A majority of corporate blogs posted authors' pictures, biography, and policy statements
However, they did not provide contact information such as physical address, telephone numbers, and email address
Corporate blogs had various user control, two-way communication, and social networking features
The level of consumer participation in message generation seems to be low. Only few blogs had at least three comments on average for each blog entry.
Results suggest that companies in the service/retail business may feel stronger needs for communicating with consumers through blogs and, therefore, are more actively engaged in such form of communication.
Source : Article "CORPORATE BLOGS AS A FORM OF eWOM ADVERTISING" at University of Minnesota
Saturday, September 27, 2008
Thursday, September 25, 2008
The rise of e-philanthropy
Electronic donations have been possible through the widespread use of Internet technology. Trends in the not-for-profit fund raising industry are similar to the music industry. Music industry’s mainstream revenue stream now comes from online selling rather than from traditional music stores [Anderson, 2006]. This disruptive change that transformed the music industry, may be seen in the not-for profit fund raising industry very soon.
Tapping into this change, many charity organizations has been into online charity products lately. However these organizations raises significant amount of funds through the traditional givings like events and charity shows than its online donations. Thus the traditional offline products such as events and charity shows act as a substitute to their online products. However the online products have capability to produce economies of scale as they have access to larger audience. Just as it happened in the music industry, it may be assumed that e-philanthropy will raise more funds in future than the traditional givings. Thus, these organizations should configure its online offering to create a totally new market for itself. They should understand the value involved in traditional givings and add those values to the online products combined with the advantages of online donations.
The advantage of online donation products is that they replace time and resource consuming practices those are involved in the traditional givings. According an article by Journal of Strategic E-Commerce, there is a different set of performance attributes of online donation products than the traditional one. Online donations provide more trust and privacy to donors while traditional givings are more participating, involving and established [Lee, Berniker, Wyhe & Johnson, 2005].
The above figure plots value curve for online products versus its own substitute, its traditional method. The figure also plots the ideal value curve.
The traditional givings often involves high level of participation and involvement. Traditional givings have been used since long and are proven approaches. It also involves one to one interactions and thus has a “human touch” that increases the emotional value of traditional products. As traditional processes involve paper trails they are relatively slow and has high cost per transaction.
The current online products of most charity organizations lack substantial participation and involvement. Including online chartrooms and message boards and harnessing the power of online communities into the marketing strategy may increase participation and mass involvement. Participating in websites like iVillage.com would definitely increase the visibility of organizations in online events. The organization also lacks online presence on websites such as Justgive.org and NetworkForGood.com that facilitates one to many interactions. “Blogs” are new way for Internet marketing. The organizations should use these upcoming tools to create visibility and increase participation. This would pull the participation element of “Current Online” to the “Ideal Online”, as shown in the above figure.
Many organizations currently share information though weekly newsletters, which are emailed to donors. These newsletters are one to all and do not distinguish donors on any parameters such as donated amount or age of the donor. An article by William McLeRoy from Fort Worth Business Press reveals that donors may like to know more than they are currently being told by the organizations. Many new companies such as www.guidestar.com have evolved that analyses nonprofit's charitable status. Association with such a company can open another channel of information sharing with donors.
Adding emotional value to online products has been a challenge. Current online products lack emotional value and human touch. To increase the human touch, an “Online Relationship Methodology” should be implemented that should connect the organization donors on regular basis, create a “healthy dialogue” and “interaction” and “appeal”. Emailing emotional videos and stories at regular interval to donors can do this.
Implementation of above recommendations might lead to a slight increase in cost per transaction for the organizations, however cost per transaction of the consumer should still be low as shown in the figure. Harnessing the power of the Internet and implementation a totally new business model for online products will help charity organizations to prepare for future competitions, that will supposedly on online offerings.
© 2008 Awaneesh Shatmanyu
References:
[Anderson, 2006] from book “The Long Tail” authored by Chris Anderson publication in year 2006
[Lee, Berniker, Wyhe & Johnson, 2005] from article “e-commerce disruptive innovations in charity and non-profit fund raising” by Chung-Shing Lee, Eli Berniker, Glenn Van Wyhe and Kenneth J. Johnson and Pacific Lutheran University
Tapping into this change, many charity organizations has been into online charity products lately. However these organizations raises significant amount of funds through the traditional givings like events and charity shows than its online donations. Thus the traditional offline products such as events and charity shows act as a substitute to their online products. However the online products have capability to produce economies of scale as they have access to larger audience. Just as it happened in the music industry, it may be assumed that e-philanthropy will raise more funds in future than the traditional givings. Thus, these organizations should configure its online offering to create a totally new market for itself. They should understand the value involved in traditional givings and add those values to the online products combined with the advantages of online donations.
The advantage of online donation products is that they replace time and resource consuming practices those are involved in the traditional givings. According an article by Journal of Strategic E-Commerce, there is a different set of performance attributes of online donation products than the traditional one. Online donations provide more trust and privacy to donors while traditional givings are more participating, involving and established [Lee, Berniker, Wyhe & Johnson, 2005].
The above figure plots value curve for online products versus its own substitute, its traditional method. The figure also plots the ideal value curve.
The traditional givings often involves high level of participation and involvement. Traditional givings have been used since long and are proven approaches. It also involves one to one interactions and thus has a “human touch” that increases the emotional value of traditional products. As traditional processes involve paper trails they are relatively slow and has high cost per transaction.
The current online products of most charity organizations lack substantial participation and involvement. Including online chartrooms and message boards and harnessing the power of online communities into the marketing strategy may increase participation and mass involvement. Participating in websites like iVillage.com would definitely increase the visibility of organizations in online events. The organization also lacks online presence on websites such as Justgive.org and NetworkForGood.com that facilitates one to many interactions. “Blogs” are new way for Internet marketing. The organizations should use these upcoming tools to create visibility and increase participation. This would pull the participation element of “Current Online” to the “Ideal Online”, as shown in the above figure.
Many organizations currently share information though weekly newsletters, which are emailed to donors. These newsletters are one to all and do not distinguish donors on any parameters such as donated amount or age of the donor. An article by William McLeRoy from Fort Worth Business Press reveals that donors may like to know more than they are currently being told by the organizations. Many new companies such as www.guidestar.com have evolved that analyses nonprofit's charitable status. Association with such a company can open another channel of information sharing with donors.
Adding emotional value to online products has been a challenge. Current online products lack emotional value and human touch. To increase the human touch, an “Online Relationship Methodology” should be implemented that should connect the organization donors on regular basis, create a “healthy dialogue” and “interaction” and “appeal”. Emailing emotional videos and stories at regular interval to donors can do this.
Implementation of above recommendations might lead to a slight increase in cost per transaction for the organizations, however cost per transaction of the consumer should still be low as shown in the figure. Harnessing the power of the Internet and implementation a totally new business model for online products will help charity organizations to prepare for future competitions, that will supposedly on online offerings.
© 2008 Awaneesh Shatmanyu
References:
[Anderson, 2006] from book “The Long Tail” authored by Chris Anderson publication in year 2006
[Lee, Berniker, Wyhe & Johnson, 2005] from article “e-commerce disruptive innovations in charity and non-profit fund raising” by Chung-Shing Lee, Eli Berniker, Glenn Van Wyhe and Kenneth J. Johnson and Pacific Lutheran University
Wednesday, September 24, 2008
TATA Nano get its first hiccup
Finally ! Tata Motors- India's biggest truckmaker, abandoned its newly built factory for the world's cheapest car "TATA NANO", because of month long violent protests.
This is not great sign for Indian manufacturing industry. What is more interesting that Sri Lanka, India's neighbor, has offered land to Tata Motors to set up the Nano factory. "Red-Tape" and bureaucracy have been a long problem for businessmen in India.
Catch more on : http://www.ndtv.com/convergence/ndtv/story.aspx?id=NEWEN20080066478&ch=633579777634531250
This is not great sign for Indian manufacturing industry. What is more interesting that Sri Lanka, India's neighbor, has offered land to Tata Motors to set up the Nano factory. "Red-Tape" and bureaucracy have been a long problem for businessmen in India.
Catch more on : http://www.ndtv.com/convergence/ndtv/story.aspx?id=NEWEN20080066478&ch=633579777634531250
Monday, September 22, 2008
THE LONG TAIL – Is it worth tapping into?
Prior to introduction and widespread acceptance of the Internet, were we living in a world of scarcity? If we wanted to watch a movie, we had no option other than current hits or some other local popular movies. But, we can now find whatever we need. We have unlimited access to movies, sound tracks, books and so many other things published and released throughout centuries and which were not necessarily super hits. So are we now living in a world of abundance? If yes, how this transition took place? Chris Anderson explains this phenomenon in his book “The Long Tail” – Why future of business is selling less of more. The Long Tail is an interesting book, which makes you think all the way while you are reading. The book explains how the Internet has enabled bottom feeding and has created niche markets, all of which if combined together may overshoot the mainstream market! The book revolves around a demand graph, which has a peak and then a gradual diminish towards the right and after a cut-off point; the rest of the region is named as “The Long Tail”. This diminished tail of demand looks unattractive but it actually extends till infinity.
According to the author, the Internet has freed us from the “Tyranny of Locality”. Initially sale of books, CDs and DVDs were limited to the physical location of retailers. Moreover these retailers had limited shelf-space and thus sold only hits. Cost benefit analysis pushed these retailers to keep only those items, which were in much more demand over others. Rhapsody an online subscription based music streaming service has now more than 9 million tracks and each of these tracks is downloaded. The long tail has everything we may wish. In-fact when we combine the total non-hits present in the long tail, they create a rival market to the hits called as -“The Hidden Majority”. Youtube.com is again a great example of the long tail where long unavailable videos all of a sudden created a market that never existed.
With advancement in the Internet, the costs of reaching niches have been falling considerably. Three forces that are behind this and are enabling the long tail: democratization of production tools i.e. commoditization of PCs, democratization of distribution tools i.e. commoditization of the Internet as a mass distribution channel and lastly connecting supply and demand.
The author gives example of “Amateurs VS Professionals” and argues that similar to the long tail, amateurs are influencing the world more than professionals. However I feel that democratization of production tools does not necessarily signify that the quality of production will be accepted. The Wikipedia is an easy example of amateur’s collection of vast pool of knowledge. The trade-off is that you can never trust this vast knowledge base; on the other hand you can always rely on the Britannica. The author makes it look a bit easy to influence the long tail market however the realty is that the customers in the long tail may be the toughest customers to deal with. Though the Internet has enabled us to reach these customers, however we still lack in terms of understanding the exact needs that exists in the long tail. Simply putting a long table does not mean you have an increased guest list!
According to the author, Sears is a wonderful example that how this long tail was reached and satisfied. However the story is too old and reaching the long tail now requires alignment of more complex resources. No doubt that the Internet provides us a way that reduces the cost of reaching this niches, however tapping these niche requires specialized resources, which might outweigh savings that comes from the Internet. I my view, the long tail still remain too costly to chase! I might like to have second mover advantage to tap “The Long Tail”.
The author also discusses the future of marketing through “Blogs” and user generated contents. The book provides some interesting examples of word of mouth marketing tools through popular blogs such as “Boing Boing”, “Engadget”, “PostSecret” and “Daily Kos”. The book discusses music industry, books and entertainment industry again and again. There are other industries that are yet to tap the long tail and the most potential one is the philanthropy industry. The author repeatedly talks about the increased relevance of filters both pre and post filters. There is no doubt that emerging technologies has enabled Google to apply these filters to understand us better and return us the pages and links, which we would prefer to view over others. Rhapsody has also been successful to push customized popular tracks to its numerous users. However when users return to websites again and again after months, the filters still remain pretty much the same. This brings us to an interesting argument that up to what extent Google or Rhapsody has aligned its resources towards bottom feeding.
It is compelling that how the author comes down heavily on 80/20 rule and provides some really good examples against it. I had a perception that this rule cannot be generalized for every industry, however the author generalizes 80/20 rule to kill it. After years of solving organizational problems around IT and operations, I still believe that solving twenty percent of problems, leads to increase in eighty percent of organization efficiency. However, the author does well in convincing that “The Long Tail” is all about defying 80/20 rule.
Throughout the book I was guessing that whether providing more and more information to the customers is a good choice or not? It might lead to adverse effect or may even backfire. The author discusses this in later chapters. He gives an example of a jam selection event at a superstore out of 24 types of jams. The result was that as the variety in jams increased, the buying tendency of customers decreased. However the author counter argues that if the same amount of information is provided through the Internet in a structured way, with freedom to look for more information through search engines, it will not at all confuse customers!
Overall this book is happy reading, especially for someone interested to explore the world of electronic marketing. Among some other books I read in the past that includes “Built to Last” and “The Innovator’s Dilemma”, “The Long Tail” provides a more futuristic view of ever changing business landscape.
©2008 Awaneesh Shatmanyu
According to the author, the Internet has freed us from the “Tyranny of Locality”. Initially sale of books, CDs and DVDs were limited to the physical location of retailers. Moreover these retailers had limited shelf-space and thus sold only hits. Cost benefit analysis pushed these retailers to keep only those items, which were in much more demand over others. Rhapsody an online subscription based music streaming service has now more than 9 million tracks and each of these tracks is downloaded. The long tail has everything we may wish. In-fact when we combine the total non-hits present in the long tail, they create a rival market to the hits called as -“The Hidden Majority”. Youtube.com is again a great example of the long tail where long unavailable videos all of a sudden created a market that never existed.
With advancement in the Internet, the costs of reaching niches have been falling considerably. Three forces that are behind this and are enabling the long tail: democratization of production tools i.e. commoditization of PCs, democratization of distribution tools i.e. commoditization of the Internet as a mass distribution channel and lastly connecting supply and demand.
The author gives example of “Amateurs VS Professionals” and argues that similar to the long tail, amateurs are influencing the world more than professionals. However I feel that democratization of production tools does not necessarily signify that the quality of production will be accepted. The Wikipedia is an easy example of amateur’s collection of vast pool of knowledge. The trade-off is that you can never trust this vast knowledge base; on the other hand you can always rely on the Britannica. The author makes it look a bit easy to influence the long tail market however the realty is that the customers in the long tail may be the toughest customers to deal with. Though the Internet has enabled us to reach these customers, however we still lack in terms of understanding the exact needs that exists in the long tail. Simply putting a long table does not mean you have an increased guest list!
According to the author, Sears is a wonderful example that how this long tail was reached and satisfied. However the story is too old and reaching the long tail now requires alignment of more complex resources. No doubt that the Internet provides us a way that reduces the cost of reaching this niches, however tapping these niche requires specialized resources, which might outweigh savings that comes from the Internet. I my view, the long tail still remain too costly to chase! I might like to have second mover advantage to tap “The Long Tail”.
The author also discusses the future of marketing through “Blogs” and user generated contents. The book provides some interesting examples of word of mouth marketing tools through popular blogs such as “Boing Boing”, “Engadget”, “PostSecret” and “Daily Kos”. The book discusses music industry, books and entertainment industry again and again. There are other industries that are yet to tap the long tail and the most potential one is the philanthropy industry. The author repeatedly talks about the increased relevance of filters both pre and post filters. There is no doubt that emerging technologies has enabled Google to apply these filters to understand us better and return us the pages and links, which we would prefer to view over others. Rhapsody has also been successful to push customized popular tracks to its numerous users. However when users return to websites again and again after months, the filters still remain pretty much the same. This brings us to an interesting argument that up to what extent Google or Rhapsody has aligned its resources towards bottom feeding.
It is compelling that how the author comes down heavily on 80/20 rule and provides some really good examples against it. I had a perception that this rule cannot be generalized for every industry, however the author generalizes 80/20 rule to kill it. After years of solving organizational problems around IT and operations, I still believe that solving twenty percent of problems, leads to increase in eighty percent of organization efficiency. However, the author does well in convincing that “The Long Tail” is all about defying 80/20 rule.
Throughout the book I was guessing that whether providing more and more information to the customers is a good choice or not? It might lead to adverse effect or may even backfire. The author discusses this in later chapters. He gives an example of a jam selection event at a superstore out of 24 types of jams. The result was that as the variety in jams increased, the buying tendency of customers decreased. However the author counter argues that if the same amount of information is provided through the Internet in a structured way, with freedom to look for more information through search engines, it will not at all confuse customers!
Overall this book is happy reading, especially for someone interested to explore the world of electronic marketing. Among some other books I read in the past that includes “Built to Last” and “The Innovator’s Dilemma”, “The Long Tail” provides a more futuristic view of ever changing business landscape.
©2008 Awaneesh Shatmanyu
Tuesday, September 9, 2008
IT in Healthcare: A Challenge or an Opportunity?
The good news, according to a research by Datamonitor, is that the healthcare industry will spend approximately $39.5 billion USD on information technology in 2008. Reports on IT spending in healthcare from Gartner are also favorable and predict that the compound annual growth rate (CAGR) from 2006 through 2011 should be around 5.2%. Above figures definitely paint a rosy picture for IT in the healthcare sector, however when compared to other industries like baking and retail, IT in healthcare is still far left behind. For instance, according to IDC, IT spending by U.S. banks was approximately $60 billion USD in 2007, almost double of the worldwide IT spending in healthcare in 2008. This certainly reflects that implementation of IT in healthcare has been a challenge but can also turn into a potential opportunity.
Health care industry has a reputation of being very labor-intensive. Most of the procedures are generally paper-based as blue-collar staff circulates paper medical charts all around in hospitals. There are several other challenges. Physicians who have been practicing for a long time are also not comfortable when it comes to using IT, making IT systems hard to sell. Moreover patient demographics on age is quite spread out and is tilted towards older patients, who are definitely not well trained to find relevant information from a bunch of IT systems such as a hospital website. IT also faces organizational resistance like doctors might feel that IT will reduce their power, as they will share all information with the hospital administration.
Up to what extent, processes can be inefficient in a hospital? The analysis may vary from hospitals to hospitals, however in a most common scenario, hospitals tend to have paper-based referral process. Hospital staff spends a lot of time to index these received referral documents and prioritize them. Doctor’s orders are also written on papers. Again, this process suffers from high risk of transcription errors. These orders are read and rewritten on requisitions forms, which are then sent to other departments such as lab, pharmacy or imaging departments. Above all, patient charts are physically transferred from one department to another, off course not a grand use of hospital staff.
Implementation of an IT project in any hospital can be categorized as a three-tier project. First tier consist of indentifying key processes, over those if IT is implemented will result in higher return on investment (ROI). Thus proper business process analysis should be carried over to identify insufficient processes and tweak them accordingly. Many healthcare providers have a chain of hospitals, thus, in this case it is important to standardize processes across all the chain hospitals wherever applicable. Second tier consists of initiating a change management project to educate and involve all stakeholders. This is a very important step in implementing IT projects as most of the failures occur as result of poor execution of the change management project. This is supposedly the most challenging aspect of any IT project in the healthcare industry and should be handled with utmost priority and sensitivity. Once the above two tiers are executed successfully, the third tier i.e. implementation of IT systems is straightforward step though there might be occasional hiccups.
Some of the common IT systems that hospitals should experiment are online referral system, physician order entry system, electronic medical chart, bar coding system, automated drug dispensing system and medical transcription system. It has been proven that successful implementation of above systems leads to huge dollar savings. Thus IT can positively help the healthcare industry to cut costs, increase efficiency, reduce waiting lists and invest the saved money into more valuable work such as medical research.
©2008 Awaneesh Shatmanyu
Health care industry has a reputation of being very labor-intensive. Most of the procedures are generally paper-based as blue-collar staff circulates paper medical charts all around in hospitals. There are several other challenges. Physicians who have been practicing for a long time are also not comfortable when it comes to using IT, making IT systems hard to sell. Moreover patient demographics on age is quite spread out and is tilted towards older patients, who are definitely not well trained to find relevant information from a bunch of IT systems such as a hospital website. IT also faces organizational resistance like doctors might feel that IT will reduce their power, as they will share all information with the hospital administration.
Up to what extent, processes can be inefficient in a hospital? The analysis may vary from hospitals to hospitals, however in a most common scenario, hospitals tend to have paper-based referral process. Hospital staff spends a lot of time to index these received referral documents and prioritize them. Doctor’s orders are also written on papers. Again, this process suffers from high risk of transcription errors. These orders are read and rewritten on requisitions forms, which are then sent to other departments such as lab, pharmacy or imaging departments. Above all, patient charts are physically transferred from one department to another, off course not a grand use of hospital staff.
Implementation of an IT project in any hospital can be categorized as a three-tier project. First tier consist of indentifying key processes, over those if IT is implemented will result in higher return on investment (ROI). Thus proper business process analysis should be carried over to identify insufficient processes and tweak them accordingly. Many healthcare providers have a chain of hospitals, thus, in this case it is important to standardize processes across all the chain hospitals wherever applicable. Second tier consists of initiating a change management project to educate and involve all stakeholders. This is a very important step in implementing IT projects as most of the failures occur as result of poor execution of the change management project. This is supposedly the most challenging aspect of any IT project in the healthcare industry and should be handled with utmost priority and sensitivity. Once the above two tiers are executed successfully, the third tier i.e. implementation of IT systems is straightforward step though there might be occasional hiccups.
Some of the common IT systems that hospitals should experiment are online referral system, physician order entry system, electronic medical chart, bar coding system, automated drug dispensing system and medical transcription system. It has been proven that successful implementation of above systems leads to huge dollar savings. Thus IT can positively help the healthcare industry to cut costs, increase efficiency, reduce waiting lists and invest the saved money into more valuable work such as medical research.
©2008 Awaneesh Shatmanyu
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