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How Do Enterprise Buyers Research New Software?

A few weeks ago, I wanted to know what role “social” plays in researching enterprise software. Every one of the billion dollar companies that responded to my inquiry said that blogs, social networks (from Twitter to LinkedIn), and online forums weighed heavily in their initial research and opinion formulation process. Of course, the traditional research houses (Gartner, Forrester, IDC) are still the strongest sources of unbiased insights and strategic guidance on large enterprise software. But, the emphasis on searching social sources for initial inquiries confirmed what I believe strongly – if you’re selling enterprise software, you need to be a part of the conversation online.

After a very long-threaded discussion, we came up with this mapping to indicate where sources fit in the context of a very nuanced process to research new software players. See if it resonates with you.

This map courtesy of Joachim Stroh.

In related research news, I have had the pleasure this year to work with Jane McConnell on developing input to her annual Digital Workplace Trends report. I suggested she develop a customized Digital Workplace Scorecard for this year’s report. It will be very handy to track these scorecards over time as enterprises mature. It can become a benchmark to demonstrate the material returns on transformation initiatives. The research will be done in February, and I’m looking forward to presenting it here in the U.S. You have until October 28 to contribute to the survey. Learn more here.

As you should know, we are working hard on Change Agents Worldwide. We are currently testing our models in the market with customers. Once we’ve moved a few customers through our unique approach to delivering on the business of world-changing, we will be making a formal announcement that explains our goals for the company. As always, feel free to reach out to me with any questions.

VoloMetrix Knows What You’re Doing at Work

There’s been a gaping hole in the enterprise market for someone to come along and start identifying what’s actually happening within the corporate “people” network. Once the company can see its aggregate collaboration data, it can make intelligent tweaks to improve productivity and apply strategic management thinking on what to do – and more importantly – to stop doing.

At first blush, this product will freak you out a little with the “creepy” factor, but the more you know, the more you realize it’s harmless and can actually be supremely beneficial – for management and individuals alike.

I’ve written numerous times about how the answer isn’t blowing in the wind; the answer is in the network. Social network analysis is the next frontier in understanding how companies function, and how they suffer under dysfunction. VoloMetrix is the first company I’ve come across that has a commercial offering for the enterprise that begins to get at this rich source of actionable data.

The company was launched in early 2011 by Ryan Fuller who spent time at Cognos and years as a management consultant at Bain & Co. He saw what was missing in the market was an easy way to look at the key relationships in the business (employees, customer, suppliers, etc.) and get a realtime view of collaboration and connections, so you could analyze patterns in a meaningful way. Once you have the data on what’s going on inside of the organization, it’s eye-opening. Fuller says one of his clients discovered 5 out of the top 20 meetings the company held involved a leading enterprise software vendor. Overall, the way the relationship was managed with the vendor cost the company about $20M per year. Another client analyzed its conversations with one of its supply chain partners and found that over 1,200 different individuals in the company racked up over 25K hours/quarter dealing with the partner.

Today, VoloMetrix only analyzes corporate email, IM, and calendaring, but they’ve been in contact with social collaboration platform vendors, and incorporating internal social networks is on the roadmap for the platform. Fuller sees VoloMetrix as a good complement to social collaboration platform vendors because they can pin-point with accuracy an ROI for the vendor in “before and after” quantitative terms (new relationships, reduction in email, increased productivity, etc.).

So is this the NSA of the enterprise? Maybe. Yet, truthfully, every corporate employer owns your data and has the right to track you on the job with very few exceptions (at least in the US). But, like the NSA, VoloMetrix claims it’s only capturing header data or metadata (to/from, date) and aggregates it to look at larger trends for analysis. “We’re not reading your email,” Fuller says. The data is mapped to the org chart, but it’s anonymized to show activity and relationships. He says one of his clients let the employees opt-out if they were uncomfortable, but only under 3% took them up on it. On the flipside, the data works in an employee’s favor too when you’ve been telling your boss for weeks you’ve been spinning your wheels talking to department X and never making any progress. Now you have evidence to back up your frustration. No one wants to waste their time at work, and VoloMetrix is a time-waster’s best friend in that it will put dollars against that wasted time.

I’m keeping my eye on this startup. They’re a SaaS-based enterprise play in a very hot space with virtually no competitors that I have seen. If I’m wrong about that, let me know in the comments. If I have any advice for the young company it would probably be this: borrow a binder and get a woman on your management team.

Update: Today, the VoloMetrix site has two women directors on its about page. ~~My oversight.~~ This morning I was told I had made a mistake, that the women were on the page and I missed it. I very rarely make mistakes like this, so my EI friend @jonerp ran a quick indexed cached page from July 21. No women in sight. Shame, shame, shame. Something bad made worse.

Come Shake your Cosmic Thing in Atlanta this Fall

In my new role as social mercenary while I work on the startup, I’ve been doing some work for my good friend, Robin Carey, founder of Social Media Today (SMT). Robin is one of the key influentials who served as an early catalyst to introduce the social phenomenon to the business world. SMT is a disruptive publishing and community hybrid that has delivered the right mix of thought leadership, exposure, brand value, and community engagement to thousands of early adopters worldwide. SMT launched in 2007 and as chiefly a new media online enterprise, Robin has always avoided the temptation to get into the conference game. That changed last fall when Blogworld approached her about doing a conference. Blogworld’s New Media expo draws thousands to its flagship event in Las Vegas.

What I love about Robin is that she sees the whole market – the macro market – for social’s total potential for impact on a 21st-Century business. Where she could easily be content to stay sequestered in the profitable social media marketing large chunk of the social pie, she has never lost sight of what social can do internally for an enterprise. Robin credits her heroes as the inspiration for the conference, but she is a hero to many of us who are thankful she has never let go of that vision.

Robin chose another one of my good friends, Maggie Fox, to serve as MC and content producer for the event. Maggie too has always been a champion for seeing the larger possibilities in the market beyond social media marketing and serves as a strategic advisor to large companies trying to navigate the social possibilities of a changing world. She is focusing the conference agenda around issues that demonstrate how social is developing new models and changing traditional roles for individuals and brands.

So, when is this fabulous conference? The Social Shake-up Conference will be held September 15-17 in Atlanta, GA. The tracks are already established, and the sessions are getting filled in quickly. Although you’ll see a lot of familiar faces in the speaker list for Shake-up, you’re going to be introduced to some new, dynamic speakers too. The star opening keynote will be Porter Gale, who recently published, “Your Network is your Net Worth.” I’ve heard she is a fantastic speaker.

In the back channels on the social web, I’ve been hearing a lot of grousing about how there is a hole in the market for a great conference. So many of us who’ve been at this for a while recall the magic that happened when people who knew each other really well online met for the first time in person at an industry conference. It has always served as a good lesson behind the hoopla that powers the social web that real relationships are forged and forever grounded in the chemistry and bonding of a face-to-face encounter. I’m looking forward to attending this conference and helping Maggie and Robin in every way I can. BTW, this is not a conference where you will see a pathetic dearth of women speakers. Women have been strong voices in the social revolution. Come celebrate with us in Atlanta.

Early bird registration ends this week, July 5. There are blogger press passes for influentials too, so just reach out, and I’ll make sure to hook you up.

Bonus question: who can identify the obscure B-52s reference in this post?

Mad Men and the UNIX Wars

I’ve been cleaning out my closets and finding some real gems. I came across my old ad portfolio a few days ago.

With all the increasing tension between transparency and privacy and the role of Internet freedoms, it’s hard to believe there was once a time not too long ago that computers didn’t “talk” to each other. So-called “closed systems” enabled large manufacturers to secure unfair advantage in the market for hardware, software, and services. Entire walled garden ecosystems surrounded the largest technology vendors in the world. The UNIX operating system changed all that. I remember when the “UNIX Wars” cropped up when I was working with AT&T on the company’s (ill-fated) foray into the computer market. I was the liaison between the client, our account team, and our creatives at Ogilvy & Mather to explain the significance of UNIX to, well, the world. (Lucky me!) I recall we had about a million dollar media budget (in ’88 dollars) to brand AT&T’s special version of UNIX: System V.

These were the days pre-Internet where influence and power had to be levied with massive spend. AT&T could afford it at the time. We ran this 1988 full-page ad in the Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, and the Washington Post to flex muscle in the negotiations AT&T was having with its ecosystem and to position it against its rivals. There’s a great narrative for all you deeply geeky readers on what happened behind the scenes by Christopher Kelty in his book, “Two Bigs – The Cultural Significance of Free Software.”

I’m an avid Mad Men fan. As I watch the series, I wonder if it will approach the period of time I was in advertising (the 80s). When I joined the advertising world, computer advertising was the #3 spending category. IBM launched the PC in 1981 and it created a bonanza of new media spend for large agencies, as well as publishing media empires that seized the opportunity to track the industry and attract the newly minted print dollars.

Who remembers the thump of PC Magazine in its heyday?

“I just want to say one word to you. Just one word…” Elastics

My daughter is graduating college next week, and I’ve been thinking about all the advice this next generation will get from relatives and friends. In the 60s, Benjamin (Dustin Hoffman in The Graduate) received well-intentioned advice from Mr. McGuire, a family friend, to pursue the plastics industry. Plastics and U.S. manufacturing conjure up an image of the industrial age economy we once knew. Well, 45 years later, all that has changed. Plastic is out and “elastic” is in.

I caught up with my former colleague Nick Vitalari yesterday at the third annual Austin IT Symposium. Nick and Hadyn Shaughnessey who covers innovation for Forbes wrote, The Elastic Enterprise: the New Manifesto for Business Revolution. The book is well-researched with conclusions drawn from over 80 interviews with leading companies practicing open, elastic strategies. Essentially, the books lays out how enterprises will have to re-conceive “how we scale and operate businesses in the 21st Century.” Based on five core “dynamics,” the book simplifies and makes crystal clear how large enterprises will need to transform. The book is a quick read, highly accessible and chock full of great examples. Pick it up for a flight or download it to your favorite e-reader.

The Symposium agenda was centered around the issues CIOs need to understand to embrace the Elastic Enterprise. A special thanks to my friend Keri Pearlson and the Austin SIM chapter for an invite to the event.

Crushpath Reboots the Pitch

I caught up with Sam Lawrence just before SXSW to hear about his latest milestone with the company he founded in 2011, Crushpath. Readers of this blog will remember Sam as the first highly visible CMO for Jive Software. Sam’s Go Big Always blog defined the category for social software back in ’09. Sam’s contribution was always edgy, always provocative, and always right. There were few in our space that had the voice, influence, and insight Sam had early on. I’ve missed him over the years, and am really happy to see him back with this amazing new offering. I told Sam on the phone I simply could not be objective about this product because I frigg’n love it. Even though I was a Sam fan already, I’m an even bigger Crushpath fan.

What is Crushpath? As usual, Sam says it best:

Crushpath gives people a way to pitch their product, service, idea, or event with a simple, one page website that grabs the attention and captures leads in a way that email can’t. Your pitch is searchable, shareable, and social, so you get tons of eyeballs on it and are notified every time someone is interested. Then, keep track of your business relationships with a chronological play by play of all activity as it’s happening.

Sam gave me a trial account to experiment with, so I’ve begun building a few pitch sites to see how it works. The elegance of the user interface and drop-dead-simple design is what does it for me. Until I spoke to Sam, I didn’t realize Matt Wilkinson was a co-founder. Matt led product development for another product I absolutely love: Socialcast. So, that the product is simple to use, looks great, and has a lag time of about 15 minutes to usefulness does not surprise me, considering Matt’s track record with building great software.

But, really, what makes Crushpath brilliant is what it does. It’s built on the philosophy that “everyone pitches.” And this is where the company taps into a wellspring of need that has previously gone unanswered in the market. The plethora of junky email marketing, CRM systems, cold-calls – younameit – that clutters up today’s marketing outreach is sorely in need of a dramatic improvement. Crushpath cuts to the chase. It sums up what you’re selling and let’s you do that in a straight-forward, no nonsense way. In the company’s latest announcement, Crushpath reduced its pricing to $9/mo. for a limited time. At that price, it’s the best investment you can make on the social web to get your story out and connect directly to your market. Definitely check it out. I’m sure you’ll love it as much as I do.