A recent posting from one of the country’s leading ITIL consultants rained down unsolicited praise for FedEx. Although the source was a personal blog, the estimated 400 member readership contained many IT consultants, contractors and industry professionals – all of whom rely upon carriers for their business.

Now I can hear the naysayers already: “one could complain just as quickly” – and you’re right. That is precisely the beauty of this evolution in communication mediums. Like it or not, your customers will hear all the big customer service stories. It used to be that each bad incident was relatively self-contained. However, this is no longer the case.

Now, emotional (favorably or negatively) customers will log onto any of the growing number of vendor-neutral customer complaint boards, the Better Business Bureau, or industry discussion forums and distribute their thoughts. If customers Blog about it, you will see that incident quickly broadcast to hundreds of readers. The internet is undiscriminating and the communication is immediate. What are you doing to manage this environment? Are you:

• Monitoring relevant industry and consumer discussion boards?
• Surveying your largest customer’s for preferred communication channels?
• Researching customer service incidents online for “vent-sessions”?
• Offering your customers a direct online forum through your own site?
• All of the above?
• Something else?

Today’s leading organizations understand these benefits and challenges. Web 2.0 savvy-leaders are addressing the response in many different ways. You must be aware of these concerns and opportunities – leveraging the processes and related technologies for your benefit and avoiding greater detriment.

The metrics painted an interesting picture:

• 25% of U.S. adults online read a blog once a month (Forrester cited)
• IBM’s internal social network, “Beehive“, has 30,000 employees on it
• Twitter estimates 1 Million users now
• Dell’s service on Twitter has brought in $500k+, in new orders, in the last year
• Splogs (Spam Blogs) now account for 90% of all blog postings (though filters catch most)
• Technoratti now indexes 74 Million blogs (but only 5.2 Million are estimated as active)
• Best Buy’s social staff site, “Blue Shirt Nation” has 20,000 participants, most exited staff remain users

BW also had some good insights, both positive and negative, into the growing trends and impact at the workplace:

• “Millions of us are now hanging out on the Internet with customers, befriending rivals, clicking through pictures of our boss at a barbecue or seeing what she is reading at the beach. It’s as if the walls around our companies are vanishing and old org charts are lying on their sides”
• “This can be disturbing for top management who are losing control, at least in the traditional sense.”
• “…companies that don’t adapt are sure to get lots of (the downside)”
• “…we have developed top-down reflexes that are nearly Pavlovian. We have to reprogram ourselves.”
• “(employees) may see what technologies their competitors are putting into alpha tests and get the buzz on new rounds of financing.”
• “Work and leisure, colleague and rival; they all blend on these networks.”
• “…wikis raze traditional hierarchies: An intern can amend the work of a senior engineer.”
• “Managers have to make sure that quieter employees don’t lose out.”

The article sums things up nicely by stating “…the potential for both better and worse is huge, and it’s growing”. So not unlike other developments it is all about how each enterprise manages this evolution of communication. The question is, are you leveraging this evolution in communication for the benefit of your staff, customers and company? Your competitors are probably working on it now.

Whatever happened to those companies that didn’t put up a website anyway? Happy twittering.

… a web application that combines data from more than one source into a single integrated tool; an example is the use of cartographic data from Google Maps to add location information to real-estate data from Craigslist, thereby creating a new and distinct web service that was not originally provided by either source.”

With IBM’s announcement of the release of Lotus Mashups at Lotusphere in January, we have another example of how Web 2.0 and web-as-a-platform solutions are presenting solutions for the early adopting enterprises. Still, the majority of mashups today seem to focus on map overlays. This is where I liked IBM’s positioning at Lotusphere – while they covered the mandatory examples of map overlays, they also really emphasized data-to-data and other non-(geographic)map mashups.

I took a quick look around for some of the more innovative and popular non-map mashups and here some that stood out:

• Love-o-Graph: Don’t trust yourself, match.com or any other dating algorithms? Why not entrust the future of your love life to a mashup driven entirely off of your name and your prospective partner? I found the future for my wife and I is “open to interpretation”.
• LivePlasma: A cool visual representation of connections between musicians, actors, films, books and so on from the Amazon API.
• Secret Prices: A really cool site that combines data including online coupons and rebates with sales sites and opinion data.
• Similarity Web: This site takes Amazon.com’s “Customers Also Bought” logic and provides an impressive visualization of similar products.
• Google vs. Yahoo: With this mashup, you can compare the results of a search as reported by Google and Yahoo.

With IBM’s investment in enterprise mashups solutions, we move from one-offs and technically challenging solutions requiring programming expertise to a common business platform. Then we look at examples like those above that range from the entertainment to consumer focused. It is clear there are many great opportunities for mashups beyond the geographic maps and expanding solutions for average business person.

For more examples of mashups, check out Programmable Web. In particular, they have a somewhat dated article on increasing non-map mashups.