6 Best Practices for Digital Pros and CXOs that Click

Digital marketing is fast coming into its own as a specialized discipline. From the early days of setting up websites left, right and center and cutting checks for search engine optimization, it now encompasses social media, mobiles and apps as powerful new possibilities.

So much so that some companies now have Chief Digital Officers (CDOs). In some cases, the CMO or the CIO may wear the hat of the CDO as well. The point is, the digital realm is getting bigger and more important as you read this.

In a world that is happily clicking away for content, groceries, travel, leisure and anything that fills up our life, how do you do digital? Sure, a bunch of boutique social media firms and others with 360-degree charters and integrated plays have come up recently, but as a digital marketing professional or CXO, it wouldn’t hurt to keep a few best practices handy, would it? So here you go:

1. Identify the digital goals for your organization: There are pioneering companies that have set their ambitions to nothing less than complete digital transformation. At the other end of the spectrum, there are (still) firms that are splitting hair about whether to go beyond a brochure or static website. Deliberate on where your company wants to be in the next one or two years and decide on specific digital goals.

2. Get the T&T (the team and its tools): Both these Ts will be crucial to the success of your digital efforts. However, in all likelihood, if you have the right team in place, they will go find the best digital tools to work with.

Again, in today’s increasingly fluid scenario, having a team doesn’t necessarily mean hiring bench-loads of Facebook junkies; it might work better to onboard a couple of digitally savvy professionals who are nimble-minded. They could even be hand-picked from within the company. Also, they should be able to manage the work outsourced (if any) to specialist agencies, programmers, etc.

3. Have a well-articulated social media policy: We keep reading of employees or customers cribbing on Facebook, Twitter or other social sites, followed by the klutzy approach taken by certain companies to respond to their comments. Given the generally open culture that social media fosters, even those who are not authorized by the company end up jumping in the fray—often causing reputational damage.

Building a brand online may be considered hard but it is nothing compared to the nightmare of salvaging a sullied reputation. It is best to have a detailed, idiot-proof policy (this must remind some of their boss :) concerning the use of social media and responding to comments or taking any other course of action. Goes without saying that a quick complaint-redress mechanism needs to be built alongside the policy. On social media, you must respond in minutes and hours rather than business days or weeks.

4. Mobile in the middle: In the feverish world of e-entrepreneurs, they have a new mantra for a successful business model: it’s called mobile-first. The idea is to think of the mobile phone (essentially the smartphone) as the first touch-point for customers (some storied mobile-first stars include Instagram, WhatsApp, Uber, Spotify and Evernote, among others).

Not every corporate entity on Earth needs to be mobile-first, of course. But with the usage of mobiles exploding and the number of those phones going smart increasing like crazy, it would be stupid not to give “mobile” the place it deserves. The caveat here is not to think of mobile in terms of any single device but to look at enabling employees, partners, customers—whoever—to interact with your organization anytime, anywhere, using anything that can connect to the Internet (you might have heard of the Internet of Things).

5. Balance speed and quality: If you ask around, most people would agree that the speed of life as well as business has gone up several gears in the past decade or so. In the context of digital, they would also aver that quality—the quality of content, software, etc—has gone down. While the race for digital supremacy is impelling most organizations to cut corners on quality, reduce time-to-market and respond to customers faster than ever, the winners will likely be those who manage a fine balance between speed and quality. It’s tough to achieve, but very much within reach, especially for companies that are not constrained by resources (or mindset).

6. Spread digital as a culture: This one is for the long term as well as the biggest impact. Arguably, it’s also the trickiest one. Remember the old saying, “You can lead a horse to water but you can’t make it drink.” Having said that, people are not horses and digital is much different from water. With a top-down approach, can-do motto, the right tools and persistent monitoring, long-term organizational change can be brought in.

The key here is culture rather than strategy: you can strategize all you want, but unless the organization’s culture is soaked in digital, the results would be sub-optimal. No wonder management guru Peter Drucker is said to have once remarked, “Culture eats strategy for breakfast.” Or lunch, if you are a lunch person, but you get the idea.

And here’s the short, two-word conclusion to this article concerning your digital journey: start now.

(The above article first appeared on IndiaDigitalReview.com.)

5 Things CIOs should Probably Know about the Internet of Things

In the past few months CIOs would have been bombarded with headlines along these lines: Internet of Things will disrupt how business will be done in 10 years; So and So says IoT is a gazillion dollar opportunity; IoT will cause new security headaches for IT managers...etc, etc, etc.

The headlines would, of course, have been followed by futuristic scenarios (some beneficial and some alarmist), details on offerings and products, and other nitty-gritty of what makes IoT so, ahem, different.

And as is likely in such cases of continuous media strafing, people tend to think of the technology either as mere hype or too futuristic or, if I may say, too banal.

But sometimes, when the technology is as all-encompassing as cloud computing or IoT, entire industries, not to speak of companies, can undergo cathartic changes. So let us take a peek at some of the key things CIOs, business decision makers and tech professionals should know about IoT:

The name of the beast: First things first. This much is clear: the idea behind IoT is to get more and more devices, including items of everyday use other than PCs or mobiles, connected to the Internet in order to bring more and more intelligence into the system. So, who coined the term “IoT” and is it the only one to depict that idea?

When I asked Google about it (I didn’t ask Page or Brin but typed in my query, of course), it told me this: “Kevin Ashton supposedly coined the phrase “Internet of Things” while working for Procter & Gamble in 1999.” This puzzled me. See, this information appeared in Google’s own box that comes on top of all other search results, including Wikipedia. I checked Wikipedia, too, and it confirmed the name of the P&G guy. So let’s give the credit to Ashton (though I’m still uncomfortable why Google was unsure and played safe with “supposedly coined”; if Google doesn’t know something for sure, who does? )

As to the terminology, IoT is not the only term and there are other contenders—including Internet of Everything, Internet of Anything and Industry 4.0 (reminds you of Web 2.0, Web 3.0, etc, doesn’t it?) From what I gathered, IoT is by far the most used term, so I’m sticking with it. (There’s another term, M2M, which is considered as the precursor to IoT by many in the industry; while some people quote a few technical differences between the two, it seems M2M is more or less being subsumed or replaced by IoT.)

The scope of IoT is, like, huge: From changing whole business models and impacting supply chains to creating a new environment for how consumers live and how the ever-smarter cities make use of all that embedded intelligence, the scope of IoT is limited only by human imagination.

If you look at the projections for the number of devices to be connected to the Net or the estimated revenue impact from IoT, humongous is the word. While research firm Gartner says the number of connected devices will grow from less than a billion in 2009 to 26 billion units in 2020, estimates from Cisco suggest that 25 billion devices will be connected by 2015 and 50 billion by 2020 (Gartner excludes PCs, tablets and mobile phones from its tally whereas Cisco’s figures include all types of devices). There are projections from other firms as well. Irrespective of whose data you look at, the numbers are much bigger than the entire population of the planet.

Further, a Gartner report says that “economic value-add (which represents the aggregate benefits that businesses derive through the sale and usage of IoT technology) is forecast to be $1.9 trillion across sectors in 2020.” To put that number in perspective, the entire spending on IT and telecom worldwide is estimated to be $3.8 trillion in 2015 as per IDC.

A matter of industries and degrees: As the hype phase continues, no one is denying the overall big-ticket impact of IoT. However, it has been conjectured that the impact will differ in degrees and that certain industry segments will be affected much more than others. According to Gartner, these verticals are leading the adoption of IoT: manufacturing, healthcare and insurance.

But adoption will also depend on which new “things” come up in the market for connectedness and which other segments or companies drive innovation through their own use-cases.

The challenges en route: The direction IoT will take is being set each moment and each day, as vendors (especially biggies like IBM, Intel, Cisco, Google and Qualcomm, among others) continue to jockey for pole position in the market for IoT components, gear or services. One of the major challenges is equipping existing devices with a chip intelligent enough to be powerful and useful yet cheap enough to be commercially successful on scale. Another is the high failure rate of start-ups that come up with new “things,” connected hardware such as smart meters, wearable devices, health monitors, etc. The reasons for failure could range from high cost of development (and hence the device), lack of consumer interest, or just being too ahead of the market.

Companies may also be wary of embracing IoT due to additional liabilities or issues (privacy, legal tangles) engendered by the customer data captured, stored or monitored through IoT devices.

And then, the existence of multiple standards for wireless (Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, Zigbee, among others) will likely continue to be a headache. Pointing to the fragmentation in connectivity, Rob Chandhok, president of Qualcomm's interactive platforms unit said in a recent article on WSJ.com: “It's not that things aren't getting connected—they are getting connected badly.” (In another context, his remark would gel with those who know how Internet generally works in India.)

Management and security hassles: CIOs and other decision makers will have barely eased their BYOD pain when they would be facing the much larger prospect of handling multiple “things” across the length and breadth of the company. On their part, solution providers are working towards filling the gaps in IoT security. For instance, ARM Holdings recently acquired a Dutch firm Offspark to include the latter’s PolarSSL, an IoT security layer for across-the-devices usage, into its mbed IoT development platform. McAfee, owned by Intel, enhanced its security management for Intel IoT gateways. There’s much happening by way of streamlining security for the upcoming IoT world.

Having said that, information security is already a highly complex and daunting task for most organizations—and the complexities and challenges are only going to multiply when more data flows through more devices, often in real or near-real time.

All in all, developments in IoT will be quite interesting for CIOs and decision makers to watch and ready their own organizations for solutions or services relevant to their business.

For instance, the BFSI sector would continue to innovate around micropayments, contactless or virtual cards (that might be apps or embedded into a wearable); healthcare providers would keep coming up with new gadgets and services to remotely monitor health parameters and administer medicine/advice; connected sensors will make better sense of energy use in smart buildings or cities—and yes, more and more fridges will order milk from the supermarket on their own.