Marketing Influence & Thought Leadership

Innovating the Customer Experience

Innovation is the buzz word of the millennium. Everyone, every company and now even governments are trying to innovate. Why? Competition in many industries is global and many companies see innovation of products, services (especially customer service) and business models as the path to maintaining competitive advantage, and creating sustainable profitable growth. The age of the Internet and now Web 2.0 has disrupted government and forced a new era of transparency that has never been seen before. Governments are now in a situation where citizens are now customers demanding enhanced services.

Many companies think they can simply “silo bust” and force feed a collaborative culture and bam they get innovation.  It doesn’t happen that way. Technology can be a key enabling platform especially for innovating the customer experience, but it is nothing without the innovators.  Everyone is not an innovator, just like everyone is not an entrepreneur, but the two share similar characteristics. According to the Oxford English Dictionary the word innovation harkens back to Hartz Darm 1297: Innovation= the action of innovating; the introduction of novelties; the alteration of what is established by the introduction of new elements or forms. This is quite an eloquent definition and it somewhat fits modern day organizational process.  When I think about innovation today I see four pillars, all of which in some way are related to the innovation of customer service.

The Four Pillars of Innovation

• Product innovation
• Business model innovation
• Services model innovation
• Organizational innovation

Building a culture of collaboration isn’t the instant answer to creating innovation or innovating your customer’s experience. However, leveraging the newest collaborative applications can help find your innovators and ultimately lead to innovation. The biggest challenge facing organizations today are finding the innovators in their organizations and/or, recruiting innovators. Creating, managing and enabling a culture of innovation is a difficult task and as I always say, “you can’t make huskies run like greyhounds.” I discussed the cultural aspects of innovation in my blog the Silicon Valley Way and how culture has played a key role in the rise of the valley.  http://myventurepad.com/peterauditore1/54784/silicon-valley-way

Who are the Innovators?

Three years ago I became an active member of the Berkeley Innovation Forum, (BIF) which includes a selected group of innovators along with those companies that are trying to innovate. BIF is the genius of Dr. Henry Chesbrough, Professor and Executive Director of the Center for Open Innovation, who has brought together a “who’s who” of innovation from many global corporations. Dr. Chesbrough has also written a series of books on innovation which I would highly recommend, including:

• Open Innovation, HBS 2006
• Open Business Models, HBS 2006
• Open Services Innovation, Jossey Bass 2011

My colleagues and I at SAP have attended the meetings and participated in three innovation challenges. Interestingly all of which have been directly related to innovating products, services and business models:

• Best Buy Challenge: Selling and Marketing of Electric bikes.
• Nike Challenge: Selling Biometric clothing to a target market.
• SAP Challenge: Acquiring a billion users. 

Innovators are a rare breed and like entrepreneurs they are major risk takers and are not afraid to fail. Sometimes an innovator is an entrepreneur. Many come from cultures of innovation like Silicon Valley or were raised by innovative parents or family members.  They think differently and when they were kids they got the birthday card that said, “You march to the beat of a different drummer.” There are innovators in your company, and/ or organization, the way to finding them is by empowering them. Innovation is also driven from the ecosystem surrounding the organization including its partners, but this also includes customers.

At the BIF meeting this spring, Scott Cook CEO of Intuit presented their approach to finding the innovators and executing what he called “small experiments” that were product and/or services model innovations.  This was a very new and unique approach to finding ideas and innovators in Intuit and it was done through an IT platform developed by a new employee that came into the company and said Intuit’s knowledge management sucked. They empowered the employee and built a new “Facebook like” collaborative knowledge management platform for sharing ideas in hopes of facilitating innovation. This has enabled Intuit to find the innovators and empower them, the old knowledge management platform was seldom used by employees as are most because there was nothing in it for the employee. SAP has recently announced that it will be bundling its collaborative platform named Streamworks into its business portfolio, making it easier for its customers to find innovators and share knowledge across CRM and ERP systems.  

Innovating Customer Service

During the late 1980s CRM emerged and one of the first proactive steps in customer service was the customer satisfaction survey. There was even a company named CustomerSat in the valley that I worked with. Customer satisfaction information can be easily acquired now by sniffing the digital exhaust of the social customer. In the case of social customers that don’t post reviews it is not that easy, but you can bet that they are reading online reviews even if they aren’t posting them.

In my view innovating customer service begins with understanding the complete end to end customer experience. This is not easy and many companies in retail services like Starbucks for example, have gone to third parties to hire “secret shoppers” who chronicle their experiences. Today’s customer experience doesn’t begin at your website; it begins in the social media ecosystem. I walked into an AT&T store last week to add another IPhone to my account and as soon as I walked in the door I expected poor service. It was not, the service was excellent but why? The representative was armed with all the information about me that made the visit PERFECT and his understanding of AT&T products and services was outstanding. Here is where the training comes in and we all know about the employee turnover rates in retail.

Knowing the customer is king and when you look at competitive differentiation today for many companies it’s all about the customer experience. In order to wow them you must know them. This means understanding the discipline of business intelligence and leveraging it to harvest the rich data sets that are easily accessed from social media. Innovating the customer experience requires more than CRM systems and information technology, and/or collaboration between employees that probably aren’t innovators. You must find your innovators, they may be your customers and/or your partners. Intuit’s example is a great one; I have posted a series of blog on BIF on this site and www.myventurepad.com. One thing I have learned about innovation in scientific and technology careers and at BIF, is that it is not a defined process with a cookie cutter menu. And this is what many companies try to implement. Until next time I wish you great selling and marketing in the millennium.

 

 

 

 

The Social Media Crescendo Effect

The Oxford English Dictionary defines a crescendo as “a musical direction indicating that the tone is to be gradually increased in force or loudness.”  This is exactly what is happening with influence as behaviors and interrelationships continue to evolve in the still new world of social media. In analyzing data from a recent research project with the Society of New Communications Research; our team defined what we call “the social media crescendo effect.”

Our analysis didn’t just jump out of the data; it came from over two years with each team member blogging regularly at least once a month. We combined this experience with the latest data set from the New Symbiosis of Professional Networks research survey to come to one of many conclusions the crescendo effect perhaps being the most important.  

The crescendo effect is simply how many Tweets, Facebook, LinkedIn mentions and other digital means of notification a blog may get. This is paramount because the new flow of influence, (which has metamorphosed into a new form of advertising and word of mouth marketing,) acts like a crescendo through the ecosystem of whoever liked your blog enough to recognize it. Make sense? It is not the number of views that the blog gets but the ecosystem of the viewers, how they collaborate and how the influence flows from it.

When we first started blogging we envisioned our success would be the number of blog views and how many comments we received. Two years later after building our influence and gaining readership, we are experiencing a new form of collaboration in the crescendo effect. Last year our team created more than sixty blogs that generated around 100,000 readers, few commented, but many shared with their ecosystem through Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn.

Some Key Findings:

• The Amazons of influence are now Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn.
• Just like magazines social media communities are all about content aggregation.
• Collaboration is less about exchange but more about endorsement.
• Information doesn’t have to be exchanged to be an endorsement, just viewed.
• Endorsement is the interaction that flows into Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Yelp and TripAdvisor for example.
• In professional social media networks people trust the information enough now that it is accelerating business decision making.

Actionable Information

For years I have watched analysts and journalists, academics, and luminaries tell us what is happening and most of it is all rear view mirror analysis. Where they nearly always fall short is helping us to create actionable information that enables us to gain competitive advantage, insight, or sustainable profitable growth in the case of corporations.

What the crescendo effect means to companies, organizations and governments is that they need to:

1. Know who their influencers are.
2. What their ecosystem of influence is.
3. Where that influence flows.
4. Understand the dynamics of their influence outside of the social media world.
5. Know when that influence wanes.
6. Engage and create sustainable relationships with influencers that enhance your position and brand.
7. Do not create episodic and adversarial relationships.
8. Be extremely careful on who you promote as an influencer.
9. Find out who are the influencers and thought leaders inside your organization.

10.  Leverage the organization’s influencers and expand their ecosystem of influence.

Net/Net

One of my New Year’s resolutions is to read more books, this month I picked up The Man Who Sold America, HBR press by Cruikshank and Schultz. This is a great book about Albert Lasker, an original Mad Man it would seem, who began the modern advertizing industry. Mr. Lasker was responsible for the creation of many brands, including Kotex, Palmolive, Sunkist, SunMaid, Lucky Strike, etc, etc. The beginning of this book starts out with, “we live in a world of mass persuasion,” our mass persuasion now comes in the form of social media.

Social media has created a new platform for interrelationships as the evolution of social media behavior continues to evolve with a new form of collaboration for the masses. Gary Hamel aptly said, “influence is like water it flows everywhere.” Until next time I wish you great selling and marketing in the millennium. 

 

The Social Media Data Tsunami

The data tsunami has arrived. According to recent research from the MIT Center for Digital Research, digital Information is doubling every 1.2 years and will exceed 1000 Exabytes in the next year. And the size of the largest data warehouses is tripling every two years. There is so much data now related to our “own lives” that it is overwhelming and almost unmanageable. This is especially true for the social customers who are becoming more powerful every day through the new word of mouth marketing platform called the social web.

Let’s take a short walk down data memory lane. Before the Internet we had tons of data collected and managed first on punch cards, large hard drives, flat file data bases and then came one of the most powerful technological innovations in the form of the relational data base. This was quickly followed by the advent of the business intelligence market and data warehousing platforms which enabled CRM. 

The MIT researchers also point out that an inflection point in information technology use began right around 1995 when the Internet took hold. At that point purchasing of industrial transportation and other business equipment leveled off as information technology purchasing skyrocketed with business process reengineering that enabled the digitization of business processes. In 1993 Michael Hammer and James Champy’s book, Reengineering the Corporation delivered the thought leadership and acted as a catalyst in those smart companies and organizations that understood IT is a competitive advantage.

Pre-Internet Data

• Flat file and RDBMS
• OLTP transaction
• Business process transaction
• Email messages
• RFID
• Real-time machinery diagnostics/engines/equipment
• Bar code scanner data
• Stock market transactions

Enter the Internet, a massive disrupter that changed the way we do everything. Corporate web sites flew up with reckless abandon in hopes of innovating business models and creating more sustainable profitable growth. It was all about clickstream data, site visits, stickiness, and the data for the most part was rudimentary in nature, but the big search engines knew more about everyone and everything. There was even a search engine called Alta Vista, but they became road kill very quickly because of geographical cultural issues. More importantly, however, there was one company that thought that it could quickly build its own Internet on its own standards and we know who that is now. As Socrates once said “the very thing that makes you great will be your undoing.” Amazon was the first to begin sniffing the digital exhaust and began to harvest the gold in ways that none had visioned with one click shopping and predictive analytics.

Internet 1.0 Data

• Clickstream/Page views/Web transactions
• Web links
• Alta Vista/Google/Yahoo Searches
• Wikipedia updates

Now a tsunami of social media data is upon us. During my evolution to Social predator I left such a large plume of digital exhaust to be honest I couldn’t believe it. Most of it wasn’t through Twitter, although our most recent SNCR research clearly shows it as an Amazon of social media. What surprised me was what I wrote about in the Crescendo effect, and in the Ecosystem of Influence blogs, was that hundreds of people read my reviews of restaurants and hotel stays. Now we have even more powerful data to work with, like the customers or a potential customer’s location in addition to preferences likes and dislikes about food and environments. This leads us further down the experience economy path where brand experience reins king.

Social Customer & Web 2.0 Data

• Mobile phone/GPS/Location data
• Blog references
• Facebook updates
• Twitter feeds
• LinkedIn Updates
• Yelp Reviews & TripAdvisor reviews

Net/Net

In the New Symbiosis of Professional Networks research respondents told us that LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook where the top professional social networks. What we have going on here is a dramatic sea change in human collaboration and interrelationships that is already digitized and available for harvesting. Other findings I thought worth mentioning are:

• A strong 60% of the population used social networking to increase the own professional network
• And 60% of those surveyed were using it to monitor brand.
• Nearly 50% of the respondents indicated that they also participated in specialized or industry specific social networks.
• Apple is the portal to social behavior as 67% of respondents used an Apple mobile device to access a social network. Apple IPhone apps for social networking rose from 180 in 2009 to 736 in 2010.

So what does this all mean? It means that those “Amazon like” companies that understand the basics of analytics and data harvesting can gain a massive competitive advantage over those in their industries that do not go “web farming.” This is an incredible bonanza for data miners who can essentially know everything about us and now where we are. In 1999 I ran across a book entitled Web Farming for the Data Warehouse by Richard Hackthorn, that provides a cook book for web farming the information resources of the web, a great book way ahead of its time.

The Game Changer

In Memory data management is one of the newest technology innovations that portends to change the way we collect, manage and make decisions on data. Along with predictive analytics and other business intelligence tools, this brings a new way of looking at data and will enable “real time data mining,” even of OLTP data bases. This is something that many companies asked for in numerous surveys that I conducted during the 1999-2000 period. The good news is that now memory is cheap. In the simplest of terms, In Memory computing enables you replicate and mirror data sets from any data base in memory on a separate hardware device or within the BI system and/or platform. That means that I can look at data as its collected in real time and watch it trend enabling “real time business decision making.” These technologies are not out of the reach of small and midsized businesses that will leverage the cloud.

 

 

The disciplines of data warehousing and analytics are now taking on special meaning in our society from predicting where and when parolees recommit crimes, to enriching our customer experience at the theme park. Companies that harvest the rich web of social media will undoubtedly gain competitive advantage in their industries and governments can also serve their citizens with enhanced services. Until next time I wish you great selling and marketing in the millennium.  

 

The Good, the Bad and the Ugly of Facebook in the Experience Economy & Cephalopods Pelagic Raptors of the Deep

Joseph Pine and James Gilmore’s book, The Experience Economy 1999, was a harbinger of the end of the services economy, which according to these authors peaked some years ago. As observers of the rapidness of commoditization in nearly all markets and business they were vaticinators of the experience economy we are now realizing in social media. The social media tsunami is fueling the experience economy as people, groups, customers, partners, companies, and governments and many other organizations are interacting and forming interrelationships via the social media peer groups in new and unforeseen Web 2.0 ways.

The societal and anthropological aspects of social media peer groups are just now beginning to be understood and the ramifications of these interrelationships are just being felt. These new platforms are enabling communications that leads to interrelationships between people, and groups that has never been seen before. They now enable us to create, build, maintain and reestablish previous relationships from other points and times in our lives, and are enabling new relationships with our government, NGOs, and the companies we consume products and services from.

Enter the social media landscape: craigslist, facebook, youtube, myspace, twitter, flickr, photobucket, linkedin, digg, ning, yelp, tagged, squidoo, scribd, stumbleupon, hi5, bebo, reddit, myyearbook, technorati, caboodle, Friendster, flixster, xanga, epinions, plaxo, mybloglog, yuku, metafilter, blackplanet, care2, getsatisfaction, friendfeed, clipmarks, cafemon, newwvine, omgili, gigya, ballhipe, current, revver, ping, tribe, magnify, digo, dzone, xing, faves, tweetdeck, ecademy, twine.

(The Fifty Top Social Media Sites from Website Magazine’s Feb 2010 issue, I added craiglist)

The Good, the Bad, the I don’t care and now the Ugly

In the world of Sociobiology our father E. O. Wilson taught us about societies and behavior previously unknown to man, the hierarchy of termites, ants and other insects that have one common trait, altruism. Each member of the community communicates, interacts, behaves and performs a function that is predetermined by the community hierarchy and all are in the best interest of the community, harvesting, defending territory, nurturing eggs and gardens within. Humans don’t act like this and when presented with a new community like social media they will act in many ways that are often predictable and sometimes nefarious. What we don’t know about Facebook and many of the other sites is how humans are really acting and what the good, the bad, the I don’t care and the ugly experiences are.

The Good

Two years ago I found my long lost cousin in Australia on Facebook, wow we Skype nearly every week now. This is a good interrelationship. I have found enormous professional value in being a member of LinkedIn and my network has expanded to several hundred colleagues and professional connections. My Facebook community of friends and colleagues is mixed with both, but I would prefer that it be only my friends and that is where the line blurs. I know that HR people can profile me now on Facebook and even decide whether I am culturally fit for a potential job, this is good and bad. I could be culturally unfit just because I am too old or because of their perception of my sexual preference. This is good and bad. Facebook in particular has now become a great tool for social media marketing for small and large businesses alike in addition to non profits who want to get closer to their customers.

The Bad

The beginning of the bad is when relatives that did nothing for you suddenly appear and want to be your friend. They are the relatives that you wanted to forget, but they are still there back at you as if nothing really happened. It’s like that Rodney Dangerfield joke, “would you be friends with your relatives if you weren’t related to them?” It can get really worse if you are stalked by a former girl friend or boy friend and Facebook has many stalkers, I even had one person do what they thought was a cute video of me during the last holiday season. There is a tremendous amount of information out there on all us and it is growing every day, so be careful when you share information about traveling and other personal issues. Remember that according to statistics a high percentage of identity theft comes from your own relatives that are jealous of you. There are also many stalkers that use Facebook’s IM to get people’s attention to start a conversation; they may come from your friends networks. For example some men will IM every women they know to be single a happy mother’s day wish even if they don’t know if they are mothers or not. This just happened to one of my friends. 

I don’t care!

Then a series of old friends from high school came back into the picture, and I connected with them, but have found their world to be one that I don’t live in anymore. They talk about the little insular and provincial New England town that I was raised in and invite me to groups and events important to that town. These events aren’t important to me, I don’t live there and to be quite honest I really don’t care about them. Nor do I want to enter into relationships with people that I really have nothing to share with anymore. I am not trying to be snotty or uppity but I really don’t care about their home town lives. I don’t live there.

The Ugly

The ugly stories keep pouring in and with hundreds of millions of people on Facebook and within other social media peer groups, I bet there are hundreds if not thousands of stories like the following happening all the time. Last weekend I had lunch with a friend that hates Facebook. He claims it has wrecked his brother’s and his best friend’s marriages. In the case of his brother, his wife left a marriage of 23 years and a 14 year old daughter to be with another woman. Unfortunately, she forgot to de-friend my friend and is flaunting her new life on Facebook for all to see while abandoning her husband and daughter.

In the case of his best friend his wife also left because she found her high school sweetheart on Facebook and recently just up and left another 20 year marriage with two children to be with him. I heard the same story from my hairdresser on Monday of last week about how her sister just up and left her family. It would be easy to dismiss these situations based on unhappy marriages and the times of uncertainty that we live in today because of our broken government and financial system, but I don’t think so. Facebook and the other SMPGs are enabling communications that would have never happened before. What do you think? How many stories like this have you heard?

The Personality of Cuttlefish

Cuttlefish (Sepia sp.) are marine invertebrates and are actually are mollusks in a class called Cephalopoda which is highly adapted for swimming. They are the fastest swimmers of all marine invertebrates and employ a highly evolved jet propulsion system using water. Some species can actually propel themselves out of the water and are known as flying squids. There are only around 650 species in the class which includes squid, octopods, and nautili, the largest are the giant squid. Giant squids inhabit depths along the continental shelf to depths of 600 meters and the most famous of them the Humboldt squid range in large schools up and down the Pacific coast.

 

All cephalopods are kings of camouflage and can change their color instantly and in some cases their skin texture to match their immediate surroundings to hide from predators or lie in wait for prey.  Cuttlefish are slower swimmers than streamlined squid and leverage their small shell for bouncy along with fluid and the gas nitrogen. Light is a major factor for Cuttlefish and it regulates its bouncy the more light the less buoyant. They spend the day burrowed into the bottom and at night they become active gaining more buoyancy to swim up into the water column to hunt. Cuttlefish and squids are what is called highly adapted for raptorial feeding and carnivorous diet, they have ten arms arranged in two arrays of five around the head. Eight are short and heavy while the other two are twice as long and are called tentacles used for seizing prey.

Some Cuttlefish live at depths of more than 1200 meters and others live in shallow tide pools in our warmer oceans. These animals have the highest degree of nervous system development of all marine invertebrates which enable their mobility and carnivorous nature. They are diecous (meaning there are males and females) and they engage in copulation with normally the male seizing the female head on. Cuttlefish can display complex color changes which are thought to be directly related to behavior and most species change color when alarmed. I hope you have enjoyed this blog post and good luck selling and marketing in the millennium. And how will your behavior change the next time you log onto Facebook, will you turn a different color?

Is the Social Media Bubble Bursting, or Will The Tsunami Continue?

According to Umair Haque, Director of the Havas Media lab,  the social media bubble is about to burst, here is an excerpt from his post on HBR March 23, 2010, “I'd like to advance a hypothesis: Despite all the excitement surrounding social media, the Internet isn't connecting us as much as we think it is. It's largely home to weak, artificial connections, what I call thin relationships.” You can read the full editorial and it is actually quite an interesting myopic look at the new world of Internet communications: http://blogs.hbr.org/haque/2010/03/the_social_media_bubble.html?cm_mmc=npv-_-WEEKLY_HOTLIST-_-MAR_2010-_-HOTLIST0329&referral=00202

What is most fascinating about this post is that he tries to draw a connection in the form of a metaphor on the subprime loan business? Quite bizarre indeed if you think about it, the subprime loan scenario evolved from the perfect storm of:

·         Giving anyone a loan that could fog a mirror.

·         A spectacle of American greed where banks and investors were not and are not being held accountable even today, so much for Sarbanes Oxley.

·         Digitization of mortgage loan origination systems where loan processing leveraged business process management software to take loan processing time down from months to less than several days.

(There were business rules engines in the BPM systems that could easily kick out those with low credit scores, but somehow they were tweaked to let those less worthy in.)

I simply don’t get this metaphor, do you?

Trust Enters the Global Social Media Landscape

All right lets attack this hypothesis. The customer is king and has just been given a new pen that moves at Internet business velocity and the only thing slowing down the social customer’s influence (word of mouth marketing) are time zones. One of the issues that Mr. Haque argues is that social media sites lack trust, well that may be the case for some sites that are blurring the lines between our personal and professional lives, but they are not creating fake thin relationships in my world. In fact we decide to enter into them and they are bringing us closer to our friends, past friends and relatives that we still want to know more than any other platform. In the business world we know exactly how social media helps to bring us closer to our customers and how they are leveraging the platforms to drive change.

One of the key findings from our SNCR research last year was that professionals do trust information and relationships on social media sites. This is key for any business and for many companies it’s all about influence because trust is the foundation of influence on the social media planet influence flows like water, it’s everywhere. This is why I always say that social media is the new word of mouth marketing. In several of my previous posts I have demonstrated how P&G, Indium, Kodak, SAP and others are gaining competitive advantage through social media. Is your company leveraging social media to their greatest advantage?

Why the Internet is the Greatest Innovation of Our Time

When Proctor and Gamble decided to build a social network of more than six hundred thousand mothers, do you think they were worried about trust? Probably not, but what they did was build and leverage a social network to build their brand and get competitive advantage. This is a story best told by the most social customer of us all Paul Greenberg, the inventor of Social CRM. The Internet has not only connected us in ways that are innovative and great but from an anthropological standpoint it is melding the cultures of the world.

As a member of the WWW conferences I had the pleasure of working with many early Internet pioneers who would have never predicted the social media tsunami. At the time we were still babbling about how a protocol standard called TCP/IP had just created a global area network called the Internet and debating the nuisances of stateless vs. stateful protocol streams. Remember that this was just sixteen years ago. For those of us that have gray hair we remember how Microsoft fought the Internet and would not endorse this routable protocol even though theirs wasn’t routable. Wow times sure have changed, but guess what, now I am a social customer, author, participant and B2B marketer.

·         I don’t think my relationship with the hundreds of people that read my blogs each week is weak or fake.

·         I don’t think that sites like YouTube are a fad.

·         When I don’t like something in a business I go Yelp about it.

·         When I need information I do a search.

·         Before I buy a product I do a search.

·         My sales friends are using Facebook and LinkedIn to do “digital hard rock mining.”

·         When I need to find old friends and relatives I go to Facebook and most of them are there and I don’t think my relationships are weak.

·         When I join a professional group I go to LinkedIn.

·         When I watch baseball now it’s on the IPhone with MLB.com.

·         And today I did not join 304,059,724 against Obama's Healthcare takeover.

·         I would really like to know how the Havas Media lab positions itself as a platform for a new kind of strategic advisor that helps investors, entrepreneurs and firms experiment with, craft and drive radical management business models and strategic innovation.

 

Net/Net:

The Internet has rapidly expanded to become a global network of seamlessly connected computers and devices that has revolutionized information sharing and communications, challenged governments, broken down cultural barriers and driven innovation and business velocity to levels never before imagined. One of the most important successes of the Internet is how it is enabling globalization and more importantly business model innovation. Today’s most successful companies are driving product and business model innovation from outside their own walls by leveraging the Internet as a collaborative community building platform. This platform has allowed organizations to harness the innovation power of the community and not just individual innovation.

There are many that would argue that many of the enabling technologies that drive the Internet and Web 2.0 today have been around for some time. The reality is that we are finally leveraging their potential in new and exciting ways, there is more to come, because the Internet is all about innovation.