The first letter she asked him to find was ‘O’ which is normally one of the easier ones for Scotty because he knows it looks like a ball or like a Cheerio. Unfortunately, he could not find it and when I looked over his shoulder (I am a satellite dad who tends to linger around and above his kids a bit longer than he normally should do), I noticed that there was no ‘O’ on the keyboard. It had been scratched away due to aggressive usage by numerous school kids. Instead of defending Scotty, I let the teacher explain that it was too difficult a request. To be honest, I also lingered on the fact that Scotty was given a challenging and maybe not worthwhile exercise.

First of all, my kids learn their ABCs in their proper sequential order at home. A-B-C-D-E-F-G. (I guess, however, it might be good to have them randomly select a letter). Secondly, I am not sure keyboards will be around in the next few years. Or at least keyboards will not be as we know them today. They might be more like the keyboard that is part of the iPhone device. Instead of tapping lots of separate keys, we might be rapidly tapping our fingers on glass.

Right now, there are lots of big letters lingering around or on the walls of our house, so that we can reinforce the alphabet. We also go to a number of good websites that provide alphabet games. And despite all this talk about learning with tablets and smartphones, we still have ‘an old school’ nightly routine of reading a book before going to bed. So, I guess somethings might not  ever change…..for a while, at least.

Click the play icon below to hear the interview:

In 2010, Bell was named as one of the top 25 women in technology to watch by AlwaysOn. I was fascinated by some of her previous interviews (see below for a list) and wanted to talk to someone from Intel, a company that is obviously going to play a big role in the future.

When Genevieve told me that she found her job when she met a man in a bar in Palo Alto, I knew I was in for a great discussion. She said, “He (the man in the bar) challenged me to think about how to make what I did more accessible to a wider group of people and introduced me to the people who would become my colleagues at Intel.”

She said Intel realized that her coworkers knew that the people using their products would not look like them in the future; (This made me wonder if other companies have really embraced this), so they hired cognitive psychologists, social scientists, and cultural anthropologists.

While other companies have hired these sorts of individuals, they tend to hit a glass ceiling, or some sort of ceiling, in the company where they cannot influence the final decisions about a product.

This hasn’t been an issue, however, at Intel, where she has a seat at the table with the company’s key decision makers. (I have to say that most of the company’s I have worked at have excluded the researchers and the ethnographers from important product related discussions).

The conversation was especially interesting when we looked at the role of women in technology. While I knew the prevalence of women in technology is staggering, I was amazed at some of the statistics she recited. They each indicated that companies, especially technology companies, need to really to pay attention to women.

Genevieve believes that even though companies have done a decent job in developing products for women, there has been a real disconnect that has been taking place. When women take over certain areas of technology, those areas become devalued.

I think where the disconnect exists and where I think there is great reason to have urgency and attention is that while it is certainly the case that women have achieved parity and in some place dominance of the use of certain kinds of new information and communication technologies, they are nowhere as well represented in the places of the people who make them and design them.

I think those are places that companies reasonably should pay attention, because there becomes a much more interesting question about, “What would it look like if you actually pushed on those spaces and said it’s probably not good enough that women are 17% to 20% of people getting graduate degrees in computer science?”  That’s kind of a shame.

I then asked if she thought it was true that even though men seems to be early adopters of new technology, (think Everett Rogers Diffusion of Innovations)   or Geoffrey Moore’s Crossing the Chasm, women tend to later adopters to new technologies. (Men start using smart phones before women for example, but then women seem to be impact the market more).

Genevieve cited three reasons:

1. Women will not use technology unless it saves time, labor, space, or money.
2. It has to be neutral or subtractive to whatever they carry around with them (think handbag).
3.  The product has to work perfectly the first time out of the box (think about when you use an Apple product).

According to her, Men in the West are proud of when they can master technology, even if it takes an extensive period of time. Women, on the other hand, want it to work right away and work flawlessly. For women, the stories of mastery don’t exist.

We then discussed the importance of taking a holistic approach in developing products (I think most companies talk about understanding the customer, but they attempt to do this from a product perspective and not from a customer service perspective for example).

Genevieve explained why it is important to measure in terms of its “service infrastructure.”  What she meant by this phrase was that “It doesn’t just mean that the screen turns on.” “It means that there’s content.”

Again, I think this is a place where Amazon and Apple, in very different ways, have understood the market well.  They’ve understood that devices are really front ends to services. It the same way, people buy televisions because they may esthetically be appealing? Ultimately what makes a television a good thing is that it’s got content.

Although part of my Future of Work research is looking at the differences between multiple generations, Genevieve recommended that it might be better to look at individuals from a life stage lens or lenses, like when how people change before and after they have kids.
Probably the most fascinating comment of the interview was when I asked Genevieve about what countries are providing the most insight into the future of technology.

I asked this because the US is not always ahead of other countries as illustrated in the case of mobile technology. It was very much to my surprise when she said “Indonesia.”

Interestingly enough Indonesia is Facebook’s second biggest market and was once Blackberry’s second biggest market. It has nearly 300 million people and has an 85% literary and long tradition of adapting technology

Talking to Genevieve Bell was an amazing experience and was a great way to kick off the Future of Work series. The only disappointment of our discussion is when Genevieve told me that I would probably still be creating PowerPoint slides in 2012.

• Transcript of Interview
• Recording of Interview
• Wikipedia Information 
• YouTube Talks

Similar to some of the other women I recently spoke to, Cindy has a degree in Math and Physics with a concentration in Computer Science. She also spent many years at Aberdeen Research, which at the time was one of the premier research companies.

Cindy’s focus is really on how people use technology; “Consume” and “Consumers” were two terms Cindy used often during our discussion indicating that she tries to see things from the point of the view of the person using a given technology. She also makes the distinction between interacting with a device vs. just consuming information from a device. This made me think of the iPad as something you interact and create or be productive with vs. the Kindle which is mainly an information consumption device.

In some ways, though, I would describe her as a loyal skeptic, meaning she is extremely loyal to her work and her clients, but always ready to challenge why someone might need to play with the latest gadget or participate on the latest social network.

She was one of the few technologists to tell me “the iPad doesn’t do it” for her. “From a consumer standpoint, I’m not a big consumer of technology.  I don’t own an iPod.  I don’t own an MP3 player.  I don’t look at technology from a consumer standpoint as much as I do from a business standpoint.  So, it really depends on which perspective you’re looking at technology.  And when I look at technology, I don’t – as I said, don’t look for technology as the next gee-whiz thing  I would only buy an iPad if I thought it was really going to contribute to my ability to do my job and build my business.

While I might be reading into her personality a little bit too much, I see this as an important trait and one that probably contributes to her success, especially because more and more people will be skeptical of social networks, like Facebook, who often changes their privacy policy.

One online community Jutras frequents focuses on Six Sigma, which is something that I had been heavily involved with at Intuit. She said that she likes conversations that focus on certain performance improvement techniques. When it comes to company community websites, Jutras rightly pointed out that they often talk about technology and present their technology as the be-all and end-all, but they don’t focus on the actual business benefits.

Our research at Human 1.0 has also shown that men tend to focus more on functional related information vs. what’s the customer really going to get out of their products. This is similar to the “tell not sell” chant we often hear in management circles.

Jutras prides herself on her ability to “educate” her customers and help them clearly define their own needs. I can easily see how easy it would be for her customers to talk through their business issues with her and work towards defining their own requirement.

In terms of future trends, she sees a big opportunity for companies to leverage enterprise data using their mobile technology. “What’s not pervasive now is being able to directly interact with enterprise data from that mobile device and actually take action.  Most people want to be able get their alerts and notifications on their mobile device; but nine times out of the ten, once they have that alert, they turn that Smartphone into a dumb phone.  They pick up the phone and call someone, and they have someone else actually take the action or investigate the issue.

During our conversation, I noticed that Jutras did a great job on shying away from buzz terms such as Social Business. Her approach is “to look at business issues and needs from what these social streams can bring, and that’s connectivity, and collaboration, and openness.” This is especially true if you start dealing with individuals in more traditional industries such as manufacturing because “they tend to view social as something people do on their personal time.” They do want to collaborate.  They do want to monitor activity.  But to them, that’s not social. Which is, again, highlighting the importance of knowing your audience and customer.

Cindy mentioned a blog that I never knew about — Laurie McCabe’s, which focuses on small and medium size business processes and technology.  When we spoke about LinkedIn and Twitter, she indicated that her view of them have changed over time. LinkedIn Groups first seemed more useful, but now there seems to be a lot of self-promotion and advertising, and Twitter seems to attract a group of people just focused on building up their Klout scores. I tend to agree with this.

And of course the Big Data term was brought up in our discussion. Cindy stated “if companies start to recognize that they need a better job of managing that data, reaching the data, and handling the data, then they’re going to find that the only way they can do that is through some of these technologies, whether it’s accessing it over the cloud, whether it’s through a mobile device, whether it’s monitoring activity streams, or commentary, etc.  By looking at what – understanding what problem they need to solve, and then searching for the technology that can help them solve the problem, then they’ll arrive at that destination, technology-enabled, and also solving a problem.”

Cindy focused at the end of our discussion on the changing role of the IT leader, who has to identify and focus on specific business problems and has to work better across the organization with such groups as marketing. They also need to really live the life of a customer and understand the tasks or needs of that individual. By focusing on these, companies can help people become more efficient in their work.

Cindy is very customer focused and appears to be very efficient in how she manages her business. As I could see from our discussion, her years as an analyst have paid off and really helped build a successful consulting business.

• Transcript:
• Website
• Cindy Jutras’ website

Trends discussed:

1. “Walking with your customer”
2. Importance of identifying and focusing on business benefits and issues vs. talking about technology. Most successful IT people will also understand business issues
3. Downsizing of CIO and CTOs
4. Users of social networks like LinkedIn are becoming too promotional and marketing oriented
5. Enterprises need to leverage mobility for an ongoing relationship

If you are focused on e-Commerce, customer support or involved with any website, you need to think about the implications mobile has on your offerings. If you’ve avoided jumping on this bandwagon, there are some trends that might convince you it is time.

The Demand Exists

1. Smartphone ownership in the USA is 46%.
2. Smartphone adoption is on the rise in nearly every corner of the globe.
3. Since Christmas 2011, the tablet market has grown 19%.
4. Smartphone users are more likely to buy from retailers with mobile- optimized sites.
5. When faced with mobile site difficulty, 40% of consumers said they will go to a competitor’s website, and 19% said that a negative mobile site experience leaves the user with a very unfavorable impression of the company.
6. 62.4 million Americans access Facebook via their mobile device each month, with 38.2 million of these respondents stating that they use their phones to connect to social media almost every day.
7. Nearly 60% of respondents use Facebook via their mobile device to read updates of organizations, brands or events.

(Data above from the Dac Group).

Strategies Currently in Use

Many companies, such as Starbucks, now place more development resources on their mobile platforms than traditional websites. These companies realize that mobile commerce is important to their business and requires:

1. Redesigning and simplifying a company’s website by focusing on marketing to the critical few — the 20% of the features that 80% of their customers use.
2. Price flexibility because consumers can now walk into a retail bricks-and-mortar location, scan the bar code of a product into their cell phone, and quickly do a price check — it forces e-commerce companies to develop different pricing options.
3. Augmented Reality, which enables you to overlay many dynamic content sources into an augmented reality view through your phone’s camera video.
4. Integration of Social Elements providing customers with real-time reviews and information about who in their network has used a certain product.
5. Location Based Promotions leveraging GPS capability and promoting products and services when a customer is within proximity of a retail store.
6. Reduced and Improved Search Results by combining the top two pages of a regular search page into one page — statistics show that most people only view 1-2 pages.
7. More Video especially now that YouTube traffic represents the biggest source of mobile video traffic around the world.
8. Micropayments on the Go where you just pay as you accumulate digital products.
9. Real-time verification of Product Issues by photographing or taking a video of any damaged areas and sending it to the manufacturer or e-commerce site so they can overnight you a replacement.
10. A Facebook Strategy  since nearly 60% of Facebook’s traffic comes from mobile phones, businesses need to think about how to leverage that platform either by selling directly or driving users to their own mobilized site.

Despite the fact that more and more people in the United States walk around with a smartphone or tablet, many companies still have not jumped on the bandwagon; they don’t have a mobile e-commerce strategy nor one for customer service. In short, these companies will need to spend the rest of 2012 and 2013 catching up.

As I surfed the web and prepared for my interview with Maria Klawe, President of Harvey Mudd College and Microsoft Board Member, I found several photographs of her skateboarding around her college campus.  I asked her about this and as I listened to her speak about her skateboarding hobby, I realized it was a good metaphor for several trends we would discuss:

1. Second Careers: She took up Skateboarding when she turned 55, indicating the importance of adapting one’s skill sets later in life in order to evolve with this ever changing world.
2. Reverse Mentoring: She saw it as a great ‘reverse mentoring’ opportunity, where her students could sit down and teach her how to board.
3. Desire for (self) Improvement: She has always challenged herself as illustrated with her unique blend of academia and business experience: Working in management at IBM Research, connecting with key business leaders in her role as Chair of the Computer Science department at University of British Columbia, being the dean of engineering at Princeton University, being on the Microsoft Board, and being the President of Harvey Mudd college.

A great deal of our discussion focused on education. (I think we both believe that you can’t really talk about the Future of Work without taking our current educational system into consideration).

When asked about what needs to be reformed in this country—the United States—and more broadly in the world, Klawe replied, “It’s really more about science and engineering education than it is about science and engineering research.”  “We’re (USA) still very strong in science and engineering research, but I think there really is a need for change in the way we do science and engineering education, both in K – 12 as well as at the undergraduate level.”

She continued, “Traditionally, the way we educate people in both K-12 and then in University, is that we tend to expose them (first) to the basic building blocks of Math and Science before we actually let them see applications, which means students will not get to the application courses like artificial intelligence, computer graphics, human-computer interaction, databases, etc. until their junior year.” “So, it’s important to get students to what I would call hands-on technology as soon as possible.”

“Another key change is creating interactive learning environments, especially for those who do not have access to such great campuses such as Harvey Mudd.”

So, Maria seems to be on a mission to change the way technology is taught in K-12 and in college. She believes society is at a real inflexion point. Thanks to improved broadband access, which has made the web more accessible, there is a real opportunity in education and technology as well as in machine learning and other data techniques. This improved access allows educators to better understand on how to design data analysis techniques, which can improve the overall design of learning activities.

We also discussed another trend or need in corporations, which is diversity training whether it is dealing with minorities and women in the United States or business partners and customer overseas.

In several of my discussions with corporate executives, there seems to be a big gap here.  Klawe mentioned how she thought IBM was still a leader in this area – in helping integrate women and minorities into their organization, as well as help its employees participate on an international level. (IBM is one of 60 Fortune 500 companies to have a female CEO. A survey of 60 major companies by McKinsey shows women occupying 53% of entry-level positions, 40% of manager positions, and only 19% of C-suite jobs).

Some reasons for this cited by Klawe were that women have more interests, so there’s more to life than their work. Another reason is that it’s a challenge to be a women working in a group that consists mainly of men. Finally, women tend to focus less on building their network of “who they know” to get ahead.

We also examined how men and women might use technology differently. Maria said, “One of the things we know about young males and young females is that young males, whether they are young men or boys, are much more likely to get totally immersed in a particular game, and learn every single thing about the intricacies of that game.”

“So, whether it’s World of Warcraft, or StarCraft, or, you know, Final Fantasy – some type of thing – Assassin’s Creed, and so on – you know, they tend to get completely – they get immersed in the culture and knowledge of that game, an extent that is rare for females.”

“You know, there are lots females who are counterexamples to this, but on average that’s true.” “ So, females are more likely to play games socially.”  “They’re more likely to play games on mobile – on phones or on iPads than on, you know, game platforms like Xbox or PlayStation, and so on.”

“In terms of the amount of time that they spend on them, I think we’re – we don’t actually know a lot about that yet, because, you know, the fact that so many women are playing games on their phones and on iPads—my sense is, they often do it, you know, while they’re waiting for something to happen or, you know – and so on and so forth.”  “They’re less likely probably to go and spend three hours playing nonstop, but they may be playing three hours over a day.”

Maria is known as one of the more dynamic leaders and personalities in her field. After talking to her for forty-five minutes, I could see why that’s the case. In fact, after our talk, I wanted to jump in my car and drive from San Francisco down to the Harvey Mudd campus in Claremont, California, and sign up to join her in the cause to improve technology in education. After all, Harvey Mudd’s mission is to educate scientists, engineers, and mathematicians and to be well versed in the social sciences and humanities so that they better understand the impact of their work on society.

Final note: PBS did an interview with Maria Klawe on “Bridging the Gender Gap; Why more Women are not scientists or engineers” the same week of our interview.

• Interview transcript,
• Interview Podcast
• For Wikipedia Info
• Recent New York Times article on Maria Klawe Giving Women the Access Code

Click the play icon below to hear the interview:

Nancy was my computer science teacher back in 1982. At the time, she was doing computer-assisted analysis of semantic patterning in William Blake’s The Four Zoas, which involves identifying semantic / text patterns and considers the way in which these patterns contribute the structure and the meaning of the work.

If this sounds a bit “nerdy,” then it might be important to point out that this was a precursor to text analysis, which data analysts love to do these days. Since Nancy has been in the Computer Science field since the 1970s, I consider her a real pioneer.

Nancy is part of a lineage of great female computer science teachers at Vassar. She eventually replaced Winifed Asprey , who had replaced, Grace Hooper, who many consider the mother of all computing. Grace was one of the first programmers of the Harvard Mark I computer, and developed the first compiler for a computer programming language.

When asked about the changes that have taken place in Computer Science in the last 30 years, Nancy said that even though the core parts of computer science are the same, there have been some significant shifts in computer languages and operating systems in terms of the Future of Computer Science and how it is taught. Nancy stated that while the fundamentals will always be the same, but there’s now a big shift towards parallelism; distributed computing; and, of course; cloud computing. This influences how schools teach computer science, especially in the areas of application-oriented courses.

One of the interesting areas we discussed was remote teaching, which is something Stanford and MIT seem to be pushing more and more. Nancy felt liberal arts schools recognize that this trend could impact their ability to attract students, but right now academic institutions are in a ‘wait and see mode.’ At Liberal Arts schools, the computer science classes are more oriented towards the hands-on-research.

Other shifts have been that there are more women majors in computer science at Vassar these days and that they don’t feel like they are some sort of “geeky weirdo” that’s outside the broad circle of normal people.

I get the feeling though that these women don’t actually have a role model at this time, and as a result, there is no “regular female” model that works for them. Everything is either Barbie, or Butch–not much in between.” (Note: I first asked about the term ‘Butch-Femme,” which I discovered in the book, Beyond Barbie and Mortal Kombat: New Perspectives on Gender and Gaming).

We also discussed some of the differences between the two sexes when it comes to computer programming. Nancy stated that “men are like Windows PCs and soon to be Androids and women are like Apple’s devices”. Maybe my next book should be called ‘Men are Androids and Women are i-Devices;” Men tend to be more ‘hackers,’ working from the bottom up verses women who tend to first design what the structure of a programming language should be.

In terms of Future of Work, Nancy implied that students need to be better prepared for the different career options. Even though companies send their recruiters to campus, there’s an opportunity for the universities to get more alumni to share their work experiences, and for the companies to bring others besides the recruiters to campus.

As Human 1.0 learned from other research, students want to meet employees who do similar jobs to the ones they will be doing after graduation. We found that some companies are hesitant to do this because of the time commitment. Let’s just say this is another area for them to treat even prospective students as key assets.

Final note: One of the themes of this series is the importance of looking back and learning from one’s past to chart out their future. As such, I will be reaching out to people from my past that have provided me with some valuable guidance and learning. Who would have thought in 1979 when I was learning PL1, I would be so heavily involved in the Internet today.

• To listen to the interview
• To read a transcript of the interview
• To read papers by Nancy Ide

• Co-editor-in-Chief, Language Resources and Evaluation
• Book series Editor-in-chief, Text, Speech, and Language Technology, (Springer)
• Founder, the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI)
• President, the Association for Computational Linguistics Special Interest Group on Annotation (ACL SIGANN)
• International Expert, Institut de Linguistique Francaise, Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS)
• Member, Scientific Advisory Committee, Swedish National Data Service.
• Member, Hercules Science Commission, Brussels.
• Member, International Standards Organization (ISO) TC37 SC 4 (Language Resources Standards)
• Convener, International Standards Organization (ISO) TC37 SC 4 WG 1 (Language Resource Management, Descriptors and Mechanisms for Language Resources)
• Co-organizer, Collaborative Resource Development and Delivery, held in conjunction with The Eighth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2012), Istanbul, Turkey, May 27, 2012.
• Co-organizer and Program Committee Co-chair, The Sixth Linguistic Annotation Workshop (LAW VI), held in conjunction with The 50th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, Jeju, Republic of Korea, July 12-13, 2012.
• Scientific Committee, The Eighth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2012), Istanbul, Turkey, May 21-27, 2012.
• Program Committee, The 2012 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, Montreal, Canada, June 3-8, 2012.
• Program Committee, The 50th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, Jeju, Republic of Korea, July 8-14, 2012.
• Invited speaker, Linked Data in Linguistics, March 7-9, 2012, Frankfurt/Main, Germany.
• Plenary speaker, 6th Brazilian School of Computational Linguistics (EBRALC) and 11th Brazilian Corpus Linguistics Meeting (ELC), Sao Carlos, Brazil, September 11-14, 2012.
• Program Committee, META-RESEARCH Workshop on Advanced Treebanking, held in conjunction with The Eighth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2012), Istanbul, Turkey, May 22, 2012.
• Program Committee, Merging Language Resources, held in conjunction with The Eighth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2012), Istanbul, Turkey, May 22, 2012.
• Program Committee, Challenges in the Management of Large Corpora, held in conjunction with The Eighth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2012), Istanbul, Turkey, May 22, 2012.

Projects:

• American National Corpus
• Manually Annotated Sub-Corpus (MASC)
• INTEROP-SILT: Sustainable Interoperability for Language Technology
• XCES : XML version of the Corpus Encoding Standard

This weekend I had some down time and decided to read The Daily You by Josephy Turow, dean of Graduate Studies at the Annenberg Communications School at University of Pennsylyania.

And all I can say is that this book is a must read for anyone working in the digital space, especially advertisers. The book starts out with a nice history of web advertising and then goes on to discuss today’s customized advertising, discounts, news and entertainment , all of which are being tailored by newly powerful media agencies on the basis of data we don’t necessarily know they are collecting and individualized profiles we don’t know we have. Advertisers are placing individuals into what the author calls “reputation silos.” (These are really different psychographic type of segments)

For example, you might be categorized as a Caucasian living in New York City who only eats organic foods and watches Mad Men every week. Is that such a bad thing? It depends on what types of ads and offers are being served up to you based on this information.

The main message of the book is that although we love cool new web based technologies and platforms (Facebook, etc.), the consumer runs the risk of limiting our privacy and anonymity to advertisers.

Reading this book reminded me of my days at AOL, when I worked on their first commercial Internet properties, GNN and WebCrawler, creating advertising inventory. One day back in 1995 stands out for me. It was when Proctor and Gamble, the largest media buyer, wanted to advertise on several of our properties. My co-workers and I spent the rest of the month running around like chickens without our heads making sure everything went perfectly for P&G. It was a simple reminder that the advertiser rules when revenue is involved.

According to the author, we are just at the very beginning of an advertising or consumer behavior tracking revolution as advertisers aim to integrate consumer information across multiple platforms (the web, mobile, and TV). This is Holy Grail for marketers. Companies like Google will also use this information to serve up personalized search results, not just ads. Ironically, when people were asked how they’d feel if a search engine tracked what they searched for, 65% said it was a bad thing. 73% overall said they were “Not OK” with personalized search, since they felt it was an invasion of their privacy.

Although Turow doesn’t touch upon Facebook’s and Google’s recent and ever-changing advertising privacy policies in the book, he does provide some good commentary on this topic in a recent interview he did on NPR’s Fresh Air with Terry Gross.

So far, The Daily You has not gotten the press it deserves. So, take a chance, buy it and read about where media and advertising are going. And for those folks who are media buyers or work with major advertisers, it is important read because of it will provide some valuable insights into customers’ and viewers’ privacy concerns.

Companies can get more informed and responsible by becoming members of the Network Advertising Initiative (“NAI”) and adhering to the Digital Advertising Alliance’s Self-Regulatory Principles for Online Behavioral Advertising. If you’re an online user, you can find out more about online behavioral advertising and learn what choices you have and how to use browser controls and other measures to enhance your privacy.

Since online advertising is becoming more and more complex, what do you think both publishers and advertisers should do in the face of the increasing discussion about consumers’ privacy?

More and more companies are bringing their digital media buys in-house where they can buy the tools and hire the people they need to achieve their goals. They are orchestrating their own ad buys in house. This will probably lead to lower cost and make a more efficient operation.

They don’t need the middleman.

What does this mean for agencies, especially those who focus on media buys? That’s a good question. How do they work better with the tools, the creative teams and the client. Since ‘digital media buying’ is still in its early stages, there’s still time to figure out their future. One area where there is a big opportunity is collecting, analyzing and deciphering data. And taking that data and integrating with other customer / prospect data in your internal systems. But again, companies probably would prefer to do some of this on their own especially if they don’t want to share all their data with a third party.

After all, sometimes, “You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.”

Originally posted @ Digital Marketing 2.0

DataXu Sponsors New Editorially-Independent Marketing Community

Andover, MA – February 22, 2012 – Human 1.0, an international business innovation firm helping clients understand, adopt and execute social business strategies, together with DataXu, provider of the industry’s only fully-integrated digital marketing management platform and number one ranked DSP current offering, are pleased to announce the launch of Digital Marketing 2.0, an editorially-independent thought leadership community for digital marketers.

Living in an era of ubiquitous digital devices is changing consumer behavior and, in turn, driving a paradigm shift in marketing. CMOs unanimously cite that they are underprepared to handle the data deluge generated by consumer interaction with digital media, and are uncertain what tools, technologies, partners and resources they will need to develop new strategies for interpreting the data and making real-time business decisions based on the insights it provides. In response, DataXu decided to launch and support an industry-wide conversation, backed by a research study, on how companies can tap into the power of the customer intelligence derived from a fully digital world.

Digital Marketing 2.0 is edited by Stacy Williams, who for 20 years has helped companies develop and implement their marketing, positioning, and internal and external communications strategies. Along with Williams, there are four main contributors including Dan Greller, an IT executive and former CIO at Legg-Mason, Ian Gertler, Chief Marketing Officer for online advertising Pioneer Cursor Marketing under Lexos Media, David Rogers, the Executive Director of BRITE at Columbia Business School and the faculty director of the school’s Executive Education program on Digital Marketing Strategy and David Allen Isben, a 25-year market-driven business strategies veteran in both the consumer and technology spaces.

“Our community discussions will focus on the promise of Big Data and the ability to create actionable insights that come with digital marketing. The community aims to deepen and drive the conversation and uncover ways in which the entire ecosystem can benefit through shared information and expertise,” said Williams.

The site is sponsored by DataXu and produced by Human 1.0.

The term “Social Business” has been completely redefined from its original meaning. For those of you that don’t know, the term was coined by the Noble Peace Prize Laureate Professor Muhammad Yuna. And now that phrase seems to have migrated away from its ethical goals of helping people with pressing needs, to helping enterprise organizations sell their products and services.

In the newer sense of the term, Social Business has both internal and external implications. For the Enterprise, it requires genuine organizational transformation — into a social business. While this could first start with understanding your customers, providing the right framework and infrastructure will increase the probability of success.

Identify Your Goals

Another important element is getting alignment on your business goals and success metrics. It is important to look at the bigger picture from the outset: what are you really trying to solve? Are you trying to get employees to be more collaborative so they generate more product ideas or are you trying to drive external sales? Or both? These goals could require completely different strategies and programs but in the end they should all circle back to the overall objective — engaging with customers to enhance your business — why should the two be mutually exclusive?

Foster Innovation

The challenge is to foster an environment where employees can collaborate better, have the room to innovate and can become external ambassadors for the company. To do this right, I recommend you focus on humanizing your organization, and if you really want to do that right, you need to start with the people who log into your company email everyday (not all people show up at the office). Humanizing your brand and products also starts with having the support of the leadership at the top, giving people permission to experiment and fail, and to learn and improve over time. At Intuit, we called this “Learn, Teach, Learn.”

At NetApp, they recently announced that any employee could create their own mobile applications. Similarly, Intuit has made a push in innovation in the last few years, with Idea Jams (taking a page from IBM’s Playbooks), by developing small cross-functional product teams and letting employees blog and tweet with minimal corporate directive. Intuit realizes the power of bringing people together who have different experiences, different skill sets and different understandings of technology.

Be Agile

In some companies this requires a complete transformation of the enterprise. In others, it is more a question of the culture, the company’s DNA, and having leaders who are open to a new way of doing business. Social business requires an agile approach. It is about having the infrastructure and insight to anticipate and quickly address the evolving needs of the marketplace.

All of this will impact your company’s external activities. In an ideal world, internal silos would fall like the Berlin Wall. Unfortunately, today, cross-functional teams or centers of excellence are rare. However, each internal group can benefit, whether it is bringing products to market faster, having customers and partners answer service questions, or using word of mouth to generate leads, by cross-functional collaboration.

Build the Framework for Collaboration

A social business recognizes that ‘it’s about the people and for the people,” so companies need to identify tribes who want to collaborate, engage and contribute. They need to create the infrastructure and framework to bring these parties together.

As we have learned at Human 1.0, this can help humanize your brand, which will make your products and services more desirable and approachable. Here are some gentle reminders on how to become more of a social business:

1. Don’t start with the platform or your internal technologies. Many companies license collaborative platforms without focusing on how willing and able people (employees and customers) adopt technology and what the tool needs to accomplish.
2. Start with your employees by building an environment (with them) where they can experiment and learn, and at the same time recognizing and understanding what’s important to them.
3. Create the framework and provide simple guidelines and guardrails for employees on how to engage with customers.
4. Be clear on what you are solving for and how you will measure success.
5. Start with the various tribes in your ecosystem that have similar goals, interests, pain points, language, etc.

Social Business is really about humanizing your company, your brand and your products and services — whether you’re helping companies in the third world or a Fortune 1000 company wanting to continue to be successful in business.

Originally published @ CMSWire.com