Social Media, is it REALLY important for the Fortune 500?
quite a deep question. To answer the first part of it: yes, social media is definitly important for F500 corps. Why? Because there are a lot of people on the social media platforms and the continue to grow. And while the social media platforms remain free (if you really only use the standard functions) every lead you pick up is free also. Like Zero bucks.
Since a lot of companies are moving towards things like reputation retention/frontline customer care strategies, this person who spends the whole day on the web, could easily be involved in other online communities shoving out content, etc.
One of the simplest things that come to my mind is to synch up your blog on several social profiles and thus automatically publish posts to the according websites.
The second part: I am pretty much present everywhere. And has it helped me? Yes, it definitly has. I comment pretty frequently and participate in a lot of discussions, blog a lot of articles associated to my business but also about my private life.
Enterprise 2.0 – Community V/S Control?
no, I don’t. A lot of enterprises don’t see the value of mass collaboration and which benefits it brings along. And if they do, they deploy a platform but do not encourage their employees to use it adequatly.
Now, I know that the hardest task in implementing an E 2.0 solution inside an organization is to get the people to contribute but there are simple measures I have worked out to do so. And the whole organization profits from these because of the high amount of information flow taking place.
Domain name branding: Use domain hacks (country extensions etc) or use a meaningless .com?
the time you took to ask this question has cost you $100. A domain costs a few cents a month 
But seriously – the best way to go is to have an appealing name that is not too far from the original message you are trying to convey.
In the two domains you have pointed out I would go ahead and use both of ‘em. You could run into copyright issues with “Enigma” because I’m willing to bet my three newest pairs of boxers that someone on this mother earth holds the rights for the name with all associated credentials to it. Please also considder that and do some research on it.
The bottom line being: the shorter and more meaningful for the product and the easier to associate and remember, the better.
Is the maintenance of project blogs beneficial?
actually I believe so. Yet you have to find out whether there are tools out there that are – in general – even more beneficial, like a Wiki for instance. A blog could definitly be interesting also, that I must admit.
I recently heard about a programming session a few devs were having. The core was seated in one room and the rest was decentralized across the globe. The means they used to communicate were a software which allowed the synchro altering of the code and they were all connected over an IRC channel which they used to communicate in non-code… That might be referred to as real time mass collaboration I guess
Yet I would almost go ahead and use an integrated blog/timestamp tool in another solution – something customized. Because a blog is cool approach, but a bit of a broad sword because you need one or more features here (which a blog may not bring along) and can neglect some other tools which the blog-sw brings along but only costs server load, disk space or whatever.
How does a corporation go public?
Most of the times it happens through a wide spread campaign with a lot of variables.
Starting from figuring out which demographics and localities you’re facing and – upon figuring that out – developing a marketing plan, the press release and who to send it to, etc.
Along with that may go an initial publicity campaign in the social media world, getting you attention from that specific group of people you are facing.
What is the importance of Web Analytics for Social Networking and Etailing Sites?
The importance lies in the determination of the visitors perception of the project and how – and into which direction – the network or etailing site needs to develop if a certain site/section or piece of content is percieved as uninteresting or even neglected.
The problem the personal profiling though. While the social networks have a pretty easy time because they hold tons of information about a person etc., the etailing platforms can only rely upon the information given by the customer in the past. And let’s be honest: while we spend hours and hours detailing our profile on social networking platforms we get sceptical when a commercial platform asks us for a our date of birth or associated, “intimate” information.
The metrics used are a combination of those in every above standard web analytics software plus the data a platform holds about it’s users.
Hope I was able to help and feel free to call me if you need any more information.
Pricing information on the cost to redesign large corporate websites?
It is premature to say that it would cost a buffalo nickel or a fortune because there are too many dependencies involved.
Some of them will include:
Whether or not the platform can be open source which will determine a tremendous amount of the projects costs.
Is there really a need for a content management system involved at all or is the content static? Minor changes can be done to a website for a rediculous amount of money and if this specific company has a change every half a year and the implementation of an enterprise level CMS (regardless if open source or not) can really lead to some sleepless nights.
You probably get my point. You really have to work down a pretty individual catalogue before you even go to stage two of the project.
If you need my help please feel free to call me.
What would people say is the top CRM system?
I have handled a few projects regarding CRM and must say there are quite a lot of them out there. Yet the “true” CRM which matches the companies needs 1:1 hasn’t been born yet (I’m working on it though )
But seriously – CRMs are highly individualized solutions that require a long pre-run analysis of what the organization wants to achieve with it in the first place. The bottom line being that knowing a lot about your customer is worth a hell of a lot of money. But on the other hand maintaining that data in the system with all the follow ups etc. can either cause your typists fingers to bleed on a regular basis or cost you money on the other hand.
Once that is leveraged you go to stage 2, which is: how the heck do we get that into our existing workflow?.. What you don’t want to happen is to get too far away from what is currently going on inside your organization because it will slow you down dramatically and lead to disturbances you do not want to occur.
Step 3 is finding the right product that will match your need. Now this is where it gets nifty… there are a few CRMs out there (even open source) that do a good job. Yet the thing I emphisize every time is that you have map your existing processes upon the CRM and not vice versa. A CRM which you can’t individualize/customize is worthless because you’ll end up with a rebellion in your company which will not bring you any benefits what so ever.
Now, this is just a rough outline of the battleplan I have utilized successfully on a few assignments. Contact me for further details.
As the web industry continues to push for compliance…who’s listening?
In your question you point out that amazon.com, disney.com, google.com etc. don’t have compliant websites.
First of all – and to state just one more rumor – compliant websites are to be beneficial for the SEO score / PageRank. And some say they have proven to be more successful because (of course) bots have an easier time crawling them. The good things about the companies you have pointed out is, that they don’t need to be indexed because they have such heavy traffic, so many backlinks on the web, and are just “found” without any complex SEO strategy implied. If you want to visit Disney, you enter their URL; if you want to search something, you enter Google’s.
Second: let’s face it… if your company would be that successful with a PR8 or higher, would you give a damn if your website was compliant? If your name was branded that good and everyone knew it? Your primary concern would be to have the website appealing so that your billions of visitors come back regularly.
The focus shifts from SEO to retention of customers as your company reaches a certain size and your efforts for third party validation in associated publications are taken care of because of the media’s interest in your endevour.
Further more, you point out that we don’t tell Nissan how to build a car. I don’t really concur with you on that because we very well do. It may not be as publically known, yet the automobile industry does heavy market research to determine the people’s request for the spend a considerable amount of time about whom they are going to entrust a huge pile of money they have worked for pretty hard for the last couple of years in order to be able to afford a new vehicle in the first place.
What you are totally correct about is that the users don’t give a damn about whether the website its self is compliant or not. Just as long as it looks good in their prefered browser on their, exceptionally distinct operating system.
The best way to fill the gap between Business professionals and Sofware professionals?
the best way to do so is to set someone in the middle of the two that understands both the business aspects but also has extensive knowledge about the possibilities of ICT and knows how to forge the two into a productive tool.
And there are tons of things to considder – what about the UI in the software? Is that accepted by the staff or can it be altered to make it easier to use (especially vital to an organization with demographic aspects, etc.), does the Corporate ID play a role when creating the UI? Is there a sufficient amount of USER FRIENDLY help in the system so that helpdesk does not get bothered with questions all day?
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