Author Archive
Social CRM Software
11March 2010 |
For businesses of all sizes, acquiring, retaining, and supporting customers is more challenging than ever before. But the rise of social media—blogs, social networks, etc.—offers a wealth of consumer data that businesses can leverage for client retention. More than 80% of Americans aged 18-55+ use social networks and tools monthly, which means two things: 1) there is a wealth of customer information on social networks/conversation platforms that businesses cannot afford to ignore, and 2) businesses will benefit by reaching out to existing and potential customers through these social platforms. Social CRM systems (previously referred to as “CRM 2.0”) have emerged as a way for businesses to consolidate customer-related processes across functional areas—as a traditional CRM platform would—but with the addition of social media management and monitoring. Within the Social CRM space, there are many types of solutions, each having their own flavor, and each meeting different business needs. What is Social CRM Software? Social CRM is a process for monitoring, engaging in, and managing conversations and relationships with existing and prospective customers and influencers across the Internet, social networks, and digital channels. Social CRM is very much supplementary to traditional CRM processes, as it aims to engage communities and foster the creation of content for a targeted market, converting content into conversations and collaborative experiences that will hopefully build meaningful relationships with customers. In many ways, Social CRM is traditional CRM with the bonus of social media / conversational data analysis and management. Does My Company Need Social CRM Software? Businesses of all sizes and in all industries can derive value from a Social CRM solution. The increasing number of users on social networking sites is a testament to that, and the data created on these sites can prove invaluable. Traditional CRM is still relevant: it focuses on contact management, and manages the processes, services, and technology that marketing, sales, and customer service departments rely on. However, the growth in social media usage has led to a shift in customer behavior—consumers expect personal interactions with their favorite brands —and leveraging social media for customer outreach is become crucial. And as social media makes customers more accessible, a Social CRM platform that manages and monitors social media campaigns and communities is a no-brainer. Common Social CRM Features Social CRM is intended to help businesses monitor and execute campaigns and outreach initiatives to engage customers in collaborative conversation, and such platforms come in various forms. Important Note: There are two basic Social CRM models. The first is what many major CRM vendors are offering: social media management capabilities in the form of modules that integrate with their existing CRM platforms. Modules can range from simple (just a Twitter integration) to complex (complete community management) depending on a business’s outreach goals. The other route: there are a number of Social CRM vendors whose platforms focus almost exclusively on customer relationship management through social networks. These Social CRM products were developed with community engagement and online communication in mind, and are less process-centric than the aforementioned Social CRM platforms. Some of these products are standalone platforms, but nonetheless they are usually integrative with major CRM platforms. This article was posted by RANGIKA PERERA |
Factors selecting WCMS for your Enterprise
9March 2010 |
For organizations looking for a WCMS to manage their website, intranet, or portal there are literally over a thousand potential solutions from which to choose. WCMS solutions vary significantly in price, design, functionality, and in many cases, provide far more than just content management capabilities. A WCMS will typically serve as the foundation of an integrated e-Business or e-Information delivery platform. As such, there is more to consider than just how content is managed. The goal of this whitepaper is to provide industry insight that will help organizations to effectively evaluate and differentiate WCMS solutions and ultimately make better informed decisions. Identify Business Drivers The first step is to clearly identify the core business objectives driving your organizations need for a WCMS solution. The key business drivers behind why you need content management will play a significant role in identifying potential WCMS solutions. Get Help from A Content Management Specialist Define Your Base System Requirements In identifying your WCMS solution requirements, you need to include both business requirements and technical requirements. In defining your business requirements, begin by asking the internal stakeholders that will be using the WCMS what they need the system to do. In defining your technical requirements you will need to work with your IT team by making sure that your solution aligns with your organizations IT infrastructure and long-term strategy. Identify Potential Vendors Evaluating WCMS Vendors WCMS vendors vary hugely in price, design and capabilities. We’ve often said that WCMS products are 30% similar and 70% different. They all have the same bullet-point list of features, but it’s how they work that makes the difference between success and failure. Evaluating WCMS Products While WCMS evaluation often focuses on a checklist of features and functionality, this rarely leads to the best selection. In most cases, a typically deployed WCMS solution uses less than 30% of the out-of-box features and functionality available in a WCMS solution. Every organization has unique needs and business processes. As a result, our experience quite often has been that out-of-box features and functionality do not match the client’s individual requirements, thus, custom solutions have to be developed. Technology platform Many organizations have a single coherent IT platform such as Microsoft, Linux or Oracle. If this is the case, it should be specified as a precondition in the evaluation or tender. The same goes for the corporate-wide database standard, and it is reasonable to expect that the WCMS will use this database to store its content repository. WCMS Usability
WCMS Solution Costs When evaluating the cost of a WCMS solution, you need to consider all the costs of deploying and maintaining a CMS solution including the following: *WCMS software licensing This article was posted by RANGIKA PERERA |
What Are Social Patterns?
8March 2010 |
we have watched the proliferation of Internet technology spread These electronic connections and social tools are changing the way we interact with one another. We believe that these tools can be designed and simplified to help normal peopleexpand their online experiences with others. These social patterns of behavior and theinterfaces to support them have emerged and continue to evolve as we find better ways to bring people together. Social patterns are the components and pieces of interactivity that are the building blocks of social experiences. They are the best practices and principles we have seen emerge from hundreds of sites and applications with social features or focus. They are the emergent interaction patterns that have become the standard way for users to interact with their content and with the people who matter most to them. This article was posted by RANGIKA PERERA |
Deciding to use open source
4March 2010 |
Open source is about freedom not simply the ideal of freedom, but the commercial reality of freedom. Open source software does not carry licensing or subscription fees. Although the initial attraction of open source software may be the fact that it is free of charge, you are likely to find very quickly that the long-term advantage of open source lies in two other characteristics: The code is accessible. Unlike many commercial products that not only hide their code but also forbid you from modifying it, open source code is visible and you are free to modify it to suit your needs. Open source protects you from being tied to a specific vendor. If you adopt an open source solution, you can partner with the developer of your choice to assist you. If you deploy a system such as Joomla!, which is based on popular and common technologies, you need not dread having to change vendors in the future because finding people who are familiar with the system and have the skills needed to work on it is easy. Taken together, the initial cost advantage plus the long-term benefits of having access to the code and your choice of vendors create a compelling argument in favor of open source. However, you should also consider the disadvantages in the course of making your decision. If your firm has existing software deployed on a proprietary system, you may want to continue with those systems rather than introducing different products or platforms into your business. Support can also be an issue with open source products. If your firm requires a high level of support, you need to select an open source vendor that can offer you an appropriate service-level agreement. Determining whether open source is right for you Although open source provides a welcome alternative to commercial software and it will work for the vast majority of people, it is not necessarily the right answer for everyone. Whether open source is right for you depends upon your situation and your tolerance for business risk. The advantages are: Cost. Open source is cheaper to obtain and studies show that implementation costs can be significantly less than for closed source solutions. Open source can be vendor agnostic. You are not tied to a single vendor and cannot be held hostage by that vendor. Open source presents less risk. Studies consistently show that open source development process produces better code and that many eyes make for more secure applications. Moreover, when problems are detected, open source produces patches at an extremely fast rate. Open source is easier to install, configure, and customize. Open source promises more rapid innovation. This article was posted by RANGIKA PERERA |
Importance of a sitemap to an SEO-Friendly Website
2March 2010 |
The first step is to ensure that your site can be found and crawled by search engines. This is not as simple as it sounds, as there are many popular web designs and implementation constructs that the crawlers may not understand. As far as Google is concerned, they might as well not exist—great content, good keyword targeting, and smart marketing won’t make any difference at all if the spiders can’t reach those pages in the first place.
Google, Yahoo!, and Microsoft all support a protocol known as XML Sitemaps. Google first announced it in 2005, and then Yahoo! and Microsoft agreed to support the protocol in 2006. Using the Sitemaps protocol you can supply the search engines with a list of all the URLs you would like them to crawl and index.
The first step in the process of creating an XML Sitemap is to create an .xml Sitemap file in a suitable format. Since creating an XML Sitemap requires a certain level of technical know-how, it would be wise to involve your development team in the XML Sitemap generator process from the beginning. <?xml version=”1.0″ encoding=”UTF-8″?> </urlset>
An XML Sitemap generator This is a simple script that you can configure to automatically create Sitemaps, and sometimes submit them as well. Sitemap generators can create these Sitemaps from a URL list, access logs, or a directory path hosting static files corresponding to URLs. Here are some examples of XML Sitemap generators: • SourceForge.net’s google-sitemap_gen Simple text You can provide Google with a simple text file that contains one URL per line. However,Google recommends that once you have a text Sitemap file for your site, you use theSitemap Generator to create a Sitemap from this text file using the Sitemaps protocol. Syndication feed Google accepts Really Simple Syndication (RSS) 2.0 and Atom 1.0 feeds. Note that the feed may provide information on recent URLs only. What to include in a Sitemap file When you create a Sitemap file you need to take care to include only the canonical version of each URL. In other words, in situations where your site has multiple URLs that refer to one. Where to upload your Sitemap file Google and the other major search engines discover and index websites by crawling links. Google XML Sitemaps are a way to feed the URLs that you want crawled on your site to Google for more complete crawling and indexation, which results in improved long tail search ability. By creating and updating this .xml file, you are helping to ensure that Google recognizes your entire site, and this recognition will help people find your site. This article was posted by RANGIKA PERERA |
Widgets for web 2.0
1March 2010 |
Widgets are stand alone program can be embedded into third party web pages to execute within the HTML base web pages without requiring different compilations. It is a chunk of code could run on the web page to offer a service, web Widgets has described using gadget, badge, module & snippet. & so on. All these technologies have been introduced due to an evolving trend in web 2. Web Widgets are implemented using web technologies including HTML, java scripts, CSS & flash. Most of Widgets have developed using java libraries such as jQuer & Ajax which indeed makes the web page dynamic and graphically rich. Google has released many gadgets lately in 2007, for example calculators, colanders, currency converters, fun games and many more.., these are free apps anyone can fix on to their web page as a service, as well as yahoo weather checker is one of apps freely anyone could embed in to a web page. One important factor with Widgets is that the host does not control the content. The host does however control the placement of the Widget. The content would derive from another host. Therefore these apps are mostly in place to improve the looks and to increase feature of dynamical contents. This article was posted by RANGIKA PERERA |
What is Cloud Computing?
26February 2010 |
What’s the cloud? “Cloud” is a metaphor for the Internet. It’s an abstraction of how networks of computers are connected. Till recent pass most of the organization connect their resources using LAN & WAN, may be to interconnect their computers in order to use their application software within the company network. In fact with the evolving change in web 2 companies release software’s as a service where as any company that uses the application can get it as a service, Software-as-a-service, or SaaS, is an application that businesses access and use via the Internet. Software-as-a-Service and the cloud have changed the landscape for businesses worldwide, from small businesses to the enterprise. No longer do you need to purchase expensive hardware and software for many business functions. If you have an internet connection, you can move much of your business computing to the cloud.
In 2006 Google also take initiative of developing Cloud applications, software pieces released as services. Speaking in which salesforce.com Founded in 1999, salesforce.com is currently the leading cloud CRM application, with over 51,800 customers and over 1.1 million subscribers. Amazen.com was developed and released as a web services in 2002. Cloud Economics One of the significant fact of cloud computing is that Software-as-a-Service in the cloud delivers substantial cost savings compared to purchasing and maintaining software in-house. Cost analysis been evaluated on certain factors. For instance; that companies can achieve significant cost savings by migrating from on-premise email to Google Apps. Google Apps is an entire suite of business applications residing in the cloud: email, calendaring, documents, spreadsheets, presentations and collaboration. Cloud Migration Process It is challenging to determine which computing infrastructure will deliver the greatest benefits by moving to the cloud. The best starting point depends upon your current computing situation and immediate business needs; to achieve the highest short-term ROI, select the business area with upcoming hardware or software capital requirements.
This article was posted by RANGIKA PERERA |
Google Analytics
25February 2010 |
Google Analytics is a full comprehensive web-analytical service pack offered free of charge to all the users, the compelling features and benefits such as keyword comparison, custom dashboards and AdWords integration for everyone from senior executives and advertising and marketing professionals to site owners and content developers. You may already deployed some of other third party packages or techniques to track the traffic volume which is good you should try mix of all but google analytics is most often choice of all for starters. In fact, since it’s easy on your wallet because it is freely. It is used on websites from static to dynamic. There are even free Wordpress Analytics Plugins, easy to set up. You could learn more about page views, user behavior tracking, and average time on site, and importance of understanding bounce rates, unique visitors, referrer traffic and optimizing landing pages here. I recommend you to go through the video tutorials
This article was posted by RANGIKA PERERA |
The CMS Evaluations
24February 2010 |
Introduction Contain Management Systems (CMS) have become more and more dominant trend of development in today’s co-operate businesses. Content and feature rich websites Content Management Systems (CMS) are the engines that bring your website to life. CMS not only allow you to easily create and edit content but play an increasingly important role in deploying powerful interactive functionality. It is very much important fact that you choose the right CMS in the beginning. Unfortunately changing the web site will going to cost you a lot while it is up and running. There are hundreds of different CMS available, so it can be challenging to find the best solution. CMS are technical, complex applications. As a helping hand for the user as well as to check the growth of each CMS, an evaluation, comparison and awards are been published each year. Its guide you on your quest for the best CMS. The goal of the CMS Intelligence Report is to gather all the pieces and attempt to put them together in a way that reveals the big picture. CMS Evaluations For the 2010 CMS Intelligence Report, we incorporated the findings of seven primary evaluations augmented by several secondary reports. The evaluations can be essentially divided into two categories: popularity and feature evaluations. walter&stone, CMSWire Open Source CMS Market Share Report The 2009 Open Source CMS Market Share Report by walter&stone and CMSWire is an in‐depth analysis of market share and brand strength. It uses a well conceived multivariate academic approach. Like many of the reports we included, it offers a distinct viewpoint; what CMS is the most popular. While not directly evaluating which system is best, most powerful or full featured, we feel this is a good indicator of the quality of a CMS. The report focuses on 20 CMS deemed the top based on an initial analysis. The CMS that made the cut were:
Reference: http://www.cmswire.com/downloads/cms‐market‐share This article was posted by RANGIKA PERERA |
Outsourcing for Profit
18February 2010 |
What is outsourcing? Outsourcing is a process of subcontracting your organizational function to a third part who are specialized at the particular domain. There has been lot of discussions about off show out sourcing business processes. In the 20th century process of outsourcing got so influence to the IT sectors comparatively. Therefore Outsourcing is a fundamental business process and it is leading to specialization. Why outsourcing? You do not have the skills or experience to do a specific task, and you do not want your existing client to talk to a competitor. You do not have an optimized process framework to do a particular task or project. The same can be done by an outsourcing partner more efficiently and effectively. You want to optimize your profits by reducing your costs. You want to bring agility to your dynamic business by converting fixed costs into variable costs. You want your team to focus on your core strengths and future strategy, while outsource tasks which are no longer key differentiators in your industry. You want to diversify as your business evolves, but also keep your existing business and revenue stream intact. What factors to consider before you outsource. Most importantly identify the needs of outsourcing • What is your business strategy? The three levels of outsourcing You can outsource your business processes in three different ways. 1.Outsourcing a task When it is essential to have direct control of the project, you may outsource some or all the tasks, while managing the project in-house. Here you may be looking to reduce the cost or bring in special capabilities to effectively and efficiently execute the project. Example: • Design to XHTML conversion 2.Outsourcing a project When you have a well defined project scope and an agreed upon process and deliverables, you may outsource the end-to-end project delivery. Here, your outsourcing partner provides the project management services where you bring in consulting and customer relationship management capabilities. Example: • Web site design 3.Outsourcing a process You can also outsource an entire process, i.e. a set of related tasks from every project. This enables a company to let go off an entire non-strategic activity. It is important to decide the task, project or process you wish to outsource based on the above mentioned pointers. This article was posted by RANGIKA PERERA |