Here is part three of my summary of the book. Why Buy the Cow?, by WebEx leader, Subrah Iyar with my friend Cindy Gordon. I was pleased to have the chance to write Part Three. In the first section covers what is happening within the enterprise. I start with one of my favorite quotes from the jazz artist, Charlie Mingus, “Making the simple complicated is commonplace, making the complicated simple, awesomely simple, that’s creativity.” This should be a mantra for the enterprise 2.0 application developers since it is this creativity that will win over the business features, not more robust features. That was a problem with Lotus Quickplace. I was a big fan and did one of the early business implementations for Ryder. But then, as I was told, they keep honoring requests for more of this and that and lost the simplicity that was one of its strengths.
Several of the cases, that have been discussion this blog are offered, the excellent work at MIT Sloan by Al Essa and the stuff done at Novell by Ray Sims and others. What Al did with blogs to simplify project management has been refined by some of the newer enterprise 2.0 vendors such as QuickBase, Awareness, Traction, Daptiv, and Serena. The transparency and simplicity of web 2.o tools gain extra power behind the firewall where they operate within a trusted environment.
The next section covers who businesses are using the web to enhance customer connections. WebEx refers to this as the “Web-Touch” Model. One of my favorite examples is the blog, Oklahoma Wine News Blog, created by the web design firm Vine by Design to support the Oklahoma wine industry. Here is a listing of some of their key initial results:
1. Most Oklahoma wineries send them notifications of new events they are hosting or attending.
2. Traffic to their parent's winery website, Nuyaka Creek, their firm,VineByDesign.com, and the Oklahoma Wine News blog have been rising steadily. The blog is the number one referral source to the web site and the reverse is also the case. The two media works together and compliment each other. The web site can provide the glitz and the blog can provide the details and the dynamic content.
3. The search engine results page ranking on our sites it good, considering they spend no money for placement or links from anyone.
4. New wineries are contacting them for winery promotion jobs. The number of winery website customers VineByDesign.com handled tripled in the first year of blogging.
5. The blog’s RSS Feed makes the events they list more easily accessible than ever before and the blog has been successful in making their website traffic more regional rather than global. This is important for tourism related sites that depend on local traffic.
There are also cases from Active Words and Techdrive.net, two software firms that have successfully used blogs to create greater awareness for this products and services. I also cover how iQuest can extend search engines like Google to create a greater understanding of the business communities and networking that occurs in the web. Here is a recent review of Why Buy the Cow? by Paula Thorntom on the Fast Forward blog, Tomorrow I will provide a summary of the last section, Ongoing Innovation.
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