Never.Stop.Learning: 2012

Wednesday, May 16, 2012

Social media strategy - measurement

As a social media strategy, a company should know how to measure their content and performance.

They should reach out to the customers and measure how well they are doing on their products and services.

They should measure their performance by conversation and transactions. The more the transactions a company makes, the better they are doing.

A company can make measure performance by the influence a customer makes on the other customer. If a customer encourages other customer to buy product or service, right there you know that the influence has been made enough.

A company should measure the performance with the help of tools like Youtube and technorati. These tools also let you know exactly what area you should focus on.

Cloud Computing

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Cloud computing is an important concept each enterprise should know. To define cloud computing is simple language, cloud means on the internet and cloud computing means making the stuff available over the internet. For example, an enterprise have shared folder on the network.

But that folder is only accessible when employees are in the office. What if they want to work from their home and access their folder? That's when the concept of cloud computing comes in handy. The stuffs should be on the internet or on the cloud to be accessible from anywhere. It gives employees flexibility and increases the work efficiency.

Social Media and Cloud Computing

If a company mixes and combines cloud computing and social media, then they can rule the market.

Here's how: Nowadays almost every company uses Facebook. Facebook has a unique feature called "groups". If a company creates a "group" for the employees, then people can join the group via their Facebook.

Company needs to be careful though. They should set the privacy to 'employees only' because the groups can contain some confidential conversation that a company should not allow them to be seen publicly.

This "group" can act as a cloud computing tool. Rather than sharing and collaborating on the office server, employees can collaborate on the 'cloud' meaning over the 'groups' which builds connection.

Increasing engagement with Facebook's new layout

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On march 30th, a company wants or not, Facebook switched all brands layout to the timeline mode.

The author of this article Marisa Peacock says that every business's primary focus should be customer engagement. Many of the businesses complained that the new timeline mode affected their online presence. But the author said that this can be increased if the tools are implemented in right way.

The first suggestion for a timeline mode brand page is to make it visual. After all, a picture speaks thousands words. So it is very important to have a great visual picture on the cover page.

Second suggestion: Content is the king. Page should have valuable content and should be relevant to the company's brand.

Third: make a good use of 'milestone' feature because after all this is a timeline. And each timeline has its milestone.

Social employees add enterprise values

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Have you every thought about how social employee can add value to the enterprise?

Yes they apparently do add values to the enterprise. The more social an employee is, the more collaboration happens. Employees do not talk about the world outside of the work life are can never add values to the enterprise. The employees must be social engaged to the outside world. The engagement of the outside world spurs many new ideas that can be useful to add values to the company.

According to the above article, author Virginia says that a topic about snookie from Jearsy Shore can also be socially engaged topic to talk about. She says that "social is the glue that binds".

Cisco extends telepresence offereings

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According to the latest article in CMSwire.com, Cisco is stepping up to increase the collaboration between the teams.

According to the author Chris Knight, Cisco is bringing communication tool Jabber to iPad and windows which will enrich the teleconferencing experience. Jabber is a teleconferencing tool that is offered in Apple's macbook. With this teleconferencing tool, employees can talk to many managers at once from different countries.

With this new launch, instead of getting big screens for teleconferencing and spending lots of money for the equipments, a company can just buy an iPad for 500 dollars and do the same thing over the ipad. The collaborating made easier with Cisco's this new launch. However, for the IT managers, it would be wiser if they stick with their current provider.

Transforming the online workroom

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According to the above article, author Michael argued that with the lack of engagement and empowerment, the enterprise has come into danger zone.

To increase productivity of employees, intranets are crucial for our modern workday.

To build simple web pages that are rich in content, there are many tools available to the content development employees.

However, having a good UI designs is crucial because poorly UI designs can slow down the intranet engagement. Another point that the author made is empower the informal organization. There are many organizations who are now focusing on enabling this kind of teams to transform their online workroom. After all, customers and content is the king for any organization.

Managing sensitive information in social business

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The above article talks about how to manage sensitive information in a social business environment.
Even though companies have their employees sign non disclosure document, about 90% of the employees share company information outside of the work environment according to the article. Making employees a part of group on the cloud is a good thing but it can leak many information. According to the survey that was conducted in the article, there can be many reasons why employees do this:

It is possible that the boss gives green signal to employees.

Employees may take confidential documents outside of the office to complete the project at home staying up late

Interestingly, it is also possible that the confidential information is about the employee himself.

Employees use their office email account to communicate with the outside email account.

Productivity in social business

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This article talks about how can a company improve productivity. It gives some tips. Here is a summary of it:

Avoid activity - only solutions: In this tip, author says that most people don't have time out of their work life to post something on the community. So we should be careful and not annoy them by asking for contribution.

First time user experience matter: author in this tip explains that for a social business, it is important to make user experience easy for the first time user. Because first impression is the last one. So the better the first time experience, the more enjoyable it could be letter on.

Simple and transparent: Transparency is the most important element in any social business. It is a foundation of social business. So a company should keep it simple and transparent. If your employees are scared to use your business solution then how can they utilize the productivity?

Monday, May 14, 2012

Skype

Who doesn't know about skype? When people think of video conferencing tool, the first name comes in mind is Skype. Skype is a very powerful tool for individuals as well as businesses.

Many companies use skype to have a short conference meetings. It is a very convenient way to communicate and people use it for personal as well as professional use. When I was working for a corporation, employees over there used skype for short messaging purpose. Instead of populating email accounts, why not populate skype servers to communicate? There is one advantage of using skype. The conversation gets saved on one place and employees don't have to search for emails. If you are not using skype yet, start using it.

Google Plus

Everyone knows that Facebook is a social networking giant. But many businesses do not know that there is another social networking tool which is Google plus.

Google plus also have business pages that a business can utilize. Think about this: how many users may have Google account? Nowadays everybody has gmail account. With the gmail account, people can automatically have all the Google services with one single id.

An advantage of using Google plus over Facebook is that Google approves and verifies each business page before they are created. This build credibility for the customers which is a plus. A good example of google plus page is Mashable. Check out their google plus page and get the idea of what a business page should look like.

Instagram

Along with the web social networking applications, there is a whole new category of mobile social networking apps. And instagram is one of the giants in social networking app.

Instagram is a tool for iOS photographers. It has the ability to take pictures and modify it to give pictures professional looks.

Even though a beginner takes pictures, this app makes it look professional.
The pictures that are taken from this app can be directly posted by facebook social plug in. Meaning people can share pictures in facebook to their friends.

With the help of facebook plug in, this app has reached to the top in-app purchase list.

When we think of social networking and social media, we usually think of a personal community. But there is Linkedin community which is a community for professional purpose.

Linkedin is a very useful social networking tool for job seekers. It is also for people who has knowledge to share with other people. LinkedIn has a feature called 'communities' in which professional people can share their experience of their current position and also about current industry.

With the help of linkedin, a company can set up their business page and attract passionate people more efficiently. Linkedin is a tool with transparency because it includes recommendation section in potential employees profile. Because of recommendations, it builds credibility and helps to choose right people.

Copyright: Nidhi Shah

Google Docs - office collaborating tool

I must say that Google docs (now called 'Drive') is a great collaboration tool. Google docs offers many office tools for free. Whatever you have in your Microsoft office, you can get it in google docs.

Rather than paying about 80 dollars for your office software, you can get the same capabilities for free. So why not utilize it? And the best thing about google docs is the live editing. A person owning the document can create the document and then share it with his or her colleague. Then his/her colleague can edit the same document live. Google docs also has ability to save the documents automatically. So there won't be any sad moments when you created the document and forgot to save it and you accidentally closed it. This is called live collaboration.

Copyright: Nidhi Shah

Thursday, May 10, 2012

Why social business will fail (and how to save it)

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According to the above article, the author Haydn argued that Social business will fail if an enterprise miss the main point. According to the interpreter Rawn Shah, social media must not have different moral goals.

The author said that social media can apply to many areas such as customer services, HR, sales, marketing etc. The author also has arguments against the word 'collaboration' and the use of it. He says that the business can work efficiently only if there is collaboration? Otherwise it can not? That is not digestible to me either.

Leadership is something that can company succeed in a long run and that's something many company miss out. To transform a company, a company must have a leader.

Copyright:Nidhi Shah

Why content is king?

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The article above talks about why content is king for Search Engine optimization (SEO).
For SEO specialist, the most important thing is content.
Here are four tips and advise for any SEO specialist:

You should provide original and relevant information on a research or analysis.

Quality is 100 times more important than quantity. The content's quality should be rich and valuable to the readers.

Each type of content should cover the whole topic not just a part of it.

The content should be attractive and should make readers to bookmark or favorite them. The number of 'likes' or '+1' are important to build credibility over the internet.

Wednesday, May 9, 2012

5 essential elements of business blog

First of all, a blog has to have your own domain name to increase the credebility from viewers view point.

You have to have subscription buttons for RSS feed in your page.

Most importantly from my own personal point of view, a search button is essential for any blog. It is very handy tool when a user is searching for a specific topic.

Share button for facebook, reddit, digg and delicious. You can see I have implemented those button on this blog entry as well. Scroll down and you'll see it.

Re-tweet button for twitter. You basically should give your viewers handy tools to implement your blog on external website for more visibility.

What is microblogging?

We all have heard of blogging. But there is a whole different category called 'microblogging' that some of you might be unfamiliar with.

Let me define what microblogging is in simple English. Microblogging is writting short messages on the web. For example, twitter. Twitter has the limit of 140 words so people are forced to write small messages to fit in. Instead of long and lengthy posts, microbloggers can just include the title and the link for the blog so that whoever is interested in reading the article may click on it rather than going through all the lengthy materials. Personally, I encourage people to write microblogs rather than the traditional blogs.

Friday, April 27, 2012

Facebook 'likes' are profitible to businesses

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According to the article above, businesses are getting more profits by have more and more likes than the competitors.

Social media is helping businesses to have more visibility of their products and services. Many businesses are attracting customers by offering them free products or giveaways via contests. The article also have evidence that the company can buy fans for $7000. Now why would a company buy fans?

Why would they do this? Well, it is people's tendency to trust those products and services that has more likes. People automatically trust a company with more likes so it is very essential to have more likes.
Now one may argue that this is unethical. But personally I think that everything is fair in businesses as long as you deliver good quality of products.

Google Analytics

We have lots of blogs that suggest content is king. But along with the content, we need to measure our content efficiently and effectively.

Google analytics is the tool to measure your content. It is a great tool to measure the traffic source of your website or blog. It can measure everything. It can tell you page visit, unique visitors, average visit duration, bounce rate and everything is visual.

This tool shows you in pie chart, line chart, and also can show you the earning made from advertising.
The most important feature of this tool is the keyword measurement. You can see what people searched before they come to your website. Therefore, it is very easy to tell who your audience is.

Customer Relationship Management (CRM)

Customer Relationship Management is a very powerful tool for any customer related business. CRM tool is a must have to manage the information of prospects leads.

GBS also offer a CRM tool. According to GBS's website "GBS CRM will help you develop the best line of defense - providing highest quality support and counsel".
This tool can help an organization to improve on their leads. They can manage it and see what channel has the most leads. For example, if GBS has an online contact form, then customers can fill that form to ask questions. The contact information goes into internet form channel and will show up in CRM. After that, sales people can contact that customer to answer questions or ask if they are interested in product or not.

http://www.gbs.com/en/crm

Better leadership through social media

In this below article, the author Alexander says that you can improve your leadership skills through social media and he gave tips and tricks on how to improve it.

Here is the summary of his tips:

Create a dashboard that contains news, articles, interesting topics about the industry. The author suggests not to just monitor the infographics, rather he tells us to use dashboard tools like iGoogle and such.

Staying focused is a key. Having all kinds of tools available on the dashboard is a good thing but we shouldn't waste our time looking at it for whole a lot of time. It is also important to stay focused. But a the same time, we shouldn't get too much involved into our work life. We should be creative and have fun on the work environment.

If a company is still using emails to communicate, then they should change their channel to more like short messages services like Twitter. Twitter has 140 character limitation which forces users to keep it simple and short. On top of that, the smartphone can update twitter automatically and in real time.

Click here to view article

Copyright:Nidhi Shah

News: China punishes social media websites

After reading this article, I thought how lucky we are to be in a democratic country. Because China is a communist country, they totally banned the use of social media because they don't want people to talk and complain about government policies. I have heard that the government killed many people because they went against their government policy.

I must say that China is missing out of so many advantages of social media.

Companies are most in disadvantage of this strict policy. Companies can not be transparent to their users and can not promote their products and services efficiently.

Click here to view article

Tuesday, April 24, 2012

Google's new unified privacy policy

Let us understand Google's business model first. How do Google gets paid? It is the advertisement. Advertisers pay for keywords. When a user searchs for a keyword, the search result shows up with advertisements. And if user clicks on one of those advertisement, Google gets paid from the advertisers and that's how they get paid. Simple, isn't it? No wonder how Google manages to offers all his products for free.

Now if a company denies to agree with the new unified privacy policy, then Google won't get any revenue. Which means, Google can't offer you the products for free. Would you sign up for a Google plus account if you had to pay? Probably not.

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News: Virgin Media gets social

Virgin media is now stepping up and going more social with by using Cisco quad collaboration tools.

UK based company Virgin media is now using Webex, and other Cisco products for their business. This tools is going to give many flexibility to Virgin media working environment.

Virgin media is now hoping to take advantage of all these collaboration tools to bring their employees closer to each other. These tools also improves work life balance. People are more connected to each other via voice, instant messaging and conferencing tools. The interaction the employees will have will increase productivity to the company.

Click here to view article

Facebook in corporate environment

Here is a video from other TGMC team. Let us talk about what they think of social business.

In this video, they are talking about how Facebook should be allowed and should not be allowed in corporate environment.
As cons of using Facebook in work environment, they said that facebook is just a time waster. They argued that Facebook use has no relativity with the work environment.
The facebook game maker Zynga made cheap games that affected employees and made them addicted.

On the other hand, they argued that it should be allowed because they think that employees only spends 5 minutes. I personally don't agree with it. Who told them that they spend only 5 minutes? I think their arguments for pro side is not that strong.

CIO and company value

Here is the second from another team of TGMC competition.

They say that a CIO can use social values that will allow an organization to collaborate effectively and efficiently.
They also argue that marketing and sales department has the most exposure of the social media tools because they get to deal with customer service and their feedback.
Now what about the future CIO office? The future CIO office will have all the widgets on the dashboard and everything will be stored on the cloud.

Twitter will be used extensively since it acts as instant messaging in real time.

However in my opinion, whatever points they have made have already been implemented.

Social business and their challenges

This video talks about social media tools such as blogging, facebook, and twitter and the challenges social businesses face.

According to the team, blogging is easy to use, transparent, and empowers the prospects. I agree with this. Blogging is always transparent and gives indephth knowledge about a certain topic.

Social media giant Facebook is a media friendly tool that helps in marketing and analystics.

Youtube is another giant for commercial use as well as the personal use.

I agree with the points they have made. All these tools help eliminate enterprise challenges to an extent and should be used more.

What is corporate social responsibility?

Every company or corporation has to have corporate social responsibility. Let us define corporate social responsibility. Corporate social responsibility is set of values that a company has and are limited in those values.

It is very hard to be in the limitation of corporate social responsibility because it is hard to control employees. It is possible that an employee leak some information or behave in such a way that hurts the company's social responsibility. On the other hand, a good social responsibility can improve the business performance and business profits.
Every company should do something to increase the corporate social responsibility that will ultimately will increase the credibility of the company.

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Problems with social media influence

This article explains that the problem with social media is me and you.

But I somehow do not agree with this statement. The problem of social media does not lie between me and you.
I think that if a brand want to influence others, then they should make sure the average person knows and understands in and out about the brand and can influence other customers.

After all, people gets the most influenced by word of mouth rather than the advertisements. According to research, only 14 percent of people believes in advertisements and 87 percent of the people believes in friends, family and bloggers about the products and services.

Click here to view original article

Wednesday, February 29, 2012

Appcelerator - How to create custom tab bar for iPhone

Appcelerator - How to create custom tabbar for iPhone
Hi There!
It's been a long time and I have not posted any how-to video. Well here we go. This time I'm gonna post about Appcelerator.
For those who don't know how what Appcelerator is, please check their website. Basically, Appcelerator is a Cross-platform developing tool which lets you develop for both iOS and Android platforms at the same time using Javascript. From my own experience, I must tell you that iPhone and Android have a lot different capabilities. So, you have to have if and then condition in your code all the time. If you don't, your app will definitely crash. But it's a good platform for the beginners to get started.
If you opened this page, I'm sure you know that Appecelerator doesn't let you customize tabbar.
What you can do is, you can fake a tabbar with your original tabbar hidden.
Here's an example:
In your app.js file, you could have this code in your tabgroup

Now for your custom tabs, you could create a window that will appear at very bottom of your app. Like this:

Don't forget to add tabController in tabGroup
tabGroup.add(tabController);

Now let's create custom buttons for your tabController. I recommend creating buttons in Photoshop and use them as backgroundImages.

Notice that I have an event listener. And on the click event, I have set the active tab (0) which is your homescreen. The screen which will load 'onload'.

For next button, you should have tab(1) on click event. Like this:

Make sure your tabbar is hidden like this:

So there you go. You have your own custom button in tabs and you still have your beautiful navbar.

If you have any questions/comments/requests, please leave a comment below. Hope you found this helpful :)