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By Alan Berkson, April 28, 2010 9:30 am

I was inspired by Francine Hardaway’s recent blog Social Media Analytics for Small Business: Still Missing in Action and ensuing spirited commentary to talk about the impact of enterprise standards in the SMB marketplace. In her blog Francine talks about a report by Jeremiah Owyang of the Altimeter Group and John Lovett of Web Analytics Demystified on measuring results in Social Media and questions the value of sophisticated measurement techniques to SMB’s. She writes:

The problem I have is that most of the small businesses I deal with don’t know how much it costs to get a customer, and only measure their marketing with a single business objective:  does this help me get customers?

When we started InfoManage back in 1995 our goal was to bring enterprise level support to the SMB marketplace. Our original marketing material talked about how:

…we make enterprise-level support available to small and mid-size businesses…

We could do this by implementing enterprise standards within our service offerings and then doling out portions of our  service to our SMB customers. By association, our customers were now implementing these same enterprise standards, already “baked in” to the service – similar to what Managed Service Providers and SaaS vendors routinely do today.  As I commented in her blog:

The beauty of the “Web” era is how much it levels the playing field for SMB’s to have access to technology/resources/strategies that were once well beyond reach. This goes for standards as well. Very few small businesses know what ITIL is yet they can leverage ITIL ( as implemented by service providers, SaaS, PaaS, et al) to make their businesses more successful.

What Jeremiah Owyang and John Lovett are doing here is setting a process in motion to create a standard. From there, bright entrepreneurs will figure out a way to product-ize these standards. So, what may seem like rarefied air enterprise speak can and will find its way into the life of the SMB market.

While I’m not sure if I believe in trickle-down economics, I do believe in trickle-down technology. There is tangible value to the SMB marketplace for efforts like Owyang and Lovett’s Social Marketing Analytics report. While Enterprise drives innovation and standards to increase operating efficiency and improve the bottom line, these same innovations and standards eventually find their way into ROI equations for the SMB’s.

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By Alan Berkson, April 19, 2010 9:00 am

A while back I remember reading a blog by Merv Adrian, Why Virtual Conferences Suck, in which he says:

Virtual conferences are an opportunity to think about what conferences are for again. There are big social opportunities that can be enhanced, made asynchronous, documented better, and extended beyond the event.

And finishes up with:

 As we say on Twitter: FAIL.

I am going to take some license and extend his comment to apply to virtual seminars as well.

I recently attended a webinar on Social CRM given by Jeremiah Owyang and Ray Wang of the Altimeter Group. The content of the webinar is interesting as a side note since it was about the impact of Social Media on Customer Relationship management, but what’s more interesting is how I “consumed” the content. I was dialed into the webinar on the phone, logged into GotoWebinar on my computer and was using Tweetdeck on my computer to view my Twitter stream. At the beginning of the webinar, the first slide included a #hashtag to follow along on Twitter.

As the seminar commenced I experienced an interesting dynamic: listening to the speaker, reading the Powerpoint slides on the webinar, and following along the running commentary on Twitter. As the webinar continued, I also posted my own commentary and replied to others’ tweets.

The experience was *way* more engaging then just being on the webinar. You got the feeling of sitting in the audience and hearing chatter around you, having a side conversation with your neighbor. It was a revelation.

Some observations:

• I felt compelled to contribute to the conversation which in turn made me pay closer attention to what was being said;
• Seeing what others thought was important enough to tweet gave me a deeper understanding of the content;
• Got retweeted a bunch of times = fun;
• Got new followers.

In addition, by the following their own hashtag the presenters had a feedback loop on the effect of their presentation. It’s worth noting I have attended dozens of webinars in the last 6 months but this was the first one which actually suggested a Twitter hashtag. There’s some real value to be had leveraging all the tools at your disposal. What’s your POV?