StoneBridge Systems

Shopper Survey Results

2012-01-27T11:10:00.003+11:00

Every year Baynote do a holiday shopper survey to gauge what is happening in online retail. During Christmas they look at consumer sentiment regarding the shoppers digital shopping experience and the results are always worth reviewing! This year the sample pool is over 1000 shoppers based primarily in the US. Even though there are limited numbers from our region, the results are important to Australasia for two reasons. The first is that many of our local shoppers tend to shop at US online stores due to the considerable price differences (and know Mr. Harvey, it has little to do with GST) and the second is that we believe the US online retail space continues to be a number of years ahead of our local market, so its important that we understand where the trends are heading.Here is a quick summary of the results:• Overall, more than 84% of consumers said their online shopping experience this season was “good” or "excellent”, up from 78% last year• The personalisation of the shopping experience on Facebook, mobile phones and tablets lags far behind traditional eCommerce websites• Vast majority of shoppers reported social networks had no influence on their holiday purchase decisions• Email and search delivered shoppers the most relevant product recommendations, outperforming eCommerce sites and in-store sales associates• Coupons and promotions delivered via email, direct mail and search were more useful to shoppers than daily deal sites and social networksSo you can see that there are some pretty important points to be noted if your looking at your online retail strategy. Technologies such as email and search continue to be incredibly important and therefore worth a level of investment. The social media channel is gaining in importance, but its still not as important as a web site that provides easy access to what people are looking for.The consumer report card gave Facebook a C+, which means there is considerable improvement to be made in the way shoppers are being engaged through social media.Also, mobile was not the killer channel I expected it to be. Whilst everyone is talking about it, it seems that consumers are not yet ready to convert to mobile platforms. No doubt this will change over time (only 16% of people surveyed even had a tablet) but its important to note that current investments need to be made in your existing web platform while you determine the best mobile strategy for your business. You can download the full details from Baynotes web site. Just go to http://www.baynote.com/resource/baynote-2012-holiday-online-shopping-experience/

Silicon Valley travels

2012-01-19T14:22:00.002+11:00

The StoneBridge Management team recently visited Silicon Valley to speak with a number of software companies (small and larger) about our existing partnerships and the plan for 2012, or potential partnerships for some of the organisations that were new to us. It was an exciting week of meetings and discussions and it was very interesting to hear what some were saying about the business environment. We hear a lot of doom and gloom on the financial forecasting front (and with some good reason when you look at the state of Europe) but my observations of the US market was that it is coming back. All of the companies that we spoke with had finished their 2011 with figures better than they expected, and far better than their 2010 numbers. They were all buoyant and looking to new markets (hence our discussions) and willing to make some investments in those new marktes to get them "off the ground". I didn't hear a single person say anything that would make me think that the market for software and IT services was not going to be very good in 2012.In one meeting, there was a partner from Germany that services a number of customers in Europe. Despite the economic realities of that region, even these guys were pretty happy about the current state of their business and their ability to grow it further in 2012. So I'm no economist, but judging by my experience travelling through that exciting (for IT folks) part of the world recently, I would say that the IT business is in good shape, and 2012 is looking even better.Happy New year everyone!

Fixing the online shopping experience

2011-11-09T12:32:00.002+11:00

A large hardware retailer has had enormous success in the Australian market by introducing something that was rarely seen before they entered this space, the Store Greeter. The Greeter is responsible for making you feel welcome as you walk through the door, but more importantly, they are there to direct you to where you want to go. As stores have become larger it became more and more difficult to find exactly what you were looking for. Most of us go to the hardware store with a job in mind or with some intent to purchase a particular item. The Greeter’s job is to make sure you can get to the item as quickly as possible, and if they are doing their job properly they will also double check with you as you pass through the checkouts to make sure you actually found what you were looking for. The main strategy in play here is “buy more, buy quickly”.

Retailers like this one have made offline retailing a science. I’ve had numerous conversations with successful retailers/merchandisers who use scientific principles to carefully place items in their store to maximise sales – it’s based on years and years of research printed in thousands of books with decades of history. But online shopping hasn’t been around for quite as long as offline. The first online store was invented around 1979, but it wasn’t until Jeff Bezos created Amazon that the online shopping dream began to become reality. Now, figures from the US suggest that online retailing is well and truly with us and here to stay. US ecommerce and online retail figures are projected to reach $197 billion this year! Up from almost nothing less than 20 years ago. Online retailing is still a new world!

Given we don’t have the same history, what have we learnt about the online retail world? Here is a typical comparison between an offline experience and an online experience:

Offline: See interesting item
Online: See interesting item

Offline: Ask where item came from or go to favourite store
Online: Go to Google and search for item

Offline: Do not see item, ask for help or keep looking
Online: Do not see item, leave

Offline: Find item, add to cart, look for more items
Online: Find item, add to cart, leave

Offline: See accessories nearby, add to cart
Online: Do not see any accessories, leave

Offline: Go to checkout, see impulse items, add more items
Online: Go to checkout, see nothing but cart items, leave

Her are some suggestion for how we fix these issues in the online world (assuming you already have your offline world covered!).

Let’s start with the home page. You need to make sure your visitor stays interested by showing them products that are either what they are looking for, or in the right category (“ah, I’m at the right place, they sell this type of item”). We may be able to use profile information or past interests but most often it is the search referral that gives us the most important information as it usually is the best hint as to the “intent” of their visit. Specific strategies could be to show most popular, or recent popular (i.e. new, interesting) or relate directly to the term used in the search that got them to your site.

If your site is well structured, they will quickly find their way to the category page (in fact if your site is well structured, they should have landed on the product page!). From here we need to guide them to the right products, just like sales staff or the greeter do in the store. Understanding their intent at this point can be critical and once again, the search refer information can be used. But we may also start to observe behaviours at this point that can help us refine what we believe to be the intent of this visit. For example they may have spent a lot of time looking at an article describing the latest hiking boot technologies – we may be able to start to infer that they are looking for hiking boots (how many others looked at this article and then purchased hiking boots?). There are a number of different heuristics that we can now start to look at to try and put the correct product in front of the customer based on behaviours of previous shoppers and the information that has come through from the search engine. If we still can’t determine a product to recommend, then we can fall back to most popular, interesting or new or even perhaps relate back to the last products which were of interest (which may relate to a recent visit or something they have recently done on our site).
By now (and hopefully within 3 clicks) we should have the customer on a product page. As I mentioned before, if you are able to understand intent right from the search refer then you may already have landed the customer on one of your product pages. Now they are on the product page we need to get them to buy once, and then get them to buy more! Increasing the average order value can make a huge difference to site profitability and turnover! Now that they are on a product page you should know what they are currently interested in. Now we want to look at what we can place nearby that might also be of interest. We use recommendations such as “people who bought this also bought this” recent popular in this category or even a random recommendation can often have good results.

At this point it is very important that you:
1. Use a “multi” recommendations strategy to increase average order value
2. Don’t disrupt the shopping flow
3. Show accessories and possibly replacements for the product shown.

If we have done everything correct to this point then we will have a customer with items in their shopping cart and they are heading for the checkout. Remember the offline scenarios we spoke about earlier? When they come to your checkout you want to tempt them with more items that might match their current intent (which we have now determined) or possibly look at other accessories that might fit well with the purchase. Technologies such as Baynote allow you to look at everything that’s now in the cart and recommend products that fit with these items, either because other people have purchased them together (the best way), or because we know as a merchandiser that these items go together. My preference is always the first option as we find the wisdom of the crowds almost always does better than the merchandisers! The other important point is to make sure that any additional items being recommended are below the price point of the items in the cart. This is because your customer already has what they came for! That was the major purchase, we are now simply trying to add on to the existing purchase (Coles and Shell do this beautifully with the chocolates at the register when you go to pay for your petrol).

Finally, after they have purchased their items, we have one last opportunity to give them a great experience and to “sell more”. We send a confirmation email to confirm the order and the shipping details and in this interaction our goal is to get them to come back to the site. Most likely we will be looking at recommending accessories (i.e. people who bought this also bought this) for the items that they have just purchased but there is also scope to offer popular, interesting or new items.

These are just a small number of suggestions that will help increase revenues from your online web site. Customers that we have worked with have increased conversion and average order values by double digit percentages – almost without exception – proving a very quick return on investment for a recommendations based solution.

Dont say it if you don't mean it

2011-06-02T09:03:00.002+10:00

Recently someone introduced me as "the guy that embarrassed himself on twitter" and I had to correct him. What he was referring to was a conference that we both attended. I went to a session and at the end of the session I posted a note on twitter with the conference hashtag that said I thought the content was "disappointing" - or words to that effect. In the main exhibition hall the vendor was displaying a giant twitter feed with all tweets that used the conference hashtag. My tweet came out and it seemed to cause a minor explosion of activity with one of their managers "accosting" me a few minutes later asking for an explanation. I explained exactly why I thought it was disappointing and thanked him for responding so quickly. Was I embarrassed by my tweet? Absolutely not - I said exactly what I thought of the session. Was the vendor embarrassed by my tweet? Possibly, but then if your going to put a giant twitter feed on a wall you need to know that not everything that gets displayed there is going to be positive (necessarily). By the way, i did post positive comments as well!

But here is the point, this person thought that I should be embarrassed about posting something truthful about an event on twitter. Unfortunately this guy doesn't get it. Posting the truth is what social media is all about. Giving a voice to everyone to be heard - thats why we were able to see social media play such a huge part in the overthrow of a number of middle eastern governments in recent times. People were finally able to speak the truth and with power! Thats why we use tools like twitter.

So to the vendor, I'm sorry if you were embarrassed that I told the truth, but if your going to use social media, be aware it allows you to capture all types of feedback - both good and bad. Shout about the good and address the bad, don't go around saying that the people who spoke these truths are the ones that should be embarrassed!

How do you treat your prospects?

2011-04-07T21:39:00.003+10:00

Do you have time to give your prospects what they need? I recently qualified as an open water diver, so though I have a certificate it's fair to say that I'm not an experienced diver. On my most recent break I was at Cape Paterson and found a dive shop that services the area. They do a number of dives in Cape Paterson and on Philip Island, so I made an enquiry via their web site. The email I got back from them was pretty poor (from a customer service perspective). In the email they also said they would send through their dive program - which they didn't. After I waited a few days and never recieved anything, I asked them to send it through. they made out like they had already sent it and that I must have misplaced it. The one line email read "here is the dive program, again". I figured these people must be so busy that they don't need any new customers!

This experience got me thinking about how we treat our customers, or perhaps as importantly , our prospects. Anyone that has met me will know I'm always saying how busy I am, and I tend to keep myself pretty busy, but I don't ever want to be too busy to respond to someone who is looking for more information regarding how our company can help their business. If anything, I want to err on the side of too much information rather than not enough. If I give them too much information then they can delete or not bother with the pieces of information that they don't need. But too little information and they go looking somewhere else for someone who is going to be more helpful than you have been. Or how about this for an idea, provide a brief email, but send this person to a web site that already has the information that they requested where they can download it (and perhaps some additional information) and then fill in a form that allows them (in this case) to book a dive.

Being new to the dive industry I find it very interesting that this organisation (and many like them) seem stuck in the 90's when it comes to servicing their customers. Perhaps I should setup my own online dive forum and show them all how to do it right! Now there's an idea......

Demographics means nothing...

2011-03-31T21:25:00.004+11:00

Here is a quote that was brought to my attention by Rohit Bhargava (strategist from Ogilvie).

"There is no link, none, between the age of the specified demographic delivery of the campaign and the sales generated by that campaign."

To some this will be surprising, to others it may be old news. It is a quote from CBS Corporation's Chief Research Officer David Poltrack which gives it a whole lot more credibility (at least in my eyes). But online marketers that have been doing their research and watching their site analytics should already know this - or at least be starting to see that selling or marketing just to a demographic is pretty pointless. When people come to your web site if you want to "convert" them and "engage" them then you need to understand their intent, not their demographic. Why did they come to your site today? Just knowing their age or where they live is probably not going to be too helpful in understanding why they are on your site and what it is they have come for "today".

There are more and more tools becoming available for determining exactly what it is that someone has come to your web site to do today - its based on behavior. Humans are quite predictable (don't you love the show "Lie to me"). By reviewing and understanding behaviors we can start to classify people in to certain groups that are far more useful to the online marketer than a demographic! If we observe enough behaviors then we can start to create a very large number of groups which increases the chance that we will be able to predict someones intent and therefore show them what it is that they came to your site to do (or to buy, or to see - whatever it is that you do on your web site).

So here is a suggestion for the online marketer - give up on the demographics (sure you may want to track them for the CEO when he asks for a report about how many 16 year olds are buying a particular "product"). Look at implementing tools that allow you to understand the users intent. Why did they come to my site today and what is it they are looking for. When you understand intent - not demographics - your site will all of a sudden become far more engaging, and if your goal is to sell product, then watch them fly off the shelves!

Your not unique!

2011-03-16T08:49:00.003+11:00

I read this morning that the NBN believe their requirements are so unique that they will need to build their own OSS/BSS solution. I've seen this before with a number of other large enterprises and, in my experience, this usually ends up in disaster (i.e. over budget, over scope, late, etc). There is a certain arrogance in saying "I'm completely different to anyone else in the world" and its this arrogance that usually causes much of the overrun because no one is willing to compromise.

Let me stop here and say that I am not a supporter of the NBN. I don't believe this is the way to solve our broadband issues in this company and I believe that creating another government owned Telstra is just taking us backwards 30 years. I also believe that it is a very poor use of taxpayers money and the above is an example of why this "company" will continue to be a drain on taxpayers right up until some bright spark in the government suggest privatising (perhaps in another 15 years time after the 43Billion has been spent).

So, if you believe you are unique, and you can't find a solution to your problem, you need to get over yourself, look at where you can compromise, redefine your scope and save yourself some millions.

Some things just don't make sense

2011-02-22T08:50:00.003+11:00

Today I clicked through an email to a web site because the ad in the email made me think that I might find something I was looking for on that particular web site. The ad did its job of engaging me and appealing to a need or a perceived need that I had. When I got to the web site some music started playing and there was NO WHERE on the site to turn it off. So I closed the page without even reading it.

The ad was for a masters program at Adelaide University. Why do designers believe that playing music is a good thing for a web site when the people you are trying to attract are most likely clicking through from their desks at work? I personally can't think of a single valid reason why I would suggest to a customer that they should automatically start music playing (or videos for that matter) without a very clear way of stopping these things.

I bet this university spent a bucket on the design and the placing of the ad and will probably sit and wonder why they didn't get a lot of engagement when they got so many click throughs (thats if they are even measuring engagement). When design is this bad it should should be obvious!

Create Landing Pages That Deliver Sales

2011-02-02T11:49:00.006+11:00

In my travels I've spoken to a number of web site managers, online marketers, marketing managers (and other titles that essentially have responsibility for web sites) who all seem to have a common issue. "How do I optimise my Landing pages?" The need to optimise that first impression of your site is increasing as online competition and alternatives increase. Capturing the prospect/ciusotmer in the first 3 clicks has always been important, but now even more so as google has already provided plenty of pages of atlernatives to surf to if your site doesn't appear to be meeting the need. Despite this, we find that most businesses see only single-digit conversion rates from their landing page campaigns. One of the primary reasons is the failure to refine and update the pages over time. This is in large part because of their failure to refine their targeting over time.

Below we have listed 5 ways for businesses to solve this issue with landing pages that will hopefully allow you to convert more of the visitors that come to your site from prospects to customers:

1. Start with intent. Tracking demographics or transaction data is good, but knowing your prospects’ Zip Codes or what they browsed online last week cannot reliably inform you what will resonate with them as they land on the page. Pay attention to the keywords visitors use on search engines to arrive at your site, and how they engage with different site pages that may or may not include these keywords. This analysis helps increase the relevancy of your landing pages to what customers need right now.

2. Trust the like-minded crowd. When you triangulate customers, their vocabularies, and the website content they find engaging, you can create more effective segments comprising customers who share the same intent. You can then optimize your landing pages with content that other customers who used the same vocabulary found engaging.

3. Personalize in real-time. Optimizing pages manually can be arduous and ineffective, even if you have good analytics data. Several commercially available technologies allow websites to tap into site visitors automatically and in real time, not only increasing conversion rates, but also allowing you to focus on other higher-value tasks.

4. Convert gradually. Consumers don’t typically convert in a single session. Rather than taking an all-or-nothing approach (convert or bounce), get visitors to sign up for your newsletter or subscribe to your RSS feed by populating sidebars on the landing page with relevant reading materials.

5. Converge channels. Too many small businesses silo their marketing efforts: The paid-search manager doesn’t share insights with whoever is managing e-mail campaigns, who doesn’t talk to the person who manages your company’s social media presence. Yet all these people are targeting the same prospect. By adding Twitter updates or other forms of social media on your landing page, you can sustain the conversation across channels and keep those prospects who are not yet ready to convert highly engaged.

For more information contact StoneBridge Systems at www.stonebridgesystems.com.au.

(The 5 rules reprinted with permission from Baynote Inc.)

SAP Enables accounts payable departments to achieve greater value

2010-10-06T08:32:00.004+11:00

Published on SAP.com: Republished here with permission.

SAP NEWSBYTE - October 04, 2010 - Traditionally, the accounts payable (A/P) function has been viewed as a purely tactical function that ensures a company’s suppliers receive payments for goods and services. Strategic A/P departments are in the process of evolving and looking to improve visibility by eliminating paper-based processes and automating their back-office functions to open up new areas for cost savings, cash management and improved supplier relations. Partnering with SAP AG(NYSE: SAP), Aberdeen Group, a Harte-Hanks Company (NYSE:HHS), explored this issue in its recent accounts payable study, E-Payables 2010: The Strategic Value of Accounts Payable Automation.
Aberdeen explores how companies of all sizes can improve efficiency through automation, capturing cost savings and providing visibility into invoice and payment status. Helping companies to achieve these goals, SAP and its partners offer solutions that automate back-office functions, opening up new areas for cost savings, cash management and improved supplier relations.
Integrating cash management and payment processes with a company’s banking partners can help reduce operating costs and strengthen compliance. The SAP® Bank Communication Management application, part of the SAP® ERP Financials solution, helps companies meet this challenge by enabling efficient integration of financial systems with multiple banks. SAP streamlines the payment process, controls the release of payments for cash flow optimization and provides multiple approval levels and audit trails.
The key to establishing effective business-to-business (B2B) collaboration lies in improving how trading partners are integrated – and how they share data. The SAP® Information Interchange application by Crossgate, delivers prebuilt business partner profiles that connect trading partners enabling fast, efficient B2B e-commerce and e-invoicing.
Processing vendor invoices in a timely, accurate and efficient process is critical to operating a well-run business. The SAP® Invoice Management application by Open Text helps companies manage invoice processing, meet critical payment and compliance deadlines, and avoid risks related to inaccurate business information.
SAP solutions improve efficiency and visibility by automating the A/P department end-to-end from receipt of invoice, processing and payment

The new version 9.8 of Open Extended ECM for SAP Solutions is released.

2010-08-16T18:54:00.001+10:00

Open Text Extended ECM is the flagship product to provide ECM for SAP and non-SAP content to SAP and non-SAP users. It enables management of unstructured content in the context of the business processes and transactions supported by the SAP Business Suite.

The product includes a complete set of Enterprise Content Management (ECM) capabilities such as Document Management, Records Management, Capturing, Archiving, Workflow, and Collaboration. Thus customers can manage the complete lifecycle of content, from creation, to sharing and approvals, publication, search archiving, retention, and destruction — all within the context of the SAP-driven business processes. Open Text Extended ECM also includes the product Open Text Archiving and Document Access for SAP Solutions.

The following new features were added in this release
• Powerful collaborative Business Workspaces enable users to enhance SAP business objects (e.g.! customers, vendors or equipments) with collaborative workspaces
• Flexible and powerful Data Mapping of SAP Business Data to Open Text Content Server Meta Data
• Business Policies to govern access control to Content Server Business Workspaces based on SAP roles and SAP policies
• Business Relationships to relate Content Server content (e.g. documents or folders) to any number of SAP business objects with bi-directional link capability
• Wide choice of user interfaces to manage unstructured content in workspaces easily via Extended ECM Web UI, SAPgui, SAP Web, MS Windows Explorer, MS Office and MS Outlook.
• Support for new UI localization languages, bringing total to EN, DE, FR, JP, ES, CN
• Integration of workspaces in DocuLink: New type of workspace node in DocuLink to display Open Text Content Server workspaces.

Outstanding Customer Service

2010-08-11T06:29:00.000+10:00

How many times have you heard the phrase –“we exceed customer expectations”?
I have a question, how can you do that? Can you ever clearly know what the customer expectations are? Would you think that they might even change with the myriad of different influences continually at play within any customer’s personal and business life? Sounds like marketing talk to me.

Let me explain what I mean.

We can all read and understand a statement of work or an RFP or a responsibilities matrix designed for a project, and these should all be clear and concise with specific tasks and duties, gathered from discussions with the customers. But is that all that goes into making up the expectations of any single customer about what they want to see from a successful project? What about the emotive and political expectations that exist in every customers mind making up their perception of what constitutes success in both the running and the outcomes of a project. Sometimes these factors are more important than the fact that we finish on time and on budget. How often do we know what these emotively and politically influenced expectations are? I would suggest to you that we really don’t know these very often, if at all. So how can we exceed them? What damage do we do if we say we do exceed them and of course we don’t, because we don’t know what they are? I don’t think it is possible to understand each and every emotive, political and personal expectation of every stakeholder in a projects outcome.
So what can we do?
What we can do is set our own standard of Customer Service. Develop the kind of systems and practices we need, to deliver the kind of service we want to be associated with, one we are proud to put our names to. You know the kind I mean. The one that gives us all pride when a customer says “Stonebridge did that” and you know that they mean a high quality outcome and inside a voice says “hey that was me” or “hey that was our team”.
When should we set this standard? Well we have already started. We have a team of highly skilled and highly motivated professionals in Stonebridge..all hand picked. During our formative years as a young company, our staff are the ones who are creating and setting these standards?
It is their professionalism, attitude, attention to detail, willingness to go the extra yard, “never say die” when problems arise, that customers are talking about. This is what creates a culture in a company, and as I said it’s a culture that each and every one of us is proud to be involved with. It becomes a self regulating culture because we won’t allow second rate performance from our colleagues and we are ready to help, coach and motivate each other as we need to. And we are not afraid to ask for help from each other. The customer has to win.
I call this OUTSTANDING Customer Service.
We have fantastic reports back from EVERY project that our team have done. I don’t know if we have “exceeded customer expectations”, but I do know that we have very happy customers because we delivered Outstanding Customer Service. That’s the kind of team I want to belong to. How about you?

Enhancing SAP Case Management Applications with SAP Extended ECM

2010-08-03T15:00:00.001+10:00

Caseworkers face a rising flood of unstructured content – from e-mails and shared documents to reports, contracts, and photos. As this content is often stored haphazardly on desktops, shared drives, or stand-alone applications, it can be easily lost to your organisation, along with its context.
Adding SAP Extended ECM to SAP Case Management applications delivers the secure environment that caseworkers require to handle unstructured content.
SAP Extended ECM has met the director of Central Intelligence directive (dCId) 6/3 Pl3 and Pl5 security accreditation requirements for storing, processing, and communicating classified information on top-secret networks within the United States.

SAP Extended ECM further supports internal collaboration through investigation team workspaces, discussion forums, collaborative approval workflows, team-oriented tasks, and follow-ups. For external stakeholders, you can set up secure extranet environments and workspaces for sharing documents.
Join us for a walk through of this exciting new capability!
Presenter: Harald Rossman, Open Text
Register to view this webcast, scheduled for August 10, 2010 at 2pm Eastern Standard Time (New South Wales) Sydney/9 pm PDT (8/9/10)

Steve Harris joins Stonebridge Systems

2010-07-30T21:32:00.002+10:00

Steve Harris has joined Stonebridge Systems recently to work with our .Net cms solutions and open source platforms. Steve has a considerable amount of experience deploying enterprise cms solutions using ooen source and other .Net cms platforms. Steve will be working with Elcom Technology and will also be working with our search and recommendations platform from Baynote. Steve is English and has just migrated with his wife to Melbourne so will also provide us someone to tease when Australia beat the English in the ashes later this year!

Welcome to the team Steve!

Did you even try it Steve?

2010-06-06T16:25:00.003+10:00

Steve Balmer this week was quoted as sayingn that the iPad was "just another pc". How wrong can you be? I've recently been criticized by some of my friends for buying my iPad and telling others I agree with Steve Jobs that it's a game changer. Does it have deficiencies that need to be addressed? Absolutely! Does it have everything you need to ditch your laptop or desktop? Not even close. But what it is, and what Steve B seems not to realize, is that's it's a new and improved way for consuming content - rich content! And i thnk it is better at it than just about anything else on the market and time should only make it better. Steve ballmers criticized it because you couldn't
write on it, well I disagree with that and i think that will also get better over time. I use my iPad now to take notes in meetings and I am using it to type this blogpost. With tools such as drop box and the hundreds of new ipad specific apps that are already on the market, the uses will get better and better. But i wonder if steve b has even bothered to use it or to try it? StoneBridge is an ecm specialist and for us to survive in our industry our customers expect us to know the competition. If we just made blanket negative statements about every new product just because we didn't sell it then our customers would lose faith in us as experts pretty quickly. When a new product or idea or innovation comes out we need to understand what's good about it, perhaps whats not so good about it, and where we would recommend it to our customers. Microsoft don't seem to be able to do that anymore. If it isn't Microsoft then it is supposedly inferior. So my message to Microsoft is this, stop criticizing everything anyone else does and learn how to use those billions in r&d dollars to innovate so that people might one day say "wow" when they purchase something from Microsoft. That's whatbyourncustomers want.

Seven best practices for ECM implementation

2010-05-20T20:26:00.003+10:00

Open Text and Gartner recently release a document titled "Seven best practices for ECM implementations". For anyone that has been involved in enterprise scale implementations in the past, there is not a lot of new information here. In a nutshell the 7 listed are:
1. Understand the project
2. Secure Management Support
3. Create a project plan for the entire project
4. Get user buy-in
5. Use phased implementation
6. Encourage continuous user involvement
7. Create a competency Center

Like I said, nothing terribly startling in that list (though I do recommend you read the document, even if only as a refresher, its available here http://img.en25.com/Web/OpenTextGlobal/Gartner_2_final.pdf. But I'd like to pick up on number 5 and discuss in a little more detail. Why number 5? Because number 5 has not always been easy (some might say, not even been possible)! I come from the "old" ERP school where every enterprise implementation was big! ECM wasn't much better (in fact in a lot of cases it was worse) - primarily because many people in the organization didn't know exactly what it was! Today, most people in teh organization will understand the concept of electronic documents, scanned invoices, storage and management of emails etc. We have better understanding in the organization and the ECM solutions available are advanced enough that you can actually bite off smaller chunks based on a larger, longer term ECM strategy. Not only is there better understanding and the products able to support this strategy, but our methodologies for implementing are far better at allowing this approach as well.

I was recently speaking with a SAP customer looking at ECM. They were scared that starting down the ECM path was going to be big, expensive and a far too audacious goal for them to complete in a reasonable time. Having completed an ECM strategy review with them we sat down and broke out each of the components that would make up the project and all of a sudden it started to look manageable to them. They still have a long term ECM strategy that will be delivered over a period of time, but they can now see that it will be completed in small chunks that will allow some of the other 6 best practices to be easier to deal with (like keeping the users involved and maintaining your executive level sponsorship). As well as getting some quick wins in place and establishing a platform on which they can build out the other pieces.

So when you get to a point where you know your unstructured data is out of control, where you have holes in your SAP data and workflows because of all the docs that live outside the system, when compliance is becoming a real issue, you can address these problems gradually and implementing ECM does not need to be the next massive, big bang project failure that will scare the heck out of your CFO at budget time.

Customers do your best marketing

2010-04-01T09:33:00.002+11:00

I love it when customers buy something and feel so happy about what they have bought, and the results they have achieved, that they take the time to blog about it and tell the whole world. Check out the latest sun and ski blog post on Baynote Recommendations. Can you get a better endorsement? I think not!

Never say Never in the tech industry!

2010-03-05T17:21:00.004+11:00

The other day I posted about technology that can "read your mind". I said in that post that you probably can't use the more sophisticated brain scanning technology as people are not wired in to the internet for brain scanning. Then I read this article. So if you want to read the mind of your consumers today, you need Baynote Collective Intelligence Platform, but for the very near future you will be able to read the consumers mind for real! We live in exciting times!

A matching problem

2010-03-04T09:54:00.005+11:00

I often read a blog by Jonathan Mendez who has some interesting things to say about advertising and marketing. His most recent post is called "Displays Matching Problem" and you can read it here. In this blog article Jonathan talks about how difficult it is to match what your are selling or advertising with what someone actually wants at the point that they make contact with your web site. How do I better understand context and intent, so that I can match the product, content or advert to the person now browsing on my web site?

In recent times there has been a lot of research done on how the brain works (Cognitive Science) and one very interesting discovery is that when I think about "golf" and when you think about "golf" our brain waves are more or less the same - at least close enough that a computer can "predict" what you are thinking, or essentially "read your mind"! 60 minutes in the US did a story on this and its interesting viewing (sorry, don't have a link to the video)! But the technology used int he CBS report isnt going to solve your "matching" problem because every one of your customers is not hooked up to a brain scanner when they visit your web site.

The good news is, it doesn't matter! What the research has shown is that human beings are largely animals of context - its biological! So once you recognize the patterns of behavior you can begin to understand context. Baynote explains this very well in their "Recommendations Tour" on their web site. If you have any interest in this subject I recommend it to you. Baynote have been involved in this research for a number of years now and what they are able to provide is essentially the tools to understand in what context your customer (or prospect) is visiting your site today and also what is their intent. Once you know you can begin to recommend products, services, content, rich media, videos, advertising etc and your customer is provided with a far richer and more engaging experience as they are now being shown things that they are actually interested in! Heady stuff.

So if your interested in increasing engagement or average order values by as much as 50% then check out the Baynote solution or contact StoneBridge Systems and we can show you how this solution reads the mind of your customers.

The NBN and Telstra

2010-03-04T08:58:00.005+11:00

I normally don't use this blog to post on "politics" but I really want to make an observation on the whole NB vs Telstra debate and this is the only "public" forum I have to do this.

A number of years ago the government owned and operated the telecommunications business in Australia. At some point the government decided that the government should not be a telecommunications provider, so they floated Telstra on the Australian Stock Exchange and encouraged "mum and dad" investors to buy in to this fantastic investment. The cash raised eventually found its way into the governments "future fund" to be used to invest in other ventures. Now the government wants to get back into the Telco business because they are unhappy with the way this private enterprise (that they created) is looking after certain parts of the Australian population, and they now believe that the government can do a much better job at providing the backbone technology required to run a telco in this country. While they are at it, they are threatening to get involved in retail sales as well, which would essentially destroy the Telstra business and the investment that all those mums and dads made a number of years ago.

I may be simplifying whats happening just slightly, but generally I believe these to be the facts. This government is essentially going to create "another" Telstra owned by the government. I guess we should be wary in 10 years time when a new government tries to sell the new Telstra to the mum and dad investors - yes, those sames ones who will see their own Telstra investment become worthless after the current labour government build their NBN.

Vignette Version 8

2010-01-15T08:51:00.007+11:00

Vignette Version 8 CMS is now generally available. This is a good thing. This is the culmination of years of development that was required to essentially fix the flaws created by the introduction of version 7 six years ago. If we turn back to 2004 when Vignette customers were struggling with the new version, Gartner wrote a paper that told customers if they were considering upgrading to V7 - then reconsider. They were right. Existing customers found it difficult and expensive to upgrade and once complete they were usually left them with less functionality than they had in their version 6 or even version 5 Vignette application. I'm not going to go into all the reasons why that was, but Vignette spent a lot of time and development effort trying to fix the issues they created with the introduction of V7. Many of the product issues were fixed by around V7.4 but some larger underlying product issues remained, including the ease of use of the CMA (vastly improved in 7.6). I'm happy to say that pretty much all of the issues that were introduced in V7 have now been ironed out with V8, which is largely built on the same platform as 7. The upgrade path to V8 is also a relatively easy project and this puts the product back on track with an easy to use management console, an open, robust and scalable architecture and one that would suit almost any enterprise class web site. Couple this with the integration of video, the vignette social platform (community manager) and the additional Open Text solutions and, in my view, Open Text have bought into Vignette at exactly the right time to take full advantage of their solutions.

There is a cheesy marketing video available on you tube that shows you a little about V8 (I've included it below) but if you would like to know more then please drop us a line and we can organise a demo for you.

Merry Christmas

2009-12-17T11:22:00.002+11:00

I'm about to being a small break for Christmas and wanted to say thanks to everyone that took the time to read my thoughts in this blog this year. I also wanted to say thanks to all of the StoneBridge Systems customers who have supported us in 2009. Its been a year of stellar growth for us and we plan to continue that, with your help, in 2010.

Hope everyone has a great break over Christmas and a very prosperous and happy New Year.

Cheers,

Craig.

My Search Sucks! - part 4

2009-12-04T18:35:00.002+11:00

Continuing the reprint of the blog post from Scott Brave of Baynote.

Reason #3: Search does not exist in a vacuum.
In order to improve search, we need to observe more than just search behavior. Search and navigation have traditionally been seen as two separate paradigms: separate interfaces and separate systems driving them. But in reality what’s happening? A user is coming to your site and expressing an interest or intent through their actions. They might have first expressed that intent through a Yahoo! or Google search that brought them to your site. They might then express it in the pages they visit and engage with, the navigation they use, the links they click, and maybe the site searches they perform. This expression of interest may span multiple searches and clicks. And, finding documents that hold true value for that interest and intent may also take multiple steps.

Let’s think back to the “Insight/Incite” example once more. Had we only looked at what search results users clicked on, the problem might never have been solved. Why? Because the valuable content was never in the results – it wasn’t there to be clicked on in the first place! To learn what users really meant by “insight”, we had to watch their subsequent navigation, paying particular attention to the patterns of behavior that indicated engagement or that they had discovered content that was of value – even if it happened several steps after the initial search. Observing search behavior alone is not enough!

What about users who don’t search at all? What can we learn from them? Users are actually giving us continual clues to their intent and interest with every link they click and every category they choose. The documents that users engage with and the order in which they engage also tell us not only about relationships between documents, but intent. If we take this valuable, implicit insight into account, then we really begin to see how this insight could be used to fix search.

What’s really remarkable is that once we take a step back and think of the entire online experience as a single unified expression of intent and value, we can do a lot more than fix search. We can start to make recommendations and optimize the user experience with every interaction they make with your site; from the moment they arrive, every step they take through the site, as well as every search they perform. The true goal is to understand the user’s intent and then automatically surface documents that other like-minded peers have found valuable in that same context. That’s the true wisdom of the crowd, and what Baynote’s Collective Intelligence Platform (CIP) is all about.

My Search Sucks! - part 3

2009-12-01T08:07:00.001+11:00

Continuing the reprint of the blog post from Scott Brave of Baynote.

Reason #2: Actions speak louder than words.
Okay, so we’ve figured out that the critical information is not in the document. Where is it? Well, it’s in the users’ heads of course. Let’s look at an example. If we look at a work by Shakespeare—or any great work of literature—the meaning cannot be identified simply by looking at the words within it. It’s synthesized in the reader’s mind, and different readers may derive different meanings based on their own unique makeup and experiences. The same applies to any document. We must look beyond the words within the document to truly understand the value. The key question to ask is this: when and why is this document valuable to users? Only the users themselves know the answer.

Now that’s all well and good, but how do we extract that knowledge from the users? We could ask them directly, but while that might seem like a good strategy, it’s actually not. Asking users to explicitly rank, rate, or tag documents is doomed to failure. The core problem is one of participation. Think back to how many times you’ve provided feedback on the web. Most of us never have; others may have on occasion, but almost certainly not on every page visit or search result. This participation problem leads to a few key challenges:

A. Low coverage. A small subset of the population rates content, and when they do, the ratings only tend to cover the most popular content. Where does that leave the majority of our content?—the long tail. Unranked and therefore undiscovered. And with search, it’s not just about knowing that a document has value; it’s about whether it’s valuable for that specific search topic and that user.

Let’s take a deeper look at this. Let’s say we have a bunch of ratings on a particular camera. Sounds great, right? Well, not really. People like or dislike a camera for a variety of reasons. Someone looking for a “lightweight camera” might think it stinks, while someone looking for a “cheap camera” might love it. You can’t ignore the context of what a person is looking for, and getting explicit coverage across every topic of interest is even harder than just getting an overall rating.

And, when you factor in staleness of content — be it the article or the rating — then even the ratings you do have become less meaningful. Add to that the mountains of content that are being created every day, and the problem really gets out of hand. There’s just no way to keep up with it if we’re relying on people to go out of their way to explicitly rank, rate, and tag content.

B. Biased. In general, the people who do participate in explicitly rating something online represent a very small subset of the population. That means that, even for those documents and topics that do have coverage, there’s no guarantee that the knowledge imparted by users even represents the majority opinion. In fact, it almost always represents fringe opinions that are either extremely positive or negative because those are the people motivated to be heard.

To read more about the bias inherent in explicit methods of capturing community wisdom, check out my “7 Deadly Biases” whitepaper.

C. Inaccurate/Incomplete. Even when an individual decides to provide some form of explicit feedback, it often is not fully representative of even their own experience. Let’s go back to the insight/incite example from my previous post. Let’s say that a user decided to tag the Incite product page that was so useful. What tag do you think they would use? Probably “incite” or “incite phone,” right? They would almost certainly not tag it with “insight” once they realized their mistake; but this is actually the tag that would be of most value to the community! It might surprise you to know that social scientists are generally distrustful of people’s own accounts of their feelings and behavior! Meta-cognition and emotional self-awareness are far more complex, and less intuitive, than people think.

So, if asking people to tell us what documents are valuable and why they’re of value doesn’t work, then what is the right way? The key is to observe what people do, not what they say. It’s both more accurate and more comprehensive. The wisdom we are looking to tap is present in every single search–whether the searchers were successful or not. By watching what people do, we can understand which documents are valuable and when.

But we need to be careful here too, because watching which search results users click on is not enough. Clicks are a very weak indicator: just because people clicked on a result does not mean it’s valuable. Perhaps the title was intriguing, confusing, or even misleading. It is critical to follow the user all the way from query to success or ultimate failure—even if several steps later—and not get distracted by what they click on. At Baynote, we track 24 different behavioral heuristics to ensure that we accurately capture where users are engaging given a particular context and intent. And it’s not just about search; it’s about the entire online experience.

My Search Sucks! - part 2

2009-11-28T13:06:00.002+11:00

Continuing the reprint of the blog post from Scott Brave of Baynote.

Reason #1: The critical information is not in the document.
All full-text search technologies basically work the same way: they look for a match between the words in a user’s query and the words in the text of the documents searched. That said, there are lots of fancy layers that can be added from simple stemming to complex natural language processing (NLP), but the fundamental assumption is that the engine can figure out which documents best meet a user’s needs by looking inside the document.

While this is a start, it’s just not enough. The critical information isn’t in the document; it’s in someone’s head. But whose head is it in? Let’s look at some examples.

A favorite example comes to mind involving one of our customers, a large online appliance retailer. Users were coming to their website looking for a “stove” over and over again, and the search results had “stove-top safe” kettles and pots, but no stoves. Turns out the reason for this was that this retailer’s website was using the manufacturer terminology, “cooktops” and “ranges.” The word “stove” was nowhere to be found. The community was using a different vocabulary than the site.

Sounds like a simple fix, right? All you need to do is to create a synonym to tell the search engine that a “stove” is the same thing as a “range.” And sure, once you’ve found and addressed the discrepancy, customers searching for “stoves” will find the “ranges” they’re really looking for. But what about all of those long-tail terms and content—and what about when things change?

Sam Mefford, an expert in the deployment of enterprise search technologies, commented on last week’s blog. In his search practice, he sees this challenge surface on a regular basis and provided an example from one of his clients. The company re-branded one of its products, and made the appropriate changes in its marketing materials and documentation. Afterwards, field agents and customers could no longer find the products and information they needed, because they continued to search using the old name. This problem took months to discover.

Another great example is from a customer that’s a well-known wireless provider. They launched a new LG phone called the “Incite.” Suddenly, one of the most popular search queries on their site became “insight.” The search results included lots of business-type documents about how to achieve great “insight” into your business operations, but nothing that matched what users wanted – information on this exciting new phone. Sure, searching for “insight” while the product is called “incite” was technically the user’s mistake, but does that matter when you’re losing opportunities?

Let’s say the words do exist in the document. It’s often not enough. There may be 1000s of documents that contain the search terms, but which documents are the best? A traditional search engine will assume that the one with the most occurrences of the keywords is the most valuable, but this is very often not the case. Obviously, the technology is more sophisticated than this, but the fundamental basis is along these lines. The most useful document may only have one instance of the keyword and therefore may be buried on page 10 of the results. So, how do you get the most useful document to the top of the search results?

Manual tuning is the traditional “solution” to all of these site search issues, but as we discussed earlier, it’s nearly impossible to catch all discrepancies and adapt rapidly—not to mention the time and effort involved. I’ve even mentioned the spirit of the solution: it’s fundamentally a recognition that the needed information is not in the document, it’s in someone’s head. But whose head is it really in?

Many companies have experts that manually tune and tweak search. But that’s a labor-intensive way to temporarily solve the problem and certainly doesn’t guarantee that the expert’s view on what’s right matches with users’. Why take that chance? Better to go straight to the source of the information: the user!

My Search Sucks!

2009-11-24T11:15:00.002+11:00

The next few posts are reprodcued with permission from Baynote. These posts were written by Scott Brave. Here we go...
“My Search Sucks!” — we hear this from prospects more than any other complaint. Coming from consumer search experiences on the web with the likes of Google, Yahoo, and new entrant Bing, these frustrated employees wonder why they can’t get better search results on their company’s website and intranet. Fair question. Turns out there are a few key principles that explain why site search often sucks and how to fix it:

1. The critical information is not in the document
While documents — whether webpages, pdfs, or Word docs — seem like the best place to discover a match to a user’s search term, they’re not. Processing documents is a good start, but the words within a document do not necessarily match the way a user understands the topic and phrases their question. And even if the search term is in there, it doesn’t mean that particular document is useful. The critical information is in the heads of users, not the documents. The key is to understand how, when, and why people use each document. At Baynote, we call this UseRank.

2. Actions speak louder than words
To get information from users you might think the best approach is to ask them. Seems simple and straightforward, right? Wrong. Turns out that there are a number of problems with explicit means of collecting information stemming from who participates, when, and why. As social science has taught us all along, if you really want to understand people, watch what they do, not what they say.

3. Search does not exist in a vacuum
Any time someone comes to your website, they are looking for something and they give you clues to what that is through both their search and navigation behaviors — and not just what they ask for and where they go, but what they do when they get there. Often they got to your site through an external link such as a search on the web — that’s your first clue. Although the goal might be to solve the site search problem, observing search behavior alone is not enough.

Tomorrow we will expand on these reasons and provide some ways to make search better on your site.

Gartner says $12Bill in context aware computing

2009-11-20T13:59:00.002+11:00

I was reading a recent Garntner press release (available here) and was very interested to see that Gartner at least is beginning to understand how important understanding "context" is when dealing with your customers online. We have been working with Baynote for a little while now and thir collective intelligence engine allows you to observe behaviours and, using this information, better understand context. It is bringing huge returns for online retailers using this tool for product recommendations but there is also mobile to consider as well as content recommendations based on context. Understanding your revnue model is the first step but there is almost no limit to the applications to which contextual online solutions can be applied. If you can improve the quality of the interaction with your customer, then the chances that they will buys eomthing, sign up to your newsletter, come back again (!) or simply spend more time on your site greatly increses. Baynote now have hard evidence in terms of the ROI that a context driven application can provide. Drop me a note if you would like more information on how it can improve your business!

The Honda that isn't Jazzy

2009-10-07T21:03:00.002+11:00

My friend bought a Honda Jazz about 4 years ago - about the same time my daughter bought her Yaris. Hond at the time had switched production of their car to Thailand to try and compete with the Echo/Yaris platofrm from Toyota as they were being killed on price. However, the switch seems to have come at a price for Honda. Honda has always been known for slightly boring but very reliable and classy Japanese cars. My friends Jazz needs a new gearbox after 4 years!! I couldn't believe it - its just out of the 3 years warranty period and she hasn't done that many klm's in it! I wonder how many other people suffered from similar issues when they bought one of these inferior Thai built cars (please, not suggested everything in Thailand is rubbish here - just saying Honda didn't do this right). You see Honda appear to have been so focused on getting the price down for their car, that they completely sacrificed their normal quality assurance. This is the sort of thing that will hurt them more than losing a few sales to Toyota. Brand is important and working out what you stand for is an imperitive. Once you have worked it out however, you need to be consistent. If you brand stands for quality - then don't do a botch job on a car by building it cheaply in another country where you can't control the quality!
At StneBridge we want to be known for WOW customer service. I want to create experiences where people simply can't help but tell their friends or come back for more - thats what our Brand will stand for.

Nothing important

2009-10-02T07:58:00.002+10:00

I read in the "Rust Report" today that Aussie software company iSoft has made it to the shortlist for some large software deal in the UK. Its the first time I've ever seen a software company announce making it to a shortlist. Companies make it to a shortlist all the time - and then come second. I wonder if there next annoucenent will be "We came second, but they said we had the best presentation".

Implicit only please...

2009-09-23T07:49:00.005+10:00

A friend sent me this article on the "Dangers of using the wisdom of the crowds". You can view it here. It is talking about the dangers of trusting explicit ratings systems - you know the ones where people go on to the site and click on a rating of a product or piece of content. It talks about how the systems that trust people to provide the feedback can be manipulated and can sway the crowd in the wrong direction - or more importantly, a direction that may not be what you want or need for your business!

The idea that competitors can manipulate results by clicking many times, using robots to click or unfairly rating is not new - Google has been dealing with this issue for quite a while now with their ads. Some unscrupulous people were going to their competitors ads and clicking them multiple times - using all their ad words budget for the day - to ensure that never saw the light of day.

So how do you overocme this problem? Ratings, reviews, recommendatsion should be a useful way for us to find what we are looking for! We want to be able to use the crowd to get us to the ultimate goal - whether thats a new set of golf clubs or that hard to find new album/dvd/book. Fortunately there are solutions out there that provide implicit ratings and recommendations that are much mroe difficult to manipulate - in fact almost impossible! THe Baynote collective intelligence platofrm collects data from your web site based on 24 diffferent hueristics making it impossible to manipulate the results of the recommendation that these observations provide.

I don't subscribe to the theory that ratigns are a bad thing - be they explicit or implicit. I think if you are trying to help people find content or products on your web site that both are valuable and the article I referenced above really overplays the dangers. But if you are concerned about using explicit ratings on your site, and you want the benefits of ratings and recommendations - then use a solution that is providing these ratings implicitly based on observations of activity on your web site. For more information contact StoneBridge Systems.

Connect it straight to your brain...

2009-09-10T06:45:00.004+10:00

I was reading an interview by Eric Schmidt, one of the Google CEO's and he was joking about how the best way to improve search would be to connect electrodes directly to the brain. You can read the full article here. Wouldn't that be great if the search engine you were using actualy knew something about what you were thinking. It knew what "context" we were browsing in at that particular point in time and it knew my "intent". Wouldn't that be cool?

Further down in the article Eric starts talking more about this concept, but in ideas that would work today rather than in 10,20 or 50 years time. Heres a quote from the article "One big problem with search is a proper understanding of what exactly the user wants.". If you have a web site that has many products or lots of content, wouldn't it be nice to understand what it was that the user of your site wanted at that particular time? Well, you can! Baynote technology is a platform that observes what people are doing and how they are browsing on your web site. It goes beyond just measuring clicks and measures "context". The value of that information is that once you have a pattern for what someone does on your site, what search terms they enter, where they click, hover, browse, you have something that can be applied to the next person (i.e. the wisdom of the crowd). The tool says "Oh, you just did this, and then this and then this and the last 400 people who all did that were looking for this product or content - so is that what your looking for?" The tool then presents some options, your customer clicks to what they want (and we all know 95% of visitors abondon your site within the first 3 clicks if they don't get what they want) and you make a sale or have someone engaged on your site longer than before. Brain science has come to the web and its called Baynote Recommendations.

ECM what is it good for..

2009-09-05T09:24:00.003+10:00

I was recently reading a great article from Gartner on how to implement an ECM strategy. You can find it here (http://www.gartner.com/it/page.jsp?id=1152312) if your interested. It talks about how expensive ECM is, to include open source, to consult an outside provider (such as StoneBridge Systems)and to consider the green benefits. All great reasons to look at your overall ECM strategy. But what I find interesting is that even today, ECM means something different to different people. If you speak to someone from EMC they seem to believe its document management - because thats where they are strong. Microsoft seems to be more focused on knowledge management and integration of your desktop documents such as word and excel (though MS is broadening their understanding as their offering matures) and even organsiations like Open Text, who call themselves the largest niche player in ECM, get confused depending on who your talking with. Interestingly it seems to be the people on the document management side who have the most issues. For some reason they can't fathom that other systems that are managing unstructured content are part of the ECM world. Yes, yoru web content management system should be part of your ECM strategy along side your EDRMS systems. They should not be considered independant! Integration between all these solutions is far better than it was 4-5 years ago (though could still improve). Open Text say they are spending gazillions bringing it all together and I'm waiting with baited breath to see the outcome of their strategy. I think if they do what they say they will do we might just see the first fully integrad ECM solution that allows you to take control of ALL of your unstructured content and manage it the way YOU want to manage it. At the end of the day that should be your ultimate goal in implementing an ECM strategy.

So what do you think ECM is? What does it mean in yoru organisation? Does it include your web content as well as your records management systems?

Search Engine Optimisation - so much more than 7 tips!

2009-09-02T16:39:00.006+10:00

I read an article on the age web site that detailed 7 tips for improving search Engine Optimisation on your web site. Here they are again:

7 tips for improving SEO

Even if you can't afford an SEO expert, there are simple ways to improve your business's ranking in search engines.

* Create unique, accurate titles for each page. This appears in the title tag

* Use the "description" meta tag. This can be a sentence or two. This text is not seen by customers but can be used by search engines to help customers see what you offer. Be concise but informative.

* Give your documents meaningful names. A web page named "consulting.html" rather than "document15.html" can help search engines identify relevant pages for customers.

* Make your site easy to navigate. Group categories of similar content together. For example, put all articles into one directory and all price catalogues in another.

* Provide compelling content. By publishing useful information, you increase the chances that other websites will direct customers to you. These recommendations can help improve your ranking.

* Use meaningful text for links. This helps search engines recognise the relevance of material.

* Include "alt" tags on images. Search engines use these explanations to identify the content of pictures, which can help customers find what they're looking for.

I'm going to give the credit to "The Age" newspaper though I think they copied these 7 tips from somewhere else. So why am i reproducing someone elses 7 tips for SEO? Because each of these tips requires you to do something and to continue to monitor to keep your site optimised for search engines.

What if I was to tell you that there is a tool that can do most (not all) of this for you - AUTOMATICALLY. Not true you say, how could it possibly? Baynote now have a tool that observes how your customers are describing your content and then DYNAMICALLY changes all the items mentioned in the tips above. The title tags, the header tags, the alt tags on images, the product tags etcs. Imagine how much money you can save now that you don't need that person monitoring the analytics reports full time and "tweaking" your tags or google ad words! Its a huge potential ROI. If your interested in finding out more, drop me a line, at melbourne@stonebridgesystems.com.au.

Oh, and the reason you haven't heard of this before, is no one has done it before Baynote!

Nobody cares what you have done, only what you have learned

2009-08-29T20:56:00.006+10:00

The quote in the subject line of this post is one that I acknowledge as truth. It is not mine but I'm afraid I'm not sure who to attribute it to (apologeis to the author). Its an interesting quote and one that is not only true for others, but also for yourself. My greatest learnings were on projecs or in situations where I felt under stress. Do I want to remember that time - not particularly. Do I want to remmeber want i learnt during that time - absolutely. Without learning the next time I'm faced with that situation I'm likely to make all the same mistakes unless I learn something from those experiences. So here are the 9 rules I try and follow;

Help each other be rigth not wrong
Look for ways to make new ideas work, not for reasons they won't.
If in doubt, check it out!Don't make negative assumptions about each other.
Help each other win, and take pride in each other's victories.
Speak positively about each other and about your organisation at every opportunity.
Maintain a positive mental attitude no matter what the circumstances.
Act with initiative and courage, as if it all depends on you.
Do everything with enthusiasm: It's contagious.
Don't lose faith.

Anyone that has worked with me before would hopefully see these traits in the way I manage and lead. Sometimes its harder than others to portray these qualities. For instance, there has been a lot going on in my personal life that has impacted my ability to be enthusiastic at work - but I know that I have to regain that enthusiasm if I'm to insure the long term viability of our company. Overcoming the personal issues, the stressful issues, the diffcult issues are all the things that make you a better leader, manager, employee, etc....whatever role you have in life. So be positive, be enthusiastice, help others and never lose faith and you will be successful in whatever it is that you set your mind to do.

Here is one other quote I will leave you all with. As a leader, I believe this to be true and something that I base my leadership on:
“If you want to build a ship, don't drum up the men to gather wood, divide the work and give orders. Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea”…Antoine de Saint-Exupery

Give something back

2009-08-21T20:51:00.002+10:00

Our company, StoneBridge Systems, has a philosophy that says we must "give something back". If we have time, money, people, success etc then we need to share that with someone that needs one or more of those things. We have joined an organisation called good company that matches charities or not for profits with organisations that have skills/people/time/money that they are willing to give away. As part fo the program we have been involved with a few different organisations including the Adult Multicultural Education Service, the Centre Agasint Sexual Assult and others. Our latest charity is Childrens Promise. An interesting concept that I would encourage you to check out and support. The web site (which we are "rebuilding" as part of our commitment) will be live shortly. Take a look and tell me what you think. But more importantly, check out Good Company and see if there is some way that you or your company can give something back.

Its the content stupid...

2009-08-11T07:53:00.005+10:00

A few posts back there was something of an experiment to see whether or not we could raise the profile of a sleepy country town pub, just because my own rating was 5 stars (our of 5). Turns out we probably can't - at least not quickly. But it raises a couple of key points about not only social media sites, but web sites and pretty much any marketing tool that you might use. You see, people only respond to content that is relevant to them. Thats why tools such as tweetdeck exist that allow you to create search columns that will filter out particular tweets that might be relevant to you. Its also why roughly 80% of people abondon a web site when they can't find the results they are looking for? My experiment was really only relevant if you lived in Melbourne and you were thinking about a trip to Yea. If I was the owner of the hotel that was referenced in my blog post, then I may have wanted to be able to target only those people who might find that content relevant to them. So how do we measure whether or not the content is relevant and make sure we present the most relevant information? The answer is context. You need to first understand in what context a person is visiting your site. There are many tools today that attempt to measuer context and its usually based on where that person came from to get to your site, or what they clicked on when they got there. If they happened to buy something or "convert" then we put a positivve tick beside the KPI "delivering relevant content". However, just measuring clicks and search terms only goes a small way to measuring context. What about if you could measure how relevant the search terms were, did it take your prospect to a landing page that was what they were looking for? When they clicked on a link, were they "engaged" with the content that they found? Or did they immediately click on the back arrow realising that the page they had clicked through to was not relevant? What we need is a tool that measures all the interactions with your web site, that can then use that information to gauge context and then serve up content based on what others did when they were browsing in a similar context. For isntance, if i go to buy a new set of golf clubs and i land on the golf club sales site, my context is "buying golf clubs". I want to have content that is relevant to this context. Many sites like amazon will offer recommendations that are not relevant - perhaps based on my last visit where i bought a teddy bear for my niece. The tool that IS able to deliver relvent content in context is Baynote Recommendations. Its a must have for any web site that wants to sell more or better engage their customers/constituents/partners etc.

This little old country pub needs to be "found"

2009-07-26T13:38:00.008+10:00

Last weekend we were driving through a small Victorian country town after visitng some awesome Victorian wineries (I love living in the Yarra Valley) and we stopped at a small pub for lunch. From the outside it looked nice, though nothing special. Inside the decor was fantastic with lots of art, dark wood, antique tables and racks of wine. The menu had plenty on it, though the basis of most of the meals was either seafood (fresh from the markets) or red meat (straight from the local farms). The service was excellent and we also got into some of their more boutique beers (had a go at the matildabay.com Fat Yak, which I really enjoyed). We discussed what we would have and we all wondered whether the food was going to live up to the ambience and service that we had recieved so far. We ordered our meals and when they arrived, ate heartily! The meals were great, in some respects typical country pub meals with a touch of class, though not too sophisticated (now I'm sounding like Matt Preston - who , BTW, gave this place 3 stars in the Gourmet Traveller).

So far, the owners of this pub appeared to be doing everything right. Great abience, decor, service, food, drink etc yet I wondered how they were ever going to get enough people through the door to really grow a hugely profitable busienss (just as an aside, I didn't ask them if they were trying to grow a hugely profitable busienss, or if they just wanted to run a pub in a sleepy little Vicotiran town, so I don't mean for this post to speak for the owners). I started thinking about Social Media and how this small pub could raise its profile. So this blogpost is the first step in a social experiment - though I wish I was a slighlty more popular blogger like Perez Hilton (not that i would like to be like Perez Hilton, because I'm pretty sure I wouldn't, but for this expriment to be seen as successful, his notoriety and popularity would certainly be helpful!).

So here we go! I've now given this place a bit of a rap. Here is the pubs web site:
http://yeapeppercorn.com.au/restaurant.htm
The site says that they are famous (or their sticky date pudding is, but i had never heard of them before - nor their pudding). You can see they have done a pretty good job on their site - though I always find it interesting that the companies that design web sites have a heap of different ways to spread the word on their own site (RSS, Del-i-cios, reddit etc), but don't seem to implement that on their customers site (whats up with that?).
Sorry, on to my experiment. I'm going to tweet to direct people to this post and I'm ging to ask people to retweet and also, if your in Victoria, to go and visit the pub and perhaps post a comment here on this blog so I can see how the experiment went and whether my blogging and tweeting abut this place made any impact on raising its profile. Maybe you could say "StoneBridge Systems sent me here" if you end up eacting or drinking at the pub and I can get an idea of how this little experiement went.

Now.....what could go wrong with my experiment? Well, the fact that no one reads my blog could be a huge problem. Although the fact that this blog is defintiely NOT popular actually makes this all the more interesting IMHO. So I need to make sure I somehow encourage people to read my rants (or at least this one). I have less than 1000 followers on twitter, so that could be an issue, though if I get enough retweets then maybe i can reach enough people to raise the profile of this place. This blog is linked to from my web site but our site focuses on Enterprise Content Management so I don't know how valuable those links are.

What else could I do to increase exposure? Love to hear your comments on that subject as well.

Enterprise 2.0 is coming....

2009-07-17T13:50:00.003+10:00

About a week or so ago I was lucky enough to see a demonstration of the Social Media platofrm from enterprise content management vendor Open Text. I was blown away! This is enterprise 2.0 at its best (IMHO). The presentation only lasted about 15 minutes as that was all the time that was allocated in this particular forum, but all of the functionality you would expect from your favourite social media applications (like facebook, myspace and linkedin) were present and it was VERY easy to understand the business use or application for each piece of functionality. At the time we were in a room full of records managers, which was actually a good thing becuase one of the issues often raised with these tools is "how do i manage/control/secure the content". I believe if you can put a record managers mind at ease with these technologies then you can pretty much put anyones mind at ease - a more anal bunch you will not find (and i mean that in the nicest possible way for all you record managers out there). Access to the system provides sophistcated security which is enterprise grade and "content" (no matter how it is generated) can be classified and moved into your document/records management solution to ensure it is properly managed (with security, taxonomy and retention management).

After the presentation we also had a personal demonstration of this app on the iPhone and the Blackberry bold. The iPhone app was a whole lot easier to use than the blackberry but they both provided very useful technology that will assist businesses in their communication and interaction with each other. Could it possibly kill email in the enterprise? Perhaps that can be discussed in my next post.

Maximising ROI for ecommerce site with recommendations

2009-07-17T12:33:00.003+10:00

With the GFC making CFO's nervous, cost cutting has become an important issue - as has ROI. If the company is going to spend money, then where is the best place to spend it. If your main business is developed through a web site - whether thats transaction based or advertising based, there are probably 10 or so options that you might look at to increase the your revenue to avoid getting into some nasty cost cutting (like redundancies) - each with its own cost and time to benefit characteristics. StoneBridge has started working with Baynote (www.baynote.com) as we see one of the fastest way to increase revenue without a huge investment is through product recommendations. Probably the only faster way (with a slightly lower investment) would be introducing more payment options to allow your customers to buy more easily from you.

Why product recommendations? There are some very good reasons for investing in a product recmmendations solution right now. One of them being that you can actually determine, through multivariant A/B testing, whether or not this solution is going to make a difference to your site even before you shell out the cash to do a full implementation. ROI can be almost immediate in some cases, but the initial testing makes sure that you are investing in the right technology. So the risk is minimial to the business, and the reward is potentially signficant, depending on your site.

In these times of challenge, focusing on quick wins is an important way to ensure survival of your business.

StoneBridge Systems Blog

2009-07-17T11:09:00.001+10:00

Welcome to the StoneBridge Systems blog. I'd like to use this forum to provide general information about StoneBridge and also provide comment on the indutries that we service and the technologies that we deploy. I hope you find this information useful.