gmail, to make it truly popular - and make some more millions off Adsense ads wisely integrated into Gmail interface years ago.

Ok, they don’t really want to invent and innovate these days. Instead, they simply follow the market trends and launch their own products to meet demands of their existing user base for these products instead of creating awareness and building new markets. After all, they probably innovated enough after they came up with the best search engine that ever existed, introduced the cleanest possible interface for email and made contextual advertising a hit. Now they definitely can afford following the market trends and launching their own iterations of promising things someone else invites.

Google Buzz is only one example and probably not the most prominent one because only a tiny portion of web users ever knew about FriendFeed - and an even smaller portion actually used the service. But come to think of it, Google’s product policy has not really been about dramatic innovations recently.

When they launched Gmail, internet users knew what email was and many had Yahoo Mail accounts - and the only thing that Google did was packing it all in a much cleaner interface and adding some small unusual features on the road. The growing popularity of their web-based office suite - Google Docs - is not really a wonder either: after all, everyone knows what text processors and spreadsheets are and it’s not really too much of a challenge to explain that it all can be used online via a browser and for free as an additional benefit as opposed to expensive Microsoft products. And was not it logical to launch a web browser of their own? After all, everyone knew what a browser was by the time and many people found the clean interface and speed of Chrome to be very appealing.

Android was their next huge release and again there was nothing revolutionary in it: everyone knows what cell phones and smart phones are and a number of companies develop operating systems for these devices - so Google simply came up with something that would be attractive to their target users, not really inventing but instead improving on others’ products.

Finally, they decided to launch a phone of their own - Nexus One - and again the same pattern: there’s no real need to explain to people what a touch-screen phone is, right? And it only took me 2 minutes to explain to my husband’s younger sister that his new phone actually was a Google phone even though she only heard about Google as a search engine until the moment she borrowed that shiny and new Nexus One to make a call.

The only exception from this policy that I can remember right now is Google Wave that is promised to revolutionize the way we use email - and pretty soon. Right at the moment of Google presenting Wave to bloggers I thought this idea was too complicated to be useful and later on I have never figured out exactly how Wave could improve my life. Google Wave is the service that I’ve received the most questions about from my less techy friends asking what they were supposed to use it for. And the worst part is that I myself could never find any worthy explanation for them. In fact, I have never even given all the invites I have out because I don’t have enough friends who I could explain why they might need it to at all.

But exceptions only confirm the general rules and for Google it looks like a general rule has become this one: follow the market trends, listen to demands, improve on existing ideas and make them work because of the huge user base Google has. After all, everyone needs a text processor, a web-based email, a browser and a phone. And why should not it all be powered by Google?