InformationWeek gauges IT project priorities in the enterprise, and gives tech marketers an idea of their prospects and customers’ mindset for the rest of the year. This year’s study shows that technology professionals want to deliver business value, but have a hard time breaking out of the vicious circle of underfunding and playing catch-up. The good news is that more than 39% of survey respondents are reporting an IT budget increase for this year, and say the increase will be between 10% and 14%.

We heard from 513 business technology professionals in our InformationWeek 2013 IT Spending Priorities Survey. All participants are involved with setting, managing, or have a working knowledge of at least some part of their organizations’ IT budgets. Our new report includes insight and data on:

• 2013 IT Budget
• 2013 Business Technology Priorities
• Centralized vs. Business Unit Technology Spending
• Scrutiny of IT Project Spending
• 2013 IT Initiatives
• Top IT Projects for 2013

Download the full report today and see where your technologies fall on the priority and spending list.

2013 IT Spending Priorities Report
pdf | 3.08 MB
Please log in or register to download this file.

+++

B2B media and marketing professionals have to rethink how we serve professionals to attract new customers and create new products and revenue streams.  One of the most effective ways to make this happen is through customer modeling: using data, insights and targeted marketing techniques to unlock new opportunities.

There are many variations and interpretations of data-driven customer modeling.  My colleagues and I at UBM Tech defined customer modeling in a few ways (often these can overlap):

• Discover new customers – “find me more of these types of professionals”
• Develop new products – “uncover unmet customer needs”
• Improve customer engagement – “deliver targeted content and offers”

Our effort to gain deeper insights and apply customer modeling started with overhauling our technology and processes.  We needed the tools and techniques to capitalize on the data, draw business and customer insights and act on them in our media and marketing programs.  This is a work in progress as technologies evolve and techniques are mastered (you are never done building and iterating).

The first step was to consolidate our databases, from roughly 23 databases to one, providing a single, 360-degree view of our customers (audience).  We also deployed a marketing automation system (Eloqua) to automate our customer communications processes as well as our ability to capture and integrate online and offline behaviors and preferences.

At the same time, we began to deploy techniques to convert organic web traffic from passive visitors to active registered users.  We did this by leveraging both existing high-value content and creating specific types and formats of content (special reports, research, infographics, slides shows, etc.) targeted to specific visitors. Then, we applied analytics and gathered data to set benchmarks to understand what was working so we could deploy similar approaches on a larger scale.

The data we aggregated over time allowed us to segment customers, providing both a way to identify the best methods to engage and convert prospects to customers and to set customer valuation, what we call ARPU (average revenue per user).

Frictionless Engagement

Another important piece of the puzzle was to make the customer/user experience frictionless and easy to engage with brands, content and products.  This includes the ability for the user to control preferences for how they are communicated with and what they want to receive, and when.  This effort is ongoing; because of many disparate legacy systems, we still have a ways to go.

As these key pieces were implemented, we were able to yield positive results.  Here are some ways in which we are utilizing customer modeling to drive new customers and revenue:

• Customer segmentation:  We segmented our database into five unique profiles based on past behavior and engagement.  This guided us on how to communicate with customers/prospects in unique ways.  For example, nearly 50% of the database records were “fading” – meaning these users had not engaged with us in the last 12 months.  Instead of sending more product offers, we targeted them with “we want you back” communications, offering unique content based on past behaviors. The content included special reports and career-oriented information.  This effort resulted in more than 53,000 re-engaged, reactivated customers, a large number for B2B media.  With ARPU at approximately $150, you can see the potential for revenue growth.
• Identify untapped or non-core audiences: Our core audience is information technology (IT) professionals.  However, through regression analysis to identify patterns, we found that there were non-IT people (lawyers and professors, for example) who were paying to come to our educational conferences. We are now able to develop new content tracks for these types of non-IT pros and tailor our communications to their needs, making the content much more relevant.
• Cross-sell and up-sell products:  It would make sense that somebody who downloaded white papers or reports on cloud security, for example, would also be interested in attending events on the same general topic.  Over a 12-month period, we were able to cross-sell using this technique, yielding nearly $2.5 million in identifiable revenue we can attribute to these efforts.

Creating A Data-Driven Culture

These results don’t happen overnight.  Organizations must begin to create a data-driven culture to support these efforts.  Here are some things you can do to make build a strong foundation for data-driven marketing and customer modeling:

• Build a blueprint and then achieve quick wins. Like any successful project, define what success looks like, create a blueprint, go at it and adapt along the way.
• Start with a business/brand that has the most upside. Avoid “big bang” projects that require deployment across the entire organization.
• Create a culture of measurement, metrics and analytics. Using data to drive insights can eliminate guess work and back and forth.  Just as importantly, using data builds trust with stakeholders and can enable more funding to create even bigger results.
• Develop data-driven talent. This is one of the most underestimated areas.  You can accelerate your impact by both developing/training existing team members and bringing in outside talent with expertise and a “make it happen” attitude.

We believe we are just scratching the surface of what is possible and, by no means, have we unlocked the “holy grail” yet.   We are developing our blueprint, looking for quick wins and sharing our learnings along the way.

+++

Originally published in eMedia Vitals on May 1, 2013.

It wasn’t long ago that companies such as Jive and Yammer were proclaiming the era of the social enterprise. Knowledge workers no longer would be slaves to email. The best parts of social media would find their way to the workplace (sans photos of drunken friends). Knowledge and data would be found and shared with ease. Communication would be neither push nor pull but one or the other in the most appropriate times.

And indeed the social enterprise has shown its worth. Insurance giant Allstate’s 10-day innovation blitzes spring to mind: Practical applications of internal crowdsourcing and collaboration techniques to inspire new business ideas have become part of Allstate’s culture. In vertical industries like education, social collaboration solutions like Edmodo are re-writing how teachers and students interact and learn.

The question now isn’t whether such tangible results, or even less lofty ones, are worth pursuing. They are. The challenge now is how to wire social constructs into all business practices. Soon enough, social business will simply be business as usual.

The technologies and platforms are still important, and will become more so, but companies will harness their power more in the context of business tasks and within “non-social” applications.

Adam Pisoni, Yammer’s co-founder and now the general manager of engineering in Microsoft’s Office division, talks about a future filled with context. “Social feeds are just a user interface,” Pisoni says, emphasizing that social messages are encoded with information such as location, conversation participants, roles and other data often derived from mobile (and, in the future, wearable) devices. That infusion of informational structure and relevance is changing the potential of social interaction. Business users connect not for the sake of conversation (being social), but to complete a task, share knowledge and discover opportunity — doing so with context is far more efficient and effective. Marketing opportunities might be more ripe for exploitation when, say, location and weather data are factored in, for example. (Pisoni will be part of the E2 keynote lineup, and we’ll cover that ground.)

Yammer competitor Jive, another early social business leader, finished its most recent fiscal quarter with 33% year-over-year revenue growth, including strong customer renewal numbers. The vendor’s latest product reflects its work on partnerships: integrations with Box.com and Salesforce.com — to drive specific business outcomes, around shared documents and projects, or sales opportunities, for example. Jive’s goal is to make other business processes work better within Jive, to make it a hub of communications to simply “get work done,” a company spokeswoman says.

Jive’s recent acquisitions of Clara and StreamOnce point toward that more streamlined social future. StreamOnce, for example, brings LinkedIn, email, Marketo (marketing automation), Salesforce (CRM) and Workday (HR) into the social sphere. (Jive CTO and co-founder Matt Tucker and Marketo CMO Sanjay Dholakia will also be part of the E2 Conference keynote lineup.)

Social Business In Context

Salesforce is the most visible driver of social business in the context of an enterprise application, making Chatter a core service of its cloud-based CRM offering. Now, having hammered home the social enterprise message, CEO Marc Benioff is talking more about customer-centricity, where other data points, such as location awareness and identity management (read: more context), are important. “All of these things are taking us to a customer revolution, and it’s the next logical step for our industry,” Benioff said at a recent gathering in New York.

Just last week, Salesforce announced Communities, which brings the notion of context full circle. Collaboration systems, Salesforce says, are “disconnected from the business.”

Alex Dayon, Salesforce.com’s president of applications and platforms, says: “The next generation of enterprise apps are social with business data embedded at the core and accessible from any device.” The goal is to deliver more data with more context to more constituents (in its case, communities of sales and marketing partners).

Workday CTO Stan Swete talks about integrating social platforms and social techniques with Workday objects. For example, Workday’s HR suite features built-in commenting and exposes shared professional experiences among workers. (Swete will be a featured keynote speaker at the E2 Conference.)

Kenandy, another emerging leader in cloud-based ERP (manufacturing and financial applications), is built on Salesforce’s Force.com platform, and it’s decidedly social. A manufacturing company can create a purchase order, find out if the supplier has parts via Chatter and embed that interaction into the context of the purchase order. “Social in the context of doing business,” is how a Kenandy spokesman phrases it. Sound familiar?

Enterprise application vendor Infor last month rolled out Ming.le, a collaboration feature where users can follow not just people but KPIs, data, documents and workflows. One customer Infor cited is using the technology internally and with partners, in the context of inventory lookups, so that information about part availability, approvals and other communication is all accessible in one place.

Naturally, the pure plays such as Jive and Yammer see social interactions through the lens of a platform, whereas application vendors see that interaction through their own application viewfinders. Either way, the implicit message is that context and relevance (and, yes, Salesforce, the customer) will drive the true value of social business.

Social is simply the means to a business end.

+++

Originally posted on InformationWeek Social Business on May 14, 2013.

SAN FRANCISCO, CA — May 14, 2013 – Today, Black Hat, the world’s leading family of information security events, announced that Gen. Keith Alexander – Commander, U.S. Cyber Command/Director, National Security Agency/Chief, Central Security Service (NSA/CSS) — will present the Day One keynote address at Black Hat USA 2013. Black Hat USA will take place July 27 – August 1, 2013, at Caesar’s Palace in Las Vegas. For more information and to sign up for early registration by May 31, please visit http://www.blackhat.com/us-13/.

A highly regarded advocate of battlefield visualization and “data fusion” for more useful intelligence, Gen. Alexander has led NSA/CSS since 2005. NSA/CSS gives the nation a decisive edge to make information and information technology an asset for the United States and a liability for its adversaries. It applies tools and tradecraft with creativity and agility – maintaining capabilities that exceed what others think is possible. The aim is to discover, make sense of, and securely share information at Net speed. What’s more, NSA/CSS measurably improves the security of critical information systems and other operations.

At the helm, Gen. Alexander’s depth of experience has made all the difference.

In 2010 the U.S. Senate confirmed Gen. Alexander to head U.S. Cyber Command as a four-star general. The establishment of Cyber Command both unified and strengthened the Defense Department’s work to protect vital networks and ensure integration of cyber operations.

On the whole, he emphasizes, success is measured by how well the government collaborates with partners and customers.

“As our dependence on information networks increases, it will take a team to eliminate vulnerabilities and counter the ever-growing threats to the network. We can succeed in securing it by building strong partnerships between and within the private and public sectors, encouraging information sharing and collaboration, and creating and leveraging the technology that affords us the opportunity to secure cyberspace,” Gen. Alexander said. “Black Hat provides a great venue to have that productive dialogue by bringing together world-class researchers, technical experts, government officials, executives, and students for critical collaboration and education.”

Gen. Alexander continued, “It is my hope that in sharing some of my insights and perspectives with the information security community at Black Hat, we will continue to cultivate the information sharing and collaborative relationships needed to address the cyber threats facing global society.”

Black Hat USA will welcome Gen. Alexander to the stage on July 31, 2013. His keynote will give attendees an unmatched insider’s look into the U.S. Cyber Command and the interworking of offensive cyber strategy.

“Gen. Alexander’s role is one of the most unique in the information security field. He manages risk in ways most of us will never understand. The saying, ‘walk a mile in my shoes,’ does not apply here, so hearing his story and perspective on international risk management will be both valuable and inspirational for the next generation of information security professionals,” explained Trey Ford, General Manager, Black Hat. “We are honored he is joining us this year in Las Vegas.”

This year Black Hat USA will welcome security experts, public and private sector security professionals and underground hackers to Las Vegas for a first-hand look at groundbreaking new research, vulnerabilities and security tools from around the world.Sponsors of Black Hat USA include Diamond Sponsors: Microsoft, Qualys, RSA; Platinum Plus Sponsors: Accuvant LABS, Alien Vault, Cisco, Core Security, LogRhythm, Looking Glass; Platinum Sponsors: Blue Coat, IBM, Lieberman Software, Solera Networks, Symantec and Trustwave.

For more information and to register for Black Hat USA 2013, please visit:http://www.blackhat.com/us-13/.

Connect with Black Hat

Twitter: https://twitter.com/BlackHatEvents - hashtag #BlackHat
Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/blackhat
LinkedIn Group: http://www.linkedin.com/groups?home=&gid=37658
Flickr: http://www.flickr.com/photos/blackhatevents/

SAN FRANCISCO, CA — May 14, 2013 – Today, Black Hat, the world’s leading family of information security events, announced that Gen. Keith Alexander – Commander, U.S. Cyber Command/Director, National Security Agency/Chief, Central Security Service (NSA/CSS) — will present the Day One keynote address at Black Hat USA 2013. Black Hat USA will take place July 27 – August 1, 2013, at Caesar’s Palace in Las Vegas. For more information and to sign up for early registration by May 31, please visit http://www.blackhat.com/us-13/.

A highly regarded advocate of battlefield visualization and “data fusion” for more useful intelligence, Gen. Alexander has led NSA/CSS since 2005. NSA/CSS gives the nation a decisive edge to make information and information technology an asset for the United States and a liability for its adversaries. It applies tools and tradecraft with creativity and agility – maintaining capabilities that exceed what others think is possible. The aim is to discover, make sense of, and securely share information at Net speed. What’s more, NSA/CSS measurably improves the security of critical information systems and other operations.

At the helm, Gen. Alexander’s depth of experience has made all the difference.

In 2010 the U.S. Senate confirmed Gen. Alexander to head U.S. Cyber Command as a four-star general. The establishment of Cyber Command both unified and strengthened the Defense Department’s work to protect vital networks and ensure integration of cyber operations.

On the whole, he emphasizes, success is measured by how well the government collaborates with partners and customers.

“As our dependence on information networks increases, it will take a team to eliminate vulnerabilities and counter the ever-growing threats to the network. We can succeed in securing it by building strong partnerships between and within the private and public sectors, encouraging information sharing and collaboration, and creating and leveraging the technology that affords us the opportunity to secure cyberspace,” Gen. Alexander said. “Black Hat provides a great venue to have that productive dialogue by bringing together world-class researchers, technical experts, government officials, executives, and students for critical collaboration and education.”

Gen. Alexander continued, “It is my hope that in sharing some of my insights and perspectives with the information security community at Black Hat, we will continue to cultivate the information sharing and collaborative relationships needed to address the cyber threats facing global society.”

Black Hat USA will welcome Gen. Alexander to the stage on July 31, 2013. His keynote will give attendees an unmatched insider’s look into the U.S. Cyber Command and the interworking of offensive cyber strategy.

“Gen. Alexander’s role is one of the most unique in the information security field. He manages risk in ways most of us will never understand. The saying, ‘walk a mile in my shoes,’ does not apply here, so hearing his story and perspective on international risk management will be both valuable and inspirational for the next generation of information security professionals,” explained Trey Ford, General Manager, Black Hat. “We are honored he is joining us this year in Las Vegas.”

This year Black Hat USA will welcome security experts, public and private sector security professionals and underground hackers to Las Vegas for a first-hand look at groundbreaking new research, vulnerabilities and security tools from around the world.Sponsors of Black Hat USA include Diamond Sponsors: Microsoft, Qualys, RSA; Platinum Plus Sponsors: Accuvant LABS, Alien Vault, Cisco, Core Security, LogRhythm, Looking Glass; Platinum Sponsors: Blue Coat, IBM, Lieberman Software, Solera Networks, Symantec and Trustwave.

For more information and to register for Black Hat USA 2013, please visit:http://www.blackhat.com/us-13/.

+++

With the rise of Klout and other personal influence measurement tools, much of the talk around influence marketing has focused on how to best target and engage high-ranking influencers.

But new research is showing that a focus on mid-level influencers is actually far more effective when it comes to engagement and driving earned media, and at a much more efficient cost than working with “professional” A-list influencers.

This is the conclusion from a SocialChorus analysis of over 200 social word-of-mouth campaigns, which shows that large-scale social engagement is increasingly driven by a group of influencers the company refers to as the “Power Middle.”  These influencers typically have a smaller but very loyal audience (2,500 to 25,000+ unique monthly visitors to their blog or other social networks). Because their communities are so loyal, these Power Middle influencers drive an average of 16x higher engagement rates than paid media and owned alternatives–and at a much lower individual cost than professional influencers.

Interestingly, these findings match what many experienced marketing people have known for years. In an interview a year ago, Zoetica co-founder Kami Watson Huyse talked about how to leverage the power of the “Magic Middle“–a term based on a 1996 article by Technorati founder David Sifry–to build long-term relationships and form enduring communities around your brand or initiative.

The SocialChorus analysis finds that brands can achieve both scale and engagement when working with 100 – 300 power middle influencers, vs a smaller number of high-end influencers with larger followings. Over the course of three months, a Power Middle campaign with 100 influencers routinely drives 10 actions per influencer and 30,000 to 40,000 social endorsements delivered to millions of consumers.

Why do these mid-tier influencers drive so much engagement? Their audience isn’t just consuming news but often feels a true connection and allegiance to the influencer. They are part of a community and an ongoing conversation.  As a result, a mid-tier influencer’s audience is much more likely to engage with an influencer-endorsed brand.

Campaigns targeted to Power Middle influencers tend to be far more cost-effective. In the 200+ programs SocialChorus has run, the “social currency”–content, access, product and other rewards used to engage the influencer–has averaged under $100 in total value per influencer, within a range of $0 (when highly exclusive content is involved) up to $500. In contrast, professional influencers can require thousands, even tens of thousands of dollars to work with brands. The lower cost of the Power Middle allows brands to approach a wider set of influencers with different personalities, perspectives and vertical areas of expertise, which, in turn, can drive more focused engagement from each influencer’s audience.

Successful social brands truly see these campaigns as two-way relationships. One way they increase audience actions is by repurposing influencer-generated content on their owned channels. Influencers appreciate the attention and are more likely to link to your brands and encourage their audiences to do the same.  SocialChorus found that when their clients repurpose Power Middle influencer content on their owned channels, it outperforms the brands’ own content by an average of 3 to 5X and as high as 10X when used for (Facebook and Twitter) sponsored stories.

Echoing the conclusion drawn by the influence marketing panel at this year’s SXSW, the Social Chorus analysis shows that ongoing relationships are more important and effective than sporadic campaigns.

For more details on the analysis, including how SocialChorus measures and compares engagement rates across different types of platforms and campaigns, you can download the complete Power Middle white paper (free, registration required).

+++

Originally posted by Tonia Ries on The Realtime Report.

It’s a possible outcome for large organizations already adopting the cloud, and will depend upon whether IT can adjust to its changing role.  Our 2013 InformationWeek State of Cloud Computing report discusses how despite the massive potential for the cloud to revolutionize IT, there are very few adopters who believe it will fundamentally change the way they do IT.

The survey tells a tale of tepid adoption that’s both unsurprising and discouraging. To understand the breakdown between private/hybrid and public models we asked about not only SaaS, PaaS and IaaS, but use of virtualization. Among 446 business technology professionals at organizations with 50 or more employees, 64% are virtualizing; that meshes with last summer’s Private Cloud Survey, which showed 51% of 414 ­respondents with clouds in place or starting down the road; we’ll buy that the additional 13% have hybrid clouds in place.

However, the number in our current survey using the most popular public option, SaaS, actually dropped eight points since our 2012 State of Cloud poll.

In this report, we walk through the main themes revealed by the survey results. In particular,  the differences (where they exist) between the way that the cloud is adopted by startups and the early majority versus our survey respondents. Additional data points include:

• 66% have between two and five providers in use
• 51% cite security defects in the technology itself as a top cloud risk
• 33% do not integrate various cloud services; users have separate accounts for each provider
• 21% accept SLA terms as they are, up from 15% in 2012
• 19% rate the general performance of cloud-based applications better than same app hosted in-house

Download the full report today and get vital information that can help you best market your cloud services.

2013 State of Cloud Computing
pdf | 2.3 MB
Please log in or register to download this file.