Academia 2.0

Here are some Web 2.0 tools I wish we business academics had:

• A news story exchange - to help alert us to stories relevant to courses we are teaching. I often run into a great story that illustrates, say, advertising but unfortunately I am teaching marketing research that term. You are teaching advertising but spot a nice example of marketing research. How about a platform for sharing these things, and letting people add discussion questions and feedback from how the class reacted?
  
  
• A social network-capable version of EndNote. This would be a personalized citation library that would allow sharing and user tagging and also support comments and dialogs on papers. Maybe something like Facebook's "Wall" application but customized to let people link to other papers, and to allow different levels and types of moderation.
  
  
• A version control system for academic papers. These systems have been in use for software development for years supporting groups who write code together. Despite this, people who write papers together are basically stuck with Word's "Track Changes" function.
  

With all the social network folks running around Silicon Valley these days, is it too much to ask that one, just one of them would turn her or his attention to college professors?

Electronic Misnomers

I really hate the phrases "electronic marketing", "electronic business", "electronic commerce", or its derivative, "e-commerce". The word electronic focuses on hardware, which, at this point at least, tends to be electronic. This obscures the fact that the raw material of Internet business is software. Companies do not use electronics to create so called "electronic services", they use software to do so.

The defining characteristic of software is, of course, its softness. In other words, the most useful thing about software is its sheer arbitrariness. One can do anything one wants to do with it. This utter flexibility is itself quite challenging. At the design end, complexity forces programmers to build code so that it functions well within the Internet software ecology. At the user end, complexity impacts the consumer also, since that customer needs some sort of mental model or metaphor to understand how the e-service functions.

Software is becoming more and more ubiquitous in the consumer's environment. More and more, marketing is becoming a process of managing software. Marketers need to think about its design or acquisition, adoption, assimilation and implementation, all in way that furthers the firm's marketing goals.

Marketing departments need to absorb the fact that the physical, psychological, social and commercial worlds are increasingly constructed with software. It is not an e-world, it's an s-world.

Related Paper: Hofacker, Charles F., Ronald E. Goldsmith, Eileen Bridges and Esther Swilley (2007), "E-Services: A Synthesis and Research Agenda," Journal of Value Chain Management.