 yt Support | John Scanlon 1 September 2010 10:52:19 AMLarge corporations are now appoint Social Media Directors and Strategy Teams. It is being utilised as a revitalising marketing tool and it is being mined for knowledge by large companies. The most common reasons for embracing social media tools are: 1) Companies or organisations take to Social Media for Marketing Brand and engagement, the Marketers approach is as follows: - Publish regularily on Social Media to create interactions with fans, thinking like a gossip magazine to create talk.
- Give people a reason to join, e.g. virtual gifts, coupons or contests.
- Expand relationships with prospects and fans by responding directly and recognising personal events, birthdays,etc.
- Let users talk to each other when discussing the company or products and then respond in a conversational way.
- Promote across other channels and media ensuring other content can be shared on social media too.
- You must give Social Media initiatives sufficient support and you should target content to each niche. Ensure you have management support before you begin.
- Measure social media marketing efforts and their impact on your business objectives.
2) Companies also use Social Media for Recruitment - checking users facebook, Linked In and My Space, aacounts, etc. This includes their wider friends and community. Human Resource companies are becoming expert at using these tools for candidate profiling.
3) Media Monitoring Companies can monitor their name and brand throughout these social media domains. Then head off any bad comments or identify issues quickly. This includes steering the dialogue back your way.
4) IT Cost Reduction Of course you get some free applications that can be used to interact with your users, but you must read the Terms & Agreements for potential downsides, especially related to content ownership. The specific approach you take depends on your business and products. You should design a Strategy which includes your expected benefits, that states each of your product categories or user/customer types and how your marketing & communications strategy will target them. Expect to see benefits within 6 months to 2 years. Measure regularily and against your expected benefits.
John Scanlon 12 August 2010 08:35:31 AMVideo is a very good way to provide content and to connect with your audience on your website. The idea is to use it to help engage visitors with your site, products or stories. Australians spend a lot of time watching online videos with increasing popularity of watching videos on a phone. The average duration for online video is 4.4 minutes*. Video capability is a fast growing feature for small business websites, but more so for online retailers. You need to be specific in your video strategy designing the video for your goal. Videos can increase loyalty, site goals or traffic. Your video goals may be to introduce key people, part of the sales cycle or demonstrate products. For instance use educational videos to increase site loyality, use product review videos for conversion goals and use viral videos to increase traffic. The videos types may be: Humour, How Tos, Demonstrations, Testimonials, Classic branding Commercial, Documentary, Short Film, Interviews or Abstract Viral. A documentary style video works best for information heavy content. An educational style video will establish trust, simplify a process or reduce buyer concerns. Educational videos may include, How Tos, Induction, Safety, Benefits & Features or Online Learning. Viral videos need a good budget and design, they should be original, extraordinary, unexpected or funny, mysterious or sexy. Ask who is your audience, how do they learn, where do they watch, which style do they prefer and how will they respond. Direct your message to each audience group. The video quality is important but there is a process required to create the video which takes time and money. Don't forget to measure your goals perhaps using one of these methods: - enter your details - download this file - buy this product - deposit now - like - rate it - quick poll You should also orientate your Video search engine optimisation (SOE). Search engines are completing to provide blended search results and like videos but can't categorise them easily. To do this you can use Video site maps which is an XML based way to inform the search engine about your video. Other video SOE include using keywords in the filename, using titles, description and tags. The videos should be embedded into relevant pages in your site. These days, many sites host their videos for free on YouTube and them embed this on their own site. But be aware that YouTube will then own your video content and their own goals are to increase YouTube search results not your own site search results. There is anecdotal stories of increased conversion rate on sites when video is added, indeed popular USA site www.zappos.com will make 50,000 product videos in 2010 and reckon the videos increase sales buy 6-30%. For higher costs purchases a video explaining premium product benefits are excellent. Other internet users are always looking for online content to validate or reinforce opinions about products, sites and businesses. Use your video content along side your social media marketing strategy and monitor user feedback or talk. Big brands like Sony, Coca-Cola and Nike even run submitted video campaigns for their own marketing and research objectives. In summary the considerations are similar for any web page or marketing content. What is the purpose, the audience, is it relevant, valuable, searchable and are your results measurable. * Comscore & Nielson John Scanlon 7 August 2010 02:22:09 PMHere is the Lotus knows buzz: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8uy7micFCcA
IBM Lotus Software delivers robust collaboration software that empowers people to connect, collaborate, and innovate while optimizing the way they work. With Lotus you can drive better business outcomes through smarter collaboration.
The Lotus Product Range includes: --------------------------------------------------- Lotus Notes and Domino - A low cost of ownership, security-rich platform for collaboration and business applications. Easy to use, integrated desktop client that brings together email and collaborative business applications. Push email offering for quick access to email, calendars and more to mobile devices, including iPhone and Nokia Symbian devices. Lotus Sametime - Get integrated, real-time communications services for voice, data and video. Find, reach and collaborate with your colleagues, customers and business partners. Lotus Connections - social computing software for business. Lotus Quickr - team collaboration software that helps you share content, collaborate and work faster online with your teams - inside or outside your firewall. Lotus Forms - Automated Forms processing. Lotus Foundations - Email, calendars, contacts, office productivity tools, network security, remote access, file and print sharing, backup and disaster recovery - all in a single package priced with the small business budget in mind. Lotus Web Content Management - increase the efficiency and accuracy of website deployments by placing content creation in the hands of content experts - while IT can retain control. Lotus Live - Lotus collaboration solutions offered in the Cloud. IBM Mashup Center - enterprise mashup platform, supporting rapid assembly of dynamic web applications with the management, security, and governance capabilities IT requires. Websphere Portal - personalised portals based on composite applications, SOA and highly scalable. http://www.lotusknows.com http://www.lotuslive.com
Project Vulcan Demonstration: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7SkYTetx-9Q John Scanlon 29 July 2010 10:12:55 PM29th July - All Domino Managed Servers (production, development and staging) have now been upgraded now Domino 8.5.1CF3. Separately, here is an interesting poster of the Top 10 Most Common Software Vulnerabilities found on users computers for the first quarter of 2010, with explanations of AdWare, Virus, Phishing, Trojans, Malware, Riskware, Spam, Spyware, Worm and Hacker:
http://www.intac.net/wp-content/uploads/2010/07/web-spam.jpg John Scanlon 5 July 2010 03:39:38 PMLotus Notes is a powerful messaging platform. We know that. But it is only one of its functions, it does many other things which combined with its email platform makes it very powerful for organisations and reduces their total cost of technology ownership. The list is long and we will compile one for you when we have more time. But as a mature software platform it doesn't generate much press, so it's good to see when managers exhibit their own case studies for the press: http://www.computerworld.com.au/article/352073/boystown_achieves_lotus_position_-_without_exchange/?eid=413Comments Disabled John Scanlon 25 May 2010 09:46:50 AMSocial Media has grown enormously around the world this year with the main players being Facebook, Twitter, ????????? (Russia), Renren (China). It is not only the young signing up but it is also inter-generational, with seniors and house wives and families signing up. It is pervasive, also on netbooks and iPads. It is inter-connected to other web services and application providers. Generation Y & Z utilise social media constantly and consider email old hat. It has clear benefits in aiding communications between families, friends, organisations and like minded groups. It can really enhance our social communications, ...right? Amongst the rush on use these new tools (200 million new users in the past year world wide), we are all still learning how Social Media will impact us for the long term. The upside is terrific. We can all communicate and stay in contact or informed in a much more fun way, easily sharing more of our lives through rich media. We can follow distant friends and family more closely. Our social connectivity will grow. This helps us to be more human and happier people. On the down side though, there are sinister issues. Social media competes with each other and for our attention. It becomes better and better at reaching some of our psychological instincts. Because it taps these social areas in us, it easily sneaks past our normal environmental anti-trust barriers. We share enthusiastically, ..why not, everyone else is. Thus do our lives become over exposed. We become exposed to any sort of predatory tactics. Those with criminal intent quickly develop strategies to enact financial fraud, or they groom their victims - with deadly consequences. Those with commercial intent quickly develop strategies to ingratiate and commercialise customers like never before. We become more material and beholden to consumerism. We don't even know that these commercial forces are shaping our thoughts because they become so implicit in our interactions. The Social Media frameworks that we use enhance our online communications absolutely wonderfully compared to times past. However, these frameworks are still very limiting to the overall human experience. How we evolved for human to human communications is subtly different to how we behave for online social communications. This can be both good and bad. We simplify our emotions for online communications into polarised instincts - happy, LOL, sad, like, angry. The full gambet of emotions that we use to communicate in person cannot be transferred online. The online communications are 'restricted in their emotional feedback' and 'contain a delay in their emotional feedback'. This in fact reduces our emotionally range in these interactions and it places our emotional responses into simple base camps only. We forget too that the written word is permanent and transferable, it is not ephemeral and immediately reactive. Therefore, it contains a its own special power in communication. We forget this because we forgot formal written communications. We replaced it instead with verbal written communications in our online, mobile world. SMS speak. Short responses. Simple sentences. No room or time for thoughtful paragraphs with more meaningful communications. We scan and quickly filter on LOL, Like, Sad, Angry. (Time strapped scanning relies more on emotional responses counted in milliseconds then it does on logical responses.) With simplified online emotions we seek forth in our Social Media frameworks looking for our simplified emotional interactions. Like - :-) - LOL. We know that on the internet popularity is the winner. Popularity feeds itself to become more popular. It goes viral. We can be more in touch with popularity online then ever before online and you can't avoid celebrity, mostly trash for its own sake. We can become popular too, Social Networks encourage this and make it easier. Be my friend. I follow you. You are popular. I copy you, I become popular too. Thus, on these frameworks we become more homogenised. Our behaviour becomes more similar. We will learn and adapt fast. But we may become different people. We will be lesser people? We will become better consumers online. We will also become 'prosumers' (the opposite of consumers). Which is, we will learn the art of self promotion online. We will "customise our private moments online for the edification of potential buyers online"* (Lee Siegel). The potential buyers are our social networks, customers, business partners and present or future employers.
Comments Disabled John Scanlon 25 May 2010 09:45:57 AMThere is a lot of talk about Adode's Flash and HTML5. Here are some Links which will elaborate further. Read them in order. 1)
http://www.theaustralian.com.au/business/news/apple-ceo-attacks-adobes-weak-flash/story-e6frg90o-1225860441502 2)
http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE63T47V20100430 3)
http://blogs.adobe.com/flashplayer/2010/03/improved_flash_player_support.html 4)
http://chargedweb.com/labs/2010/05/03/apple-truth-revealed/ It's an interesting Industry stouch. Will usability lead the way? What do you think? PS> Lastly: As a developer you can purchase Adobe software product, then build what you like. You will own the IP and you can run it anywhere. As a Apple iPhone or iPad developer you must sign Apple's Developer Agreement and then use own their tools or API's. More here:
http://blogs.techrepublic.com.com/programming-and-development/?p=2486&tag=leftCol;post-2518 Comments Disabled John Scanlon 25 May 2010 09:44:34 AMHere is something we developed about 10 years ago which is still in use by one of our clients. As development managers you may or may not use Function Points, but if you do, give it a whirl:
http://realitytest.isbsg.org A function point is standard metric for the relative size and complexity of a software system:
http://foldoc.org/Function+Point+Analysis A few year ago we did an analysis of our own average function point price for our own development projects using Lotus Notes / Domino Web Development. We turned out to be very low cost because we utilise this platform in conjunction with a Rapid Application Development approach and have a large library of existing re-usable routines with can use:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rapid_application_development Comments Disabled John Scanlon 20 May 2010 11:37:35 AMThere is now a Notes App store which offers companies information about a wide range of Lotus Notes applications that make up a complete business suite. Products in the Notes App store include Project Management, HR, E-Mail, CRM applications and more! The benefit of the Notes App store to IT managers is that they can spend less time searching various web sites for important Lotus Notes applications and more time talking to vendors who can provide them. Imagine a vibrant and centralized site for Lotus Notes applications, which the Lotus community can easily search! Such a store exists, at http://www.notesappstore.com/
 Comments Disabled John Scanlon 6 April 2010 10:33:40 AM Domino Easy - All production servers have been upgraded to Domino 8.5.1. Lotus Notes\Domino provides a unique platform for Notes, Web & Eclipse applications, utilising XPages technology. The IBM Domino Designer Software build on the open and extensible Eclipse platform is now freely available for download from IBM. IBM reports that there are are more than 280,000 IBM Lotus Notes developers worldwide and 10 million Lotus Notes Applications.
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