Category Archives: Knowledge Management

Beer, Soup, Cereal and Web 2.0

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This month’s “Inspirational Brands,” a print magazine supplement to VNU Business Publications, includes interviews with marketing executives in several large corporations who are utilizing new web tools for market intelligence and the extension of traditional brands.

The magazine asked:

Why is online connectivity to your consumers so important for your brands today? What sort of online outreach do you have? Do you try to create a community of users with helpful tips? What do you make of blogs as a tool? [emphasis mine]

Responses included:

Bill Laufer, VP of Convenience Channel & Trade Relations at Anheuser-Busch, Inc. talked about

  • viral buzz
  • a pseudo mash-up called “Crash the Trailer” in which site visitors can insert their own image into an online movie-trailer for the film Wedding Crashers
  • a new collaboration with JibJab to produce branded entertainment that will “break through the traditional advertising clutter and create a situation where consumers are seeking out our message.”

Mike Salzberg, Senior VP of US Sales at Campbell Soup Co. said they use online communication to:

  • build relationships with consumers through meeting rising expectations for online services and communication with trusted brands
  • to extend and nurture the trust they have established with consumers
  • monitor blogs for brand and competitive references and to detect emerging trends.

Salzberg said that “as our key target groups move online – at the expense of time spent with other media – it’s critical that we have a meaningful online presence to achieve our reach objectives.”

Michael Greene, VP of Customer Marketing at the Kellogg Co. said:

  • they recognize that many people now use the internet as a primary research tool before making any purchase
  • the company uses “on-pack language that directs the consumer with questions or interest to a company web address”
  • at the company’s site specialk.com visitors can find product information and a character blog (written by a red headed woman named “Kay”) with monthly posts about being healthy
  • web events help create a sense of timeliness and engagement (e.g. The Two Week Fiber Challenge)

I wonder whether blog monitoring at these companies is done using RSS? It’s painful to imagine it happening otherwise. These three large companies appear to be partially embracing some of the ethos and less of the tools of what many people call web 2.0. Here’s how these company’s public sites seem to stack up in some key categories:

A. News section with RSS subscription options?
B. Dialog section updated more than once a month?
C. Comments enabled?

Anheuser-Busch.com

A. No
B. No
C. No

Campbellsoup.com

A. No
B. No
C. Yes, at least there is a forum section where people share recepies.

Kelloggs.com
A. No
B. No
C. No

I can’t believe that none of these companies even offer RSS subcription to their press releases on their media and investor relations pages! Overall, a trip to these sites leaves me feeling condescended to and unimpressed by the way that the rhetoric in the above interview is actualized on the company’s own sites.

Nonetheless, perhaps this is another example of an opportunity for non-market leaders and other organizations to speed ahead of these supposedly optimized corporate behomoths. They know that these emerging media are things they should be engaging with, they are talking about them in trade media, but as of yet they do not appear to be moving significantly on these emerging tools and trends.

Finally, almost every company online that I have ever made a blog post about has discovered the inbound link to their site via a search to RSS feed and posted a comment in response. We’ll see if these companies who talk about monitoring the blogosphere and utilizing connectivity with the market do the same!

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Less E-Mail, More Wiki, Says Business Week

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The very cool wiki company SocialText was just highlighted in a Business Week article on the decline of email and the ascendancy of wikis for internal organizational communication.

What is a wiki? My short explanation is that a wiki is a web site that any authorized visitor can edit, where all previous versions are saved for easy retrieval, creation of new pages is as simple as giving them a name, and users can receive an automatic notification whenever any page of interest has been changed by anyone. Wikis are great for planning, collaborative document development, knowledge bank creation, etc. They hold great potential for knowledge management.

(Aside: one of my favorite pitches that never got made was to create a wiki for the local University Ethnic Studies department, so that succeeding generations of students and staff could have a depository of cross cultural information that maximized knowledge retention and collaboration. Doesn’t that sound like a cool idea? I wish I could find the time to talk to someone about it.)

Here’s a few highlights from SocialText’s coverage of Business Week’s article Email is So 5 Minutes Ago: It’s being replaced by software that promotes real-time collaboration

  • Legitimate e-mail will drop to 8% this year, down from 12% last year, according to Redwood City (Calif.) e-mail filtering outfit Postini Inc.
  • Internet research firm Gartner Group predicts that wikis will become mainstream collaboration tools in at least 50% of companies by 2009.
  • At Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein, Rangaswami says that among the earliest and most aggressive adopters, e-mail volume on related projects is down 75%; meeting times have been whacked in half

  • So far, companies have invested 95% of their spending in business processes, according to Social Life of Information author and former Xerox Corp. (XRX ) Palo Alto Research Center director John Seely Brown. A scant 5% has gone toward supporting ways to mine a corporation’s human capital. That’s why fans say the beyond-e-mail workplace will become a key competitive advantage. In the global race for innovation, it’s not as much about leveraging what’s inside your factories’ machines as what’s in your employees’ heads.

Wikis are not always easy to start using, however. Especially non-technical users have some real psychological barriers to overcome before they buy in substantially to this radically different model for communication and collaboration. It is amazing how much email has staked a claim on our minds and habits! But the benefits really are incredible, and with a good wiki mentor helping new users take advantage of the tool – a wiki really can work very well.

That said, many of the same claims could be regarding other Web 2.0 technologies as well. The above article is good for showing mainstream validation of the tool, but only scrapes the surface of the real benefits of wikis in particular.

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Static vs. Dynamic Sites for Organizations

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Zentech Corp analyst Sarah Kittmer’s front cover story this month in the print magazine KM World offers a helpful explanation of the benefits of a dynamic intranet, or CMS portal. (Article online here.)

Does your organization have a web site that rarely changes and relies on email to transmit information to team members and supporters? Even adding sections for dynamic content and automated update delivery via RSS subscription may be less cost-effective and useful than recomposing your infrastructure from scratch. According the the article:

A hand-built site containing static HTML pages is the starting point for many organizations implementing an intranet. It might begin with departmental enthusiasts tinkering to create pages for colleagues. Eventually, the HR department realizes that they too can use the site to provide information to employees. Handy applications get added.

The site’s value to employees is demonstrated, but it can quickly become messy….Consequently, the ability of the site to provide information to the whole company at a low cost is undermined. A dynamic site based on Web content management (WCM) software is a good option, which can significantly improve the quality of the navigation and content.

The article goes on to discuss the following:

  • Online learning management systems as mission critical levers to change the direction of an organization.
  • The importance of data living in a portable format (e.g. the XML format of RSS)
  • Integrating learning features into the general online work environment
  • Long term savings poised to emerge from the predicted 15% annual growth between 2004 to 2009 in the $330 million global market for learning management and learning content management systems. (Numbers from Gartner VP Tom Eid in the article.)

Much, if not all, of what’s described here can be captured by a combination intranet and public web site built on blogging software with inbound and outbound RSS baked in. Organizations large and small should take note of such increasingly clear articulations of ideas already advocated for some time by early adopters. A static intranet or public web site is a huge lost opportunity in terms of learning and communication, both inside an organization and with the outside world.

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RSS and the ROI of KM

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The benefits of spending money on research and communication infrastructure and training can be understood more easily by examining intangible values and the roll of early adopters.

Paul Strassmann offers an interesting metric alluding to the ROI of KM (Return on Investment for Knowledge Management) in an article on Baselinemag.com. He argues that the difference between a company’s Financial Value, as determined by its own accountants, and it’s Market Value, as determined by the price its investors are willing to pay for its stock, is of key importance. Investors are willing to pay more for a good company than it’s tangible assets are worth because unlike accountants they recognize the value of intangibles. Strassmann argues that Knowledge Management makes up the bulk of those intangibles.

Why? Accountants don’t know how to explain the worth of employees’ knowledge, trademarks, accumulated software, customer loyalty and other intangibles—underscoring a major difference between the way CFOs and CIOs evaluate technology operations. CFOs look at I.T. strictly in terms of financial accounts; CIOs also look at intangible factors such as the worth of the knowledge held by the company’s workforce.

After eliminating companies with highly volatile stocks, Strassmann comes up with the following formula:

Market Value minus Financial Value equals Knowledge Value.

He goes further and recommends that the Knowledge Value then be divided by Number of Employees. It’s an interesting formula, isn’t it? The article also contains a table illustrating the Knowledge Value of several large corporations, primarily in the pharmaceutical industry. I think this analysis is worth pondering in almost any circumstance, though, even if only as a thinking process.

The ROI of KM is a very important issue, as it could, if quantified, be a key source of leverage in securing funding for things like training, research and communications infrastructure.

I think this could be of particular interest to the Web 2.0 community, as new tools begin to transition from early-adopter ephemera into marketed commodities. Where does a tool like RSS stand in the above equation today? Where will it stand in 6 months or 5 years? RSS may be a good example of an asset that stands in the shadows of even the intangible Market Values. Outside stakeholders are unlikely to place value on your organization’s utilizing a well-constructed suite of RSS feeds. But they are quite likely to place great value on the things that RSS enables. For example:

  • Rapid response to any off-site links to your organization’s web site
  • Your group-members being consistently informed about breaking news and hot topics in the field without inefficient manual “web surfing”
  • Your organization and its members developing longer-term relationships with other key players in the field, many of whom will be early adopters of RSS themselves and will thus be reading your feeds. Non-early adopters may not recognize the importance of Persons A, B and C being subscribed to your outgoing feeds, but they are more likely to recognize the importance of a well developed relationship with any of those people regardless of the technology that enables it.
  • A cohesive message from members across the team, as information is more effectively shared internally via RSS than by emails.

Perhaps then this points to the complication of such equations posed by emerging social technologies in general. When your organization makes the transition from having a few early adopters seruptitiously using RSS to magically be on top of the knowledge in their field into a scenario where instead your organization is paying for RSS services to acquire those intangible assets – that’s a shift in Strassmann’s equation that will be helpful to understand. The “investment” part of the ROI equation will really be an upgrade from partial adoption of emerging technolgies in the intangible column (or from being altogether invisible) and into the tangible costs column.

But the impact in the Knowledge Value column will shift from being of unknown causality (“group members are using RSS? what’s that?”) into an amplified impact caused by actual Financial investment. In simpler terms, purchasing emerging research services and tools won’t hopefully be something alltogether new with surprising consequences, but rather a formalization of a previously marginal investment leading to greater intanible assets. Recognizing Strassmann’s three values (Financial, Market and Knowledge Values) could be a helpful way to understand and thus explain the ROI of Web 2.0 enabled KM.

Strassman article found via Gary Price’s Resource Shelf

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Intranet Themed Blogs: They Only Come Out at Night

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There’s certainly no shortage of things to talk about in the world of Knowledge Management and Intranets, as is evidenced by the packed 4-day schedule of workshops now winding up at the in San Jose, California. Why then are there so few people blogging about these topics on a regular basis?

The Aussie intranet guru James Robertson writes that he’s having a good time at the conference, but finds it distressing how few Intranet focused blogs he’s able to find. (Note, this is about intranets in particular. There are many blogs on KM in general.)

What these recent conferences have really highlighted to me is that there is actually a fair bit of intranet expertise about, within organisations or consulting firms…These intranet folk, however, are almost entirely invisible. In my news aggregator, for example, I have over a dozen CMS feeds, two dozen usability/IA feeds, but only only two (!) intranet-specific feeds…So this is my call to everyone working in the intranet space: make yourself more visible, as there’s a huge need to build a stronger community around intranets. A simple starting point would be to establish a blog, and to start posting on your day-to-day experiences. Even write a small article or two.

The KM and Intranets conference has a wonderful blog and wiki hosted by the wiki firm SocialText, including a wiki page for atendees to list their own blogs. A great idea, but so far only 6 people have added links to their blogs there!

The conference wiki is undoubtedly a great resource site, and will continue to be for a long time, but where can you find RSS feeds about Intranets? Here are some suggestions for more fruitful places to subscribe to:

Well, those are some pretty sparse resources! Robertson seems correct in bemoaning that the field he is a star in is not well represented in the blogosphere. Roberston’s own site and feed are amongst the best sources on the topic.

It may seem counterintuitive to blog about your experiences with intranets on the open internet, but what could be more useful than a number of blogs and feeds to chose from that adress lessons learned from internal communication? Hopefully the KM and Intranets Conference and the efforts of pathbreakers like James Robertson will help spur the launch of more resources like this.

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