AlacraBlog

Alacra Pulse Adds Twitter, Social Bookmarking Integration

Alacra Pulse has just added two new social media features to help users more easily share critical information with peers:

Tweet This allows users to share their favorite Alacra Pulse stories on Twitter. By clicking the Tweet This button, a draft “tweet” is automatically created, including a short snippet from the specific business event. The user may edit the tweet before posting to their Twitter account.

Tweet This has an added twist: integration with the popular StockTwits service. If you are a StockTwits participant, your tweets will automatically be assigned the “$ ticker” for the company the Pulse event is describing, so your tweet will automatically flow through to StockTwits. StockTwits is a Twitter-based community of more than 70,000 active traders. To join, you can simply follow @StockTwits. There’s more information on the StockTwits page.

Share This is a plugin that allows users to automatically post stories to social media applications like Facebook or LinkedIn, as well as social bookmarking applications including Digg, Delicious, Stumble Upon and others. With a single click, users can post a story to any of more than fifty different social media applications

Alacra Pulse is gaining a strong following among users of business and financial information.

For more information on Alacra Pulse, visit our free version at http://pulse.alacra.com or visit the Pulse product site to learn more about Alacra Pulse Professional, which includes support for watchlists, email alerts, advanced search and other key features.

To stay on top of the latest business events, follow Alacra Pulse on Twitter.

 

 

 

Introducing the Alacra Widget

You may have noticed a scrolling thingy on the right sidebar of this blog in recent weeks. This is the just released Alacra Affiliate Widget.  The Alacra Affiliate Widget is a widgetized version of the Premium Content Ad Network which we launched earlier this year.

The Alacra Affiliate Widget displays contextually relevant content (available for purchase at the AlacraStore) based upon the content of the page it runs on. The goal of the widget is to help readers of blogs, financial news or commentary websites to identify related content that may be of interest to them.

For bloggers and website owners, the Alacra Affiliate Widget provides new ways to monetize their traffic. The widget is built on the Alacra Affiliate Program, so bloggers and website owners share in the revenue generated by reader purchases on the Alacra Store.

Here’s how the Alacra Affiliate Widget works:

• The widget reads the content of the page that it’s on, identifying any companies that the article or blog post is focused on.
• Next, the widget pulls related and relevant content from the Alacra Store, scrolling headlines for those reports for the reader
• For those pages which are not specifically about a company, or where the widget cannot match the appropriate company, it serves up headlines for key topics selected by Alacra editors.
• When a user clicks on any of those headlines, a new window pops up, bringing them to the Alacra Store landing page for that document
• If the user purchases the document or makes any subsequent purchases in the next seven days, those purchases are credited to the website or blog which generated the click, and they share a portion of the revenue

We believe the Alacra Affiliate Widget is a win-win-win proposition.
First, it’s a win for the readers, as the ads that are displayed are contextually relevant. In addition, they are behaviorally relevant as they serve up research content at the time a user is researching a company. Compare that to a typical display advertising network – if a user is reading a page on a financial commentary about HP’s intended acquisition of EDS, a typical contextual ad server will return ads for Hewlett Packard printers or laptops. But, clearly, no one’s reading that article because they want to buy a printer. With the Alacra Widget, the user will see an ad displaying links to recent credit and investment research on HP and EDS, as well as M&A analyses and, perhaps, transcripts from HP’s analyst call discussing the deal. Highly relevant.

It’s a win for blogs and websites who run the Widget. For the reasons described above, much of the advertising on blogs, news and commentary sites does not perform as well as ads on consumer or commerce sites. Users are coming to read and learn, not to purchase products. The Alacra Widget provides website owners and bloggers with an additional way to increase their RPM – revenue per thousand page views. And, the Alacra Widget is complementary to their existing ads, whether Google Adsense, display advertising from ad networks or their own banners.

It’s a win for Alacra publishing partners. More than fifty publishers have partnered with Alacra to provide their content over various Alacra channels. Our institutional channel enables them to get their content in front of investment banks and professional services firms; our ecommerce platform, www.alacrastore.com, puts their content in front of the tens of thousands of researchers and business professionals who visit that site each day. The Alacra Widget helps publishers get their content in front of a multitude of web users at the exact time that they are researching companies, deals and markets. As user behavior shifts, and users move away from destination portals and towards social networks and other new platforms, the Alacra Widget helps publishers get their content in front of those users wherever they might be.

If you’d like to learn more about how the Alacra Widget might fit with your web strategies, contact Barry Graubart at barry-dot-graubart-at-alacra-dot-com.

Enterprise 2.0 = Knowledge Management 2.0

Rafat reported, and Fred posted about Austin Ventures' new $50 million roll-up fund focused on Corporate Social Networking and Services.  The title of Fred's post was "Is Social Enterprise Software an Oxymoron?"  That's a great question.  My view has been that what people call Enterprise 2.0 is really cheaper, easier-to-deploy and more effective knowledge management tools.  The challenge in building a business around this is that, as Fred suggests, most social software that is successful in the consumer space couldn't survive in the enterprise and, there are already a bunch of (very inexpensive) products that meet most of the knowledge management 2.0 needs: Jotspot, SocialText, LinkedIn, salesforce, and so on.  What we've found most recently is a rebirth of Microsoft's Sharepoint in a number of financial institutions and professional service firms.  But even with all the tools, it's often tough to get employees to share effectively within an enterprise, and sharing = social. 

Mary Meeker on Web 2.0

Morgan Stanley technology guru Mary Meeker was among the notable speakers at the Web 2.0 Summit.

Meeker noted that, after underperforming the S&P 500 in six of the previous seven years, tech stocks have outperformed the S&P by 918 basis points, year-to-date.  While much talk has been made of the reemergence of the tech bubble, Meeker pointed out that recent tech stock performance has been supported by positive earnings revisions.  At the same time, she noted that the high valuations given private companies in recent transactions would require superior execution to justify the multiples.

Among key trends Meeker indicated were driving the technology market:
* Growth in consumer Internet-enabled services is driving the demand for technology infrastructure by companies like Yahoo!, eBay, Amazon, Google and others.
* Wireless innovation is accelerating with data traffic growing rapidly
* Storage needs are growing quickly; more than 50 million iPods of 4 GB or larger have been sold along with 7 million phones with at least 1 GB of storage
* Strong data center growth to support today’s technology products
* Enterprises are starting to emerge from their purchasing funk

Going forward, Meeker expects emerging markets to pace the next wave of technology adoption, led by China, India, Brazil and Russia.  She also anticipates Web 2.0 technologies driving enterprise growth, long rumored but yet to happen.

The technology outlook was not all sunny, though.  Meeker suggested that the risk of recession remained a potential challenge and that the risk of subprime woes spreading should not be underestimated.

Her full presentation is available from the Morgan Stanley Global Technology site.

Is Enterprise 2.0 for Real?

While Generation Y has been quick to adopt the so-called Web 2.0 applications (social networking, wikis, blogs and other forms of user-generated content), it's been slow to make its way to the enterprise.

Web 2.0 capabilities lend themselves to expert identification, collaboration and other knowledge management applications.  Yet their viral nature and social focus has kept corporate IT from embracing them to-date.

KPMG has just released the first of a three-part series entitled "Enterprise 2.0: Fad or Future?".  In this first installment, the authors discuss seven "Enterprise 2.0" technologies (blogs, wikis, tagging, mashups, RSS, social networking and prediction markets) and provide substantive examples of how they've been applied in the corporate space.

Of course, with a focus on Web 2.0, the report is available either as a traditional document or as a podcast.

Alacra Wiki adds Consultant, Recruiter Categories

We’ve just added two new categories to the Alacra Wiki.  The new sections provide profiles of leading consultants to the content industry and executive recruiters serving the content industry.

An ecosystem has developed around the content industry, of consultants with niche specialties.  Our Consultant page includes listings of sole practitioners as well as larger consultancies.

Similarly, while many large search firms have a practice in the publishing or media field, many of the senior searches performed in this industry are handled by boutique firms led by professionals with experience in the industry.  Many of these boutiques are profiled on the Recruiters page.

Are you listed on the Alacra Wiki?
The Alacra Wiki is a vertical wiki serving the business & financial content industry.  The wiki is organized into categories such as people, publishers, investors, blogs and more.  Today, there are hundreds of people, companies and databases included on the Wiki.

Anyone can update the wiki by registering at www.alacrawiki.com.  Once registered, for tips on how to add your information, take a look here.

If you’d prefer to have us add you or your company, just drop us a note at customer_service@alacra.com with the details and we'll do the work for you.

Enterprise RSS

Read/WriteWeb highlights a new Forrester Research report on Enterprise RSS: Enterprise RSS Tackles Information Worker Overload. 

Information workers today are drowning in content — email, newsletters, press releases, and spam — and the problem is getting worse. To deal with this tsunami, workers are turning to RSS (Really Simple Syndication). Although efficient for individual information workers, unmanaged, RSS can wreak havoc on enterprise IT. To prevent problems like bandwidth overload and security infractions, information and knowledge management professionals should implement enterprise RSS solutions. Enterprise RSS turbo-charges the benefits of unmanaged RSS adoption with internal content syndication, filtering, and collaboration. It also provides increased security and reduces IT requirements.

Managing RSS feeds is quickly becoming a desktop priority as more and more content is being delivered in this format.  While a year or so ago few if any of our customers had RSS strategies, we're increasingly being asked for advice in terms of managing RSS feeds of both external/premium content and content that is created behind the firewall.   We expect the use of RSS will continue to grow quickly within the enterprise.

Hinchcliffe on Web 2.0 and Corporate Culture

Last month at Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco, Dion Hinchcliffe gave a 3 hour presentation called What is Web 2.0: The Rules for Creating Successful Online Products In The 21st Century. Several hundred people sat through the session in its entirety on a sunny Sunday afternoon.  It was the first session I attended and it was a terrific kick-off for the conference.  Whereas some of the conference sessions had me thinking "this has got to be a bubble," I kept thinking back to Dion's workshop and realized that regardless of what happens in the venture capital world, there's plenty of very useful technology being developed very inexpensively that a lot of people can use.
The best place to get more  of Dion is his blog at ZDNET.  His most recent post is Enterprise 2.0 as a Corporate Culture Catalyst.  (Sadly, there was no EBIC this spring but had there been, I am sure this topic would have been discussed repeatedly.)  Corporate culture can be an obstacle or lubricant for the adoption of new technologies and Dion cites Tom Davenport's skeptical post Why Enterprise 2.0 Won't Transform Organizations to point out the obstacles.  But I'm with Dion - the ease of use (and many other features) of the newer tools makes adoption easy without the permission or power struggles commonly required in a large organization.  And Davenport ends his post with (to my mind) the most important piece of the puzzle:

"I freely admit, however, to one key uncertainty. It's going to be very interesting to see what happens when the young bucks and buckettes of today's wired world hit the adult work force. Will they freely submit to such structured information environments as those provided by SAP and Oracle, content and knowledge management systems, and communication by email? Or will they overthrow the computational and communicational status quo with MySpace, MyBlog, and MyWiki?"

Youth will be served.

Stuff Worth Reading

The Wall Street Journal has an informative piece on Microsoft's Sharepoint collaborative software product: Microsoft Embeds Sleeper in Business Software. Here's the summary from the online version. The shocker is that there are 85 million Sharepoint licenses in the world spread among 17,000 companies.   Robert Berkman at Information Advisor has made this month's Knowledge Management supplement available for free.  It's called Social Bookmarking as a Knowledge Management Strategy. Finally, there's an MIT Sloan Management Review Special Report called The Future of the Web which contains a great piece titled Beyond Enterprise 2.0. 

COLLABORATION SOFTWARE

 

The Situation: Over the past few years, Microsoft has quietly established itself in the emerging market for collaboration software with a product called SharePoint.

Why It Matters: Collaboration software -- which allows workers to share and work together -- is a new strategic foothold for technology makers trying to gain a broader hold on corporate customers.

What's Next: Expect a fierce fight among technology giants -- Microsoft, Oracle, IBM, Adobe and others -- as each tries to become the central player in collaboration.

Social Networks: Obvious Value

The Economist has a two column article on social networking this week called Joined-up thinking. [Sorry, subscription only.]  It's one of those occasional mash-ups of an article that touches on almost everything (MySpace, Jobster, LinkedIn, Visible Path, Walmart's The Hub) but says little.  The two last sentences:

"Social networking sounds great in theory, but the business benefits are still unproven," says Paul Jackson of Forrester.  But if who you know really does matter more than what you know, it has obvious potential. 

But LinkedIn has grown to 10 million users, IBM recently entered the market and any type of social or knowledge management software creates a social network with potential value.  Among other things, social networks can help you find what you need to know quickly, from people you might not have met yet.  There's value in that.