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May 20, 2007
Our Social Media Agenda
Welcome to the Aplicor CEO blog. This forum is a part of our overall client communication agenda and a window for any interested person to learn more about our direction, business model and staff. The primary target audience for this blog is our customers, however, I certainly welcome our business partners, friends of the company and any other interested participants.
It’s my personal goal to use this blog to share candid information, solicit feedback and ultimately build upon the company’s customer relationships. However, this blog is a small part of Aplicor’s Web 2.0 and social media strategy which also leverages the Customer Portal, Partner Extranet and related attendant technologies in order to capture and act upon the voice of the customer, engage customers in order to learn from them, collaborate with customers in order to realize a true synergy and use customer information to influence our product and company direction. We continue to drive a growth and innovation agenda and we recognize that our customers will ultimately determine the degree of our success. To this end, we’ve set some measurable goals as part of our social media strategy. For instance, by March 31, 2008, I expect to source 55 percent of all new product innovation from client generated content and to source 65 percent of existing product evolution (the next version 6 upgrade) from client collaboration.
Again, welcome to this IT-enhanced relationship tool. I hope you will find the content useful in furthering our value to your information systems objectives and fulfillment. I also hope you will reach out with comments, ideas or constructive criticism so that we can benefit from your input and achieve our goals in furthering our client relationships.
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Posted by Chuck Schaeffer on May 20, 2007 in Web 2.0
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Decent post Chuck, however, what’s Web 2.0? I’d like to get your understanding for this term in a way that it impacts the aplicor-customer relationship (and my CRM system). Later.
Posted by Jim Kincaid on July 30, 2007
Aplicor's Web 2.0 Definition
You ask a very good question that cites my unwarranted presumption and need for clarification. I think the question warrants both a response from an industry perspective and then a more specific response as it relates to Aplicor’s Web 2.0 objectives.
I’m not aware of a generally accepted Web 2.0 industry definition, so I’ll cite some recognized industry sources on the topic. As best I can tell Tim O'Reilly coined the term back in 2003. However, I’ve attempted to decipher a straightforward definition from his web site and have been unsuccessful (referring to his five page dossier misses the mark for a simple definition and features some pretty convoluted graphs). Wikipedia is a classic example of web 2.0 and does a fair job of associating Web 2.0 with technologies such as blogs, podcasts, wikis, social networks, social bookmarking, RSS feeds, forums and folksonomies. If you feel adventurous and want to dive into the bowls of this topic, I recommend checking out the Social Customer Manifesto by Christopher Carfi. I attended a Web 2.0 seminar in Naples in which Chris presented and this guy is both extremely smart and humble. He knows his stuff and his web site is highly regarded. While definitions vary, the Web 2.0 term has undoubtedly consolidated a number of formerly disparate tools and technologies under a single umbrella banner. Having cited the prior sources as being far more credible on this topic than I, I will share the definition we use for our internal operational and product planning purposes.
To Aplicor, Web 2.0 is a collaboration strategy which achieves community synergies among its participants by leveraging a suite of web sites and/or tools which permit any user free expression to interact (create, modify, comment and rate) with community members and content and which collectively harnesses the position, voice or intelligence of the group. OK, now that you know our definition I’ll acknowledge its two primary faults. First, it’s too much like motherhood and apple pie (however, I’ll add technology make-up and specificity shortly) and second we’ve chosen to define Web 2.0 as a strategy and not a technical tool or platform (admittedly, most sources inevitably cite blogs, wikis, social networks, mashups, content tagging and RSS with any Web 2.0 definition so I admit we may be off base or have bastardized the definition for our working purposes). Feel free to challenge our definition, after all, this is Web 2.0.
Now that you know our starting position, let me add some color by citing some of the technologies which ultimately contribute to our Web 2.0 strategy and then reiterate our objectives and planned progression. The technologies which provide a foundation and most influence our Web 2.0 strategy objectives include the following:
- User centric orientation – Web 2.0 technologies are user centric, user controlled and produce user generated content (as well as user generated metadata such as tags).
- Component based and lightweight web pages – Excessive software downloads, local code deployment and fat client processing don’t satisfy SaaS or Web 2.0 technologies. Instead, standards-based protocols (TCP, XML, WSDL and SOAP or other Web services), lightweight interfaces (using AJAX, DHTML, XHTML, CSS, JS) and industry accepted component approaches (such as SOA, XML, RSS, REST (representational state transfer) provide the standards for simple assembly and integration (sometimes called or leading to mashups) for social media tools utilization and aggregation. User interaction should not require local software download and configuration. Some folks believe APIs are unacceptable for Web 2.0 integration purposes. We don’t share this belief.
- Server-centric (in the cloud) processing. This of course is Aplicor’s technology approach for CRM and ERP as well as social media.
- Rich User Interfaces – Aplicor uses several presentation layer technologies to achieve this technology objective, including AJAX, XHTML, DHTML, CSS, Asynchronous HTML and JavaScript. These tools collectively have the power to create immersive application experiences that were formerly reserved to desktop applications.
Having cited what we believe are the technology components of Web 2.0 – which we intend to incorporate into Aplicor product planning – we must again remind ourselves and our user community that this social media concept has little to do with technology and much more to do with culture. The benefits we hope to experience with our user community include the following:
- A self propagating source of continual information – gathering the collective voice of our customers and partners will result in a candid and increasingly valuable repository of user generated content, information and knowledge. As participation widens, interaction grows, and a number of users become truly engaged, these contributing sources become even more enriched with invaluable data.
- Trusting users as co-developers – In 2007, we established concrete goals to measure our social media goals achievement. Our primary goal is to source 55 percent of new product innovation from client content and to source 65 percent of existing product evolution (version 6 upgrade) from client collaboration. We’re not yet on track to meet this goal, however, it is still early in the process and we are committed to expanding the outreach efforts to achieve our objective.
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