I am not saying that she is wrong about the importance of web video, but I have always been a firm believer that each corporation will make the steps necessary to become involved in the social web at their own pace. Much of the urgency will depend on the type of industry that you are in; the more consumer facing you are the more likely it is necessary for your business to have a video presence on the web. If your business manufactures gas turbines for the oil industry then the need for video is not so urgent. Everything must be put into perspective, yet one thing is true each corporation should be considering using the social web in order to demonstrate their expertise and build trust in their eyes of there perspective customer.

That said the availability of web video as a marketing and educational tool is something every business should look at. On the whole though, to the uninitiated, web video sounds like another opportunity to post advertising for free, yet this is one idea you should remove  immediately from your mind. Whilst there is a place for advertising on the social web, video is not it (unless you intend to provide s sneak preview before it hits the TV screens).

Social video allows you to go beyond the advert; provide educational material for customers, explore the lives of the characters within your advert; provide an industrial insight about the processes you use; etc, etc.

Video clearly has a place as an educational tool. YouTube, with 1 billion videos viewed each month, is no longer the only source of video on the web. Facebook has recently added a video engine and the new Twitter interface also allows direct access to video. Vimeo is another video engine that is focused towards the needs of business.

Web video presence needs as much thought and planning as does defining a social media presence. Whilst it is important to be ahead of the competition, knowing that others in your industry are already using web video is no reason to panic and put amateurish video onto the web, after-all any fool can pick up a video camera and start shooting. What is important is understanding the process and giving due diligence to the process of building this presence.

All businesses want repeat business, we have heard the maxim of it being easier to sell to an old customer than a new one. There is much psychology and academic study in the area of repeat business. The last of these is often forgotten, but can drive so much business value.

Over the last couple of years there has been much discussion about how there is no such thing as loyalty any more. Particularly as the youth, or gen-Y and millennials, as some insist on calling them. Yet this writer has observed that loyalty is still important; it is simply driven by a different set of values than at earlier times. The value system today includes friends and on-line social contacts, they all have something to say.

The psychology of the customer has changed a little. Today the customer knows they are in command of the relationship. The psychology of buying is all about trust. This is one of the keys behind much of the move to adopt social media by such a wide audience. This is one reason why any business that is looking to build customers needs to think about engaging through that medium. it is all about demonstrating expertise and building trust.

There is much business intelligence to be drawn from loyalty programmes. Knowing what purchases a customer makes in order to drive appropriate offers is a key aspect. A supermarket sending money off tokens for meat produce makes no sense to a vegetarian. How does the store know they are vegetarian? Well one way may be through buying patterns – if they have never purchased a meat product that may be a clue, another method is through surveys – all add to the details we know about the customer. Relevance of the reward is an important factor for the customer.

Remember for a rewards programme to be successful it must focus on the needs of the customer.

Within an end-user organisation there is increasing pressure to deliver more complex budgets to a tighter time-line. It can be argued that IT must shoulder blame for bad communication – incorrect people at presentations, not asking the right questions, etc. This is one of the reasons why when I go to such a presentation I may take on the role of asking the dumb question (and this may not be out of ignorance, but because a message needs to be conveyed to the business).

We are still facing the same problem of vendors not living up to their promises. In fact this is one of the worst delivery faults in the history of IT. In my past career have been technical liaison for pre-sales and have spoent some time following salespeople around, and beleive me they promise some complete bull to the prospect with the hope of making the sale. My job was to tell the truth about product capability. All too often sales folks are selling next version capability for a product that will not be in beta for at least 6 months and in unlikely to hit the streets for at least a year.

From an IT perspective it is necessary to take a carving knife and get to the real picture of capability based on existing product. This is where the IT manager needs to ask questions regarding capability on reference calls.

Vendors need to be up-front about how their product meets the requirement at the RFI or RFQ stage. Your product will not be discounted because it does not have a 100% capability match. Few products can deliver 100% of the requirements. I have managed projects where none of the vendors acheived 60% of the functional requirements – we still selected a solution and implemented it successfully.

One of the key areas for project deployment today is integration. Data movement between systems is increasingly important and sometimes this is the only was a requirement can be delivered. Software vendors need to show what data they feel their product is the master of and what data should be supplied for a successful implementation. This goes back to vendors taking the time to understand the requirements of the system they are expected to deliver. It is important to understand the data integration resources that the customer has to call on when they are providing a deployment estimate. Many corporations do not have adequate data integration specialists on the team.

The watchword for vendors is don’t over-promise and do understand your customer.