Thursday, April 10, 2008

Web 2.0 for Business = profiling

I was chatting to Donald brown of Brown House fame yesterday about some of the presentations I had recently created e.g. University 2.0, Universities and Social Networking, Twitter and the Telcos and a couple of IBM internal presentation such as Innovation for Web 2.0 Technical Sales and Future of the Media industry and it struck me that all I am really doing is looking at an industry and applying some thought to come up with how I think Web 2.0 effects those industries.

I discovered that as I apply a scenario to one industry I can also apply it to another industry - its like applying an architectural pattern............ So where is all this leading?

I think that for the Corporations Web 2.0 is about the profile.

The profile has two aspects, the person or individual and the activity they are doing.


Person:
1. Measure participation
emails, IM, blog entries, comments made, wiki updates, your content, rating of content

2. Measure interactions
while doing 1 above who are you interacting with, how much and what about?

Activity:
1. What are you doing
Twitter-esk type updates, I am walking down Queen street just passing the Newsagents.

2. What is the environment, where, temperature, weather, location
Its raining, the wind is up its 11am (the person could do with a coffee!)

If we combined all this information we have a possibility to understand the needs, wants and desires of a person at any given moment.

In IBM speak we have a research product called Atlas which is part of the Lotus Connections suite which starts to do this for enterprises - its like LinkedIn on steroids. As we move forward more tools will be needed to sift through all of a persons "participation and events" to create a more meaningful profile.

Once we have this profile we are then in a very powerful position to sell services and products.

So, Web 2.0 for the enterprise is real about user profiling.

(presentation to follow although it may be a week or so as I am in China next week with my head firmly wedged on the grind stone)

1 comment:

Iwan Winoto said...

Sparky, I happened to be at the MySpace Developer launch in Sydney last night. They've release their OpenSocial 0.7 base.
One thing they mentioned which relates to your post is "hyper targetting". In my notes I wrote "long tail targetting". A MySpace app owner can target their app to a user based on detailed analysis of the users activities & profile. They are also looking at opening their analysis APIs, but I got the feeling they are approaching it more carefully than FaceBook did - which I think is good. The enterprise needs better analysis tools like Atlas. This is a big opportunity to info management vendors that can analyse unstructured data. Atlas is great for analysing the people network, but I haven't seen anything to analysis the content network (eg: who is tagging what, using which tags). The YouTube visualisation linking related videos looks interesting.