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.

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.

Thanks to my colleague Peter Kim, I've been tagged so I have to respond with this post. What's going on? There's this viral thing going on called "Blog-Tag" where the blogger writes five things about themselves not widely known, and then "tags" five other people to continue the chain. This online tagging game was recently re-started by Jeff Pulver on December 10th. He charts how quickly it spread just after 24 hours as well. I especially liked Eric Kintz at HP's approach, where he tagged corporate bloggers from Dell and Lenovo.

What I love about this game is that it shows that very human side of blogs -- that we all have quirky things about us that make us people. And especially when it comes to corporate bloggers, this is all that more important as one of the key reasons to have a corporate blog is to show that human face.

So here are my five things:

1) I'm in love with logic puzzles. Be it Sudoku (I'm now workin 16x 16 grids), or those annoying metal puzzles where you have to extract a one piece I have yet to meet a logic puzzle I didn't want to dive into. One of my favorite companies to visit is Google -- not because of their fancy bathrooms or cool decor, but because they put logic puzzles in the lobby waiting areas. Unfortunately, they are all too prompt to retrieve me for scheduled interviews so I never get a chance to indulge in this passion. It's also the only thing I asked my husband for this Christmas!

2) I made the Harvard College varsity sailing team my freshman and sophomore year and competed in the NCAA championships the spring of my senior year. All of my dorm mates were jocks while I was a pre-med geek. So I decided to try something different and went out for the sailing team, thinking that at least it would be a sport that I could enjoy the rest of my life. I ended up getting addicted and even sailed one winter in the Marblehead Frostbite league (it's exactly as it sounds - sailing in the middle of a Boston winter in Marblehead harbor). The irony is I can sail only small craft now because I get incredibly sea sick on large boats, especially in San Francisco Bay!

3) I was once mistaken for the nanny of my own child. I'm Asian and married to a Caucasian French Canadian, so our children look, well, unique. I was on maternity leave with my first child in Boston and was pushing him down the sidewalk near my house. A woman came out and was admiring my son. She then asked me if I enjoyed being the baby's nanny.  I politely informed her that I was the mother. Horribly embarrassed, she apologized and ran back into her house. One of the major motivations we moved our family from Boston to the Bay Area five years ago was so that we could hopefully raise our kids in a community where their values -- not their education, wealth, or race -- defines who they are.

4) I love, love, love reality TV shows. Give me Survivor and The Amazing Race any day over the West Wing. Why? I have limited time to watch TV so if I'm going to relax, I want to watch something that's total escapism. West Wing and Studio 60 are great shows, but I have to think and concentrate too hard! [Updated warning: Survivor spoiler ahead if you've TiVo'd the finale or are watching it overseas.] The recent series on Survivor featured teams divided by race, which raised a huge din of protest. I loved it from the very beginning because 1) it gave us a reason to discuss race and stereo types; and 2) stacked the deck to have a non-white winner. I watched the series with my kids this time, and from the beginning we cheered for Yul Kwon because he's from San Mateo, our home town. We couldn't exactly choose an ethnic team because we're a mix of Asian and Caucasian. In the end, it was thrilling to watch Yul win -- I had kids bouncing all over the living room walls.

5) Ok, this is a little embarrassing -- I play Toontown, Disney's MMORPG. I started a few years ago when I was covering gaming for Forrester and got my kids hooked on it. I then got other family members on it as well. So while the kids have lost interest, my brother and I will go online together after the kids are in bed, and take over a few Mints or battle the VP before signing off and heading off to bed. It's not nearly as cool as World of Warcraft, but hey, I get to play it with my kids! (I'm also not that keen on violent games). For those of you who know Toontown, my toon's name is Cool Duchhes, my current LP meter is at 98, and I'm still working on maxing out on toon-up and drop. You can usually find me jumping for beans in Nutty River's Dreamland. Toons of the world unite!

Ok, enough about me. Now the tough part -- finding five other bloggers to tag who haven't already been tagged. In the spirit of diversifying the blogosphere, all of my tags are women that I admire and would love to learn more about.

• Beth Blecherman - a fellow blogger on svmoms.com
• Renee Blodgett - PR professional extraordinarie
• Heather Hamilton - Microsoft recruiter
• Lisa Stone - BlogHer co-founder
• Halley Suitt - Author of the classic "How to become an alpha male"

Technorati Tags: 5 things, five things

Google Finance launched tonight – I had a sneak peak from Google last week and got a chance to play with it a bit after it went live tonight. I also had a chance to speak with a Yahoo! spokesperson after the Google site launched and was able to get their reaction. Here’s my quick take on the new service and what it means:

There are three new features in Google Finance that stood out for me:

-         Search. No need to know the ticker symbol of a company. I could type in company names like Home Depot and Target, and get the full information page in a wink. On Yahoo! Finance, MSN Money, and Marketwatch.com, I have to know the ticker symbol. And even when I use the lookup, especially for Target, I get a long list of companies with the name “target” in them. Finally, I don’t feel like a dummy when trying to look up companies!

-         Charts. Google took a page from its Maps product and makes the charts interactive – you can drag them back and forth over time to see how prices have changed, without having to wait for the page to refresh. Another nice feature – key new s stories are mapped out on the chart (see the screenshot above).

-         Community advocates on message boards. Google will have as part of every publicly traded company, a message board that is a part of Google Groups. Taking a page from the popular Yahoo! Finance message boards, Google has created a discussion area for every publicly traded company (or so it appears). Inappropriate and spam postings have always been the bane of the Yahoo! boards, so Google’s put in place a few things, most notably the use of employees (yes, employees!) who will police the boards. What strikes me as ironic is that rather than employ technology to solve the problem, Google is using people to monitor the boards, in much the same way they review the content for search ads. Amazingly, there is no ability for users to flag posts for review – if quality is important, why doesn’t Google leverage its users to be the front lines in the fight for quality?

So overall, Google has done a very, very nice job pulling together a financial portal. Oops, did I just say “portal”? Sure looks like Google is pursuing that strategy now, doesn’t it! And rightly so – just take a look at the discussion board about Google and you’ll see person after person saying that they are defecting from their current finance site (mostly Yahoo!) to use Google.

But I frankly think that we won’t be seeing a mass migration of people from other finance sites to Google anytime soon. The most obvious defectors will be Google enthusiasts – they won’t be able to wait to add Google Finance to their personalized home page. But I believe that most mainstream financial site users will stick with their current sources for now, primarily because it’s simply a pain to have to re-enter your detailed portfolio information again! Are nice charts and company look-ups enough to shift people over to Google Finance? And don’t forget that Yahoo! and MSN have invested heavily in producing their own content, and I fully expect that they will improve their search, charts, and boards quickly as well.

But these features are all window dressing. In the end, Google Finance is a definite improvement on existing services, but it didn’t blow me away. It felt like it was incremental improvements rather than something that fundamentally changed the financial site game.

I believe that Yahoo! actually has the opportunity to change the game, but only if it taps into its nascent social computing strategy. For example, it may give users the technology to rank posts on quality or flag inappropriate posts. But also think about the power of tags on posts, or the ability to see rich profiles that enable users to connect with each other based on their similar investment goals. Think of a social network where I could find working moms who have to balance saving for college, retirement -- and are in the midst of building a house.

So kudos to Google for launching a nice new site that ups the ante, but don’t rest on your laurels for long – your competitors will quickly match you feature for feature, and raise you with their larger installed user bases.

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.

Yahoo! announced that it will purchase del.icio.us (posts by Yahoo! and del.icio.us give the details).

The acquisition by Yahoo! is significant for much the same reason why it bought other social computing darlings, Flickr and Konfabulator – Yahoo! is laying the groundwork for its users to add, personalize, and contribute their content and votes to the Web.

A very significant point is that del.icio.us will be working closely with Yahoo! Search. This is important because tagging will key to creating better search. Today, search relevance is determined by the number of links between pages – the more links you have to a page, the more relevant you are. Tagging is another way of doing this – you can see it in action today on start-up tagging engines like Wink and Raw Sugar. Tags on Web pages provide an additional level of relevancy to that page, and Yahoo! will be in a prime position to leverage it.

But tagging in of itself isn’t enough – it’s also the reputation of the taggers that’s important. And here is where the rest of Yahoo! formidable assets come to play – with 191 million registered users, social networking in the form of Y! 360, and personalized Web experiments with MyWeb, Yahoo! has the suite to actually pull off a really cool social and personalized search service.

The key: making del.icio.us and tagging accessible to users. It took me a while to “get” del.icio.us, (and the URL still isn’t easy for me to type!) The key problem is this is not an interface that my mother – or for that matter, most of my techie friends – understands. (Dave Taylor put together a good primer on “What’s so cool about del.icio.us?” that’s a good intro – check out the last question where Dave asks Jeremy Zawodny if Yahoo! will buy del.icio.us).

For this reason, I’m thrilled that Yahoo! purchased del.icio.us and hopefully, will integrate it into its other services quickly. I’m also optimistic about the impact that social bookmarking and tagging will have on the search industry…look for Microsoft and Google to launch their own variations soon as well. But Yahoo!, with its millions of registered users AND an enthusiastic del.icio.us community (check on the comments on the announcement – they are universally ecstatic), Yahoo! will be setting the pace in this area.

I’m also including a few thoughts from my colleague, Chloe Stromberg, who is an active del.icio.us user and resident social computing guru:

Other media companies are still mulling over their position with social media, meanwhile Yahoo has quickly and assertively snapped up another key player in the social computing space.  This means that 1) the ingredient technologies that make up social media (RSS, tagging, search, etc) will work more seamlessly together; and 2) that social computing is being taken to the masses by a company that knows UI, marketing, and has a trusted relationship with valuable consumers.

For marketers, Yahoo’s decisive acquisitions in the social marketing space mean that social marketing is destined to move out of the experimental stage and become a more stable part of the marketing mix.

Another interesting point here is about timing -- the speed of technology adoption.  Social marketing technologies have their roots in the birth of the Internet (we’ve mentioned Firefly, PointCast, etc).  It may be that after *10 years*, consumers are actually catching on, and really getting some of the principles of what the Internet can do that other communication forms can’t.  This is like 3rd wave social computing, personalization, customization -- and Yahoo has been involved all along.  It’s just, finally, this time, it may be ready for prime time.