Common Sense

Why Pre-Commerce is the Next Frontier

About 4,000 years ago, give or take a few decades, we developed the notion of currency to act as a valuable receipt for goods received.  If you were hanging out in Mesopotamia 2000 B.C., you might have trusted your buddy delivering the grain, but your boss still wanted to get a form of receipt to match the grain you would put in the temple storehouse.  Nothing personal, just business.  

 

About 30 years ago, we started figuring out how to order online.   In 1982, Minitel was introduced in France by France Telecom.  I remember it when working for Rhone-Poulenc Rorer in Paris.  It was revolutionary at the time.  You could book travel online via this little electronic box with green writing on the screen.   In the 90’s, we started introducing security protocols and improved our bandwidth dramatically.  In 1994, it became possible to buy pizza from Pizza Hut right from their site.  Not a revolution, but cool.  1995 then proved to be the breakout year.  Dell.com started with an initial goal of hoping to make $1MM per month, which was very bold at that time.  Jeff Bezos launched Amazon.com.  Cisco started selling online and eBay was founded, all in the same year. 

 

15 years later, it’s safe to say that companies have focused on e-commerce as a way to purchase goods directly through the Internet.  And, quite predictably, the majority of promotional spend goes against this transaction.   We are good at the transaction. 

 

We are bad on reaching customers before the transaction.  And this is giving rise to the next wave of e-commerce, which I refer to as “pre-commerce”.   

 

Pre-Commerce is a reality due to how the web is being transformed by technology and the customer together.    And it is a major opportunity.

 

There is a reason why we ask our peers for advice before we purchase online or why we look for weeks/months before making a decision.  In the offline experience, we can see, touch and hear direct.  Online, we are often missing that experience of interacting with products, asking questions and putting our five senses to work.  So, we do the next best thing.  We explore by ourselves.  We often start with search.   15.2 billion searches were conducted by all of us in the U.S. only in January, 2010.  We ask our peers for direct advice often after sending them content to look at.  We visit the communities we trust to learn more and ask questions.  We go to Yahoo! Answers or Mahalo and see what others have said.  We look at Craigslist now and then.   We explore until we are satisfied…..then we visit to buy online. 

 

Basically, we substitute the offline experience we know with a rich, deep exploration online. 

 

It’s the world of pre-commerce.  It’s a world most marketers think they know, but actually have no idea where or how decisions are made before a customer ever visits your transaction-focused site.  Most companies are analogous to the retailer waiting patiently in their store for you to arrive.  It’s an old model. 

 

In the future, leaders will be experts at interacting with you appropriately before you make a decision and they will integrate community into their e-commerce site, so your experience continues when you visit.  Those companies will become a valid and trusted partner in the pre-commerce journey. 

 

This is what I love about the evolution of the web.  We think we have solved how do to something and we realize we’re just getting started.  We’ve come a long way from taking receipts for grain, but just imagine where we can go from here….

 

All the best, Bob

Google Buzz and the Enterprise: A Look at the Real Opportunity

The Enterprise is the new frontier for social media – the wild west.  It’s wide open for leadership and here’s why.

 

Today, email is the center of our world inside a company.    It’s a fact whether we like it or not.

Tomorrow, text messaging will increase in importance.  The next generation of employees have grown up texting.  They don’t do email and don’t want to. 

The mobile phone is often the device of choice to learn on the go.  We want our laptop and phone to be fully integrated.

And we’re increasingly parking our data and accessing solutions in the cloud. 

 

The winner in the Enterprise will likely be the “Switzerland” of data, email, conversations and community.  They will be able to combine structured and unstructured data in new ways that streamline how we truly communicate. 

 

The winner will provide us new and obvious ways to improve productivity, share and network ideas faster and gain insights that matter with incredible speed.  Relevance of data will be key.  We want to receive ideas and insights from peers we respect inside and outside our company, not a random onslaught of opinion from the entire company and all people in the free world.  We want to benefit from the wisdom of the crowds we are part of…..what we don’t need is more clutter in Outlook or Gmail or Hotmail. 

 

So today, email is not the center we want, but it is the center we have.  It is our main way we learn.

 

Many companies are trying to build out their proprietary solutions, which is typical and expected.  I guess I would do the same to build a company.  Salesforce.com has a great CRM platform, an idea community, integration with Facebook and mobile solutions.  Microsoft has a new and improved Sharepoint 2010, Outlook continues to look for ways to integrate from Xobni to LinkedIn and Bing is impressive.  Google has Buzz, Apps, the Droid and the best search on the planet.  There’s just one problem.

 

Not much changes in the Enterprise unless you can integrate easily with current platforms/infrastructure and if your solution is adaptable with time.  Innovation in the Enterprise happens incrementally when we are talking software and hardware. 

 

So back to Google.  Their search is a great solution internally for companies.  Their Apps are reasonably popular with smaller companies.  But they have not penetrated large Enterprise in a significant manner.    

 

The solution is not to win the battle, but to figure out how to integrate across platforms and win the war.   Search, email, text messaging and the phone will be central to this success….

 

One of these companies will figure out that social media and technology are so transformative that they can’t do it all by themselves.  If they can work more openly, perhaps even partner, to integrate email, data, search, conversations and community, they can win big long-term. 

 

Meanwhile, most of the attention is on the consumer world.  To me, it is ironic, since the consumer world is a community-driven world and it will be a long uphill battle to integrate community into email.  It’s a much easier game to do the reverse and integrate email into community.  The world tilts in favor of social media communities, ala Facebook, in this regard. 

 

The good news is Google is once again raising everyone’s game via their innovation.  It is what we need to push us to a new way to drive future innovation in the Enterprise.  And we’re really just getting started…. 

 

All the best, Bob