This time of year I get a bit obsessed by fireworks. My local fireworks shop - Epic Fireworks - is worth a mention as I am pretty impressed by how they marry on-line with their traditional shop.
All of their fireworks have YouTube clips so you can see what you are buying, they blog - about fireworks of course - and tweet. My favourite part though is their Flickr feed. Buy a load of fireworks from them, and they will pack them beautifully into your car boot for you then take a photo of you in front of them. The next day you are on their website with some complementary caption (I thought it was just me but it seems they are nice about all of their customers).
All this builds a connection between company and customer which many a large company could learn from. I think the key elements that make this mix of social media and traditional shopping work are:
- It makes the customer feel good
- It adds genuine value to the buying experience
- It's fun
- It draws you in to their enthusiasm about their product
My only regret is working out the cost-per-second of my fireworks display. Some things are better left un-calculated.
The end of Active Directory
You may have heard of this "new" thing called the cloud: all of our systems, processes, data and relationships accessible via any old device with an internet connection. All very clever.
The second jigsaw piece is consumerisation of IT. Also, nothing spectacular here - services that are made available initially to individuals trickling 'up' into the corporate world.
So, what does this mean for the future of traditional directory services tools such as Active Directory.
What does AD do? Firstly it gives assurance over identity. Well, I manage relationships with a few hundred people on the usual suspect social tools such as LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and so on. I am confident that I have sufficient assurance of their identity for the transactions I share with them. For low-risk transactions such as Twitter post - low assurance. For high-risk transactions such as sharing family photos - high-assurance. I can manage a few hundred of these connections with various levels of "closeness" to me; but I am over forty. People twenty-years younger than me - internet natives - are actively managing many more relationships.
Secondly AD controls access to corporate resources. Things like networks and laptops. I work from my home office on a personal PC and network accessing corporate information resources. What about printing? Really? How 2005.
Increasingly I expect smaller organisations which are using tools such as Google Apps to switch off AD and use other web-based or social methods of identity assurance. Give it five years and larger and larger organisations will abandon traditional directory services in favour of social, web-based, organic, personal relationship management.
The real corporate assets are information, expertise, processes and relationships, all of which we are learning to manage and interact with via our friend the internet connection.
Posted at 02:16 PM in Comment, Looking ahead, Social media, Technology | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
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