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Chapter 1 Introduction to e-business and e-commerce 9

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.com/news-blog/newsletter/3200/interview-ted-speroni-director-emea-hp-
com.html. Econsultancy.com provides information, training and events on best practice in online marketing
and e-commerce management.

What is the difference between e-commerce and e-business?

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