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Archives for April 2008

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Business Video Blogging – Qik

Don’t have time to write a blog? Need something more robust than microblogging? Well if you have a phone (nokia only currently) with a camera, you can capture and stream video from your phone straight to your blog, twitter, facebook, etc. Still in alpha with just a bunch of Nokia phones supported, Qik is already revolutionizing video blogging.

Once you’ve downloaded Qik’s software, you’ll be able to stream and capture video right from your phone or video recorder. You can stream that video to your profile page on Qik’s website, to your blog, Facebook, etc. Qik is still in alpha, so if you have one of the supported phones, they still have to approve your request.

For the business audience, Qik has potential for video blogging and for documenting business processes – without having to invest in expensive video hosting and editing equipment. With the advent of YouTube and the explosion of online video, the Internet audience is not (yet) concerned with quality in picture or editing. A service like Qik could make online video so easy that it may become expected on your website.

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Qik
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Business Knowledge Sharing Community – Diigo

Billed as a research tool and knowledge-sharing community, Diigo (still in beta) has many of the same bookmark-sharing features as Ma.gnolia. You can tag and share your bookmarks with your friends and colleagues, and find new people to connect with in the social network. Unique to Diigo, the ‘People Like Me’ suggests people with similar interests based on tags and bookmarks. Suggesting new people requires enough tags and bookmarks to work. However, importing bookmarks from del.icio.us (281) either did not work with this function or wasn’t enough information for a recommendation. Along with matching tags, connections can be made with others currently online, new to diigo, featured people or searching. Diigo offers browser add-ons to make adding bookmarks, comments, tags, etc. very easy.

Most impressive and innovative is the ability to annotate and highlight content on webpages which will appear the next time you visit the page or when you share these notes with others. This note-sharing functionality makes it possible to use Diigo to share research with colleagues and co-workers, which could be very beneficial in the B2B marketplace. If a webpage is of interest to your coworkers, not only can you bookmark and share it with them, you can highlight specific content and makes notes on the webpage which they can see when they visit. Your coworkers can then make their own notes and highlights, which creates a very powerful shared research environment. (This could also be very useful for web designers who could have their clients markup website designs with changes right on the website – no more faxes and pdfs!)

The layout and design of Diigo is not as polished as Ma.gnolia, but is fairly usable. Editing bookmarks that I imported from del.icio.us took almost 30 seconds to save changes. Using the browser add-on, adding a bookmark did not ask for any tags or descriptions (which del.icio.us does), and sent the bookmark to my unread portion of my profile. This seems strange since I was the one that added the bookmark. One would expect unread bookmarks to come from friends or coworkers.

Overall I think Diigo has some very promising functionality, especially in the annotations and floating sticky notes, but seems to be very slow to use. It is still in beta, so hopefully some of these quirks will be worked out to make it a much more useful tool for business websites.

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Diigo
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Customer Communications 2.0 – Instant Messaging

Previously, we chatted about forms of communications and how they’re changing in the b2b world. Today we will glance casually at what Instant Messaging has to offer your company. IM isn’t the new kid on the communication block anymore; its actually starting to show its age. Most IMs are old enough and mature enough to consider for more serious jobs than passing on jokes to friends and co-workers. While MySpace and Facebook are hanging around at the mall in the food court, AIM, Yahoo Messenger, MSN and Jabber have all moved on to full time jobs in the retail and services industries. They have become responsible, productive members of society. Now the question is, how do we put them to best use. The key to understanding how IM can help you connect with your customers are ‘immediacy’ and ‘presence’. Lets do a little catagorizing, shall we?

Talking to someone face to face has immediacy and presence. You know they are there and that they are hearing you as you talk. The big downside is max distance being measured in feet. Also, face to face conversations are best done serially. You can have more than one conversation at a time, but the results are lousy and sometimes dangerous (me agreeing to Opera tickets with wife while talking to buddy about Hockey Playoff seats)

Phone conversations, too, have immediacy and presence. The distance problem is solved, but concurrency is still an issue. A good salesman might be able to hold two sales calls a once but I wouldn’t recommend it to the rest of us.

Along came email, which was a glorified post office with the new fangled ability of immediate delivery. Suddenly everyone was hooked. Communication through an immediate delivery that didn’t rely on presence was just the ticket for huge gains in efficiency. Digital records of the communication thread was the killer feature that cinched it. This became the defacto standard for business communication. Still, when something needs presence we fall back to the phone.

Now compare Instant Messaging. IM has the distance, presence and immediacy of a phone call. It has the efficiency and cocurrency of email by holding multiple conversations. It also has digital recordings of the communication thread. Its something of the perfect business communication tool, if only it didn’t suffer from an image problem.

In a few years your customers will start to host IM solutions for their company, as they do email today. Here is how you can put this information to use now to build stronger lines of communication. First, you need to get a corporate IM service. Each have their strenghts and reputations in the market. For a solution hosted at your location, I would recommend looking at Jabber. Now, extend this service to your customers as an alternative to email. For some customers, this will have instant geek chic appeal. Here is where knowing the weaknesses of the different forms of communication makes a huge difference. Hook up support staff with IM accounts. Start with the inside sales support people. Give the account info out to your customers. Now the customer has a direct, immediate, recorded, concurrent, pressence based method to get information about your products or services. They can ask that question while they are working with the product and writting up that email to accounting about paying you a bag of money for it. If that isn’t the bee’s knee’s in customer focused technology, then I don’t know what is.