Since I recently took on new responsibilities I begun to realise how much the information balance is so critical in a business environment, it make the difference between good and bad decisions, which inevitably have knock-on effects and repercussions. The company I joined have tried to be innovative and are using some cool web2.0 technology, (wikis) to help the info-flow, however this is only half the solution (or problem as you may choose to consider it). Since, the company has not just one centralised wiki, but at least 4 different wikis to consult to gather the required information. Not only that they have numerous networked drives that contain solution descriptions, sales proposals, etc. A wealth of valuable information spread across multiple access points. The second part of this problem is functional silos. Whilst the information appears to be shared, it is still created and stored in modes that replicate zones of competence and relevance. This may seem appropriate to the individual, but it is not practical for the organisation. My role is one of Business Consultant, which means I have to draw on all sectors of the company for the relevant information, so if my role is reflective of the organisations need for the right information, most of the time is spent searching, validating and absorbing. I agree with most people that information should be a free commodity, yet to be efficient it must be arranged in some way that the right information can be found quickly.

Back in January the Economist ran an article on Corporate Social Responsibility that indicated it was more a matter of enlightened self-interest, this last week they brought up the recurring theme of the executive pay package. As big corporations begin to lose their heads and proverbially drop their CEOs, (AIG loses CEO today) there raises the real question of integrity in the leaders that run big businesses and governments.
We have profited for quite a few years now on the back of a strong economic boom, and the fat cats have indeed got fatter, at the price of ‘doing the right thing‘. Now with recession looming more than ever, it is not these fat cats that will suffer, because they were cunning enough to arrange for their Golden Parachute in advance, it is the rest of the so called general public, who will have to worry about job security or negative equity, raising debts and the higher cost of living. The moralistic intent and the best interest of society are not concepts that today’s leaders entertain, they have lived in a walled garden protected from the society they so deem to take advantage of, yet they are the ones who are charged with the decision-making.
I recognize that these are sweeping statements of perturbed sentiment, yet I struggle to feel easy knowing that whilst there are so many people that are not recognized for their contributions, that practice integrity as a way of life. It seems in many ways that we have forgotten what is important. As we enter this essentially difficult transitional phase of our evolution, not only accounting for recession but from an industrial and capitalistic era to one of knowledge and information, integrity will be an essential characteristic that will define how well we evolve, let us hope that we remember just how we should ‘do the right thing!’.

So here’s a few cool sites to check out that should improve your web browsing experience…

• Guys from Cooliris have brought the picture-in-picture concept to web browsing with this cool-tool ‘Previews’
• Guys from Cooliris again have developed a new way to view images and videos full screen
• Microsoft takes on Google labs and starts to experiment with 3D mobile browsing
• 3D web browsing from the folks at SpaceTime
• The E15 project are looking for beta testers, anyone?
• Increase the power of words on webpages by transforming them into Hyperwords
• Brush up on your presentation skills, or just get valuable info from literally thousands of experts and their presentations at SlideShare
• Semantic Web starts here, a wonderful example of the future of Search Engines
  

I’m sure that there are many more wonderful websites out there, but I picked up on these as they are not trying to imitate but trying to pioneer new web technologies. All these sites deserve top marks, for striving to be different!

There is a very fine line between tailoring to our needs and monitoring our every action. This week the Economist features an article on Behavioral Targeting and it raises the point that the business model for advertising has to change and that this is an evolutionary step in the right direction. With over 80% of the browsing public use Google for search, we are flooded with irrelevant advertising and more importantly irrelevant content.

(Reminder… I just want to thank you Sante for the market research he sent me on Italy)

What people are worried about is the ‘Big Brother’ effect and this is where behavioral targeting titters on that fine line. The danger here is that some companies no doubt will taint this valuable transition by capturing data that should not be stored. Strict regulations need to be put in place that details the types of data and amount of time allowed period to which this data can be held. If this can be done, without inherently limiting the technology then we are definitely heading in the right direction. The next step will be to totally overhaul the search industry to make it more relevant. It is not good having 7M+ websites relating to your search if 99.99% of them are totally not what you’re looking for. There are some companies that are working on developing semantic web search and these are really when things can start to get exciting again. Imagine a world were a Search Engine brings you valuable results!

(…sounds like online utopia to me)

I noticed that I hadn’t wrote anything on Analytics for some time, so I decided to take a Darwinistic approach to this post and give you some ideas of how I think this very important sector will develop in the future.
The Early Days,….(the Volume Phase)
If we think back, web analytics is quite a new industry, but has recently become a billion dollar industry (See what Eric says at Web Analytics Demystified), but it all started back in mid 90’s with the infamous web counter, showing your visitors how popular your site was. Soon after commercial companies, namely Webtrends got into the act and started to parse web server logs and sort data into pretty looking charts and tables. I was working as a Customer Operations Manager for a large Web hosting provider at the time and we had countless calls from customers complaining about the quality and reliability of the Webtrends reports.
Adolescence….(the Aggregation Phase)
As businesses started to understand more about their users and the online traffic, they searched for new metrics, new ways to measure, new ways to aggregate and collect data. Web logs were joined by web beacons, packet sniffing and the very popular javascript tagging. New players entered the market, Coremetrics, WebSideStory, Visual Sciences, HBX and Omniture with shiny new apps to help businesses better understand their online traffic. (Funny thing here is that HBX and WebSideStory merged who were then bought by Visual Sciences, who only just recently got bought by Omniture, something of a little fish, big fish thing going on here). Then in comes Google and most recently Microsoft with their free analytics tools. This whilst making the price of analytics affordable to the general public, also helped raise awareness that businesses needed to take analytics seriously. Companies began to invest part of their budget into understanding how better to spend that valuable marketing money and gain better Returns on their investments. Aggregation of mass quantities of data helped this, but it also flooded the industry with literally hundreds of traceable variables. It was time to start making sense of all these metrics.
Maturity….maybe?(the Intent Phase)
As analytics grows in statue and new technologies establish good cause for their share of the corporate budget, it’s the intellectual understanding that will bring home the proverbial bacon in terms of competitive advantage. As the rules of economics align the differences in technologies and the number of competitors in the market fluctuate, it is the Intelligence Quotient of those utilizing the tools that will add the value and help corporations and individuals alike understanding the motives and intent behind the ‘Why?‘ a consumer/customer/browser acts the way they do on our precious websites.
It’s an exciting time for those passionate about online business and human behavior as we now have the tools and the reasons to better understand, what in the world is going on out there?

As part of the MBA, one of the first things they made each candidate do was perform the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator test, which is quite a simple test that helps to indicate your preferences. This was important as it helped you right from the start to understand what your potential strengths and weaknesses could be and also those of your colleagues. It’s a shame that we didn’t utilise this to more effect throughout the MBA.

Knowing the profiles of your fellow co-workers will definitely help you understand much better their motives and how they will react to different circumstances and can prove to be a valuable tool in human relationships.

Now that I’m in business for myself and the results of this test are even more important as they help me understand what I can contribute and what I cannot. If you’re interested in taking the test the 41Q website has a free Myers-Briggs test on their website.

Here’s my results, Think-Train’s MBTI Results.

I’ve been thinking about creativity and perspective in an almost accidental frame of mind for the last few days and I thought it valued a few lines. I was ‘officially’ turned on to flow and creativity back in 1998 when Applied Creativity was one of the subjects on the Innovation Masters degree I was taking. I remember afterwards reading this book by a certain Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, titled ‘Finding Flow’. It was a fantastic book and sort of addresses how to be happy and stay happy. There is this ideology that creativity should be allowed to flow, almost in the sense that it flows out of you and is transferred to others or things, such as art, science, human relationships, etc. I noticed while walking around that on the whole, most people are habitual, they get up, have breakfast, go to work, smoke cigarettes (I’m surprised how many people feel the need to smoke in the morning), etc and so on. They follow the same patterns day in, day out. They take the same metro, they drive the same streets, they stop for coffee at the same places, all very habitual and I’d say that as much as 70-80% of the general population are happy to with their habitual routines.

That been said, there’s very little scope for creativity, you share the same perspective as everyone else (more or less), you perform the same activities day in/out, there’s very little external stimulation that encourages you to apply creativity.

I am an INTJ type individual, which apparantly makes me quite rare, less than 1% of general population. This also means that I contemplate such things as Creativity, Strategy, etc. I’m usually misunderstood very easily, part of the package it seems, but what I think is important is that I feel creativity flows when it goes against the habitual routines, when you can turn around and see the faces of all the people you were walking with and walk against them, when you look above eye-level or switch off your iPod for a while and listen to the sounds of the world. Extrasensory stimulation is a wonderful thing, to absorb all this information then combine it into an idea or a plan is being creative, this is finding your flow.

It’s easy to wear blinkers and follow habitual routines, it’s even comfortable and you can suppose be happy this way. Going against these patterns is not easy, it’s very difficult, because you have to change your perspective, you will have difficulty in being accepted and your ideas will generally be misunderstood, or considered different than the norm, but that is also why the world didn’t have ten Di Vinci’s or fifteen Van Goghs or even two Albert Einsteins. No one is saying give up your day job, but if you are in search of a little creative flux, start with choosing a different route to work, switch off your iPod, try another Coffee bar. It’s in the little things that we change we have the opportunity to see a whole new universe and stimulate a little bit of creative flux.

If you’re in the advertising industry, the concepts of reach and relevance will not be new to you, but as advertising has evolved online, these factors have gained much more importance in respect to how successful your advertising campaigns will be.
Some of my recent research has revolved around interactive and online advertising and digital or e-marketing. So I started to think about developing a simple model (most models start with a triangle).

REACH

This is essential in understanding how big your audience is, where they come from and whether you need to target specific markets, or can broadcast your links openly.

RELEVANCE

You could say that this is something of a buzz-term, with lots of focus on gauging your audience correctly, trying to match their keywords or search terms with the right kind of advertising. You also need to match sure that your advertising runs long enough and yet not too much, as well as right time for the right audience.

RECOGNITION

We’re talking about results, what is the return on investment (ROI) for the advertiser and what is the revenue potential for the publisher, and is everyone getting value?
I recognize that this is just one of any number of potential scenarios for the Online Advertising industry, but it is something to reflect upon. If you score highly in these three categories then there’s a good chance your campaigns will be a success.

Following the Yahoo Web Analytics Forum, I was averted to this wonderful piece of content relating to how the Search Engine Market. The Search Engine experts at Bruce Clay have created a histogram of relationships between the Search Engine Companies dating back to November 2000 right up to January this year. What’s interesting is Google comes in at the side and slowly (over a period of two years) takes a central position. Google seems at first to work with Yahoo, forging a results-based relationship, as the model progress Google appear to bypass certain relationships to offer direct services, such as paid search as early as July 2002, when Overture was the strong market leader. Before long Google is building up their position and offering different services to different companies, thus by the end of 2003, some search engines begin to cease to exist and Google becomes the main provider of Search results, both Paid and Organic. I can only assume that companies at that time were given very little choice, to stay in business you had to go through Google, yet what was really happening is that they were postponing the inevitable. Yahoo realised this all too slowly and by the time they had reacted and bought Overture, they had already lost most of their market share. In July 2005, we finally get the two poles of Internet Search appear, and by 2008 the picture looks decisively different than 2000. Google and Yahoo both grew substantially not only because of their ability to develop better technologies, but also through relationship building. They understood who were the important companies to work with and forged relationships with them, learning their technologies, and improving on it, then offering better services to others.
So what next? Well I believe that this is a perfect time for innovation, for smaller, more versatile companies to start flooding the market with new ideas, new ways to search. Of course no one is saying, ‘Go compete with Google!‘, but having a good understanding of innovation cycles, it is now, during a period of market saturation, that we need to plant the seeds of the innovations that will stimulate future business growth.

I’m sure I’m not the only one, but isn’t it just getting a little tiring all this talk of this ‘Global Credit Crunch‘. This is an example of greed, miscommunication and failed management. I for one will not be shedding any tears for Bearn Sterns after their gross mismanagement of a corporate IPO for the company I worked for several years ago. However, this did and will continue to have global repercussions for quite some time.
I wrote a paper on Economic and Innovation cycles back in ‘97 and it led me to create a model which predicted a global recession from 2007-2009. I brought this to the attention to the Macroeconomics professor (Shlomo Maital) from my MBA program, and he taught the class a lesson on teleology. Whilst the class sat back and absorbed all this ‘frightening’ information it reminded me of other lessons from my previous Masters degree. My paper had not accounted for the dot-com bust, if fact I doubt many had, since it was a scenario that was pretty much over within several years and did not affect the whole economy, unlike the potential of this one.
What is tiring is the lack of cooperation that we are seeing. Everyone knows that this inevitably affects every market in the world, yet each country is acting independently of the others. Experts will tell you that if they knew how deeply everyone was involved and affected they could minimize the impact, yet this will not happen, due to a trust issue. The moral side of business went on vacation a long time ago and is showing no signs of coming out of hiding.
What we need if we are going to survive is change, but unfortunately not everyone has the b@!!$ to handle this change. So the rest of us will have to get used to these reports. BTW. is anyone getting royalty for the use of the term ‘Credit Crunch‘?