Enterprise Mobility Asia News Weekly – Week of May 19, 2013

Welcome to Enterprise Mobility Asia News Weekly, an online newsletter that consists of the most interesting news and articles related to enterprise mobility in Asia.  Asia is predicted to be the fastest area of growth for enterprise mobility between now and 2016.

Also read Field Mobility News Weekly
Also read Kevin Benedict’s What’s New in HTML5
Also read M2M News Weekly
Also read Mobile Commerce News Weekly
Also read Mobile Health News Weekly
Also read Mobility News Weekly
Also read SMAC News Weekly

Indian mobile point-of-sale device maker Ezetap Mobile Solutions has obtained global certification for the latest version of its point-of-sale device from Europay, Mastercard and Visa.  This development is expected to encourage an increasing number of Indian consumers to pay for purchases at home using cards.  Read Original Content

A survey commissioned by mobile phone company Amaysim reveals one fourth of Australian adults now spend more than eight hours a day connected to technology.  Read Original Content

Mobile payment services are on the rise in Hong Kong.  Hang Seng Bank, a division of HSBC, will launch its NFC service in the third quarter of 2013, and the Bank of China – Hong Kong will also offer the service this year.  Read Original Content

Antenna Software provides a complete cloud-based enterprise mobility suite that enables both IT pros and business executives alike to create and manage mobile apps, websites and content across the entire business.  This newsletter is sponsored in part by Antenna Software.

China Mobile has been aggressively building up its 4G trial network, which could give it an edge of up to half a year over both Unicom and China Telecom in the 4G space.  Read Original Content

With promising mobile commerce opportunities in China, Amazon announced it has opened its Appstore in the country.  Read Original Content
A recent report by consulting firm PricewaterhouseCoopers emphasized the important role of mobile devices in China’s e-commerce, finding one third of Chinese online shoppers used devices such as smartphones and tablets to make purchases.  Read Original Content

MobileTECH Summit 2013 is a new event designed to showcase current and upcoming mobile innovations best suited to New Zealand’s principal food and fibre sectors.  The objective of the summit is to provide new tools, ideas, case studies and contacts for mobile communications to grow future productivity and profits.  Read Original Content

Mobile Expert Video Series: Mark Crofton

In this short interview recorded this week in Orlando, FL at SAPPHIRE NOW 2013, SAP's Mark Crofton talks about mobile solutions, mobile banking and trends in Latin America.  Enjoy!

Video Link: http://youtu.be/C_Hejd5622U


*************************************************************
Kevin Benedict, Head Analyst for Social, Mobile, Analytics and Cloud (SMAC) Cognizant
View Linkedin Profile

Read the whitepaper on mobile, social, analytics and cloud strategies Don't Get SMACked
Learn about mobile strategies at MobileEnterpriseStrategies.com
Follow me on Twitter @krbenedict
Join the Linkedin Group Strategic Enterprise Mobility

Full Disclosure: These are my personal opinions. No company is silly enough to claim them. I am a mobility and SMAC analyst, consultant and writer. I work with and have worked with many of the companies mentioned in my articles.

SAP M2M Expert Suhas Uliyar Shares Strategies for the Internet of Things

This is one of the most informative interviews I have recorded on the subject of the IoT (Internet of Things).  IoT is a big subject here at SAPPHIRE NOW 2013.  In this interview Suhas Uliyar shares what an end-to-end M2M (machine to machine) solution looks like in an SAP world.

Learn how the SAP Mobile Platform, Hana, Syclo, Right Hemisphere/ SAP Visual Enterprise, Afaria, Augmented Reality, Mapping, cloud computing and SAP NetWeaver all work together in an M2M solution.

Video Link: http://youtu.be/vJMCzQS-9wA



*************************************************************
Kevin Benedict, Head Analyst for Social, Mobile, Analytics and Cloud (SMAC) Cognizant
View Linkedin Profile

Read the whitepaper on mobile, social, analytics and cloud strategies Don't Get SMACked
Learn about mobile strategies at MobileEnterpriseStrategies.com
Follow me on Twitter @krbenedict
Join the Linkedin Group Strategic Enterprise Mobility

Full Disclosure: These are my personal opinions. No company is silly enough to claim them. I am a mobility and SMAC analyst, consultant and writer. I work with and have worked with many of the companies mentioned in my articles.

Images from SAPPHIRE 2013

SAP's Sanjay Poonen sharing SAP's mobile strategies
Clockwise from top - Kevin Benedict, SAPPHIRENOW 2013,
Internet of Things Session, SAP-Founder Dr. Hasso Plattner
and SAP Executive Board Member Dr. Vishal Sikka
Clockwise from Top - Suhas Uliyar (SAP VP M2M/IoT),
SAPPHIRE 2013, Orlando FL
Kevin Benedict speaking SMAC strategies
Senthil Krishnapillai (SAP VP Mobile Security)

*************************************************************
Kevin Benedict, Head Analyst for Social, Mobile, Analytics and Cloud (SMAC) Cognizant
View Linkedin Profile

Read the whitepaper on mobile, social, analytics and cloud strategies Don't Get SMACked
Learn about mobile strategies at MobileEnterpriseStrategies.com
Follow me on Twitter @krbenedict
Join the Linkedin Group Strategic Enterprise Mobility

Full Disclosure: These are my personal opinions. No company is silly enough to claim them. I am a mobility and SMAC analyst, consultant and writer. I work with and have worked with many of the companies mentioned in my articles.

Digital Transformation, Retailing and Mobile Technologies

Today I read the results of a report from Google titled, How In-store Shoppers are Using Mobile Devices that states the following, "One in three shoppers uses their smartphones to find information instead of asking for help from a store employee.  In some categories 55 percent say they do this when shopping for appliances, 48 percent for electronics, 40 percent for baby care and 39 percent for household care."  Those numbers point to a significant change in retailing.  They point to a self-help transformation enabled by mobile devices.  Companies that want to thrive in retail must embrace these behaviors by acknowledging them and adapting their strategies.

Here are some more interesting results from the report:
  • 79 percent of smartphone owners are smartphone shoppers
  • 62 percent utilize a smartphone to assist with shopping at least once a month and 17 percent utilize mobile to assist in shopping at least once a week
  • 84 percent of smartphone users, utilize smartphones to help shop while in a store
  • 53 percent of smartphone users, utilize their device in-store to make price comparisons
  • 39 percent of smartphone users use their smartphones to find promotional offers while in store
  • 36 percent of smartphone users use their smartphones to find location/directions to stores
  • 35 percent of smartphone users use their smartphones to find store hours.
Retail is not the only place experiencing significant changes due to mobile technologies and other innovations.  Books are becoming ebooks, DVDs are giving way to streaming video, album sales have morphed into single song sales online, classified ads have moved from the local newspaper to Craig’s List, bank branches are losing their relevance as mobile banking apps gain in popularity, product research is done on mobile devices, college degrees are being earned online and consumers are self-diagnosing their illnesses via mobile and online research.  All of these market and behavioral changes are due to what is termed digital transformation.

All industries will be impacted to some degree by the digital transformation that is happening in 2013. However, industries driven primarily by information, such as healthcare, education, financial and public services, will experience some of the most profound changes.

Specific functions in companies such as marketing, online sales, customer support, etc., will experience significant changes because of the digitization.

Digital transformation is happening as a result of technology innovations, cultural and population shifts, evolving societal behaviors, and changing market expectations.  Even traditional industries not generally associated with leading edge technologies are experiencing the effects of this digital transformation on their interactions with employee, partners and customers.

Leading these digital transformations are developments around SMAC (social, mobile, analytics and cloud) technologies.  These developments change our interactions, communications and expectations on how people, organizations and businesses should engage with each other.

Mobile technologies, including smartphones and tablets in particular, are transforming entire industries.  Today when people want answers they search the Internet or a connected data source.  When they want to remember an upcoming event, they add it to a calendar supported by their mobile device.  When they want to save information, they write a note, record an audio memo or take a digital photo/video and save it to their mobile devices and connected personal cloud storage services.  When they want to communicate with friends, family members or healthcare providers they use their mobile devices, apps and social media technologies.  When they want to research products, read reviews and find locations and prices they first reach for their smartphones.

Are you following me on Twitter?  If not I invite you to @krbenedict.
*************************************************************
Kevin Benedict, Head Analyst for Social, Mobile, Analytics and Cloud (SMAC) Cognizant
View Linkedin Profile

Read the whitepaper on mobile, social, analytics and cloud strategies Don't Get SMACked
Learn about mobile strategies at MobileEnterpriseStrategies.com
Follow me on Twitter @krbenedict
Join the Linkedin Group Strategic Enterprise Mobility

Full Disclosure: These are my personal opinions. No company is silly enough to claim them. I am a mobility and SMAC analyst, consultant and writer. I work with and have worked with many of the companies mentioned in my articles.

Renegade Business Execs, SMAC and Things are Out of Control!

Cloud based Google Enterprise Apps
This morning Cognizant, the company where I work as an analyst, reported their earnings.  In the earnings call Cognizant CEO Francisco D'Souza stated, "This year we expect to deliver about $500 million in SMAC (social, mobile, analytics, cloud) related services."  That is a significant number in Boise, Idaho where I live.

I study SMAC related topics daily and teach SMAC (social, mobile, analytics and cloud) workshops globally.  No one is arguing against these mega-trends in 2013.  The questions I get are related to how to embrace and exploit these trends for the good of the company given their unique position, market, industry and region.

On another topic - I read an article today titled, "Renegade Business Execs Drive IT Strategy" that I found intriguing.  Here is an excerpt, "Business executives are increasingly bypassing the IT department and spending their own budgets on technology as "it's too important for their business to leave to IT", says analyst house Forrester."

I believe we are witnessing the beginnings of the "consumerization of enterprise apps.  When powerful and useful enterprise apps are available in the cloud for the choosing, business executives can often select and implement them with minimal IT department involvement.  If the business believes it will help their bottom line, they pull the trigger and use their own budgets.  This of course has implications on how the IT department is viewed and their future missions.

Here is another excerpt from the article, "CIOs now have to pivot and act more as a consultant to the business. The days of a centralized controlled IT world are over. Vendor management can no longer be the central management point for IT departments."  Things are out of control!

The cat is out of the bag!  The horse is out of the barn!  Who let the dogs out?  All odd sayings, but they seem strangely relevant to what is happening in IT.  The business is more and more about technology, and thus business execs are becoming experts themselves in the use of technology to hit their business objectives.  They are no longer depending upon the IT department to recommend and select innovative solutions.  If you are selling technology to companies, you should be paying attention to this trend!

The IT department today is often viewed as the maintenance arm of the company.  The keepers of the systems of record, the ERPs, databases, security systems and IT policies and licenses.  More and more of the innovation seems to be happening in the cloud and on mobile devices.

One last excerpt, "IT will become much less of a blue-collar run and built organization and much more of a white-collar shop focused on design, orchestration and integration, with more of the integration focused on external business partners and public cloud services."

This is the future.  This is why Cognizant is studying and sharing our research on SMAC (social, mobile, analytics and cloud) with the world.  This is why we have a SMAC practice.  This is why we are working closely with Google Enterprise to demonstrate what a fully enabled SMAC platform looks like.

If you live in the UK, you may be interested in an upcoming exclusive breakfast discussion on ‘Private, Public and Hybrid Cloud’ the morning of 12th June in Thistle Hotel in Marble Arch. Moderating the session will be Paul Simmonds, ex-CISO of AstraZeneca and of ICI and a panel of experts from Microsoft, Savvis and Interxion.  There are limited seats, but email me if you are interested in attending and I will see what I can do.



*************************************************************
Kevin Benedict, Head Analyst for Social, Mobile, Analytics and Cloud (SMAC) Cognizant
View Linkedin Profile

Read the whitepaper on mobile, social, analytics and cloud strategies Don't Get SMACked
Learn about mobile strategies at MobileEnterpriseStrategies.com
Follow me on Twitter @krbenedict
Join the Linkedin Group Strategic Enterprise Mobility

Full Disclosure: These are my personal opinions. No company is silly enough to claim them. I am a mobility and SMAC analyst, consultant and writer. I work with and have worked with many of the companies mentioned in my articles.

Are You Acting Strategically Enough with Your Enterprise Mobility?

Are you acting strategically
enough to matter?
I read the following question recently, "Are we acting strategically enough to matter?"  I remember the question, because I believe it is so important for us all to answer.  It is a question all IT and business people should be asking themselves!

In this picture of charging elephants, would it really make a difference if you took a baby step to the left, right, forward or backwards?  Probably not!  The only way to save yourself would be to do something strategic and fast!

I see enterprise mobility in a similar way.  How long are large enterprises going to engage in tiny proof of concepts before they do something big!  The mega-trends of SMAC (social, mobile, analytics and cloud) are not going away.  The faster companies recognize these are absolutely market and industry altering trends and begin to do something smart about it, the better.

I read a very interesting interview with Silicon Valley veteran and investor/celebrity Marc Andreessen the other day.  Here are some of his candid technology and trend predictions:

  • Nothing is going to stop the consumerization of the enterprise. 
  • Nothing is going to stop the BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) trend. 
  • Nothing is going to stop Software-as-a-Service. 
  • Nothing is going to stop the cloud. 
  • Any installed software, where there is a web or a cloud equivalent, is in real trouble.  Old software vendors are charging these huge upgrade and maintenance prices. Companies can switch to SaaS for less than the cost of the maintenance on the old software.
Do you agree with him?  I mostly do!  I think BYOD is really BWITUICS (bring what I tell you I can support).

I was teaching a SMAC strategies workshop the other day in Edinburgh, Scotland.  The large global financial services company I was meeting with had an "Innovation Team" consisting of members of the business and IT members.  This team was tasked with recognizing market and industry impacting trends on the horizon and having a plan in place to address them.  They invited me to come in and share the results of my research on enterprise mobility and SMAC.  

I believe all companies need to have some team in place watching the horizon and developing responses to emerging opportunities and threats.  These days demand foresight and courage.  Does your company have them?
*************************************************************
Kevin Benedict, Head Analyst for Social, Mobile, Analytics and Cloud (SMAC) Cognizant
View Linkedin Profile

Read the whitepaper on mobile, social, analytics and cloud strategies Don't Get SMACked
Learn about mobile strategies at MobileEnterpriseStrategies.com
Follow me on Twitter @krbenedict
Join the Linkedin Group Strategic Enterprise Mobility

Full Disclosure: These are my personal opinions. No company is silly enough to claim them. I am a mobility and SMAC analyst, consultant and writer. I work with and have worked with many of the companies mentioned in my articles.

Enterprise and Consumer Mobility and Travel Strategies

I teach a lot of SMAC strategies workshops (social, mobile, analytics and cloud) around the world.  Conducting these involves a lot of travel.  I have been pondering these last few days just how much my travel experience has changed over the past decade.  Today, mobile smartphones can provide the following:
  • Push to buy the Heathrow Express train ticket from an app on my iPhone
  • Translate foreign languages live on screen
  • Get real-time transportation advice
  • Locate myself anywhere in the world on a map
  • Use my iPhone compass app to know where North is located
  • Use my smartphone screen as a boarding pass
  • Find a Thai restaurant and read the social reviews 
  • Book my dinner reservation
  • Help find a last-minute hotel room or book a Marriott property
  • Book, change or review my airline reservation (change my seats to be as comfortable as possible)
  • Help me understand how long it will take to travel from point A in London, to point B
  • Read about any location, building, historical event, city or neighborhood instantly
  • Download an eBook I saw in a bookstore and read on my iPad mini
  • Download an audio book to listen to when my eyes grow heavy
  • Mask the sounds of revelry in the streets with the sounds of waterfalls cascading from my iPhone
  • Look up available short-term apartment rentals within a specific distance of a given point on AirBnB mobile, see photos and read reviews
  • Help me stay in real-time contact with my family and friends while traveling
  • Create a private, invitation only, Photo Stream to share my trip photos with my family
  • Check my email
  • Listen to voicemail
  • Skype
  • Jump on Google+, open a Hangout and instantly set-up video conferencing with my team, share any Google apps including presentations live (the death of distance)
  • Write and publish newsletters and articles while traveling around the world
  • Record video interviews with my iPhone, edit and publish from any corner of the world
I could continue.  I research and write about technologies that cause digital disruptions.  All of the above mobile app capabilities are in some manner disrupting the way the travel and hospitality industry operate.

There are digital disruptions happening in every industry today - some are small, but others are massive.    I make decisions on the hotels I book based upon their quality and comfort, and their high speed internet connections.  I don't care how nice a hotel is, if it can't get me on the Internet at a decent speed I will not stay there.  That kind of behavior is a digital disruptor for hotels.

Digital disruptions are not to be feared, but rather recognized, understood, embraced and exploited.  Digital disruptions are most often ridiculed by an industry when they first appear.  However, they eventually may grow to be a tsunami of change that overturns those unprepared.  It is my opinion that all companies should have a team that meets regularly to identify digital disruptors on the horizon to debate and ponder their potential impact without ridicule or denial.

The marketplace is littered with the remnants of companies unwilling and unable to change in the face of digital disruptions.  Will your company deny or embrace digital disruption?

*************************************************************
Kevin Benedict, Head Analyst for Social, Mobile, Analytics and Cloud (SMAC) Cognizant
View Linkedin Profile

Read the whitepaper on mobile, social, analytics and cloud strategies Don't Get SMACked
Learn about mobile strategies at MobileEnterpriseStrategies.com
Follow me on Twitter @krbenedict
Join the Linkedin Group Strategic Enterprise Mobility

Full Disclosure: These are my personal opinions. No company is silly enough to claim them. I am a mobility and SMAC analyst, consultant and writer. I work with and have worked with many of the companies mentioned in my articles.

Big Data and Mobility Change the Way We Live

This week I read an interesting article titled, Mobile Phone Data Redraws Bus Routes in Africa.  Seems the MNO (mobile network operator) Orange released 2.5 billion phone records (anonymised data) from 5 million phones for an exercise on how Big Data could be used to improve lives.

The data was used by IBM's research laboratory in Dublin to determine how people could reduce travel times in the city of Abidjan, Ivory Coast.  They compared the locations of actual mobile phone usage with current bus routes, and then developed a plan to change the bus routes to more efficiently serve the actual locations of where people lived.  They reported there could be a 10% reduction in travel times by following their plan.

This is very interesting to me.  Instead of guessing how people live, travel and use their mobile phones - big data reports the facts.  If you combine telco data with actual public transportation data and other sources you can learn an immense amount about the world we live in, and thus how we can improve it.

I recently read about a research project that compared actual email flows to organizational chart structures.  The results showed that the people with the most influence (measured by numbers of emails sent and received) did not correlate with organizational charts.  In a social business, the most influential people are those with good information and the willingness to share it, not simply those with company bestowed titles.

I am reading a book now called Big Data by Viktor Mayer-Schonberger and Kenneth Cukier.  In this book the authors write, "There is a treasure hunt under way, driven by the insights to be extracted from data and the dormant value that can be unleashed..."  So much information and data in the past has been on paper.  It has not been in a format that was digitized, searchable and able to quickly be analyzed.  The authors call the process of transforming information from paper to digits datafication.  Once information goes through datafication, immense amounts of interesting results can be found via big data analytics that can be used to find efficiencies, make our world a better place, or at least push the problems to someone else's neighborhood.

Many analysts are projecting that future increases in productivity are likely to come from big data analytics that can discover inefficiencies never before recognized.  It is going to be an interesting future!
*************************************************************
Kevin Benedict, Head Analyst for Social, Mobile, Analytics and Cloud (SMAC) Cognizant
View Linkedin Profile

Read the whitepaper on mobile, social, analytics and cloud strategies Don't Get SMACked
Learn about mobile strategies at MobileEnterpriseStrategies.com
Follow me on Twitter @krbenedict
Join the Linkedin Group Strategic Enterprise Mobility

Full Disclosure: These are my personal opinions. No company is silly enough to claim them. I am a mobility and SMAC analyst, consultant and writer. I work with and have worked with many of the companies mentioned in my articles.

Mobile Expert Video Series: Darren Gbadamosi, Part 2

In this short video interview, recorded in the English countryside, I ask mobility expert Darren Gbadamosi from ClickSoftware his insights on the evolving enterprise mobility market, his views on change management and mobile strategies.  Enjoy!

Video Link: http://youtu.be/WiGDzU9hW4U


*************************************************************
Kevin Benedict, Head Analyst for Social, Mobile, Analytics and Cloud (SMAC) Cognizant
View Linkedin Profile

Read the whitepaper on mobile, social, analytics and cloud strategies Don't Get SMACked
Learn about mobile strategies at MobileEnterpriseStrategies.com
Follow me on Twitter @krbenedict
Join the Linkedin Group Strategic Enterprise Mobility

Full Disclosure: These are my personal opinions. No company is silly enough to claim them. I am a mobility and SMAC analyst, consultant and writer. I work with and have worked with many of the companies mentioned in my articles.

When IT is Destroying Your Company's Future

A long time ago, before gray hairs appeared on my head, I was an IT manager.  My title was B2B E-Commerce Manager for a computer manufacturer.  I remember sitting in long meetings discussing how successful Dell Computer was with their just in time manufacturing and just in time supply chains.  I also remember our business representatives asking IT if they could develop systems that would allow us to operate in a similar supply chain model and the answers seemed always to be, "NO!"  Our IT systems were not set-up to support a real-time environment.

Of course the business would then say this must change if we are going to be competitive, and the IT would say then give us the budget to change.  Many years after I had moved on, the computer manufacture closed.  This manufacturer had never been able to gain freedom from their business-limiting legacy IT environments.

I was in England and Scotland last week teaching SMAC strategies (social, mobile, analytics and cloud) to large companies.  In a number of these sessions, I heard echoes from my days at the computer manufacturer, "Our current IT systems are not set-up to support those kinds of things."  They were not arguing the need for business and IT transformation, they were simply sharing the reality of their current IT architecture.

When working with companies on enterprise mobile strategies, the ability to support a real-time environment is often crucial to optimizing mobile apps and the ROI.  I have personally worked with many large utility companies that wanted to support real-time mobile solutions for their field services technicians, but the biggest challenges were trying to get their back-end legacy systems to work in a real-time environment.  Some simply couldn't make that change, and they stayed with a batch service ticket model and gave-up the attempt to fully optimize their systems.

I came across this excerpt from the article Four Reasons Your SMAC Initiatives May Underperform, "The cost to support and maintain existing IT systems is eroding companies’ ability to fund new investments in social, mobile, analytics and cloud IT initiatives (SMAC). Out of the $3.8 trillion expected in worldwide IT spending in 2013, NPI estimates there will be $760 billion in unnecessary overspending in non-value creation areas such as maintenance and support, over-subscription, license program misalignment, and sub-optimal contract negotiation and management."

That is a problem.  I have also often read that 80 percent of an IT budget goes to support legacy IT environments, leaving only 20 percent of the IT budget left for strategic initiatives.  If this is true (it was when I worked at the computer manufacturer), then our past may be preventing us from achieving our goals in the future.  In order to break this cycle, often something transformational must happen.  Something beyond the normal iterative improvements.  This takes courage.

*************************************************************
Kevin Benedict, Head Analyst for Social, Mobile, Analytics and Cloud (SMAC) Cognizant
View Linkedin Profile

Read the whitepaper on mobile, social, analytics and cloud strategies Don't Get SMACked
Learn about mobile strategies at MobileEnterpriseStrategies.com
Follow me on Twitter @krbenedict
Join the Linkedin Group Strategic Enterprise Mobility

Full Disclosure: These are my personal opinions. No company is silly enough to claim them. I am a mobility and SMAC analyst, consultant and writer. I work with and have worked with many of the companies mentioned in my articles.

Social Analytics for Your Enterprise with Google+ and Ripples - Guest Expert Post


I have Google's Blogger app on my iPhone and iPad mini.  I can write articles for publication from anywhere with an Internet connection, but are they read, are they shared?  That is our subject for today.

One of the biggest growth areas involving mobility is mobile marketing.  If your company's target customers are researching products, comparing products and buying products on mobile devices then the following information about Google+ and Ripples may be of interest to you as it is to me.  I have invited social media expert Allison Rice to share her expertise in this area with us.

Question: How do you know the number of people paying attention to your company's messages or articles on social media?

If you use Facebook, as more than 700 million active users do (most on mobile devices), then you click on your business page's Insights tab and read through about four pages of fairly detailed graphs and statistics. If you're on Pinterest, you've probably already checked out their new analytics page that launched in March, while Twitter users likely get their stats from Twitter Web Analytics.

Most social media sites have some form of analytics page that goes into varying degrees of detail about your social reach. Facebook has one of the more detailed, with information down to what region most of your followers are from and how many of your first time visitors come back for a second, third or even twentieth look at your page.

But sometimes all you want to know is your overall impact. How many people did you reach with a particular post? Did those people care enough about your post to share it with others? Are you really reaching new people or are you just wasting time on a particular social media campaign?

It was just this kind of thinking that led the developers of Google+ to create a unique analytics feature called Ripples. In one glance, business owners can see what, if any, impact an individual post has had in their social community and how it reached.

Making Ripples
Click to Enlarge

One of the neat things about Ripples is that you can view the Ripples of any public post, not just your own. Take, for example, a link that Geekless Tech writer Steven Hughes posted about social media lessons for small businesses on April 19, 2013.  Within four hours it received 133 "+1" or likes and 60 shares. Since it's a public post, we can view the post's Ripples by clicking in the upper right hand corner and selecting "view Ripple."  The Ripple graph that appears shows that, within those four hours, the following things occurred:

The article was reposted 44 times
The article was seen and posted independently by 26 Google+ users, represented by the small, external circles
Harold Gardener and Rex Dow are important influencers as their shares were re-shared by one and two more users, respectively.

Below the larger Ripple graph is a chart that allows you to view the spread of the post as it occurred in real-time. This allows you to see when the most people reposted it, thereby giving you a good estimate on the best time to post in the future for the most reach.

Below that are three short columns. One lists, by name, your highest influencers -- in this case Harold Gardener and Rex Dow. The second shows the frequency of shares per hour, as well as the average chain length, and the third shows the primary language of those sharing the post.

Finally, by hovering over each sharer's name, you can see what they posted along with the re-post, any hash tags they might have included in their post, and their profile image. A running stream of real-time comments and shares on the post also appears to the right of the Ripple with the commenter's image and time of action.

So with essentially one chart, you learn not only how much your post has spread over a given period of time, you also find out:
The best times to post to reach the most people
Which influencers you should appeal to in order to reach more people
How fast your post spread and who it appeals to
What people are saying about it
The virality of your post
What region of the world your post appealed to most

With so much detail in just one glance, enterprises are quickly realizing the value of a Google+ page for their business. Apart from the Ripples aspect, Google+ pages are optimized for higher ranking in search results and the "personal" results aspect of Google searches means that your business is more likely to show up in searches conducted by people in your area, as well as in recommendations within Google+.

Even though some have marked Google+ as a "ghost town," recent surveys show it as having the second highest active user level of social media sites, ranking just under Facebook. And if the ease of use and the ability to see the results of your social media campaigns in quick, easy-to-understand analytics, the simple fact that your business is instantly more visible should encourage you enough to give Google+ a shot.

What aspects of social media analytics have you found to be the most helpful? Which have been the most confusing? What do you like/dislike about Google+ and Google+ Ripples?

Allison Rice is the Marketing Director for Amsterdam Printing, a leading provider of custom promotional products to grow your business and thank customers. Allison regularly contributes to the Promo & Marketing Wall blog.


*************************************************************
Kevin Benedict, Head Analyst for Social, Mobile, Analytics and Cloud (SMAC) Cognizant
View Linkedin Profile

Read the whitepaper on mobile, social, analytics and cloud strategies Don't Get SMACked
Learn about mobile strategies at MobileEnterpriseStrategies.com
Follow me on Twitter @krbenedict
Join the Linkedin Group Strategic Enterprise Mobility

Full Disclosure: These are my personal opinions. No company is silly enough to claim them. I am a mobility and SMAC analyst, consultant and writer. I work with and have worked with many of the companies mentioned in my articles.

Crowdsourcing, Collaboration and Enterprise Mobility

I spent time with a company recently that identified one of their strategic initiatives for 2013 as being crowdsourcing.  Are you familiar with the term?  Here is Wikipedia's definition, "Crowdsourcing is the practice of obtaining needed services, ideas, or content by soliciting contributions from a large group of people."

This company, we'll call ACME Inc., is purposely asking their employees to contribute ideas which are then reviewed, voted on, and the winners identified and rewarded.  I love it!  Now to be sure this is all very new to ACME Inc., but I applaud their thinking!  If employees know their ideas can make a difference and be recognized, and that actual thinking will be rewarded, then the sky is the limit on innovative thinking within a company!  All too often employees think only certain bestowed titles and roles in the company are paid to think, while the rest of the brain power in the company is put on sleep mode.

I am here to tell you - in the coming months, quarters and years, it's going to take all the brain power a company can muster to stay in front of the millions of competing digital disruptors as author James McQuivey calls them in his book Digital Disruption - read the WSJ review here.

With cloud based SaaS (software as a service) solutions available today, even the smallest companies can use world class CRMs, ERPs, SCMs, workforce management systems, finance and payroll systems on a monthly subscription basis.  This means your competition can appear overnight, unencumbered by your overhead, legacy IT systems, debt load, unionized workforce and benefit burdens.  If your company is going to be competitive in the market of the future, things need to change.

I also spent time with another company this month that had completed a POC (proof of concept) with a social collaboration platform.  I asked how the POC went.  The answer - not much happened.  There were no earth shaking discoveries or results to report.  Upon further questioning, the person shared that the social collaboration platform did not include a mobile app.  STOP the PRESS!  No mobile app?  Can you imagine Facebook or Twitter with no mobile app?  They wouldn't have anywhere close to the number of users as they do today.

Very few social networking users wait until they sit down and boot-up the desktop or laptop to become social.  Social is about being connected anywhere and everywhere.  You don't want to wait until later to update people and share your thoughts and ideas.  Social is all about immediacy, and immediacy is all about mobile.
*************************************************************
Kevin Benedict, Head Analyst for Social, Mobile, Analytics and Cloud (SMAC) Cognizant
View Linkedin Profile

Read the whitepaper on mobile, social, analytics and cloud strategies Don't Get SMACked
Learn about mobile strategies at MobileEnterpriseStrategies.com
Follow me on Twitter @krbenedict
Join the Linkedin Group Strategic Enterprise Mobility

Full Disclosure: These are my personal opinions. No company is silly enough to claim them. I am a mobility and SMAC analyst, consultant and writer. I work with and have worked with many of the companies mentioned in my articles.

Google Enterprise, Collaboration and Enterprise Mobility

I would invite anyone in an IT department buried in demand for mobile apps to first take a look at Google Enterprise http://www.google.com/enterprise/, before trying to develop everything yourself.  There are many mobile capabilities already available in the Google world which are free to individuals and available free or on a subscription basis for companies.  Here are a few of them:
  • Google Drive - Keep all your files, documents, spreadsheets, videos, photos, everything digital in a free secure cloud.  Access from any mobile or desktop device. http://youtu.be/wKJ9KzGQq0w 
  • Google+ - Strives to make sharing online, like sharing in person.  We at Cognizant have been using Google+ for many of our strategy groups and discussions.  I love it.  I use it for both work and personal.  I have specific "Circles" and "Communities" for work and personal.
  • Google Hangouts - This is a very powerful solution that let's you video chat with your team no matter where in the world they are located.  Share documents, videos, screens, presentations all while in a free Hangout.   Learn more about them here: http://www.youtube.com/embed/3pmSWh2BQco?cc_load_policy=0&hl=en&cc_lang_pref=en&autoplay=1
  • Google Hangouts On Air - Now broadcast your Hangouts -  I just recorded my first Google Hangout discussion with a group of mobility experts.  You can see it here http://youtu.be/GID7nRwhIIo, however, now you can broadcast Google Hangouts live through YouTube.  I will try that next.
  • Google Apps - I have also been doing a lot of work lately in Google Apps.  I have been collaborating with others on documents, spreadsheets and presentations through Google Apps.  Here is what I am most impressed by - you can collaborate on the same document at the same time and see exactly who is editing, and what they are editing in real-time.  Plus, you can start a Google Hangout inside a document so you can video chat with those that are editing.  See an example here - http://www.google.com/enterprise/solutions.html
  • Enterprise Controls - Google is rapidly adding enterprise controls to all of their solutions.  These enable you to integrate with enterprise LDAP (directories) and other things and control who is viewing particular documents and who is joining or able to join different "Circles" in Google Plus.  If you haven't read up on these enterprise controls in a while, it might be good to read this blog from Google - http://googleenterprise.blogspot.co.uk/2012/08/bringing-google-to-work.html.
I am a mobility analyst among other things, so I am always looking at these apps with enterprise mobility in mind.  All of the solutions and features mentioned above are already mobile enabled.  They already run on my iPhone, MacBook Pro and iPad mini.  I don't have to build any apps to get all of these enterprise social and mobile capabilities!

I am also a SMAC Analyst (social, mobile, analytics and cloud), so when I wear that hat, I am interested in how these Google Enterprise solutions are all deeply social and collaboration enabled, mobile, include analytics and all reside in the cloud.

Many companies are years behind and slow to support emerging technologies like mobility, cloud and the social business technologies.  They assume they have to build everything or pay millions of dollars to get these features.  You don't.  They are available today and much of it is free.

In addition, most companies are made up of many small departments, committees, projects and groups.  These small organizations are often dynamic, shifting and often short-term.  They never get a budget to support their collaboration efforts and mobility needs.  Google Enterprise can go a long way toward supporting these kinds of efforts.  Just saying...
*************************************************************
Kevin Benedict, Head Analyst for Social, Mobile, Analytics and Cloud (SMAC) Cognizant
View Linkedin Profile

Read the whitepaper on mobile, social, analytics and cloud strategies Don't Get SMACked
Learn about mobile strategies at MobileEnterpriseStrategies.com
Follow me on Twitter @krbenedict
Join the Linkedin Group Strategic Enterprise Mobility

Full Disclosure: These are my personal opinions. No company is silly enough to claim them. I am a mobility and SMAC analyst, consultant and writer. I work with and have worked with many of the companies mentioned in my articles.

Featured Post

Leadership Advice from a Futurist - A Reading

Leadership is hard.  So for all the leaders and want-to-be leaders out there, here is some advice that I hope you will find useful. ***...