Mark McDonald

Lightweight technologies, those that do not require a heavy upfront investment or operational requirements, will meet many management and strategic applications needs.  Technologies, such as social computing and software as a service, give business unprecedented levels of choice in how they provision their technology.  Executives are making that choice not for back office commodity systems but for strategic applications that drive customer engagement.

The BBC World Service is an example as they are using Face book as their primary customer engagement application.  BBC World Service announcers routinely ask questions of that audience as a follow-up to a particular story.  For example, a story on elections in a country is followed by the closing “What do you think?  Tell us what you are doing?”  The announcer closes these statements with ‘go to our page on Face book and have your say.”  Latter in the program the announcer provides feedback by reading posts as a way of showing that BBC is paying attention.
There are multiple lessons from BBC’s use of Face book around how to engage consumers of broadcast media and create a loop that builds stickiness.  But, the lesson for this post is about the choices the BBC made in creating the applications it uses to engage its listeners on a global basis.

Notice what they did not choose to do.  They did not choose to build a proprietary or custom system to engage customers. The BBC did not choose to purchase and install package software to manage these customer relationships.

The BBC decided to lease, ostensibly for free, their major customer engagement platform from Face Book a company that did not exist 5 years ago.  BBC does not own Face book, or control the technology that drives the site or their page.  The BBC chooses not to engage their internal IT department to provide this service in a significant way.  Check it out on Facebok BBC World Service

The BBC chose a lightweight technology.

This gives the BBC ready access to an audience that does not require extensive customer acquisition or training costs.  They are getting consumer-engaging functionality that is broadly available on a platform that customers already know and many already use in as part of their daily routine.

In other words they are getting the functionality they need at a radically different cost structure.  Lightweight technologies have a unique value proposition from a customer, revenue and technical perspective

The BBC World Service provides a ready example of what will increasingly become possible as executives exercise their choice and choose lightweight technology.