Showing posts with label media. Show all posts
Showing posts with label media. Show all posts

Sunday, 30 June 2013

Interesting week!

It’s been an interesting week – the auld enemies, Microsoft and Oracle, have made a joint announcement, SPDY is finding its way into IE11, and IBM has been showing off its mastery of big data at Wimbledon. So let’s take a look at what’s been going on.

It’s not quite a return to the 1960s with love breaking out all around, but large organizations are realizing that customers and, more importantly, potential customers, use hardware and software from other vendors – and the best way to do more business is to recognize this and be, at the very least, compatible. And so, with this in mind (I expect), Microsoft and Oracle have joined forces in a new cloud venture that means Microsoft’s Windows Azure cloud-computing service will now run Oracle’s database software, Java programming tools, and application-connecting middleware. Azure customers will be able to run Java, Oracle Database, Oracle WebLogic Server, and even Oracle Linux on Windows Server Hyper-V or Windows Azure, and Oracle will deliver full certification and support.

The benefits are that Microsoft gains additional customers for Azure, and Oracle gains customers for their technology who want to use it in the cloud. And it gives Microsoft something that VMware and Amazon Web services don’t have. Companies using Azure cloud service, which lets them build and run programs online, will be able to put information into Oracle’s database.

With many organizations thinking seriously about moving to the cloud, this alliance provides better choices for IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service), allowing them to rent computing power, storage, and database software over the Internet.

Also this week, Microsoft announced that Internet Explorer 11 will support SPDY (pronounced speedy), the Google-backed protocol for speeding up downloads from Web sites. The open source networking protocol achieves this by prioritizing and multiplexing the transfer of Web page subresources, so that only one connection per client is required. It uses Transport Layer Security (TLS) encryption and transmission headers are compressed. Faster Web pages has got to be a good thing – Firefox and Chrome already use it.

Meanwhile, Google has built QUIC (Quick UDP Internet Connections) into developer versions of Chrome. It’s an alternative to TCP (Transmission Control Protocol) and is designed to cut the round-trip time of the back-and-forth communications between computers on the Internet. User Datagram Protocol (UDP) is faster than TCP, but doesn’t have TCP’s error-checking reliability. QUIC is based on UDP and now provides its own error-correction technology.

So what new things could IBM bring to Wimbledon? It’s been providing up-to-date information for 24 years now, so what’s different in 2013? Well, the answer is more social media involvement.

Last year, it seems, there were around 100 tweets per second during the men’s final, won by Roger Federer against Andy Murray. So this year, IBM is providing social sentiment analysis, using its content analytics software. That means it can, for example, gauge how popular Andy Murray is in different parts of the UK!

IBM’s SPSS predictive analytics software is at the core of SlamTracker, which deploys a mixture of predictive analytics software, data visualization, and kinetic tracking to see what people consistently did when they won. IBM’s Second Sight technology measures player speed, distance, and stamina. This year it’s integrated with HawkEye, the ball-tracking and line-calling technology.

So an interesting week all round.

Sunday, 3 March 2013

Top-to-bottom social media strategy

At its IBM Connect 2013 social business event, IBM announced new software and cloud-based services to help transform organizations into social businesses.

The new social software offerings are meant to help companies gain deeper insights into big data generated through the use of social networks. Organizations applying analytics to their data for competitive advantage are more likely to substantially outperform their industry peers, is the IBM line on this. Apparently, 61 percent of the Fortune 100, are licensed to use IBM’s social business technologies.

IBM’s new software and cloud-based services include a new Web-based social networking environment that provides HR leaders with a better way to recruit and bring new employees onboard, while giving employees access to digital media and data in real time, enabling faster decision making.

IBM also announced software to help marketing teams design sophisticated advertising campaigns and quickly publish those campaigns to leading social networks, resulting in a consistent customer experience through every online channel.

And, finally, IBM announced the next release of its social networking platform will further enable users to access and analyse big data from inside and outside the organization, including through Facebook, Twitter, audio and video. IBM also plans to release the industry’s first truly social e-mail client, incorporating file sharing, activity streams, and a simplified user interface. This will be a major release of Notes and Domino.

But if you’re just starting out as a very small business, you probably can’t even afford to pay for a domain name and a Web site let alone class software like IBM’s. So here are some suggestions about how to be found by clients on the Internet – starting very small and building on that.

Your first foot in the door to tell people about you and what you can do with your business, is to sign up for a free page at https://about.me/. You end up with a page address such as http://about.me/t_eddolls. You just need a large photo (1680 by 1050 pixels) or a logo, or whatever your creative instincts tell you. You will need some text but you can update it whenever you want. And you can be found on Google – so you could attract more clients.

If you don’t mind not having a unique domain name to start with, you can get free Web hosting at zxq.net and similar companies. You can use yourname.zxq.net. Later you can pay for a domain name and hosting (see below).

If you think you know a bit about writing Web pages – HTML (HyperText Mark-up Language) and CSS (Cascading Style Sheets), go to https://thimble.webmaker.org. Mozilla (the Firefox people) Thimble makes it very easy to create your own Web pages. Write and edit HTML and CSS in your browser and preview your work. You can then host and share your finished pages.

Get a Twitter account by going to http://twitter.com and signing up. Call yourself by your business name – there is a limit on the number of characters. And you can link the account to your Facebook page. Use hashtags (putting a ‘#’ in front of a noun) to link to things. Comment on news and developments in your industry and you area – you can build relationships with local organizations. Tweet positive messages – whatever feels right for you. And local businesses can tweet about you and hashtag your business name – helping you get more business.

In addition to your usual Facebook account, you need to set up a ‘page’ for your business. I’d use the same name you did for your Twitter account. Facebook pages can be found on Google – which means that your business can be found in searches and you’ll get more clients. You can put photos of your staff, offices, happy clients. You can put links to interesting news stories. You tell people about interesting or relevant news items. You can post similar information to Twitter – or you can link the two and post only once. You can find details of how to create a page by searching on Google. One useful page is at http://www.squidoo.com/facebookpage.

Join LinkedIn (http://www.linkedin.com/). You’ll then be able to connect to lots of other similar business and join groups. You could even start your own group. You can add your company to the company pages and post information about your company. You may get clients, but, importantly, you’ll make connections. And organizations and individuals who think they do business with you, may start to follow your business on LinkedIn.

And as you find you’ve got more to say about your business, you may want to start blogging. A short article of around 500 words is about the right size. It’s quick to read and you can convey some good information. If you have a Google account, then sign up with Blogger (www.blogger.com). Your blog will be called yourcompanyname.blogspot.com. Otherwise, Wordpress (wordpress.com) also provides free blogs. And once you’ve written a blog, you can link to it from Facebook and Twitter – which will increase the number of hits on your blog and generally make you easier to find by potential clients.

Once your business is looks like it will succeed and not wither on the vine, you can buy a domain name – your-business-name.com (or a local variant, eg .co.uk). You can pay to have it hosted somewhere. You’ll need a conversation with someone who understands SEO (Search Engine Optimization). They will get you onto the first page of Google.

And you could create your own Web pages with Adobe Dreamweaver. Better still, you can get someone else to code a modern-looking Web site using Javascript. Using JQuery makes the site look very modern and interesting to visitors. Using a Content Management System (CMS) like Joomla makes it easy for you to use (and still very modern for visitors). Look out for those words if someone is offering to ‘do’ your site for you.

If you own your own domain name, you’ll probably have your own e-mail address – eg bob@mycompany.com. If you haven’t, then use a free e-mail like Gmail or Yahoo. If you have a hotmail or msn e-mail address, get a new one!
Lastly, get a modern-looking signature for your e-mail. Something like:

Fred Smith
CEO MyCompany Ltd
P: 01249 443256 | M: 07901 505 609 | E-mail | Web site | Twitter | Facebook | G+ | LinkedIn


Now there’s a trick to this! Create the address in Word, select a word (eg Web site), and press the ctrl and k keys at the same time. You’ll be able to link the word to a Web address. In this case the address of your Web site. You’ll also see a button called ‘ScreenTip’. Click on that and write something about the link, eg MyCompany’s Web site. Copy and paste it into an e-mail. That way, when you send an e-mail, all your contact information is included in an attractive and short few lines. When people move their mouse over one of your new links, the ScreenTip will appear, so they can see something about the link – helping them decide whether to click on it. And they can forward it to more potential clients.

Nowadays, most people search the Internet rather than look through phone books. So it becomes very important to be ‘found’ by potential clients. And when your company is big enough, you can start to use IBM’s products.

Sunday, 3 January 2010

Social media – a business tool

Social networks started off being ways to stay in contact with friends or make new friends. It also provided an easy way to share photos and therefore keep up with the activities of those friends that you see less often.

You can still do that, but nowadays social networks are becoming business tools and many organizations are already using them in that way. Intel, at the end of 2008, produced its social media guidelines and encouraged employees to use social media to get the corporate message out to as many people as possible.

So, if you’re not doing it already, what should you be doing? First of all there’s Twitter. Twitter was known only to a few people a year ago, but today it’s as well known as any other social media Web site. As you probably know, Twitter is a micro-blogging site allowing 140-digit messages to be sent. You have to publicize that you’re on Twitter so that people will “follow” you – ie read your tweets. You can tweet that you’re just enjoying a cup of coffee or whatever, but for business you probably want to tweet a news headline or an appointment date and time (like the next webinar or a conference). You then put a colon and a URL where people can read more details. It you have a series of tweets on the same topic, you can use hash tags (put a hash in front of a word that’s found in each tweet). And people can now re-tweet, which means they can pass on your tweet to their friends – extending the number of people who see your message. You can use a Twitter widget so your tweets appear in your Web page. That way people who browse your Web site can see the latest information you’re sharing. And you can use things like TweetDeck to see whether anyone else is tweeting about your company. You can find my tweets at twitter.com/t_eddolls.

One related thing with Twitter… it’s often a good idea to shorten URLs so they can be included with the text within the 140-character limit. Perhaps the two best-known sites for this are Bitly (bit.ly) and Tiny URL (www.tiny.cc). Example short URLs look like: http://bit.ly/6bVer5 or http://tiny.cc/MovBb. Other URL shortening organizations are available.

Facebook is also very useful for businesses. It’s easy to set up. I would recommend that you set up a new account so that anyone who becomes your friend doesn’t get access to pictures of you falling down drunk or whatever. Once you’ve set up a company name area on Facebook, anyone can become a fan. It also gives you the opportunity to post photos and meeting dates (in Events). You can also post information about your company and publish press releases, and use the “wall” to tie everything together. If you find people are putting negative comments, you will need to add positive ones so the bad ones disappear out of site further down the page. This can also be linked to Twitter. If you want to see a good example how it can be done, look for Marmite. I also include the Facebook widget on my home page as a second way of giving people up-to-date-information. You can become a fan of iTech-Ed here (http://www.facebook.com/pages/iTech-Ed-Ltd/201736748040?v=wall&ref=search).

In addition, you can have a presence on Linkedin (www.linkedin.com), Ecademy (www.ecademy.com), Fast Pitch (www.fastpitchnetworking.com), Plaxo (www.plaxo.com), Zoominfo (www.zoominfo.com), Naymz (www.naymz.com), and a host of other communities.

Get out there and blog. There are a few big blogging sites out there – Blogger (www.blogger.com), Typepad (www.typepad.com), and WordPress (wordpress.org) – and numerous others. Blogs can be used as ways of chatting about an event or a news item. It shows a friendly face for interacting with clients and potential clients. You should always Twitter a link to your blogs and put them on your corporate Facebook page.

You can also make all your news stories available through an RSS link. For example:
>a href="teblog.xml"
title="Subscribe to news about iTech-Ed" style=
"border:1px solid; border-color:#fc9 #630 #330 #f96; padding:0 3px; font-family:Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font:bold 12px; color:#fff; background:#f60; text-decoration:none; margin:4px;"<
 RSS  >/a<

This bit of code gives you a button without needing a graphic. You will need an XML file with it, and numerous examples can be found using Google.


You hope that your “fans” will be monitoring changes on your Web site, and you can do the same with rival organizations by using a feed aggregator. For example, Google Reader lets you subscribe to your favourite Web sites so new content comes to you when it's posted. Reader keeps track of which things you’ve read so that you only see unread items when you come back. If there’s a dark blue border around an item, Reader is marking that item as read.

Another thing to be thought about is shared content. If you have content (and by that I mean photos or videos) that could be shared with a wider audience, you can put it on sites like YouTube (www.youtube.com), Flickr (www.flickr.com), SlideShare, and others.
What about MySpace (www.myspace.com)? It gives you the opportunity to create a Web site and listen to music – but if you already have a Web site, I'm not sure what advantage the extra Web presence would give you.

Social bookmarking is very interesting. It's a mechanism that allows people to share, organize, search, and manage bookmarks of Web resources. Users save links to Web pages that they want to remember and/or share. Many social bookmarking services provide Web feeds for their lists of bookmarks, including lists organized by tags. This allows subscribers to become aware of new bookmarks as they are saved, shared, and tagged by other users. Examples of these include Delicious (delicious.com), Digg (digg.com), Reddit (www.reddit.com), and StumbleUpon (StumbleUpon), but there are lots of others, with new ones arriving all the time. It’s a good idea to put these on news pages or blog pages, but they can go anywhere. However, this can become a bit of a nightmare because there are so many. I made a start by copying the icons and then using the following code (it went on, but you get the idea):

<a id="digg" title="Share this page on Digg" href="javascript:location.href='http://digg.com/submit?v=2&url='+encodeURIComponent(document.location.href)+'&title='+encodeURIComponent(document.title)+' '"> <img src="digg.jpg" width="25" height="25" alt="Share this page on Digg" title="Share this page on Digg" style="border:0"/> </a>

<a id="stumble" title="Share this page on StumbleUpon" href="javascript:location.href='http://www.stumbleupon.com/submit?v=2&url='+encodeURIComponent(document.location.href)+'&title='+encodeURIComponent(document.title)+' '"> <img src="su.jpg" width="25" height="25" alt="Share this page on StumbleUpon" title="Share this page on StumbleUpon" style="border:0"/> </a>


<a id="delicious" title="Share this page on del.icio.us" href="javascript:location.href='http://del.icio.us/post?v=2&url='+encodeURIComponent(document.location.href)+'&title='+encodeURIComponent(document.title)+' '"> <img src="del.jpg" width="25" height="25" alt="Share this page on del.icio.us" title="Share this page on del.icio.us" style="border:0"/> </a>


<a id="reddit" title="Share this page on Reddit" href="javascript:location.href='http://reddit.com/submit?v=2&url='+encodeURIComponent(document.location.href)+'&title='+encodeURIComponent(document.title)+' '"> <img src="reddit.jpg" width="25" height="25" alt="Share this page on Reddit" title="Share this page on Reddit" style="border:0"/> </a>

This is not the best way to do it!
My advice would be to use a single button that links to multiple bookmarking sites, for example AddToAny (www.addtoany.com) or AddThis (www.addthis.com)

While making sure that staff adhere to guidelines, I would recommend any organization raises its profile and gets into social media – until the next big thing comes along.