Welcome!


Social Business Software

Talent recruiting is undergoing a major shift with the introduction of Big Data, turning a traditional industry on its head. Previously, recruiting was primarily conducted through open directories like Monster.com, where candidates were spammed according to keyword matches. Then the j...
I started my career as a Telecom Engineer for Rational Software in the load testing space back in the late ’90s, and when I look back on the last decade, there were enormous advances in the broader IT world including development methodologies, processing speeds, network speeds, mobile ...
A recent survey has shown that security policies and rules set down by IT departments are not just being ignored but having a bus driven through them by staff and senior executives, who wish to bring their own device to work so that they can do more, work smarter and be in touch all of...
The Open Group’s first conference in Australia will focus on enterprise transformation. Speakers and a variety of sessions will place the transformation in the context of such vertical industries as finance, defense, exploration, mining, and minerals. As a prelude to the event, Briefi...
The concept of "Just-in-Time" was pioneered in the manufacturing supply chain as a critical way to reduce costs by minimizing inventory. Implementing a just-in-time system that can handle unexpected demand is not a trivial undertaking. It requires the confluence of a number of discipli...
If you’re not convinced the hype around Big Data is entirely justified, consider the following statistics: in the time it takes an average person to read this article, 72 petabytes of data (that’s 72 x 1015 if you’re counting) will have been added to the global information pool. Each h...
Collaboration, or the act of working together, is universal across business types and industries – education, healthcare, real estate, government or any other. However, each industry has its own specific language for referring to things, and puts different emphasis on different collabo...
For any modern entrepreneur I`d suggest the sweet spot of Cloud applications you should master is the holy trinity of these three killer apps – Linkedin, Salesforce.com and Google+ Apps. In short these cater for the end-to-end requirements of a sales operation, so you can begin s...
Sales professionals are some of the earliest adopters and most annoying users of social networking. The problem is that most sales reps treat LinkedIn like a prospecting database for cold calling. It’s just too enticing when all your target prospects are out there showing off their com...
Not long ago, customers and prospects had to find a computer to visit your website. But today they’re online 24/7 via mobile devices. Serving your customers is now a continuous interaction, and this phenomenon will only grow in the coming years as customers and prospects demand reliabl...
The Office of Fair Trading (OFT) has launched a call for information as part of a study into how ecommerce businesses monitor the behaviour of people making web payments, which may be used to target certain individuals with personalized prices. It was observed many retailers track the...
This time of year, many companies are now in the process of conducting web load testing in advance of the holidays. In this article, you'll learn details on how a large online retailer conducted web load testing in advance of the holiday spike in traffic – and they're moving into the h...
What was that thing before the enterprise-level social network called? It was meetings, personal calls from salespeople or perhaps even the Christmas and summer party right? These “were” the various means that we used to talk with each other and our customers before we were connected o...
Now that the World Wide Web has taken over bricks-and-mortar shops as the primary medium through which to sell a product or service, there's never been a better opportunity for anyone, regardless of financial or business background, to set up their own e-commerce store. While bank loa...
If everyone else is faking it, here for the money, making it up as they go... Does integrity matter in Social Media? I believe that integrity is critical to success, for our nation, our business and ourselves. It's a slippery slope when we begin to sacrifice integrity for our own perso...
Global legal services leader Foley & Lardner LLP has adopted virtual desktops and bring-your-own-device to enhance end-user productivity across their far-flung operations.
While the retail store or restaurant is accepted as being “ground zero” of the path to purchase, integrating this critical product selection and purchase location into the “paid-owned-earned” model of media, messaging and engagement has challenged merchants and brands. Now, dynamic loc...

I had the chance to sit on a great round table on social media with Ian Lowell, Mike Epstein, Blair McHaney and Gordon Johnson at this years Jul. 25, 2012 07:00 AM EDT  Reads: 1,690

How well have you planned your content distribution on partner sites to help buyers? You have to fish where the fish are and often it is at another company's website. Providers need to make their content available that matches the buyer's steps at their partner's websites. If planni...
A few weeks ago, while cruising the highways of Southern California in the Ford Mustang GT500 I rented from Hertz, I was forced to skip two unmanned tollbooths.  As crimes and misdemeanors go, this loathsome act probably would not have landed me on the “most wanted tollbooth skip...
Taking cues from the shared art spaces and studios that have sprung up in many major cities, there is a new way that entrepreneurs, programmers, makers and inventors are working – the collaborative workspace. Instead of being confined to a home office or a local Starbucks, these peop...
Last week, I was the "victim" of a technology-induced Customer Service disaster - the result of powerful technology being improperly used. This week, customer service guru Micah Solomon comments on the situation. Here's a quick re-cap: I bought a semi-expensive electronic gadget -...
It’s a closed deal. The media has widely reported the imminent acquisition of Yammer, the enterprise social network provider, by Microsoft for a whistle-evoking 1.2 Billion dollars. Everyone knows something big is happening here, and experts, in characteristic style, have quickly congr...
As rumored last week, Salesforce.com Monday said it’s going to buy Buddy Media for roughly $689 million in cash and stock. Buddy Media lets marketers manage their presence on social sites like Facebook, Google, LinkedIn, Twitter and YouTube. They can publish content, place social adv...
Microsoft is supposedly paying upwards of a billion dollars for Yammer, the four-year-old business social network, according the Wall Street Journal Thursday night. It’s basing its story on unnamed sources.
Facebook continues to be on the mind.  I took a quick read of Michael Wolff’s piece which suggests that Facebook lacks big ideas to justify their valuation.  I am not sure I agree with that.  The folks that I have met at Facebook have plenty of ideas. 
This is Part 3 of the 12 routines for a Windows Server 2008 user to accelerate the learning and adoption of Windows Server 2012 without the need of a touch device. It is intended for those who are familiar with the administration of Windows Server 2008 (or later) to become comfortable ...
$104 Billion in valuation, 16 billion raised in its IPO, we can’t help but gape at this phenomenon of our age with open mouths. With more than 900 million actively engaged users, it’s the largest community the world has ever known. Google search is not quite dead yet, but Facebook is ...
This is Part 2 of the 12 routines for a Windows Server 2008 user to accelerate the learning and adoption of Windows Server 2012 without the need of a touch device. It is intended for those who are familiar with the administration of Windows Server 2008 (or later) to become comfortable ...
Just as business critical as perimeter security, having strong internal controls to manage users is important. Using cloud-managed security tools can help reduce incidents. So much is written about the events outside your perimeter; those nefarious and shadowy individuals and offshore...
This article details 12 routines for a Windows Server 2008 user to accelerate the learning and adoption of Windows Server 2012 without the need of a touch device. It is intended for those who are familiar with the administration of Windows Server 2008 (or later) to become comfortable w...
Mass Marketing dominated the last century: You need to reach the masses through as many channels as possible. You need retail stores, fliers, website, PR, Ads, Social Media, and and and and and…until you finally reach critical mass and you succeed. Target is a mass marketer, Huyndai an...
I have been thinking a great deal about what the Facebook IPO means.  While reading many posts up at Hacker News about whether we are in a bubble, lamenting Zynga, or skewering Groupon, I am left wondering what will really become of Facebook.
It seems I can’t have any discussions with entrepreneurs without the topic of Instagram coming up.  They all think that now is their time to strike the iron since the valuations are going to the stratosphere. I want to be very specific and clear on this point.  Facebook bough...
If you have recently checked your category’s Google search results, you may well have been as surprised as was when I recently checked  our first page placement in the  ‘content marketing’  topic.
I can barely control my indignation when I read articles about Google Plus as a tool for “social collaboration”. These articles sometimes come from writers I respect. I guess we have a difference of opinion on this. Here are my reasons why I think Google Plus is not a tool for social c...
On Saturday, April 28, the FCC released the full un-redacted report on Google’s Street View project. The report is only 25 pages long and can be found at the bottom of this post.  I find the following tidbits particularly interesting: “ …Engineer Doe developed Wi-Fi d...
"We built SlideShare to help professionals share presentations and connect people through content," commented Rashmi Sinha, CEO of SlideShare, as LinkedIn announced Thursday its agreement to acquire SlideShare. "What we can build with LinkedIn, the largest professional network on the I...
If you have not yet checked out WayIn, you might want to head over there right now. WayIn allows you to post quick polls and quickly crowd source opinion. While it is still a small service, they have big goals (and the back-end to accomplish them).
Today, most important executive relationships are globally distributed, but many business leaders still say that they want more collaboration in person. Particularly during activities such as brainstorming for new ideas, managing a specific crisis or making presentations. This is among...