Category Archives: eMarketing

eMarketing Summit 2008

eyeforpharmaThis year’s eyeforpharma eMarketing conference took place in Zürich. Apart from Zürich being a wonderful place to be, the conference was well worth attending. It was particularly interesting to see how all of big pharma is getting prepared to cope with the challenges ahead, and what role eMarketing plays in the process. Continue reading

Website standards

PAS124In April 2008, the British Standards Institute has published PAS 124, a best practice approach to implementing, maintaining, and managing standards compliant websites. PAS 124 helps organizations deploy web site standards. So if you are involved with the planning or building of web sites, this document is a must read. Being one of my focus areas, website standards are part of my daily work. As a member of the review panel for PAS 124 I got my hands on the document very early, and I have been using it ever since. Continue reading

The mobile Web (1)

Walter Soldierer’s blog on a mobile phoneMost mobile phones have some sort of Internet access built in. However, not many owners of mobile devices use them to surf the web. There are several obvious reasons. First of all, carriers still charge too much for internet access. The WWW user experience on mobile phones is variable, to say the least. Access fees will go down, and I am sure that mobile flat rates will be the predominant pricing model soon. It will take some time though until most mobile phones belong to the 3rd generation and until mobile web standards are sufficiently well defined and implemented to support consistent web page rendering on the mobile web. Continue reading

Microformats

hcard microformatMicroformats contribute to the principles of a semantic web in a very useful way. With microformats any structured or unstructured information on web pages can be given a meaning. Name and address information anywhere on the page can be tagged as belonging to personal contact information. Words like “Walter Soldierer” are meaningless to a program, but they can be turned into something the program can deal with by tagging them with microformats. Continue reading

Enterprise 2.0

Meet CharlieWeb 2.0 hit company intranets, too. In 2006 the term Enterprise 2.0 was coined to describe the implementation and use of Web 2.0 technologies (”social software”) in an enterprise. Working in a big international cooperation involves lots of communication and collaboration. Some of the social tools offer great solutions to facilitate the working together.

At a conference last week I met Simon Revell, a Pfizer UK employee who had successfully helped implementing enterprise 2.0 in his organization, mainly blogs and wikis. Very interesting presentation.

First of all I was surprised that he is an IT manager, so the IT department brought this project forward, not Marketing, not Communications. I guess it would not have been possible otherwise because there was no social software available in the organisation, Simon’s team simply set up a LAMP open source environment using Drupal and hooked it to the network. Nobody but IT can do this in a company where everything is running on Microsoft technology.

Simon had an interesting story to tell about the difficulties of kicking off enterprise 2 (”Who gave you permission to do this?”), marketing the new “corporatepunks” culture, and getting their blog known to UK and international colleagues to make it a lively communication medium.

You can find out more about Simon.

Definitely check out the “Meet Charlie” presentation created by an IT colleague of his.

Now that Sharepoint 2007 is running more and more corporate intranets, enterprise 2.0 is easier to implement, at least technology-wise. Sharepoint supports blogs and wikis, not feature-rich but good enough to get started. What are we waiting for?