Monitoring Social Media

As more organizations are getting into social media, they are learning the best techniques to make best use of those media. One of the techniques is establishing a good system for monitoring what is being said about the company and who is saying it. Sometimes particular issues can go viral on the net, leaving the company with a tarnished reputation.

Particular techniques include identifying customers by segment, hosting one or more branded customer communities, engaging customers in conversation and integrating the social media channels with other channels of customer communication.

Social media use is quite new for business, but nevertheless the use of it must be guided by business priorities, efficiency and ultimately, profitability.

This article provides an interesting summary of an approach to social media.

The New IT Platform

It's no secret that the world of IT is increasingly dominated by cloud computing, mobile computing and social networks. What is less widely acknowledged is that these phenomena may actually replace the current IT platforms, at least that is what a new IDC report, "IDC Predictions: Welcome to the new mainstream" says.

The new IDC report was released last week and is more than a trendy muse.

Companies are already moving into social media, including blogs, Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter. But that doesn't mean in this new world that personnel will be tweeting and sending Facebook status reports that they are going to take their coffee break now. Not at all. Social media is revealing itself as a valuable tool for interacting with stakeholders in the business - employees, customers, suppliers, competitors, and others. The work that people do in the new world will be very serious work, directed to greater profitability and efficiency through the use of the cloud, mobiles and social media.

The IDC report, downloadable here, says that during 2011, these things will become mainstream. It's moving faster than we thought.

Social Media - An Important Management Tool

IBM has sponsored a new eBook, entitled "Empowering People, Removing the Barriers to Social Business Adoption," that explores the ways in which social media can be used to manage a company, support collaboration and monitor and manage the activities of teams within the organization.

For some time now, companies have been using social media as a resource in researching new personnel being considered for hiring, and for corporate wide discussions and announcements. The new paradigm suggested by IBM, already adopted by some progressive companies, goes much further than that, making social media an important and central part of the fabric of the company.

The paper offers some concrete solutions to the problems of work silos and uncooperative teams, all within a context of peer respect and transparency. You can download a free copy of the eBook from this site.

Television in Transition

That medium most central to news and entertainment life during the latter half of the 20th century is rapidly changing before our eyes. The internet has changed and continues to change everything else - books, magazines, newspapers, travel, banking, you name it - but television has been the longest holdout, particularly cable TV.

That cable still survives these days is particularly remarkable when you consider that a lot of the content that people like to view is available for free on the internet, while the cable companies charge an arm and a leg for it.

Many people realize this, and surveys are reporting hundreds of thousands of people discontinuing their cable service. And many more planning to do so during the coming year.

People are discovering the entertainment value of sites like Youtube, which offers its content for free. Also, movie services like Netflix are catching on and many of the news services offer their programs and news programs on archive and sometimes on a live streaming basis. Quality of internet content on the big screen is getting better too, and in many cases as good as regular TV.

The most interesting aspect of this changing part of the world from a business point of view is that there must be a way for the providers of the content to get paid for their product, whether it be music, movies or news features. Right from the people/actors doing their part to the companies providing the equipment and marketing expertise to get their work to the public. So "for free" may be appealing to the audience, and especially to the young who often feel that everything should be free, but free is just not sustainable.

This means that the companies in the TV business need to find new business models. that may not be as hard as it first seems. They already have strong support of advertisers - the most likely source of revenue. All they need to do is to convince the advertisers that it is worth their while to spend big bucks on advertising on the internet. As the audience shifts over, this will be an easier task.

The established players also need to find ways to compete with new players like Google TV and Apple TV.

Musicians have adapted quite well. Justin Beiber is a good example, who got his start through his parents putting his videos on YouTube. They of course went viral and the rest is now history. We can expect more YouTube stars in various fields - not just music.

The end result will not be the end of TV. It will mark the end of cable TV as we know it. And it will result in new business models for everyone in the supply chain and will mark a wonderful new era in TV content for the audience.

For a good article on this topic, check out this link.

Top 5 IT Business Videos for 2009

ITBusiness.ca has released a list of the top five videos for 2009, including the links that can be used to watch them. Worth some time! Many of the links involve the use of mobile units and social media - two of the forces currently shaping e-Business. For the list and the links, click this link.

Managing the Move to the Cloud

Gartner predicts that spending on the cloud will increase in the next year by 16%, more than three times the rate of increase expected in IT spending generally. That would indicate that many companies will need to pay attention to the management of the transition to the cloud.

One point is immediately clear - many of the same issues are going to arise as in any IT migration - the need to test before cut-over and the need to manage process change being two examples. Other issues may not be quite as obvious.

Companies need not and in many cases should not use a single supplier. In the cloud, this can be a challenge, and there is a new breed of service providers who act as cloud brokers, to guide people through the labyrinth of issues.

Also, and this is better known, it is important to pay attention to where your data is going to reside. Different jurisdictions have legislation that covers the management of data that resides in their jurisdiction. For example, the EU Privacy Act limits the transfer of private data outside the EU. And the US Patriot Act makes the data available to certain government and regulatory bodies. As a minimum, the company needs to know the location of its data and have a grasp of the governing legislation and how it fits with home legislation and relevant contracts.

For an excellent article, which provided much of the source of this article, check this link.

Mobiles in the Cloud

Mobile devices have been famously proliferating in the world of data transfer, through texting, email and many new apps that can do anything from playing Bookworm to showing movies to operating complete GPS systems. These are impressive accomplishments for such tiny devices, but yet they are limited as computing devices. They don't have much space for storing apps or the related data. Also their computing power, while impressive, pales against conventional computing devices like laptops and of course other bigger computers.

The cloud offers up the logical answer. Cloud apps run on remote servers and can run pretty well any application you can think of. The challenge for mobiles is to get the input-output interfaces working so the results of such powerful apps can be run from the limited mobile interfaces. it's a challenge but not impossible for a wide range of apps. Such apps are starting to come out in commercially viable scale and content, primarily at this point in the form of games. But then a lot of modern computing originated with games.

We'll soon see a large growth in the capabilities of mobile units. A person cruising in a boat on a lazy summer day out in the country will be able to run an app that utilizes the advanced analytical capabilities of a sophisticated ERP system and display the reports on the tiny screen of the mobile. It will open a whole range of services for the devices. And will cement their role as a focal point of the new computing environment. An article in Technology Review explains some of the new games coming on stream.

I Want it and I Want it Now

Such is the consumer of data in the modern age. They want their data anytime, anywhere. Sounding like a spoiled child, they are backed up by masses of people and by technology. And by three megatrends - the proliferation of mobile devices, cloud computing and social collaboration. It is possible for them to get what they want.

Companies who use the web for disclosing their information to their stakeholders, or to their partners and collaborators, need to respond fully to these trends. Lets take a quick look at what this means.

Mobile devices are evolving so quickly it makes it difffcult to plot strategy. However, we do know that smart phones are likely to be around for a while and that they are likely to have small screens but big capabilities. Information needs to be made available so it can be consumed on these devices as well as on more conventional devices. That part is not too difficult.

However, we also know that the consumers of data want to be able to work with the data themselves, rather than just receive a bunch of prescribed reports. That means they need to get the data into applications that are powerful enough to do good analyses. That's a challenge for the small devices, even though they are powerful. Also, people using any computers are increasingly using cloud apps for various purposes. The companies therefore need to provide the analytical ability and the logical way to do this is on a SaaS basis - in the cloud - so that the users don't need to worry about finding good analytical tools every time they want to consume some data.

Third, users are accustomed to social networks, and becoming more so. Collaboration is the key and understanding data is a natural for collaboration - between the organization providing the data and the consumers as well as between the consumers themselves. This is the way people work online, and the way companies need to provide their information.

So Mobiles, Cloud computing and social networking (see this related article) - all are key to the disclosure of information in the new and developing information environment.
 

Dell Keeps on Innovating

Way back when the Web was new, and companies were just starting to use it, Michael Dell started up a new venture to sell computers to people on demand. What set his new business apart from others that preceded it was that it didn't carry inventory, it didn't build the computers until they had been sold. This simple (conceptually anyway) innovation revolutionized the field of supply chain management, and set the stage for countless new companies in the information age.

Now, Dell is still innovating, this time in tune with the major trends of the time - SaaS, the Cloud and virtualization. The company is moving beyond hardware into service, something that all big companies (e.g. IBM) must eventually do. For an interesting article on Dell's current initiatives, check out this link.