Why everybody’s using enterprise 2.0 except the enterprise

Once upon a time, they invented weblogs. Weblogs caused a big stir, and spread around the world in a very short time. In parallel, Web 2.0 was becoming a catchphrase, as people recognised that the time was ripe for participation, collaboration, and bottom-up rather than top-down. 

After a while, the buzz cooled down, although millions of people continued blogging, and websites continued to get the Web 2.0 treatment. Everybody had a blog, and the focus was moving to what they said rather than how they said it. Web 2.0 had come of age everywhere.   

Everywhere, that is, except some of the world’s biggest corporations. In our experience, a lot of people in these large companies know about collaborative software, Web 2.0, and blogs. They see the value (often having watched how their own kids use the stuff), and are keen to implement them. Convinced by the idea of Web 2.0, they start asking around about how to put it into practice, and at that point come up against any number of people who’ll tell them why it can’t be done.

And they’re often right, considering that enterprises plan their IT for three or five years into the future.  As Andrew McAfee, an Associate Professor at Harvard Business School, points out in his blog, the key hurdle is usually technology. “…security and access control remain key concerns among technologists, and they’ll have to be addressed before most IT departments give their blessings to Enterprise 2.0.”

What’s more, Andrew says, these tools are unlikely to spread like wildfire around the enterprise anytime in the near future. 

“As I wrote at the end of last year, my most likely scenario for the near-term future of Enterprise 2.0 is somewhere between niche deployment and spotty mainstream adoption… I believe that managers and companies that are in fact willing to do this work will gain valuable capabilities and quite possibly get a leg up on the competition.  But can you see why I think there might not be a lot of them, at least in the short term?”

See also “Most Business Tech Pros Wary About Web 2.0 Tools In Business” (Information Week) Thanks to Globally Local, Locally Global for the pointer. 

David Harbottle

An argument in favour of taxonomy

We’ve been talking about the usefulness (or otherwise) of taxonomy in automated content management at Content Formula recently.

At its most basic level, taxonomy allows pieces of content to appear in the most relevant sections of a site.

For example if the Financial Times wanted to publish an article about a European government bailing out an energy firm with a big complex loan, the editor might decide to make the content appear in three different sections of the site – Europe, Finance, and Energy. Instead of publishing it three times, he simply needs to tag it correctly for it to appear in the three sections.

Among the disadvantages of taxonomy are that it can be over-complex where simplicity is required. And when you create a taxonomy it must mean something to the reader, and ultimately must speed his or her journey to the information they’re looking for. Creating meaningful (semantic) taxonomies isn’t always easy.

But this sentence from Nielsen’s Alertbox today is a great argument in favour of using taxonomy to make sure content can be found in the right place, at least in a big intranet:

“…at JPMorgan Chase, the intranet homepage is viewed 620,000 times per day, so even one superfluous headline that required one second to scan would cost the company the equivalent of 22 full-time employees in lost productivity.”

The rest is here.

David Harbottle

New draft of web accessibility guidelines

New Media Knowledge (NMK) reports that the second edition of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines are in preparation and a draft version has been released.

The guidelines are intended to help web developers and content creators make their sites as accessible to visitors with disabilities (for example the partially-sighted) as they are to anybody else.

NMK has plenty of nice things to say about the new guidelines, praising the fact that they use real-life examples and list common failures.

But they also rightly criticise the “verbose and jargon-filled language”, the excessive use of links, and the sheer quantity of material. What webmaster in their right minds is going to read something over five hundred pages long, not to mention the pages of annexes and additional material on the W3C site?

Website accessibility is a good aim. So far it hasn’t been put into practice by the vast majority of site owners. The complexity of the guidelines is one reason for this, and this second edition seems likely to take us no further forward.

David Harbottle

Today is World Usability Day

One of the central events is “the world’s first 36 hour global expert review on a number of leading websites and products”, and is designed to highlight the importance of usability in designs which are intended for international use.

This is meat and drink to Content Formula, since we have lots of international clients and we’re always looking to make sure their website content works in every country . So we’ll be watching out with a critical eye for the results of the expert review, and hopefully getting a summary onto this blog when they’re published.

 Here’s a link to the World Usability Day website.

And here’s a link to some photos of Usability Man – a superhero slated for a 3pm appearance in London’s Oxford Street today.

David Harbottle

How can writing effective headlines and blurbs help visitors navigate your site?

Whether you run a public website or a secure intranet, you’re likely to use headlines to get people moving around the site and clicking through to other sections or pages. There are several reasons why it’s worth spending a little thought on them.

• As a navigation aid, explaining what the reader can expect to find when they click on the headline
• To entice the reader to click through, and use the site to the maximum
• To improve the number of hits from search engines
• To retain the design and balance of the page

But it’s difficult to measure the effect of good headlines in a systematic way, and as a result the usability gurus offering tips don’t necessarily agree in every respect. Very often, then, your judgement is based on experience and gut feeling.

Having said that, here’s some advice from Jakob Nielsen that’s worth considering:

• Headlines should be written in plain language: no puns, no “cute” or “clever” headlines
• No teasers that try to entice people to click to find out what the story is about
• Skip leading articles like “the” and “a”
• Make the first word an important, information-carrying one

And from Poynter, some tips on writing effective blurbs:

• They’re an aid to navigation, but readers only skim them
• Blurbs encourage reading and scrolling on homepages, but don’t necessarily encourage clickthroughs
• People focus primarily on the left third of the text in blurbs – get the keywords in that area

David Harbottle

For once, the red tape is worse elsewhere

Last week we were guests of e-Circle, a German e-mail marketing agency, for one of their seminars at the Institute of
Directors. They put up a good roster of speakers, including their MD Boris Berten talking about how to get the most out of your mailing lists, and David Pool explaining “the seven habits of highly effective digital marketers”.

All in all plenty for us to think about, since we provide the content for many a newsletter. And one of the things that made me sit up was Stephen Groom’s comparison of EU and UK e-mail privacy laws.

Is this one of the areas where EU law is enforced strictly by a bunch of busybodies when it’s implemented in the UK? Do e-mail marketers on the continent have it easy compared to us?

Actually no. Only one successful prosecution has ever been brought against UK e-mailers who’ve failed to get their opt-ins and opt-outs right. The Czechs have brought two successful cases, and France five (awarding over £200,000 damages in the process). Italy has brought fifty, and the Germans, bless ‘em, have brought at least five hundred successful prosecutions.

Here’s the rest of the table, with thanks to Stephen and the folk at www.marketinglaw.co.uk. Figures were correct as at February 2006.

UK 1
Austria 500
Belgium 5
Czech R 2
Denmark 7
France 5
Germany 500
Greece 77
Holland 15
Ireland 1
Italy 50
Malta 0
Portugal 0
Slovakia 15
Spain 50
Sweden 2

David Harbottle

HTML Newsletters and the Email Client

Test, test, and test again. It’s possible that such an adage has never been so fitting as this example is to the sphere of Information Technology. With different systems, assorted architectures and various languages everywhere, it’s not always easy to ensure that consistency prevails.

HTML newsletters, for example, continue to be popular and effective tools for electronic marketing. However, consistent display of your lovingly put together HTML by the numerous email clients out the there is hard to achieve. In fact, it is even less predictable than the way in which web sites are displayed by different web browser platforms.

Consequently, it is always best practice to test the email by sending it to a number of popular email clients, including those which are web based such as Yahoo!, Hotmail, and G-mail. When testing such programs it’s a fair assumption that regional variations need not be tested and if the newsletter is being displayed correctly within yahoo.co.uk, for example, that it will look identical in the inbox of a yahoo.fr user. However, our experience has indicated that this is not the case!

When recently testing an email newsletter for a large cosmetics firm, it was discovered that yahoo.co.uk interprets the html code ™ as expected, displaying the trademark symbol (™). The French version of the same email client, on the other hand, ignored the code completely and displayed no symbol at all. In order to force the client to display the ™ symbol it was necessary to enter the number pad command ALT+0153 whilst editing the html code directly. So, if you thought knocking up an html newsletter for a varied audience would be hassle free then think again!

What can be done then to ensure that all recipients see your article as you intended? A sensible, and widely used, solution is to upload a copy of the newsletter as a web page and offer the recipient the option to view the bulletin in their browser. With so many different email clients to cater for, opting for this method seems the most realistic and efficient solution.

John Scott

How mature is your intranet?

I’ve just got back from IBF Live – an annual conference run by the Intranet Benchmarking Forum. The forum brings together a collection of intranet managers, communications people, IT people and others from FTSE 100 and Global 200 companies.

For me there was one overriding theme of the conference: intranet maturity. As with many things in the typical organisation, the corporate intranet is on a maturity curve so it’s only a matter of time (and effort, of course) before things will improve. There was a general consensus amongst delegates at the IBF that our intranets are generally poor – right at the start of the curve. But you have to go through this pain in order to progress. People were frustrated with the role that senior management plays in driving their intranet; how politics prevents progress; how their intranets have become vast and chaotic dumping grounds; some people complained that people did not visit the intranet or were not contributing to it.

But the vision of the mature intranet is definitely there. So what does a mature intranet look like? There are a few examples out there. Cisco and IBM are often touted as having model intranets, the best in the world. In fact, both these companies recently claimed that ROI studies on their internal webs had shown values in excess of $1bn. Here are some of the features that these mature intranets have in common:

• There is a sharp focus on usefulness, not just useability and information
• Senior executives are active sponsors, clearly seeing the value of the intranet and pushing it
• Employees are smarter with technology and are active and direct contributors of content to the intranet.
• Employees are the judges of the intranet and as such, influence its development
• There is a blurring of the lines that normally divide content, data and applications – the intranet becomes the interface between the organisation and its people

Dan Hawtrey

Is there a place for employee participation on intranets?

Most people are aware of the buzz surrounding things like weblogs, “citizen journalism”, and even podcasting. They’re often used as examples of how the web is allowing greater participation from its users. But is there a place for any of this participation on a serious business intranet?

We’re currently looking at ways to develop plain old bulletin boards with two of our clients. The aim is to give employees a secure place where they can ask and answer questions, report the latest competitor sightings, or just sell their stereos. Such a board can be particularly useful when potential contributors are all over the world.

Bulletin boards are basic, but practical and useful. They’re a good way for companies to dip their toe in the water and start encouraging employee participation via an intranet.

At the other end of the scale, the BBC is usually cited as the organisation that’s been most adventurous in this direction (follow this link to find out how). Employees run hundreds of internal blogs, participate in dozens of wikis and thousands connect via a network called talk.gateway. Participation on this scale has its drawbacks, but it has great potential for eliciting new ideas and pushing collaborative projects forward. So there’s a huge range of possibilities from the very basic to the elaborate. And there’s a place for all of them on an intranet, as long as the aims are clear.

There’s no shortage of opinions on how best to use these evolving resources to improve communication within a business. Here’s an article asking whether or not you should allow employees to blog on your intranet. Business Week describes how business can use Wikis to replace e-mail. And here’s a list of bulletin board providers frequently used in business.

David Harbottle

Nanny state

We all remember the global furore early this year that followed the publication of the anti-islamic cartoons of Mohammed. The cartoons were orginally published in Denmark which led politicians there to trumpet the importance of freedom of speech as a fundamental building block of western society.

When it comes to images of much less explosive materials, the law in Denmark is very different however. Working on a recent project to develop a website supporting the Danish launch of a new coldsore treatment (a medical device by definition), the lawyer who was checking our content prior to launch advised us to remove a photo from the site. The image showed a herpes sufferer with a painful looking cold sore on the corner of his mouth. Apparently, images of wounds or injuries which are targeted at ordinary consumers are not to be shown for fear that they may frighten people.

There are other peculiarities in Denmark when it comes to consumer facing materials: when making product claims that are supported by clinical studies and surveys, the actual results of those studies must not be shown. We have launched the same coldsore site all across Europe, sticking to the “master template” as closely as possible. There are always legal technicalities, or even cultural norms that needed to be taken into account when rolling a site into a specific country. However, the legal review of the Danish site uncovered a lot of differences between Danish and EU law.

Dan Hawtrey