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Social Business: Analysis – Part 1: Base-Lining

April 28, 2010 By 1 Comment

As announced last week, the Fundamentals series will start to get serious about getting into social business. The first phase of entering social business is the Analysis phase where we look at current position, assessing value and effectiveness as well as caveats and pitfalls.

In this post, we’ll look at base-lining, which is the idea of getting a basic feel of where you and your organization stand in the social media sphere. Base-lining consists of a series of assessments on:

  • People;
  • Presence;
  • Reputation;
  • Competition; and
  • Company

Let’s walk through each one step-by-step with actions to get you started.

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Getting Into Social Business

April 20, 2010 By Leave a Comment

The Fundamentals series resumes with an outline for getting into social business. Over the course of the next few weeks, I will highlight the key points of consideration for social business.

Specifically, these are the areas I’ll focus on:

  • Analysis What should you find out before getting into social business? We’ll look at current position, assessing value and effectiveness as well as caveats and pitfalls.
  • Goals and Objectives What are you going to set out to achieve? We’ll look at priorities and how to formulate goals and objectives around them.
  • Strategy What’s the plan? We’ll look at how to define a strategy around the outcomes of the analysis and goal-setting phases, and also at what comes to play when integrating social with other existing activities.
  • Organization How do you roll out social business? We’ll cover aspects such as getting employee/management buy-in, creating a social business team and a social media policy.

It’s going to be a busy period and I hope you’ll be here to ride along.

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A Flashy Future For Mobile

March 18, 2010 By Leave a Comment

This post is inspired by a presentation by Adobe’s Anup Murarka at South by South West. He talked about the future of Adobe Flash for the mobile platform. I’ll cover some of the highlights from Anup’s presentation but will put the topic in a different perspective, namely that of the mobile network operators.

Currently, 98% of desktop computers support Flash, but not even a tenth of mobile phones has Flash support. This is expected to change dramatically over the next couple of years though.

Smartphones are getting better, not only in capabilities, but also in hardware quality. Similar to desktops, notebooks and netbooks, a growing number of smartphones will also boast multi-core processors and graphics processors that can serve up rich media.

Adobe’s new version of Flash—version 10.1—will be cross-platform. Windows, Linux, Mac OS, Symbian, BlackBerry, Android, you name it—all will be supported by Flash 10.1.

Adobe expects to get around 10% of mobile penetration for Flash this year, but expect to grow that number to over 50% by the end of 2012.

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Taking Location-Based Services To A Micro-Level

March 9, 2010 By Leave a Comment

Last Wednesday, I visited a Geomarketing congress organized by my alma mater and Geodan. In this post, I’ll discuss how geomarketing on both a macro-level and a micro-level gives you more pieces to the customer puzzle.

Geomarketing focuses on the relationship between spatial awareness and marketing. Here are some of the real-life cases that were presented:

  • Understanding customer motives for visiting certain car dealerships
  • Determining the location of a new store
  • Plotting and targeting households for effective direct mail campaigns

These are all very good and relevant examples of how location affects the marketing process and how proper geomarketing can improve the rate of success. However, they’re all examples of how to perform geomarketing on a macro-level.

Even modern mobile applications like Foursquare operate mostly on a macro-level. People check into a drug store, a restaurant, a train station, et cetera. It can be good information for your business, but it doesn’t tell you how they move about while they’re at your store for example. This is where geomarketing on a micro-level comes in.

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The Impact Of Social Media On Corporate Technology

March 4, 2010 By Leave a Comment

The Fundamentals series continues this week with a look at how social media has impacted corporate IT. In this post, I’ll discuss:

  • How social media technologies are different from traditional corporate IT technologies;
  • How employees are also bringing social media into the enterprise; and
  • What the complications are of bringing Web tools into the enterprise

Social media is represented by a wide range of technologies, such as blogs, social networks, and wikis. Contrary to the behemoth systems that most large companies have implemented over the last decade, such as ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) and CRM (Customer Relationship Management) systems, social media technologies are more compact, more nimble and less costly to implement.

However, the internal use of social tools—commonly dubbed as enterprise 2.0—aren’t necessarily there to replace the current systems. Instead, they can extend and enrich existing systems.

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