Comcast has a fantastic marketing campaign these days that you’ve probably seen on television or billboards. Building on the “It’s Comcastic” theme, the company is having fun innovating on the English language in ways that speak to digital life.

This involves devising new buzz-phrases like “snurfing” (surfing the web instead of paying attention to your phone conversation) and “Wi-fiving” (instant messaging a friend to celebrate a specific part of a TV program) that represent a merging of different words into one. Comcast refers to it as triples language.

These buzz-phrases resonate with consumers because they speak to real scenarios that people now encounter in an era of digital living.

My favorite is an advertisement about “quizjacking” where a girl is watching a game show while her brother, sitting within earshot of the TV, is looking up answers to questions on his computer. He’s spitting out answers before she has a chance to take a guess.

Siblings annoying each other is always the basis of good humor and this example was sinisterly familiar. The big picture, of course, is Comcast demonstrating how television and Internet consumption go together in ways that are novel.

I think Comcast is touching the tip of the iceberg in this exercise of digitally inspired word-mashups. I’m no William Saffire, but I’d like to add a few of my own based on observations. Here’s one to start (and more down the line as ideas come to mind): SOFTSUMERISM.

Softsumerism —-> The cross-over influence of consumer applications on the design of enterprise technologies; innovation within enterprise systems addressing the convergence of personal and professional identity.

There’s no secret the software business (enterprise) is changing in profound ways. Both delivery and business models are increasingly service oriented, on-demand. Well understood, you might say.

But is that a self-contained phenomena or driven by the influence of consumer software? Softsumerism suggests that the consumer influence is profound. If you believe that, then how are those influences likely to shape enterprise applications of the future? My take is that every category of enterprise applications will face Softsumerism.

There’s a sense in the enterprise technology community that innovation is increasingly consumer-led. Nowhere is this more pronounced than in product interfaces. This includes everything from user interaction, look and feel, third-party integration and usability.

Consumer-led innovation and it’s cross-over impact on the design of enterprise technology makes a lot of sense. Perhaps a root cause of this trend is convergence. By this, I mean personal and professional convergence. People use software in their personal lives and there’s no reason why the simplicity of those applications cannot be a reference point for business technology. A separate implication of convergence is the realization that people don’t necessarily have to separate business and personal identities even when using enterprise technology. As I’ll point on below, supporting personalization only makes enterprise technology more sticky and valuable for users.

There are (3) major ways that consumer technologies are influencing business technology.

1) Integrating personal use cases - Letting users piggyback on enterprise products for personal needs, where sensible.

2) Self-service and learning - Applications which require little to no training.

3) Personalization - The ability to express yourself as an individual, especially in business communications.

On the first point, consider how enterprise IM (e.g., SameTime from IBM) allows integration into consumer IM products like Yahoo Messenger. You can IM with your family while using an enterprise-grade product that addresses specialized enterprise needs.  Naturally, Yahoo/AOL/MSN products wouldn’t be very useful for corporate governance.

Self-service and learning is possibly a more fundamental design consideration. The goal here is hard to put into words. There are way too many applications out there for users to master and they’re being spoiled increasingly by consumer applications which are “out-of-the-box” in terms of how to use them and get functional in a few minutes. Applications like analytics, which have traditionally been fairly complicated (necessarily involving training) are becoming instant-use products. An obvious example is Google Analytics. You can figure out the 2-3 most useful functions of Google Analytics in a few minutes. Traditional analytics providers might scoff at this end of the product food chain (claiming its for the less sophisticated business and consumer audiences) but that’s fundamentally untrue. And to test my assertion, ask yourself, what other product has gained such rapid adoption by *sophisticated* enterprises (Roche, Financial Times, RE/MAX) and consumer alike in such a short time horizon? Power and simplicity will no longer be trade-offs in the future and Google Analytics nicely demonstrates that proposition.

Personalization has been around for a while in simple forms - consider emoticons. No one can say that this element of electronic communications, introduced first in the consumer context, has any less of a place in business.  Smiley faces make their way into plenty of emails sent by employees.

Personalization is hard to structure so the main objective for application providers should be to *not inhibit it* as opposed to innovating on it per se. As an employee, you might want to include a funky, animated email signature in your business communications. But if your Exchange server rules are configured to block widgets hosted by third-party sites, your signature might look more like a skeleton than a graphical expression of yourself. Your email systems should support that desire for personalization as opposed to blocking it.

Piggybacking is probably the single biggest design opportunity for the enterprise technology community in the coming years. This may seem counter-intuitive but when handled appropriately (not pushing too far or too short), it can be an excellent differentiation vector. The more a user becomes accustomed to an application for personal use, the potential for standardization increases for business use too. Enterprise technology companies that exploit this synergy can gain significant advantages.

Taken as a whole, I’m using the term “Softsumerism” to refer to this collection of consumer technology driven influences and their impact on the enterprise technologies. It’s an emerging dynamic which can be really interesting to build product strategies around.

• Comcast Triples Language Site
• Interview with Head of Google Analytics
• IBM Teams With Second Life To Build Portable Avatars
• CTIA: Microsoft Touts Convergence

Filed under: Google, Web Apps, Innovation, Enterprise Technology

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Tags: Comcast Triple Play, Quizjacking, Enterprise Technology, Softsumerism, Software Design, Personalization, Google Analytics,