How difficult is it to maintain communication with partners across multiple channels?

The rapid advancement of technology and its application to business has been accompanied by a range of new terminology and jargon. The use of the term ‘electronic commerce’ has been sup- plemented by additional terms such as e-business and e-marketing, and more specialist terms such as e-CRM, e-tail and e-procurement. Do we need to be concerned about the terminology? The short answer is no; Mougayer 1998 noted that it is understanding the services that can be What is the difference between e-commerce and e-business? Q. How else are you looking to use widgets? Ted Speroni, HP.com: Another area is product advisors. We have product advisors on HP.com and we would like to syndicate them out. The principle behind this is that we don’t want to provide a link on retailers’ websites to HP.com, we want to keep the customers on their sites. As we move HP.com to a more modular, Web 2.0-type approach, we’ll see which components we can syndicate out. We also have flash demos so there’s an opportunity for resellers to have them on their website, although the resellers do have to have some merchandising people that know about the prod- ucts. Their sites also have to be Web 2.0-enabled. Q. What are you doing in terms of social media and social shopping? Ted Speroni, HP.com: We’re starting to pilot some social tagging concepts on our product pages, so that people can easily embed our product pages into different sites, like Myspace profiles for example. It’s at a very early stage but it’s about the whole concept of exporting our stuff onto the social networking sites, as opposed to trying to get people onto our sites. We haven’t implemented it in Europe, but in the US we have started some pilots. For a while now, we have also had RSS links on promotions from our site – we’ve had some uptake of that, but it’s not a killer app I would say. We’re basically looking at how we can help people who want to create content around our products, and facilitate that. There’s a lot of HP content on YouTube – lots of people make videos about how to make the new HP printer, for example. So our approach is ‘if people want to do this, let’s help them and let’s benefit from it’. If we can get user generated linkage to our products, it’s incredibly powerful. Q. Have you looked at user generated reviews? Ted Speroni, HP.com: We’re doing a pilot in the US with user generated reviews. We haven’t started that yet in Europe – I’m trying to work out a scaleable model with all the language issues. We have to have some quality control on the user reviews – we can’t depend completely on community policing. We need some proactive moderation – since it’s on our website, we can’t take risks with legal issues and so on. You can say our products aren’t good but you have to use appropriate language. Also, we don’t want you to be able to comment on our competitors’ products. You can say what you want about our products but you can’t push competitors’ products. We’ve been runnning this for about six months in the US and there’s been good uptake, and we haven’t had big issues with appropriateness. In Europe, I am looking to deploy something and looking into the multi-language issues. Source: www.econsultancy.comnews-blognewsletter3200interview-ted-speroni-director-emea-hp- com.html. Econsultancy.com provides information, training and events on best practice in online marketing and e-commerce management.

Chapter 1 Introduction to e-business and e-commerce

9 offered to customers and the business benefits that are obtainable through e-business that are important. However, labels are convenient in defining the scope of the changes we are looking to make within an organization through using electronic communications. Managers need to communicate the extent of changes they are proposing through introducing digital technologies to employees, customers and partners. Complete Activities 1.1 and 1.2 to start unravelling the different terms through looking at how General Electric, one of the world’s largest companies, has embraced e-business. E-commerce defined Electronic commerce e-commerce is often thought simply to refer to buying and selling using the Internet; people immediately think of consumer retail purchases from companies such as Amazon. But e-commerce involves much more than electronically mediated finan- cial transactions between organizations and customers. E-commerce should be considered as all electronically mediated transactions between an organization and any third party it deals with. By this definition, non-financial transactions such as customer requests for fur- ther information would also be considered to be part of e-commerce. Kalakota and Whinston 1997 refer to a range of different perspectives for e-commerce: 1 A communications perspective – the delivery of information, products or services or payment by electronic means. 2 A business process perspective – the application of technology towards the automation of business transactions and workflows. 3 A service perspective – enabling cost cutting at the same time as increasing the speed and quality of service delivery. 4 An online perspective – the buying and selling of products and information online. 10 Part 1 Introduction Activity 1.2 What’s in a term – what do we call this ‘e-thing’? Purpose To illustrate how different marketers perceive Internet marketing. There are a range of terms used to describe Internet marketing – it is called different things by different people. It is important that within companies and between agency and client there is clarity on the scope of Internet marketing, so the next few sections explore alternative definitions. Question One simple, but revealing, method of assessing how commonly these terms are used, is to use the Google syntax which returns the number of pages which contain a partic- ular phrase in their body or title. Type into Google the following phrases in double quotes or use intitle: ‘phrase’ for these phrases and note the number of pages at the top right of the results page: Phrase i ‘E-business’ ii ‘E-commerce’ iii ‘Internet marketing’ iv ‘E-marketing’ v ‘Digital marketing’ Answers to activities can be found at www.pearsoned.co.ukchaffey Electronic commerce e-commerce All electronically mediated information exchanges between an organization and its external stakeholders. visit the www