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. 

Copyright:Nidhi Shah

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. 

Copyright:Nidhi Shah

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 

Copyright:Nidhi Shah

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:

1. 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. 
2. 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. 
3. 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. 

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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.

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Copyright:Nidhi Shah

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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Copyright: Nidhi Shah

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. 

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Copyright: Nidhi Shah

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.   

 Copyright: Nidhi Shah

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.

Copyright: Nidhi Shah

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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Copyright: Nidhi Shah

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. 

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Copyright:Nidhi Shah