Internet-access software applications

Over its lifetime, many software tools have been developed to help find, send and receive information across the Internet. Web browsers used to access the World Wide Web are the latest of these applications. These tools are summarized in Table 3.3. In this section we will briefly discuss how to assess the relevance and challenges of managing the most signifi­cant of these tools in today’s organization. The other tools have either been superseded by the use of the World Wide Web or are of less rele­vance from a business perspective.

1. Web 2.0

In recent years, many tools have been developed which exploit the interactivity and extensi­bility capabilities of the web. These Web 2.0 services were introduced in Chapter 1 and described in the influential article by Tim O’Reilly (O’Reilly, 2005). We will discuss some of the technologies behind Web 2.0 later in this section.

2. Blogs and blogging

‘Blogs’ (web logs) give an easy method of regularly publishing web pages which are best described as online journals, diaries or news or events listings. Many blogs provide com­mentary or news on a particular subject; others function as more personal online diaries. A typical blog combines text, images, and links to other blogs, web pages, and other media related to its topic. The capability for readers to leave comments in an interactive format is an important part of many blogs. Feedback (traceback) comments from other sites are also sometimes incorporated. Frequency can be hourly, daily, weekly or less frequently, but sev­eral updates daily is typical.

An example of a useful blog which can keep marketing professionals up-to-date about e-business developments is the E-consultancy blog (Figure 3.10). Another example, with articles summarizing the latest development in digital marketing structured according to the chapters of a book, is Davechaffey.com (www.davechaffey.com). Business blogs are created by people within an organization. They can be useful in showing the expertise of those within the organization, but need to be carefully controlled to avoid releasing damaging information. An example of a business blog used to showcase the expertise of its analysts is the Jupiter Research Analyst Weblogs (http://weblogs.jupiterresearch.com). Technology com­pany Sun Microsystems has several hundreds of bloggers and has a policy to control them to make positive comments.

2.1. Services to enable blogging

There are many free services which enable anyone to blog (for example www.blogger.com which was purchased by Google in 2003). Blogs were traditionally accessed through online tools (e.g. www.bloglines.com,www.blogpulse.com) or software readers (www.rssreader.com) but were incorporated into mainstream software in 2005-6.

The main tools, which are free or paid-for online services, to create blogs for individual or companies, in approximate order of popularity are:

• Movable Type (movabletype.org) from Six Apart is a download for management on your servers. Paid service.
• Typepad (typepad.com), also from Six Apart who also offer this as an online service like most of those below, which is easier for smaller businesses. Paid service.
• Blogger (blogger.com), purchased by Google some time ago – the best free option?
• WordPress (wordpress.com) – open-source alternative. Highly configurable. Used by many personal bloggers.
• Other open-source CMSs more often used for corporate sites, e.g. Plone, Drupal and Mambo or corporate content management systems such as Microsoft Office SharePoint server (see Chapter 12 for discussion of the management issues).

The blogging format enables the content on a web site to be delivered in different ways. For example, the E-consultancy blog (Figure 3.10) has a lot of rich content related to Internet marketing which can be delivered in different ways:

• By topic (in categories or topics to browse) – example, online PR category;
• By tag (more detailed topics – each article will be tagged with several tags to help them appear in searches) – example, ‘blogs and blogging’ tag;
• By author (features from different columnists who can be internal or external) – example, guest column from Andrew Girdwood on SEO;
• By time (all posts broken down by the different methods above are in reverse date order). This shows the importance of having a search feature on the blog for readers to find specifics – this is usually a standard feature.

These features are useful from a usability viewpoint since they help visitors locate what is most relevant to them.

2.2. Tagging and folksonomies

A defining characteristic of Web 2.0 closely related to blogs is ‘tagging’ whereby users add their own meta-data to content they produce, consume and share. On Flickr (www.flickr.com) and Del.icio.us (del.icio.us) for example, any user can attach tags to digital media items (files, book­marks, images). The aggregation of tags creates an organic, free-form, ‘bottom-up’ taxonomy. The information architect Thomas van der Wal coined the term or ‘folksonomy’ derived from the idea of a ‘folk-taxonomy’ (Fitzgerald, 2006). Folksonomies are flat (that is, they have no hierarchy, and show no parent-child relationships) and, critically, are completely uncontrolled. A key implication of their lack of structure is that they do not support functions such as drill­down searching and cross-referencing. A key implication of their ‘anything goes’ approach is the potential for highly idiosyncratic classifications. The growth of folksonomies has generated a great deal of discussion regarding their potential to interfere with ‘official’ taxonomies and thus to generate ‘search noise’. However, there is also much discussion of the potential for folk­sonomies to coexist with and complement the ‘official’ taxonomies (Johnston, 2008).

3. Electronic mail or e-mail

E-mail is now an essential business communication tool and is also widely used for personal use. The popularity of e-mail as a communication tool has resulted in billions of messages being sent each day. For the individual, managing these communications in their e-mail inbox is rapidly becoming impossible! For the information services manager and indeed any business manager, there are four main controls that need to be considered to reduce the amount of time staff spend reading e-mail.

Controls for managing inbound e-mail can be introduced as part of an e-mail manage­ment policy which aims to minimize the volume of:

1. Spam (unsolicited e-mail).
2. Internal business e-mail.
3. External business e-mail.
4. Personal e-mail (friends and family).

At the same time the policy will seek to improve productivity and the quality of response to customers and partners. The controls that can be introduced in each area are described in Chapter 11.

Outbound e-mail marketing is an important tool for communicating with customers as explained in Chapter 9.

4. Feeds

Feeds are an important method of exchanging different types of information using standard formats typically based on XML. One example of use of feeds to exchange information between databases on two servers is uploading product details and prices to a price comparison site such as Google product search which is facilitated through Google Base (http://base.google.com).

The best-known type of feed is Really Simple Syndication (RSS), also sometimes known as ‘Rich Site Summary’, which is an Internet standard for publishing and exchanging content using XML. From a practical viewpoint it enables two things. First, content can be syndi­cated or published on one site that originates on another site. Second, and of much greater interest to promoting a web site, it is a relatively new method of distributing alerts to cus­tomers. Initially, the RSS messages were received by specialist software which could be downloaded for free such as RSS Reader (www.rssreader.com) or sites which receive feeds such as Netvibes (www.netvibes.com), iGoogle (www.google.com/ig) and Bloglines (www.bloglines.com). These RSS readers, or aggegators, poll for RSS at a defined interval, often once an hour. Figure 3.11 shows an example of a technology trial to deliver different personalized content into a personalized home page.

RSS has been embraced by major publishers such as the BBC and if you visit the BBC web site, you can see its potential. It enables you to subscribe to very specific content that interests you and then provides you with an alert when a new story is published. For example, I subscribe to the e-commerce news channel and that for Arsenal, my football team. In this arrangement subscription does not require opt-in, it just requires a request of the feed. So RSS is potentially a threat to the permission marketing model since there is no data exchange and it is easy for subscribers to switch them on and off.

More technical information on RSS is available at: www.rss-specifications.com/ rss-submission.htm.

RSS feeds are now more widely adopted since it is available beyond specialist readers in the still ubiquitous Microsoft Internet Explorer and Outlook products. According to Avenue A – Razorfish (2008) 55% of web users in the US consume feeds, although this figure will be signifi­cantly lower in other geographical areas. However, the benefits of feeds for consumers are clear:

1. More granular control of communications (e.g. choose content updates from any channel on the BBC site such as the e-commerce section – see BBC site for explanation of RSS consumer proposition).
2. Can switch on and off without registration (reduces control of marketers). Someone could subscribe to holiday offers within a 2-week period from a travel web site for instance.
3. Little or no spam since messages are pulled to the reader from the server (currently – although ads may be placed within a feed).

There are certainly disadvantages to RSS from the consumer viewpoint. That it requires a separate inbox or reader to set up and monitor has deterred many. It also only suits certain types of information – published as single alerts – it is mainly used for short stories and press releases. It has not traditionally been used in a newsletter type format with an edited collection of stories, but this is possible within the specification.

RSS is a threat to e-mail marketers since typically users profile and qualify themselves before opt-in to e-mail. With RSS this permission marketing isn’t necessary since it is a pull service where the user retrieves information from the web site hosting the RSS feed.

IPTV (Internet TV)

The growth in popularity of IPTV or ‘Internet TV’, where TV and video are streamed via broadband across the Internet, is one of the most exciting developments in recent years. In 2007 services offering streamed viewing of hundreds of channels from providers such as the Europe-based Joost (Figure 3.12, www.joost.com) and the US service Hulu (www.hulu.com) launched, and there are many competitors such as Babelgum, Vuze and Veoh. IPTV is some­times referred to as non-linear TV or on-demand broadcasting to contrast it with the traditional broadcasting to schedule.

IPTV will also be used to deliver standard channels available on satellite, in the UK for example BT Vision and Tiscali TV offer Freeview channels. Then there is also the IPTV option of digital TV downloaded before playback as is possible with many traditional broad­casters such as the BBC, Sky or ITV using peer-to-peer distribution from technology providers such as Kontiki (a commercial version of BitTorrent, where many users download and share small chunks of the programme). Who pays for the large bandwidth required by IPTV is an ongoing debate covered in the next section on net neutrality. Ultimately it will be the consumer, but many ISPs have accused broadcasters of increasing bandwidth usage!

It will be essential for marketers and ad agencies to learn how to exploit the new IPTV in order to reach these audiences online who may be forsaking traditional media for ever – already some digital technophiles do not and will never own a conventional TV – all TV is delivered via Internet Protocol!

Providers of IPTV services such as Joost are experimenting with new ad formats since the days of the 30-second TV spot are gone for ever. Research by Moorey-Denholm and Green (2007) has shown that effective video ads are substantially shorter with brief pre-rolls and interstitial ads between shots being the order of the day. A further challenge is that advertis­ers will only want their ads associated with certain types of content for targeting purposes and to avoid reputational damage to their brand by association. IPTV also offers oppor­tunities for programme makers to involve more interaction with their audiences through chat and channel forums. Of course, brands can provide their own channels such as the brand channels available on YouTube (www.youtube.com/advertise).

Brand advertisers also have the opportunity to develop their own brief IPTV viral clips to spread their message – witness the 2007 video viral clips from Cadbury and a follow-up spoof from Wonderbra which gained millions of views on YouTube. Because of limits in the amount of video that can be uploaded and control of the environment there are some sub­scription payment video hosting services such as MyDeo (www.mydeo.com) emerging.

Peer-to-peer IPTV facilities use a similar technological approach to BitTorrent which was developed in 2002 to enable sharing of large audio and video files. The BitTorrent protocol breaks a large file into smaller segments and these are then downloaded by different client computers. Once downloaded, a fragment can then be uploaded by other computers to form a ‘P2P swarm’. Fragments are then reassembled by BitTorrent software on a user’s computer. BitTorrent has become very popular with home users (and unpopular with copyright hold­ers such as movie studios) and it is thought it may account for a sizeable proportion of Internet traffic and will be a major strain on Internet performance in the future.

5. Voice over IP (VoIP)

Voice over IP (VoIP) is a relatively new approach which can be used for transmitting voice over a LAN or on a wider scale. You will remember that IP stands for Internet Protocol and so VoIP enables phone calls to be made over the Internet. IP enables a single network to handle all types of communications needs of an organization, i.e. data, voice and multimedia. VoIP (pronounced ‘voyp’) is proving increasingly popular for reducing the cost of making phone calls both within an office and for calls between offices, particularly internationally. IOD (2005) estimates that after initial investment, the cost of managing a converged VoIP com­munications system could be 50 per cent lower than managing separate voice and data systems. In the longer term it will also be used by major telecommunications companies such as AT&T and BT to replace their existing voice networks with IP networks.

In addition to the cost-reduction benefits, other benefits include:

• Click-to-call – users click the number they want from an on-screen directory to call.
• Call forwarding and conferencing to people at other locations
• Unified messaging. E-mails, voicemails and faxes are all integrated into a single inbox.
• Hot-desking – calls are routed to staff wherever they log-in – on-site or off-site.
• Cost control – review and allocation of costs between different businesses is more transparent.

To implement VoIP several options are available to managers:

• Peer-to-peer. The best-known peer-to-peer solution is Skype (purchased by eBay in 2005) which offers free calls or video-conferencing between Internet-connected PCs that are enabled with a headset (sometimes called ‘softphones’). A service called SkypeOut enables calls to landlines or mobile phones at a reduced cost compared to traditional billing. This service is only really suited to smaller businesses, but could be used in larger businesses for some staff who call abroad frequently to bypass the central system.
• Hosted service. This principle is similar to hosted software from application service providers (ASPs). Here, a company makes use of a large centralized IP-based system shared between many companies. This potentially reduces costs, but some companies might be concerned about outsourcing their entire phone directory.
• Complete replacement of all telephone systems. This is potentially costly and disruptive in the short term, but new companies or relocating companies may find this the most cost- effective solution.
• Upgrading existing telephone systems to use VoIP. Typically, the best compromise for existing companies.

5.1. Widgets

Widgets are different forms of tools made available on a web site or on a user’s desktop. They are a relatively new concept associated with Web 2.0. They either provide some functionality, like a calculator or they provide real-time information, for example on news or weather.

Site owners can encourage partners to place them on their sites and this will help educate people about your brand, possibly generate backlinks for SEO purposes (Chapter 9) and also engage with a brand when they’re not on the brand owner’s site. Widgets offer partner sites the opportunity to add value to their visitors through the gadget functionality or content, or to add to their brand through association with you (co-branding).

Widgets are often placed in the left or right sidebar, or in the body of an article. They are relatively easy for site owners to implement, usually a couple of lines of Javascript, but this does depend on the content management system.

The main types of widgets are:

1. Web widgets. Web widgets have been used for a long time as part of affiliate marketing, but they are getting more sophisticated, enabling searches on a site, real-time price updates or even streaming video.
2. Google gadgets. Different content can be incorporated onto a personalized Google ‘iGoogle’ home page, as is shown by the feed contents displayed in Figure 3.12.
3. Desktop and operating system gadgets. Vista, the new Microsoft operating system makes it easier to create and enable subscription to these widgets and place them into sidebars.
4. Social media widgets. These encourage site visitors to subscribe to RSS or to bookmark the page on their favourite social media site like Delicious, Digg or Technorati.
5. Facebook applications. Facebook has opened up its API (application programming inter­face) to enable developers to create small interactive programs that users can add to their space to personalize it. Charitable giving site justgiving has a branded app with several hundred users.

5.2. Atomization

Atomization is a way of summarizing a significant trend in Web 2.0 which incorporates some of the marketing techniques we have reviewed such as posts on social networks, feeds and widgets.

Atomization traditionally refers to fine particles of powder or liquid, but in a Web 2.0 context it describes how the content on a web site can be broken down into smaller compo­nents and then can be released onto the web where they can be aggregated together with other content to provide content and services valuable for other site owners and visitors.

For site owners, options to consider for the application of atomization include:

1. Providing content RSS feeds in different categories through their content management system, for example, the BBC effectively providing tens of thousands of newsletters or their site at the level of detail or granularity to support the interest of their readers, i.e. separate feeds at different levels of aggregation, e.g. sport, football, Premier League football or a fan’s individual team.
2. Separate out content which should be provided as a data feed of news stories or statistics into widgets on other sites. Example – the 2007 launched UK retail statistics widget dash­board for iGoogle.
3. Develop web services which update widgets with data from their databases. A classic example is the justgiving widget (justgiving.com) where money raised by a charity donor is regularly updated.
4. Create badges which can be incorporated within blogs or social networks by their fans or advocates. The membership body Chartered Institute of Personnel and Developments (CIPD) does this well through its ‘link to us’ programme (cipd.co.uk/absite/ bannerselect.htm) which encourages partners to add banners or text links to their site to link to the CIPD site. Similarly, Hitwise encourages retailers to link to it through its Top 10 Award programme (an award for the top 10 most popular web sites across each of the 160+ Hitwise industries by market share of visits.
5. Review whether widgets or feeds from other companies can be included within their content to provide value for their users.

Source: Dave Chaffey (2010), E-Business and E-Commerce Management: Strategy, Implementation and Practice, Prentice Hall (4th Edition).