Ben Kepes Archive at diversity.net.nz

Author Archive for Ben Kepes

Big big oops…

Published by Ben Kepes on September 29, 2008 in Business, IT, New Zealand, Society and Strategy. 3 Comments

From that category of "what a complete cock-up" comes news that ISP Slingshot’s iTalk VoIP service went dead the other day. The reason? An expired domain - it seemed the Slingshot staffer set the domain up and used his/her personal email address as the contact, resulting in Slingshot not getting the subscription reminder.

It’s back up now but it seems there are a bunch of less than satisfied customers out there.

Justification for using a more robust telco provider perhaps?

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On building communities of interest

Published by Ben Kepes on September 29, 2008 in Business, Design, Efficiency, IT, New Zealand, SocialMedia and Strategy. 8 Comments

It was interesting to read this post by Ben (another Ben) who details the rise and rise of Vodafone’s community forum site.

Ben says that there is a reluctance within corporate New Zealand to invest the time to build web communities - possibly due to a fear that they’ll build it and no one will come.

Ben reports on the results that Voda have had;

launched an online forum at August 1st 2008.

Investment was:

$150 for forum license

3 people engaged over a month, checking in every now and again to keep an eye on it

Link under Help on Vodafone website and a mention on Geekzone

Results:

250,000 visits with an average time of just under 4 minutes.

That’s a whooping 1 million minutes/ month. Or the equivalent of 697 days (back to back) of attention.

356 registered members and ~3000 posts (till Sept 17th)

From other forum’s Vodafone has run, they have found only 1 out of 5 questions requires an official response.

Over time the forum will build a repository of information that will provide answers to users without ANY extra work by Vodafone.

I’m involved in a project that’s building a community of interest in New Zealand - we’re getting closer to going live now (a couple of months away) and these results are the sort of thing that are music to my ears - it’s not necessarily about the traffic (although traffic is good). It’s about the level of engagement, the efficiencies gained by conversing directly with your customer base and the credibility gain that comes from being out there and prepared to talk.

Of course the real test is what happens when the conversation on the forum takes an unplanned for, and uncomfortable turn - will Voda still be happy to invest the time in it? I certainly hope so.

We’re all to prepared to say that the online community is only a small proportion of the total population. While this is true the results above show that it’s a proportion that is more than happy to engage - and engagement is an exceptionally powerful driver.

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Knocking against silo walls

Published by Ben Kepes on September 28, 2008 in Business, Design, Efficiency and IT. 1 Comment

A friend of mine is involved in creating a community website overseas and recounted to me an interesting tail. It seems had a preference to using one of the open source content management systems, and maybe going out to the developer community for any tweaks that were required to make it work to her specification.

The development team she were dealing with decided that in the interests of a "robust and secure" offering, they’d hard code it from scratch in a proprietary development application.

This of course had some unintended (well hopefully unintended consequences) in that it then required a degree in computer science to make even the most basic of changes - thereby tethering her to the development team pretty much for the life of the project.

Now I’m no developer - but I’ve spent a fair amount of time using WordPress, Joomla, Virtuemart and of course the tools we’re using, and helping create, over on CloudAve - and nothing in that experience has proven fragile or insecure. Those systems all have the added advantage of being readily extensible (even by a klutz like me) with a massive community out there building widgets and plugins which, generally, work straight out of the (virtual) box.

Here in New Zealand we have the awesome company SilverStripe doing their own open source CMS, and making revenue from the add on servicing and customisation that invariably goes with a build job.

I was motivated to read this post after seeing a post by Rodrigo - in it he talks about the democratisation of the tools for software creation and congratulates both his own company but the marketplace generally for opening up and making things easier.

Now in the case of my friend, I don’t think it’s a pure and simple case of the development house being "evil" in an effort to guarantee themselves future work. I believe that they’re concerned about doing the job and also about the security of a platform they’ll spend hours creating - however this attitude flies in the face of the realities of the web.

The fact is that things change - and fast. Any platform needs to be ready to be changed, added to, deleted from and generally played around with in a independent, nimble and agile way - nothing that I’ve seen from proprietary systems gives me faith that they enable that.

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When the Boss Buys In, You’re Bound to Win

Published by Ben Kepes on September 27, 2008 in Business, Collaboration, Design, Governance, IT, New Zealand and Strategy. 1 Comment

Next weekend I’ll be up in Auckland attending the inaugural TelecomONE unconference. The organisers, in an attempt to explain what TelecomONE is all about, have come up with the following;

The Right People + Opinions + Discussions = TelecomONE Innovation

Basically the unconference seeks to create a forum where information can be shared, questions raised, ideas mooted and the status quo questioned. I’m fortunate to have been included in a small group of external invitees (I mean external to Telecom employment rather than sitting outside during the unconference sessions!)

These sort of events are great, but sometimes end up being talkfests unless the organisation has bought into the concept at every level. I was stoked then to read on Miki’s blog of a message that he’d received from unconference facilitator Nat Torkington;

@gripnostril and I met w/ the CEO of Telecom today. He is bigtime clueful, grokked Foo Camp faster than anyone I’ve ever explained it to.

Other than the atrocious spelling and grammar (Twitter is no excuse for lackadaisical standards Mr Torkington ) it was awesome to see this message - to know that it’s not just a talk fest, that innovation is both welcomed and expected and that we’re not just a bunch of freaks off on a junket is pretty cool (anyway - how can it be a junket - we’re sleeping in sleeping bags on the floor of a hall FFS!)