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http://www.itweb.co.za/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=41995%3Astill-plenty-of-value-in-crm&catid=70&showall=1

A gauge of how little customer relationship management (CRM) systems seem to have changed can be seen by visiting http://insight.ly. It's a Gmail plug-in that manages customer relationships and bears a striking resemblance to early Windows-based contact managers.

But the resemblance is superficial. Browser-based access to CRM with back-ends hosted in the cloud is game-changing indeed.

According to David Cosgrave, business unit manager of Acctech CRM, the days of desktop-based CRM solutions are numbered. 

"We deal primarily in Web-based CRM software and that is the future," he says. "The days of downloadable products are over. It's so much easier to make it browser-based."

Cobus van Graan, CEO of Tracer, says that may be true, but the desktop won't entirely disappear.

"I agree with the cloud trend but there are certain areas where you have to integrate into desktop applications. Maybe a hybrid – for instance if a CRM system has to integrate into Outlook – is appropriate."

Ian Lottering, CRM practice manager at Consology, says given what's happening in the cloud, he can't see desktop-based software surviving for longer than five years.

"There are variables you have to contend with on the desktop that you don't have to contend with in the cloud. There is much more risk in the cloud but there are ways to get creative to mitigate it. On the desktop, we were a bit lax in the way we handled security because there are less issues."

Johan van Zijl, director of Consnet, says that Web-based cloud solutions are the future for standalone systems.

"But there will be scenarios, especially in large enterprise systems, where you will need integration into existing back-ends: things like deliveries, account information and so on, which will be difficult to have in the cloud. But for standalone systems, cloud- and Web-based is the way to go."

Heath Turner, CRM director at IS Partners, says it will depend on the customers and the industry.

"For us to make the assumption that everyone in five years will be using software plus services is a pretty broad statement," claims Turner.

David Cosgrave, Acctech CRM

"It's my view that organisations are in different maturity cycles and have different strategies. If you look at applications themselves, whether they're deployed or hosted, the fact that they are Web-based already means that it's fairly customisable and that users have accepted it. But the adoption comes down to how the organisation wants to run them. We've had massive blue-chip banking and financial service customers to whom the Patriot Act in the US is very important and even they are considering the hosting model because they don't have rack space.

“From a provider's point of view, it's about choice and customers deciding whether they want hosted or a subscription-based service. But by the same token, there will always be some customer data that they want within their environment."

Graham Mansfield, industry lead for communications, media, utilities and transport applications at Oracle, says the move to Web-based applications will be driven by more than just a general trend to Web application across the software development industry.

"We have to have Web-based systems moving forward," he says. "If you look at the statistics around mobile computing versus desktop Internet access, the number of mobile users is set to overtake desktop users within the next two to three years. These are the people who will be using CRM systems in the future, so if you don't have Web-based systems, you won't reach them.

“The second thing is to make CRM systems more effective and more useful and to do that, they have to integrate with other systems such as social networks. Yes, they must integrate with ERP, but social media is the future."

Putting in CRM systems, whether desktop or Web-based, is one thing: getting salespeople to use them is another. Consnet's Van Zijl says the measure is simple.

Johan van Zyl, Consnet

"Adoption is not just about whether your CRM system is Web-based or not. If it doesn't help a salesperson sell, then obviously you won't have user adoption. A lot of the implementations that fail are where the sales rep has been forced to use it."

Tracer's Van Graan says users can be surprisingly resistant.

"Because of that, there are two main things we work on in CRM. The first is simplicity. You're not working with people who are used to sitting in front of a computer all day. These are people who deal with people and love to be out the whole time.

“The second thing is user preferences: how does the rep want to work? The Web gives you a lot of options: work from a laptop, work from home or your cellphone. We can't even dictate the brand of cellphone. Our research shows that 75% of salespeople will turn a phone down just because they didn't choose it themselves."

For some, CRM has a natural fit because of the nature of the business. Siva Pather, GM of customer interactive solutions at Dimension Data, says adoption is strong in call centres but by no means guaranteed.

"Having come from the contact industry, the role of the CRM system there is to aggregate multiple screens. It goes back to what your primary reasons are for introducing CRM. Is it to drive efficiencies? Drive contact resolution? Once the agents are part of that process, then adoption drives itself.

“Only one in four contact centres actually have a system in place. When you phone in and they explain that the 'system is slow', there is no system. When those customers get a proper system that integrates process properly, then things like the cost of churn are no longer so difficult to measure."

Perhaps the most exciting opportunity for CRM systems is integration with social media. Gavin Moffat, MD of Puruma Business Communications, says he's watched one of his clients reinvent itself with a social media-based CRM system.

Gavin Moffat, Puruma Business Communications

"We have a client using a system, both internally and externally, and the way in which that has improved goals, alignment with strategy and communications is fantastic. It's improved relationships with their customers and made them more positive about doing business with them and increased their market share.

“Anecdotally, the reason for this is probably higher touch points. Businesses today aren't particularly agile but are becoming more so. Social CRM is one of those things that immediately persuades a business to be agile and that they're getting a positive disruptive effect."

Moffat says the improvement in the basics seems to be the reason for its success.

"Just becoming demand-driven instead of supply-driven and promoting your brand is a big outcome. Having customers linked directly into you as part of the social media platform means you can respond immediately. And the strategy can be easy: one of our customers has a strategy that says they want to turn their customers into fans. It's that simple. Everything is just a tool or a tactic to get to that end goal. That's why I find the on-site, off-site, cloud or not discussions irrelevant."

Tracer's Van Graan agrees.

"Our most successful implementations are where the customer realised that it wasn't about the technology but the strategy. In those cases we have examples of 30% growth, even during last year."

Then there is the challenge of installed base.

"Some of our clients have recognised that their current CRM strategy is restricting the markets they can address," says James Mclaren, social media and CRM expert at Accenture.

"A number of our clients have approached us to re-architect the way CRM is provided. Yes, all the requirements to serve customers are maintained, but they want to reduce the internal costs of the model. They've started to recognise that the amalgam of people, processes and technology will have to change."

Not every success story involves social media, though. HP SA's Ashton Styen, CTO and alliance executive for enterprise services, says HP is working on a design for a customer to move to a cloud model.

Heath Turner, IS Partners

"What the IT organisation is trying to do for them is provide an end user-centric environment based on CRM. It's very interesting to see the development of the self-service portal because it looks very much like a shopping mall. Another area we've been looking at is cloud integration gateways, so that if you move your Exchange into the cloud, you can exchange data between systems hosted in the cloud and hosted on premise."

IS Partner's Turner says the single view of the customer through CRM has been the big achievement so far for one of his customers.

"It's early days yet, but we have a customer in the insurance sector with whom we've embarked on a technology modernisation. Their business hasn't invested much in technology over the last 10 years, but they've acquired a lot of businesses so they've landed up with multiple systems. We've implemented CRM as a first point of call simply to give them that single view of the customer.

“It's taken for granted that CRM will provide it although we've had to do a lot of work around data management. Clients say they want a single view of the customer, but what's often neglected is the data management that goes with it. The end result has been a CRM system providing contact management that isn't a holy grail but still a good first step on the journey. Their internal staff now have a single view rather than going to three different systems."

Which just goes to show: sometimes we get too hung up on whether a particular technology is moving to the cloud in the next five years. A good CRM system helps companies get closer to their customers. And that's always good for business.

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Does the law need to change colours?

There’s a wine called Chameleon (whether or not it’s called that because it changes colour isn’t clear – ‘you want to exchange that bottle of white for a red sir, there’s really no need, just give it a few days’). Please just pretend you’ve heard of it. There’s another wine called Lovane. You don’t have to pretend you’ve heard of that, just imagine you see it somewhere. Do you say to your companion:

• Lovane, how nice, they’re reverting to those nice French-sounding names like L’Ormarins, before you know it we’ll be back to those nice Dutch-sounding names like Twee Jonge Gezellen, that experiment with silly names like Tall Horse and Fat Bastard really was tedious, or
• Lovane, I wonder if that’s connected with that Chameleon wine I know so well.

Option one is old fart territory. Option two is what the makers of Chameleon contended in a recent court case. Why? Well, because the isiXhosa word for chameleon is ‘ulovane’, something the makers of Lovane were apparently well aware of, the wine having been named Lovane because the estate is full of chameleons. So there will be confusion, argued the makers of Chameleon, because 17.5% of the SA population speaks isiXhosa as a first language. And, pre-empting the objection that only honkies drink wine, we have had black people visit our estate. Ja swart mense, kan jy dit glo!

Get a life said Western Cape judge, Lee Bozalek! Yes South Africa’s multilingual character is relevant when deciding confusing similarity, but Lovane will be seen as an isiEnglish word (Low Vane), or perhaps an isiFrench word (Loo Varn), but without any chameleon imagery no-one will see a linkage with chameleons. So basically Lovane can be regarded as a coined word. And there have been no cases of actual confusion (never necessary but always useful), and no expert evidence that Xhosa speakers would link Lovane with ‘ulovane’. And, those who speak isiXhosa make up ‘a relatively small proportion of the total population.' Really!

This decision is likely to be controversial - expect much angry clicking in the Eastern Cape, expect much talk of colonial attitudes, expect the SA government to summon the ambassador from the Republic of the Western Cape, expect JM to enter the fray. And expect huge sighs of relief from lawyers. Because when lawyers have to search trade marks, they’re always faced with the dilemma of whether or not to consider translations. Which, in a country with 11 official languages, is no joke!

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Interview - Ingrid Lotze - Ashraf Garda on MEDIA @ SAfm on Sunday, 22 November 2009.m4a Listen on Posterous

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http://www.puruma.com/?p=161

With the bastion that was printed media struggling to cope with declining advertising spends and the explosion of social media, campaigns that connect companies directly with their customers will distinguish spectacular PR agencies from the average, writes Ingrid Lotze, managing director of puruma business communications.

The announced closure of The Weekender and its subsequent last edition on Saturday is sad news. However, its demise is merely an exclamation point in a much larger tale that is playing itself out locally and abroad.

2009 has not been a gentle mistress for printed publications in South Africa. According to Ibis Media, almost 130 publications have been suspended, closed down or combined as of the end of October 2009. While nearly the same amount of new publications have been launched, presumably to exploit new niches, print media is precariously balanced on its pedestal, with declining advertising spend threatening to knock it off.

Globally, the trend is no different. Paper Cuts — a website that tracks the number of shut-downs and job losses in the American newspaper industry — estimates that over 130 US newspapers have closed so far in 2009.

The evidence seems to suggest that print media is struggling to remain relevant to audiences who are increasingly turning to the internet for their news and relying on niche communities of their peers for information, advice and guidance.

Two-way conversations

While print media remains a valid channel for specific messages clients may wish to promote, the power to define a clients’ brands, services and products has long since shifted out of these traditional mainstays and into the hands of the public.

Blogs, social networks, collaborative online information portals, such as Wikipedia, and easily accessible multimedia sites are helping individuals define and dictate how they interact with companies and brands.

More importantly, this shift has highlighted the importance of creating two-way ‘conversations’ with customers, whether it is through digital social media or more commonplace avenues.

A toppled wall

As audiences and communication channels have multiplied and fragmented, controlling the flow of information has become almost impossible. The mentality that divides public relations, the media and the public is the debris of a toppled wall that cannot be rebuilt. Nevertheless, this destruction is also beneficial and an invitation to PR agencies and companies to talk, directly and honestly, with the communities only understood via proxy for so long.

One only needs to look at the example of Frank Eliason, a Comcast service manager who suggested managing Comcast’s customer queries through Twitter. The move has allowed Comcast, with very little capital outlay, to see what people are ‘tweeting’ about their service and engage with these individuals one-on-one on a public platform where everyone is watching. Comcast and Frank’s success is not the result of leveraging a technological service, but through recognising that it is the people that matter, not the technological medium.

Printed media continues to offer certain benefits: the credibility readers attach to the publication and writers associated with it, a mature channel of communication and a platform for focused advertising campaigns. But PR agencies have always wished for an undiluted, efficient means of communicating with their client’s customers. As the saying warns, be careful what you wish for because you may receive it.

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June 1st, 2009 | by Mike Laurie

Mike Laurie works as a Digital Planner at UK Integrated Agency JPMH where he helps brands get the most from digital media. You can follow Mike on Twitter

In 2019, when you look back at the social media landscape ten years earlier, you might laugh at how hard you had to work. You had to type things into forms (ha! remember those?), type URLs in the address bar (how archaic!), and put up with irritating communications about irrelevant products. Social media in the future will be effortless and everywhere. Here’s a look at some of the new technologies in store for us over the next 10 years that will make our social (media) lives easier.

1. The Arduino - One Tough Little Italian

Arduino is a small circuit board commonly used to prototype electronics. Its low cost and ease of implementation has meant that this little device is now leading a hobbyist revolution in connecting real life objects to social networks, like Twitter(). It has allowed one man to create a device attached to a chair that tweets at the presence of noxious natural gasses (ahem), another uses Arduino to monitor when his cats are inside the house or out, and a small bakery and cafe in East London is now able to tweet what’s fresh from their oven. This may all seem like pretty pointless stuff, but the pointlessness is the point.

The revolution of objects notifying human beings of their state (e.g., The Internet of Things) isn’t happening in the R&D labs of large multinational conglomerates, it’s happening in the spare rooms, garages and bedrooms of developers. The printing press, possibly one of the first inventions to aid information sharing, was invented by Johannes Gutenberg with investment intended for an altogether different enterprise: polished metal mirrors intended to capture holy light from religious relics, presumably to sell to hapless tourists. In other words, what might seem like silly tinkering today, might be a key contributor to our future world.

2. RFID Tags & Transponders

While Arduino will help household items become involved in our social media world, transponders such as Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) tags are truly breathing life into our objects.

For a number of years RFID tags have been used in passports, ID cards, travel cards and credit cards as a means to identify us when scanned, and they are used commercially for inventory tracking. Brands including Abercrombie & Fitch, Levis and Kleenex have experimented with RFID tags to track their inventory at an item-level. Transponders can be made as small as a grain of sand and can be produced very cheaply. So it is widely thought that they may one day be installed in everything from a packet of biscuits to a pair of underpants.

But RFID tags have potentially valuable real-world applications. It may be possible, for example, to create a very cheap device which sits in your trash can or recycling box and monitors the contents by scanning RFID tags as stuff is thrown in. You might ask why anyone would want to do this with their garbage, but there is a lot of valuable data to be had in what is, in essence, scrobbling for your trash. Your trash is a goldmine of consumption data in the same way that your search data or browsing history is, and could be used to track brand loyalty and consumption habits.

And mobile phone manufacturers, particularly Nokia, are currently experimenting with consumer devices that act as readers and scanners, meaning that your mobile device might be able to do things like exchange information with other phones by bringing them near to one another, or gather information directly from products and find out instantly if anyone in your network has purchased the item in the past. Within the context of mobile phones, this technology is generally referred to as NFC (Near-Field Communication).

Of course, just because we could do this, doesn’t necessarily mean we would, or should. There are clear privacy implications involved that might make the idea of monitoring consumption via your trash or tracking your underpants dead on arrival. Privacy advocates such as CASPIAN are highly motivated to prevent this from happening — the notion that RFIDs could be on our person without us knowing is akin to web sites sharing knowledge about us without our consent. The anti-RFID site spychips.org has more information about the privacy concerns of the technology.

3. Geomagnetic Sensors in Mobile Devices

The compass is hardly new — it’s been around for thousands of years — but Yamaha has created a tiny 2mm x 2mm chip intended for use in mobile phones as a compass. When used in conjunction with GPS, AGPS or Wi-Fi triangulation and an accelerometer a compass heading could be extremely useful to give more granular positioning data to mobile applications.

Some older phones used to come equipped with these compasses, and though they have been phased out in recent years, they’re starting to make a comeback. Apple Insider suggests that the next generation of iPhone hardware will contain a “Magnetometer,” the feature already exists in the HTC Dream (the T-Mobile G1), though it is currently used for very little.

But the real world applications are many. For example, let’s say that you’ve just come out of a subway at a roundabout, and the first thing you do is take out your GPS-enabled phone’s mapping application to see where you need to walk to get to your friends waiting for you at a bar. In order to orientate yourself correctly, you’ll need to find street names. But if you happen to be in London, where I live, you know that street names are rarely in convenient places, they’re usually hidden behind trees and other signs (where’s the fun otherwise?). So a compass heading is a perfect way to let you know which direction you roughly need to walk in. Likewise, if you want to scan an area at a certain location for a great place to eat, your device is going to need a heading in order to overlay information over the top of your screen.

4. Optical Pattern Recognition & Augmented Reality

Imagine you’re on your way to a conference and you have a couple of hours to kill so you park yourself in the corner of a local bar to catch up on Mashable(). You’ve barely begun reading when an attractive girl or guy catches your eye. You’re transfixed, your heart starts to race — you’re in love. But being the shy type you can’t just go over and introduce yourself, so instead you do a quick scan of the room with your cell phone to pick up any latent metadata. Unfortunately, a social network profile pops up informing you that the object of your affection is in a relationship. Your initial excitement rapidly dissipates and you get on with your reading.

That scenario is pretty far-fetched, but it’s one potential promise of Biometric Face Recognition technology that is already used by police and security services to help identify known criminals. 3 years ago Google acquired Neven Vision, a company that provides such technology. Google reported that it is using this technology in its Picasa product to help keep your personal photos organized without you needing to do any of the actual organizing. I have literally thousands of pictures of my children and family on my computer at home. It would take me days to go through and tag each one so that I could search them more easily in the future. But at some point, Picasa might be able to tag everything for me automatically by recognizing faces and objects in my photos.

That’s still not quite to the level of our hypothetical, but Tochindot’s Sekai Camera and Wikitude are making in-roads into rich and immersive ambient metadata, too. Their current goals revolve around tagging inanimate objects, but someday biometric face recognition could be used to attach metadata to real people.

5. OpenID, OAuth, and the Identity Graph

Having to remember passwords for multiple accounts can be frustrating, and answering the same questions over and over on registration forms becomes tedious. Ten years from now, filling out our information once and then easily transferring it from place to place might be commonplace.

OpenID is an open authentication protocol that lets users use a single set of login credentials for every site they visit. It’s already in use at hundreds of smaller websites and large sites like Facebook() are starting to accept OpenID accounts. Once you’ve authenticated, a second open protocol called OAuth will help you share data about yourself with other sites you use. OAuth lets your grant authorization to sites to collect data from other places you participate online, which ultimately could eliminate the need to fill in redundant information about your profile and who your friends are at each new site you use. And companies like Cliqset and DandyID are creating platforms that will allow you to share your entire identity graph information from your profile to your contacts to your lifestream.

Together, these technologies could essentially eliminate the need to fill out forms and register for sites all together.

6. Mind Reading

My favorite scene from Back to The Future 2 is one in which Marty visits a 1980s-theme cafe where he sees some kids looking at his old favorite arcade game. Marty tells them he’s a “crack shot” but when he demonstrates the interface, the kids complain, “You have to use your hands!? That’s like a baby’s toy.” Classic.

But the idea of being able to control an interface without the use of your fine motor skills has massive implications for human computer interaction. Consider the ability to tweet what you’re thinking without having to pull your phone out of your pocket, type your message and hit send. Imagine being able to think ‘Facebook’ and your screen presents you with an overview of your friend’s activity stream. This method of interaction is at a very experimental stage but there are proofs-of-concept that exist. Most of this kind of innovation is currently intended to help people with limited motor skills, and not lazy social media addicts, however.

7. Natural Language Processing

Like Optical Pattern Recognition, Natural Language Processing (NLP) seeks to automatically categorize and understand that which humans understand with ease. By doing so, computers will be able to understand the requests and needs of their human users far better. Of course, talented programmers can already tell their computer to do things with ease, but the rest of us would benefit from applications that understand our curious ways of speaking.

Firefox’s Ubiquity is one project that’s attempting to change the way we interact with the web by allowing people to use natural language commands. Further, in the future, applications might exist that could analyze your tweets or comments with NLP, and suggest people or brands for you to follow.

The Future

Many of the technologies explored in this post are in their infancy, but they could have a profound effect on how we use the Internet and social media in the future. If you know of any other technologies that you feel might advance the future social media landscape please mention them in the comments.

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Simon Barber

http://www.businessday.co.za/articles/Content.aspx?id=72313

IF YOU’RE reading this in the dead-tree version of Business Day, and that is the version you prefer, there is a good chance the word Twitter will evoke an inward groan. Everybody seems to be talking about it, people are telling you you need to do it, but to the extent you can get your head around it, the whole thing seems, well, somewhere between silly and unseemly, not to mention an enormous waste of time. A brain- suck, to use a current American phrase.

I urge you to reconsider, especially if you have something nice to say about SA in 140 characters or less. Your country needs you to sign up for a Twitter account. This can be done from any internet-connected computer and will take less time than a round of solitaire.

Then you can start communicating with the world. Tell it what you think about SA, being always sure to include in the message the code #SAis. This is known in twitter-speak as a hashtag. What it does is permit visitors to Twitter.com to locate your thoughts on SA via a simple search. The search will turn up not just your insights but a constantly updated compendium of the wisdom of everyone else who has used the #SAis hashtag. The compendium can be inserted as a feed onto any website, blog or Facebook page, multiplying its visibility.

The #SAis hashtag is not, let me hasten to say, my idea. The credit belongs to Simon Dingle, a Johannesburg-based technology writer and broadcaster who can be heard on Radio 702. Last Friday, he tweeted to the 940 twitterers who follow him: “Want to start a new trend. #SAis — we’re constantly told what SA isn’t. I think it’s time to tell the world what SA is. Thoughts?” There are a lot of trolls camped on the internet in a seemingly relentless search for opportunities to say something nasty about SA and to attack anyone who does not share their bilious Afro-pessimism (to use a polite term for it). Happily, they seemed to be napping when Dingle launched his idea although it may well be that these are people who find the short form difficult. Ranting haikus are an oxymoron. At all events, the response to Dingle has been overwhelmingly delightful.

Hfordsa, self-described as “a South African- born web queen”, said “if SA was a restaurant, it would be the noisy one with the home- cooked nosh and people laughing and shouting in different tongues”. Karin “I embrace my inner weirdness” Botha, mother of two cherished little boys in Durban, said “SA is one happy hard-working nation who love to party- hard when all is said and done! We’re cool, that’s the bottom line.” Blindcripple, from Cape Town, said SA is “the country with the most beautiful women in the world”, prompting several to ask how he knew.

Karnaugh, a Python (the computer language, not the snake) programmer in Sandton: SA is “free, vibrant and void of much nanny- state legislation”. Justmoney: SA is “more economically stable than most of the world. Come invest here with us (great scenery included free).” Dominique Pienaar: SA is “second worldwide in terms of transparency surrounding its budgets — just behind the UK, tie with France ahead of New Zealand and US”. Myself, tweeting as Izwi, took the opportunity to link to a lovely blog post by the Daily Telegraph’s rugby correspondent in which he describes SA as “a place with an intoxicating buzz, a place to feel alive”.

The South African Twitterverse is as yet small. About 3000 twitterers list SA or a major South African city as their home compared with the 28000 odd who list London.

Nor are they particularly representative. South African twitterers are overwhelmingly white and in some segment of the marketing, media and IT biz. Nor, unless you count someone who may or may not be the musician Dave Matthews, do any of them boast the six- figures-plus armies of followers that certain American celebrities, presidents and news organisations have attracted.

It would be nice to have Charlize Theron or rocket man and electric car pioneer Elon Musk or the real Dave Matthews join the chorus. Nice to have, but not essential. The sentiments Dingle has elicited are, to my mind, far more powerful than celebrity endorsements. They are real. They are persuasive to influential audiences in the rest of the English-speaking world because — fact of life — they are voiced by people with whom those audiences feel an affinity and whose judgments they instinctively are prone to trust.

Am I worried the trolls will show up? Bring ’em on. The South African Twitterverse I’ve seen — smart, young, talented and loving where they are — will make the haters feel, or at least look, out of place and small.

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For the following articles go to: http://tinyurl.com/r98fpc

SLIDE SHOW: CEOS WHO USE TWITTER

Dozens of CEOs who find Twitter to be a personal and professional delight. Here's how they use the service, and who they like to follow

A TWITTER CODE OF CONDUCT

To prevent information leaks and other liabilities, companies are drafting guidelines for social media interaction. A rule of thumb: Don't be stupid

STARTING A CORPORATE SOCIAL NETWORK? DON'T

Save your company's cash. Leveraging Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter is fast, easy, and free

JEFF JARVIS: OPENNESS AND THE INTERNET: OPPORTUNITY AWAITS

As our social lives, business, and government become more transparent via the Internet, there are benefits for anyone who wants to create and connect

VIDEO: JEFF JARVIS ON TAPPING SOCIAL MEDIA

Jeff Jarvis, blogger, journalism professor, and author of What Would Google Do?, talks with Senior Editor Diane Brady about what executives need to know in the realm of social media

JAKOB NIELSEN CRITIQUES TWITTER

Not everyone is hearts and flowers over Twitter. Web usability consultant Jakob Nielsen discusses the hazards and limitations of tweeting

VIDEO: HOW I USE TWITTER

BusinessWeek Executive Editor John A. Byrne discusses how he uses the micro-blogging service Twitter and explains why he follows certain people

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Nightmare In Round Rock: Acer Closes In On Dell For No. 2 In PCs

Posted by: Peter Burrows on May 07

http://tinyurl.com/p6wtaq

Acer’s ambition to be the world’s largest PC maker by 2011 would have been laughable a year ago. But as my colleague Bruce Einhorn recently pointed out in his recent story on CEO Gianfranco Lanci, it’s no laughing matter for PC rivals anymore. In Gartner’s latest quarterly numbers, released yesterday, Taiwan-based Acer saw its global market share grow by more than a third, to 13% of the total market. It’s now neck and neck with Dell for No. 2 (Dell has 13.1%). HP retains the clear lead overall, with 19.8% share, but Acer is growing much faster.

Clearly, Dell needs to make some kind of dramatic escape from this trap. Just sticking to its knitting isn’t going to fix things. Neither, evidently, are moves that were once considered radical around the company’s Round Rock, Texas headquarters, such as the company’s decision to start selling at retail stores as well as on its website. That was two years ago.

What’s the answer likely to be? For starters, Dell seems intent on moving beyond Wintel in order to tap markets for new, cheaper kinds of devices. That’s why it has created a cell-phone based on Google’s Android operating system, as I reported in March, and why it evidently is also testing a notebook PC based on Android.

But Android itself won’t save Dell—certainly not if Dell doesn’t come up with truly killer implementations of Google’s easily customized code (As regards the cellphone, so far is not so good; Carriers apparently panned the product, one reason it hasn’t been publicly announced).

Rather, the company may have decided it has little choice than to do a big acquisition. It reportedly is looking to hire a top-flight M&A maven that would report to the CFO (why not to Michael Dell himself, I wonder?). Never mind that the 25 year old company has essentially zero success when it comes to buying and successfully integrating companies. Dell needs to buy its way into some promising growth markets, and do it fast—before its many corporate computing rivals grab all the tasty targets. Clearly, all the big players are jockeying to be far broader, one-stop-shops as the market moves into the cloud-computing era. It will no longer be enough to focus on one of the traditional market segments—that is, computers, networking, storage, software or services. If that fact was lost anyone, Larry Ellison left little doubt by buying Sun.

The price of more inaction could be high. In fact, Bill Whyman, an insightful analyst with International Strategy & Investment, noted in a May 5 report called “ORCL-JAVA AND THE NEW TECH ORDER” that Dell “could end up being acquired.” That would have sounded laughable a year ago, as well.

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These companies have found interesting, inventive ways to engage customers on Twitter.

By Sean Ludwig

Twitter isn't just about finding out about plane crashes and what your best friend ate for lunch. Its uses are evolving, and big corporations are joining the fun. Some corporate accounts serve as a boring PR tool that spews press releases and follows everyone who tweets about their company. But others have found interesting, inventive ways to engage customers on Twitter.

Some corporations, namely @Palm_Inc and @WholeFoods, have used the service to release news and answer questions. Others, such as @DellOutlet and @MotoDeals, have become a hot place to go to find great deals on merchandise. And not to be outdone, companies like @ComcastCares, and @HRBlock, have used Twitter as a new extension to customer service, allowing near real-time responses to difficult questions.

We've compiled a list of 10 corporate Twitter accounts that can either help you in a jam or allow you to give instant product and service feedback to someone who will actually get the message.

1. @Palm_Inc – Palm has taken the inventive step of using Twitter to break news. It also uses the account to respond to customer queries.

2. @JetBlue – JetBlue gives travel tips and answers customer questions all day long.

3. @WholeFoods – Whole Foods gives trivia tips about its company, answers questions, and makes suggestions on where to donate to charity.

4. @HTC – HTC answers customer questions and lets them know about the latest product news, often before it lets the media know.

5. @DellOutlet – Dell's Outlet Twitter feed has more than 100,000 followers, and rightly so. It lets users know about incredible, and often very brief, deals.

6. @HRBlock – Just in time for tax season, H&R Block has a Twitter account that answers your tax prep questions and gives helpful hints.

7. @SouthwestAir – Southwest Airlines answers customer questions and gives a glimpse into the lives of Southwest employees.

8. @MotoDeals – Motorola's deal Twitter account gives followers links to great offers and tips on using the company's products.

9. @ComcastCares – The official Comcast Twitter account is a useful extension of its customer service outlet. One of our very own staffers tried the service out and was able to lower his cable bill through it.

10. @Starbucks – Starbucks uses its account to receive customer feedback, give information about new products, and quickly answer questions.

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