Interesting insight in terms of different ways to avoid sending emails by accident. It arose after a client discussion and then a straw poll in the office of different email sending habits.

I observe from my statistically inaccurate poll three different approaches:

1) The safety valve

A client yesterday shared a great function in outlook which I had never heard of before - it’s a one minute delay after you click to send an email before the email is sent. This gives you the chance to edit an email within that one minute if you click send that fraction too quickly.

2) The fool-proof pre-checking system

Courtesy of Peter in the office, a link to Seth Godins approach - a list of 36 things to check before you send an email. Yeah right, we all have time to check that!

3) F*** it approach

No names mentioned here, but you get the picture. Oh well I’ve sent it now.

Suspect that most of you have never thought of this before (like me) - I now have the safety valve in place - let me know if you want the details of how to implement, and remember if the next email you get from me is rubbish, I need to find another system or hopefully not something more fundamental!

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Not much to do with the web, but a great clip - Euan had it on his blog, so i thought I’d replicate it as a note to self too.

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£110m pa if you want to develop a site on the scale of the BBC (figures released today)

Clearly we have no idea what this was spent on what inefficiencies increased the cost above reasonable norms (which is what the article implies).

However, the scale of numbers underlines the fact that if you want to create a powerful compelling web presence, it takes investment - lots of fresh content (on a by minute basis), tools and ways to engage people to capture mind share. And that they have certainly done - to quote:

“By late 2007, it had an average of 16.5million users a month, out of the total of 33million internet users in the country.”

The point for our customers is that clearly this is on a huge scale and covers many thousands of different topics, but that running and driving a website needs continual investment to make it attractive to users and to give them reasons to come back.

The question each website owner has to ask is:

- what is the value of my website - what do I want to get back from it

- How do I measure that return and quantify the value from my site

- On that basis, it needs a clear investment case and spend attached to it.

Finding value on the web in our view is much more achievable now than it used to be and there are many different ways to find/ create value be it finding new customers, engaging with old customers, recruiting staff, managing clients, driving internal collaboration, running alumni networks and so on. The question is simply defining the value that you want and then creating the right achievable plan to get it …for a tiny tiny fraction of £110m!!

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Great meeting yesterday with Phillip Goodman and Peter Rogol from accountants Goodman Jones.

Phillip has been working to drive value from the web for the last couple of years through both their Corporate Website and a blog site.

Music to my ears to hear what they have been doing - taking corporate issues and writing about them in a way that customers can relate - talking in real world language (not always a forte of accountants from my experience).

The benefits for Goodman Jones:

- Enhanced Reputation - people know about them and refer to them;

- Lead Generation - its generates business through the website.

Thats pretty compelling stuff in anyones language.

More evidence for their success comes from having Accountancy Age awards for the last 2 years for Best use of the internet. This has led to winning work from ICAEW (the Chartered Accountants Institute, of which I am a member for my sins) and helping them develop their online presence and an online community.

Its great to see people doing what we believe are the right things and getting value from it - they key thing to us is that this is all about “differentiating yourself in a saturated market place” and capturing the mindshare of your customers, suppliers, partners and employees.

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Its the biggest question around social networks. Are they actually worth the coin?

USA Today wades into the debate with this article. Having read the article which reviews all the social networks and how they are making money, the key areas the article points to are:

1) Advertising. Clearly. Advertisers follow people and that means large concentrations of people in one place are an attractive proposition for those with ad budgets. The big question for me on the efficacy of this is whether that ad spend converts in value for  the advertisers;

2)  Premium Services - sell additional services such as ringtones and other subscription based services;

3) Sell - sell it to someone else who thinks they can make more money with it.

So the bottom line is these are media platforms, with the most powerful revenue streams coming from advertising - the more focused and contextual it is, the more likely you will get better revenues. If you can differentiate your offerings enough and persude subscription based services, so much the better, then but not many people are able to do this. [I note this week that Friends Reunited are now moving to a free model rather than a paying model].

It remains a battle for mindshare, but some networks need to start proving the coin behind the model to keep the buzz sustained for the longer term.

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Does the web tell the truth?

Great quote here:

“the web provides the unvarnished truth about what the parties are really thinking”

This is one of our beliefs - people when they blog on the web or type questions into search engines ask the “real questions”. There is no hiding or dressing up what people want - its the real thoughts.

If you want to know the real thinking that people have, look to the web…

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Full marks to Jon for keeping the blog rolling - for me its been a busy few weeks and as every blogger knows, you need to find time to keep that information fresh.

So, back to our core context of finding value from web2.0 for businesses - and how is that value realised or monetised.

Well, clearly, we have a lot of ideas which we share with all our clients, but its always interesting to see different takes on web2.0 - the latest is in the BBC site today on Web 2.0 is set for spending boom.

The prediction in the article is:

Web 2.0 is set to be embraced by Enterprise 2.0 as businesses prepare to spend nearly $5 billion by 2013 on social networking tools. Forrester Research state in the report behind this that ”consumer giants such as General Motors, McDonald’s, Northwestern Mutual Life Insurance and Wells Fargo Bank will drive much of this growth and have already embraced tools like blogs, RSS feeds, podcasting and social networking”.

Forrester analysed seven Web 2.0 categories:

- blogs, mashups, podcasting, RSS, social networking, widgets and wikis.

What we are seeing and continue to fervently believe in is that it is not so much the technology and the applications, but the behaviours that exist around the technologies. Much of the work we are doing is deriving business intelligence and data from the vast amount of data, tools and applications that exist out there - there is a complete glut of information and tools (and this continues at a growing rate). The key value is knowing the Why and the How - why are these tools valuable, why would your organisation use them to either save you a £1 or make you a £1, and how do you use them.

Either way, we agree 100% - the big value in social networking and the web is about businesses and not the consumer side of life (a la Facebook).

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Great article in the times today commenting on the rise of web2.0 and how investors are increasing their activity in the web space, as London is the hub for many new web based start ups.

Could’nt agree more with the sentiment - we see lots of activity and many opportunities around the web space - with the majority of conversations being around sensible questions such as value, profit and measurable returns.

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Interesting article about web marketing on the BBC news site over the weekend about how the internet is increasingly being used for smart marketing such as using games, paid blogging and social network marketing strategies.

The key point for me and what we do at Trovus is helping companies understand how users are engaging with the web and finding the best ways to position messages and understand browser behaviour around the web.

I still marvel at the fact that the web is only 10-15 years old in its commercial form and in that time, it has gone from zero mind share and time of people on a daily basis, to up to 6 hours a day for people spending time on the web. If that doesnt represent a huge huge shift in terms of what people do on a daily basis and where they spend their attention, I don’t know what does.

We dont profess to have all the answers, but we do have a lot of insight and experience around how people are using the web and what that means for your business. Have a read of the BBC article and see if you are likely to be engaged/ have consumed any of the techniques that they outline.

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News flash…Trovus as of Monday moved into new offices .. after 12 months of living virtually and working virtually, the time has finally come to sign a lease and move partially offline.

Our new home is in Vauxhall backing onto the Oval cricket ground…photos to follow

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