Business and enterprise software, and other applications that help a business run

As sad as it is to report the fact, this is that last column that I will be writing in this space, or at least the last one for pay. The owners of this blog (and many other blogs) have had a series of financial setbacks and are having to go out of business, as of today. That saddens me, because I very much like the people involved. It is my most fervent hope that they go on to bigger and better things.

A lot of the problem has been due to the loss of page rank in the Google space. It is said that it cost the blog network 70% of their traffic. With that huge number of page views missing on a daily basis, KMM simply found it impossible to make ends meet, despite most of its writers having taken a pay cut, and despite their efforts to the contrary.

This should be a lesson to those of you that are obsessed with Google traffic that Google SEO is all, or a seriously high portion, of your marketing efforts. If, for whatever reason, your Google page rank tanks and your page views take a plunge, you will find yourself in the same boat that KMM is in now. Diversify your efforts. There are about a million small (and large) non-Google things that you can do increase traffic. Do them all.

No one has ever said what it was that led to the loss of Google page rank. I am not sure that anyone knows excerpt Google, and they are not telling. Personally, I suspect that it has a lot to do with the design of the KMM page. I even went so far as to offer to redo the page and to migrate the blogs to a different platform. It is not that big a job and it is part of what I do for a living. I think, though, by the time I made the offer, the fate of the KMM network had already been decided, although it had not yet been announced.

I may continue to post in this space for a period into the future. I have a lot of ideas in my BestBizWare notes file. I suppose, in a very real way, getting those ideas out of my head and onto paper may be a good thing for me. Plus, I will assume that KMM will continue to collect revenue on my posts, and it is one of my rules in life that I give more than I receive.

I think that this blog may have been among the bright spots for KMM over the last several months. I tend to generate my own traffic, and days of 800-1000 page views have become fairly common. Google views were only a couple of percent of my totals. That knowledge allows me to go out with my head held fairly high.

But the face on that head will be sad.

Yesterday we talked a bit about the two biggest pure business uses to which social media can be put: public relations and marketing. While these uses are important they are not, in my opinion, the most important business use of this new online paradigm. As the lines between business and personal computing continue to blur, it seems to me that interpersonal networking is the single most important benefit that social media can provide.

You can see it on any of the social networks, but it is especially evident on sites like Plurk, Twitter, and FriendFeed. People of a feather flock together, and that is a marvelous thing for business. What you used to do at breakfasts and lunches, you can now do with many more people, on line, from the convenience of your computer. I have seen, using Plurk as an example, incredible efforts put forth by groups as diverse as social media marketers and knitters.

The value of networking in today's business world cannot be overestimated. It is the way the insiders in any field learn the latest news, find out what plum jobs are coming open, who got the last job, what the latest trends are, who needs a helping hand, and how to get some assistance with a problem. For almost every profession, networking is where it's it.

Readers that are not using these sites for social and business networking are failing to leverage their single most important networking opportunity; if you are not networking on line, you are getting farther behind every day. It is possible to contact literally hundreds of like-minded professionals by typing a single sentence. The same works for asking questions. With almost no effort, you can get the help of a huge group of professionals.

So if you are not already there, begin taking advantage of online social media and networking; you're not going to win the race without it.

The purely business aspects of social media software have always existed, clear back to local ads on local computer bulletin boards. With the advent of social media sites such as StumbleUpon, Twitter, and Plurk, the sophistication of the business component of social media has grown. If one includes blogging in the social media category, as one should, you will find that very few companies of any size have no social media presence at all, and that many have a sizable presence indeed.

Part of this effort is public relations. This generally starts with a blog, sometimes by the corporate CEO, and sometimes by professional corporate bloggers. Often, forums exist on corporate sites to enhance communications. These efforts are sometimes bolstered by corporate accounts at sites like Facebook and Twitter, allowing some personal interaction between private users of those sites and corporate PR personnel. Public relations efforts are aimed at maximizing the positive exposure of the organization and its key stakeholders, while downplaying any negative exposures.

The other major business aspect of social media sites is pure marketing, generally involving efforts to drive traffic to either corporate Websites or to brick-and-mortar locations to purchase products. We have seen full-fledged marketing campaigns, especially on sites like Facebook and MySpace, and many examples of “viral” marketing campaigns on those same sites and very often including video sites such as YouTube.

These social media marketing efforts are here to stay. Although some companies have been slow to adopt such methods, major social media efforts by companies such as Ford Motors, MacDonald's, and Apple leave little doubt that social media marketing is here to stay. As long as the social media paradigm is hot, someone will be following you there to sell you something.

Social Media may be defined as follows: Social media is an umbrella term that defines the various activities that integrate technology, social interaction, and the construction of words, pictures, videos and audio. This interaction, and the manner in which information is presented, depends on the varied perspectives and "building" of shared meaning among communities, as people share their stories, and understandings.

As these communities and activities drive further into the mainstream, they are also attracting more mainstream activities, many of which have either light or heavy business associations. Some of the heavier set of business interactions involve actual advertising, the establishment of corporate social media identities, the furtherance of corporate communications, and a myriad of other activities, most of which revolve around marketing. For those who decry the entry of business into this social space, I remind you that radio and television are also basically social spaces.

The primary “light” component of business in social media is networking. Social media sites like Plurk, Twitter, and FriendFeed are built to support these networking activities, and are quickly taking over from the “traditional” web-based forums and associations. Wherever you go in the social media space, you will see like-minded people banding together to talk about their passions, both business and personal, extending their network of friends into new spaces and building their networks by adding like-minded people.

One interesting recent development in social media could be considered a reversion to the past. More and more social media Web denizens are arranging meetings in “real life” in order to bring their extended networks into clearer focus. Some of these gatherings are as simple as Twitter groups meeting for an occasional breakfast. Others are as complex as conventions with the full array of working groups, presentations, and keynote speakers. This is truly an exciting time to be involved in social media.

Day by day over the last several years, social media has been creeping into the lives of million of us. This addition to our lives, whether purposefully or not, has been doing an excellent job of preparing the way for our ultra-connected future computing paradigm. The various forms of social media, from Digg to Twitter to Plurk, have been burrowing into our lifestyles, changing the way we spend our time and how we view our lives.

Some of the changes wrought by the Web have been slow and steady, like our move away from shopping via catalog to shopping on line. Others have been lightning fast, like the adoption of micro-blogging on Twitter and now on Plurk, or the use of StumbleUpon or Mixx to find content that we are interested in. We are being ensnared by social media in more ways that we can imagine.

The people that are using social media heavily are a younger demographic, generally under 40. As the population continues to fill with computer-savvy young adults, the number of people online and involved with social media sites will continue to grow. And, as the social media site interfaces get better (a la Plurk) these sites get stickier, leading more people to spend more time on line.

All of us that participate in social media are being conditioned to spend more time on the web and less time in non-virtual pursuits. The feedback loops in social media are very strong. We are lured by knowledge, variety, and discovery every time we use StumbleUpon. We are drawn into the front-page-or-bust competitions every time we use Digg. We are drawn into instant friendships on Twitter and Plurk at every visit.

All of these avenues are used to sell to us by marketing professionals. There are, of course, the ads on the sites that we see, but there are also advertising campaigns being run every day on Facebook, MySpace, and StumbleUpon. As more of us spend more time on line, the use of social media marketing will become more profitable, and will therefore increase. That, of course, is no different than other pursuit in which we engage.

More tomorrow...

As we become more and more connected to our business associates and our friends, we are going to become increasingly dependent on social media, that ubiquitous blend of networking and marketing that runs through almost everything we do on line. We keep up with our friends and our clients on social media sites, and trade information with an increasing blend of business and social connections. This is interpersonal networking at the limits of the capabilities of the internet. Just ask Twitter.

From students walking in groups, but all talking on their cell-phones, to sites like Plurk, Twitter, and Facebook, we are already enmeshed in a web of mixed business and personal communications throughout most of our waking days and nights. We explore the world on StumbleUpon, Mixx, and Digg. We are entertained and informed via YouTube, iTunes, and the blogosphere.

Over the last very few years, a majority of our citizens have been turned into netizens, with daily routines that are connected almost as much to their virtual lives as they are to their brick-and-mortar lives. Some of us (and I certainly include myself) have gone well over the dividing line. We shop online. We get our news on line. We often have more “friends” on line than we have in the increasingly-misnamed “real world.”

As the speed and portability of our computing improves, this dependence on the virtual is going to increase. When our brains are connected to other brains by the global network, there is going to be very little difference between our virtual and the non-virtual lives, save the ever-important factor of actual physical contact. Meanwhile, day by day, we are being trained to increasingly consider the virtual world as closer and closer to the real world.

Tomorrow: How social media is changing our real lives.

The future of business (and personal) computing is writ large on the wall. Smaller, faster devices, virtual invisibility, cloud computing, planetary WiFi, and so on are going to be the order of the day, sooner than later. These all seem like positive features of  the future, but they could come at some significant costs. These costs need to be mitigated as we work out way into the fully wired future.

Security needs to be much better than it is. If all of our personal and corporate data is going to be living on the great server in the sky, we need to be sure that it is safe. Those servers need to be secure at levels that are only a dream today, as does the programming that transports the data back and forth from the cloud and you. We can't have the vulnerabilities of Windows, certainly, and either a super-secure *nix is the answer, or perhaps a totally new operating system, almost undoubtedly Open Source.

Privacy concerns need to be addressed, as well. If it will be possible for you to be connected 24/7, it will need to become possible to have total control over your on-line availability. “No” needs to really mean “NO!” If you work, you will need to be available, just as you are now, some part of the time. But you cannot have the boss butting into your life whenever she wants to. The same is true of friends and family. We need tools that make it possible to control the access that everyone has to us.

These things are not there now because we have never really needed them before. In a few years, we will need rigid security, persona privacy avatars, and all of the tools that make those things possible. When those tools are needed, somebody will provide them. Technology is an amazing animal, and it tends to provide what we need, when we need it. Once the security and privacy tools are in place, the future computing revolution will begin in ernest.

It is hard not to wonder how close the future of business computing and software will be to invisible. With a powerful computer the size of an iPhone, cloud computing, and new input / output devices, will we even know if someone is plugged in to the Net or not? The truth is that we may not.

First, we will probably see smaller and more portable devices. Perhaps roll-up keyboards and monitors will make an appearance, or maybe we will use input devices like current cell phone texting keyboards, or voice control. Maybe we will have a tiny monitor that will drop down in front of one eye, or a tiny projector that will display our data in the inside of a pair of glasses.

Not too far down the road, the way neurological research is gathering data on the brain, will be more direct connections. Certainly sub-vocalizing hardware could be used to allow us to talk to the computer inaudibly, with an earpiece completing the Input / output loop together with the eyepiece. A few small pieces of hardware will take us a long ways.

But science is also moving us in the direction of a truly direct connection to our computers. Once we have the brain fully mapped, it will be possible to implant a WiFi I/O device (perhaps in the back of the neck) that will allow us to see and hear our information, and to think commands, so that we will not need any visible hardware at all. Perhaps the only clue that someone is interacting with a computer will be a slightly distracted look...

It is hard to think of the business software and hardware infrastructure without thinking about the people in IT that support it all. You don't see them much until you need them, but when you need them you REALLY need them! There is a new report out from Goldman Sachs, based on interviews with corporate CIOs, that we may see fewer IT folks around during the coming year, which could be a very bad thing when we need them.

The study finds that the demand for IT personnel is the lowest in the forty-one year history of this executive survey. A companion survey indicates that these same CIOs plan to spend less money on new hardware and software this year, as well. It looks like the watchword of the year is economy rather than technology. These surveys combine to show a bleak picture of investment in technology in the coming year, and it was warned that hardware, software and service companies should look at the report as an early warning of a less than stellar 2009.

In the details of the report, it was noted that the companies would be paring many more contractors than direct company employees. While about 15% of respondents project that they will cut employees, almost half think that they will cut contractors. All told, our worsening economy looks like it will be taking a serious toll on IT spending.

In what I think is an unusual move, the Gartner Group is recommending that companies, cities, and other organizations don't spend any more money on WiMax, saying that we should wait until there are more WiMax receivers in the field. Is Gartner trying to hold this technology down on purpose? The spread of handsets and infrastructure are tied irrevocably together. A recommendation like this from a major name in the industry would do a lot to insure that this popular worldwide technology never catches on in the US.

There are millions of WiMax users in Asia who love the technology. It is pretty obvious that it works. Telling people not to install the infrastructure is a sure way to keep WiMax handsets away as well, since there is no incentive to introduce and sell handsets unless we are going to install the technology infrastructure. It is a case of chicken and egg, and Gartner may be insuring that that particular chicken never crosses the road. Call me cynical, but I would love to see how this particular study came about! Was it a sponsored study? What are the competing technologies? Who stands to lose money if Wimax is adopted here? Questions, questions, do I have questions!