Does Your Company Have Energy Intelligence?
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The Copenhagen Climate Summit has come and gone. World leaders have returned to their respective countries with their pressing priorities. You would think the low rumble of the Summit has gone dormant again, but look behind you. Consumers are not only thinking green, but beginning to take “green” actions. President Obama has pledged to help utilities install 40 million smart energy meters so that consumers can take real-time actions to reduce unnecessary energy usage. Consumers, like you and me, will soon have “energy intelligence” (a term coined by Information Management’s Robert Farris). So how do businesses get energy intelligence?
Businesses are being asked not only to cut costs, but to do so especially in the area of energy usage, demonstrating they are doing their part to reduce their carbon footprint and take advantage of PR benefits of being “green.” Stakeholders, including customers, investors, and regulators, are now expecting it.
Energy costs in business average around 10% of the operating expense budget. It’s a number that the Dept. of Energy says could be reduced as much as 27% with the right techniques—decision support and operational efficiencies. It’s the classic performance management scenario: getting visibility so you can take action.
Sure, you can review your energy bills, but those are as much as 30 days old and don’t usually give you the level of detail needed to make appropriate changes. Even better, you could monitor the facility management systems used to track the usage and health of your heating/cooling, lighting, and water systems. Still not enough to make the right decisions. Were there one or 100 employees in the building that day? That information may be in another system like HR or security.
This is where Robert Farris’s post on Energy Intelligence suggests a business intelligence approach. He states it so eloquently in his post:
An energy intelligence system can integrate data from islands of energy usage information (building management systems, building sensors, utilities, etc.) and combine it with other operational data from your enterprise applications (supply chain, manufacturing, HR, finance, customer relationship management, asset management, etc.) to provide visibility to trends in usage, costs and efficiencies – across all locations, sub-locations, and building systems.
By bringing this information together in one place and providing BI capabilities – trending graphs, dashboards, near real-time monitors, exception alerts, location-comparison reports and detailed analysis capabilities – an Energy Intelligence system can help company leaders understand where efficiencies are and help them make informed decisions about what actions will provide the most return.
With more and more companies creating a career path and C-level positions for sustainability leadership, business intelligence vendors and corporate BI teams need to step up and educate organizations about the use of performance management for energy intelligence.
Networking Your Social Media
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Social media is still fairly new and understanding how to connect the various social media tools is not easy. Yet, that’s where the power lies, especially when it comes to dynamic content like blog posts. I’m often asked how to get more exposure leveraging social media, so I thought I’d give you the “101” on connecting, specifically your blog with Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook.
First, this help assumes you have a hosted blog, particularly Wordpress. You can get Wordpress for free and install it on your own domain or site, as long as your site accepts PHP (hosted on unix or linux servers and not Microsoft servers) and you have the ability to create databases. It’s a little tricky to set up and configure unless you have a geek-streak like me. Let me know and I can help.
So, you have a hosted blog and you’re putting out regular posts. How do you let the universe know?
Twitter – Grab your Twitter handle and make sure you fill out your profile, adding your website URL. The rest involves plugins to Wordpress, though Typepad probably has similar functionality.
Post blog to Twitter – Grab and install the Twitter Tools plugin. It not only notifies Twitter when you add a new post, it can create a blogpost from your tweets. It comes with additional features such as Hashtag, Exclude, and bit.ly URL shortener. You’ll need to get a bit.ly API code so that the plugin will push out your shortened URL.
Retweet this blogpost – Grab and install the Tweet Meme plugin. It lets readers retweet your posts and also keeps track of how many times your post has been retweeted.
Show my tweets – If you are successful with the Twitter Tools plugin (above), you will also have a widget that shows your tweets in your sidebar.
Follow my tweets – I like the Follow Me plugin, used on this site. Stays off to the side and isn’t too obtrusive.
LinkedIn – First create a company page for your business. As you are setting up your company profile, you’ll see “Company Blog” in the box on the left side. Make sure you add your blog’s RSS URL. Now check your personal profile. Be sure you have your company blog and Twitter handle listed there too. As Wordpress notifies Twitter with a tweet announcing your post, that same tweet will show up in LinkedIn as a status update.
Facebook – First, create a personal profile. Then add the Twitter application and fill out the settings with your Twitter handle. Now all your tweets will show up in the live feed, including the tweets containing your blogpost announcements. To automatically post from Wordpress to Facebook without going through Twitter, use the post-to-facebook plugin.
Facebook’s company fan pages are still coming along. For the life of me, I can’t find an automated way to push blogpost notifications. I still recommend you create a company fan page and for now, manually add blogpost notifications.
One last suggestion, add social links to your posts with the Sociable plugin. This gives your readers several options to share your posts for you.
Feel free to add your suggestions. Would love to know what’s working for you. If you’re struggling with this or have any questions, just ask. Together, we can figure it out.
Content Relevance Boosts B2B Vendor Success
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I came across some research done by IDG spread across two different posts that was pretty interesting. They interviewed over 100 information technology buyers about their content preferences from vendors. IDG noted there has been a 60% increase in content assets over the past five years. The rush is on to get in the content game and offer information prospective and current customers will find valuable and that will ultimately drive sales.
Only 39% of those interviewed said they find relevance in links offered to vendor content (though their expectation is only 50%). These same buyers say that if they find relevant content, it increases that vendor’s success rate.
The trouble may come when, in their haste, vendors don’t make the shift from promotional to educational content. Buyers want content that is relevant to their needs, and supports their decision making process. This means the content must have “meat” behind it and not just be considered marketing hype.
IDG asked IT buyers a series of questions about their content preferences from various social conversation channels. Here’s a brief recap of the top preferences by channels:
- Blog – case studies, ads, tutorials, seminar material
- Forums – tutorials, free event registration, evaluation versions, white papers
- Live Chat – free event registration, evaluation versions, white papers
- Microblog – ads, technical knowledge base, free event registration, white
- Social networks – free event registration, ads, ROI calculator, white papers
- Wikis – tutorials, white papers, case studies, knowledge base
To me, these seem more like expectations than preferences, and the study is really quite small. What I did like was their takeaway message.
Winners will be vendors that build a “relevant” content bridge to draw the conversation towards their own hosted platforms and insight.
This will motivate engagement, and build a sense of interest and reliance and credibility with buyers. The wrong content will damage vendor consideration within the ongoing conversation and beyond.
