I spent the last two days at a Carson Workshops summit called The Future of Web Apps, which featured speakers from some of more promising Web 2.0 players and thought leaders. There’s a great write up on the conference at CenterNetworks, which is a good place to get a summary of all of speakers’ presentations.

One of the big takeaways for me is the buzz around translating the best consumer-focused models of Web 2.0 to the enterprise. Web 2.0 is about collaboration, sharing and communities. Enterprise marketing applications have made strides in all of these areas, but today don’t offer the same simplicity or the ability to capture (enterprise) community decision-making in real time.

Kevin Rose presented the story of how he started Digg and grew it to be the phenomenon it is today. This is one of my favorite models and a great example of real-time decisions being made by large numbers of people. He said that all of his marketing has been word of mouth, which goes to show that “listening” can sometimes pay off more than “marketing.” The best part of this session was seeing his response to a question I had been dying to ask him - have you considered posting your product roadmap and allowing users to “digg” and “bury” upcoming product features? I knew what the answer would be and he still let me ask my real question about how he translates user feedback to a product roadmap. To my surprise, it’s just reading a lot of incoming emails from users.

Another presenter who impressed me was Carl Sjogreen, who is the product manager for Google Calendar. He talked about the need to submerse yourself in your client, so you can understand them beyond the features they want in your product. In an increasingly connected world, I couldn’t agree more - we’re innundated with large amounts of information pieces and truly understanding your audience requires good old-fashioned human contact. He gave some examples of the insight that came from this approach. One assumption is that calendars are for busy people. Through discussions with college students, he learned that they’re incredibly busy, but they have regular schedules, so many of them don’t need calendars. He also talked about staying focused on the real competition for this product, the market heavyweight that remains unseated with the most competitive set of features - the paper calendar.

Jeff Veen, the project lead for Google’s Measure Map, gave an inspiring presentation on design, from visualization to information architecture. Turning data into simple images that conveys information and meaning is at the heart of what we do at Biz360. Veen talked about using design to build trust by empowering users to do what they want. We agree that giving clients more control to see information how it best suits them creates a postive user experience.

There were lots of other great presentations on building communities, finding business models that work and why passion is the number one ingredient for success. There were also a lot of other great speakers that I didn’t mention, so I encourage anyone interested to read more at Techmeme and check out the photos on Flickr.

The Forrester Brand Monitoring Wave that we mentioned last month was published today and is now available for purchase. The Biz360 summary is available here. It’s the deepest dive into our space to date, and we’re hopeful that the increased attention will benefit the industry as a whole, especially those of us who were selected for the review.

Overall, analyst Peter Kim rated Biz360 as a “Strong Performer.” From the executive summary:

The vendor offers a strong, end-user-focused brand monitoring solution with good coverage of data sources. The company’s Market360 product features a powerful and flexible user interface with broad reporting capabilities. Biz360’s presence in analytic and consulting services is small but growing, making the solution a better fit for companies that seek a self-service tool.

The report includes more detail regarding our flagship product, Market360:

Biz360’s user interface provided the most in-depth functionality for client-side use. The ability to construct queries, reports, and alerts, as well as tuning and filtering sources and speaker sentiment, are provided in a user-friendly Ajax-based interface. However, empowerment comes with a downside: Some clients report that the system’s complexity makes it easy to miss some of the functions that are available for use.

The complexity criticism is fair, and one that we’ve heard from some of our users in the past. In an effort to help our clients to realize as much value as possible from the application, we just conducted an extensive round of customer feedback interviews. Based on this feedback, further usability enhancements are in the works. Here’s what we currently do to help users on this front:

• Build customizable dashboards that can incorporate all of the reports our customers need on a single home page.
• Offer alternate delivery options, including periodic email, email alerts, offline reports, and RSS.
• Provide personal assistance through our account services and technical services teams.

The Forrester report also evaluated our services capabilities:

The vendor offers training opportunities on par with other vendors. Biz360 is building consulting services capabilities, but these services are still nascent.

On this point, we respectfully disagree. Our consulting services team is small, true, but it consistently generates very high rates of satisfaction and loyalty among our current customers. Our services strategy involves not only building a top-notch internal staff, but also partnering with external consultants for targeted strategic engagements. Combining the power of our application with the insight of expert media analysts has led to some of our most compellling client success stories.

A couple of our competitors secured higher overall ratings in the study. Congratulations to Cymfony’s Jim Nail and Nielsen BuzzMetrics’ Pete Blackshaw, both of whom are recognized as industry thought leaders. We can thank them for leading effective marketing campaigns which have increased awareness for this space. With our own brand and thought initiatives like MarketIQ and key executive positions filled, we plan to be in the leader category when the next brand monitoring wave rolls around in 12-18 months.

On August 15, 2006, a media flurry began when Dell announced it was recalling 4.1 million laptop batteries manufactured by Sony, the largest safety recall in the history of the consumer electronics industry. Overheating batteries have been causing laptops to catch fire or explode. The following week Apple recalled 1.8 million laptop batteries, also made by Sony.

Seeing two of the industry’s most polar-opposite brands pulled into the same debacle made us wonder how the media treatment would play out. We looked at the tone and visibility of Dell and Apple’s battery woe media coverage and noticed Dell had far more visibility and negative tone than Apple.

Media Coverage by Tone
Dell and Apple Battery Problems, August 2006

MediaSignal^TM is calculated by adjusting the reach number for each article based on how prominently the subject (Dell/Apple) is mentioned and then adding together the adjusted reach numbers for each company’s total base of news articles. This chart is based on 6,986 online, print and broadcast news articles for Dell and 5,270 for Apple. Green corresponds to positive MediaSignal, blue/gray to neutral and red to negative.

One reason for this discrepancy in tone is that Dell was first to recall the Sony batteries and in that initial burst of coverage, Apple came forward to say that it was looking into the matter and examining its own Sony laptop batteries. Was it Dell taking a proactive lead on critical safety issues? Engadget and other blogs had been following the saga laptop by laptop, calling it to Dell’s attention. If you take a look at discussion of Dell and battery problems in the Blogosphere, the writing may have been on the wall for awhile.

Newscycle Report
Blog vs. Media Coverage for Dell Battery Problems

The chart shows the media coverage in volume (blue) over time compared to blog posts (gray) over time for discussion of Dell and battery problems.

InfoWorld reported that Dell and Sony knew about the problem as far back as 10 months ago. According to one Slashdot comment, Dell registered www.dellbatteryprogram.com on 11/10/2005, possibly anticipating a recall. One thing is certain though - with upwards of 50 millions blogs containing the personal experiences of millions of people, there’s no need to wait for customers to come to you. Public information on the Internet is often a better source of data for understanding your customer’s experience with your product.