Web 2.0 needs Customer Service 1.0
Facebook, Twitter, YouTube. These are but a few of the services many of us have come to enjoy.
Yet there's one thing that seems anything but enjoyable about them: dealing with their customer service.
Collecting multichannel customer feedback
It's increasingly common for businesses to seek out feedback from consumers and their customers, both directly and indirectly. From email surveys to customer reviews to brand monitoring solutions, companies have no shortage of tools to try to find out what customers think of them.
The biggest challenge is collecting the data and analyzing it to gain actionable insights.
Roll your own social network using WordPress
If the social network is the next message board, the social network has been waiting for its phpBB or vBulletin; the software that would give thousands upon thousands of people the ability to easily set up their own social networks.
Now the social networking market may have that. WordPress, the most popular open-source blogging platform, can now be turned into a fully-fledged social network.
Take your analytics anywhere using the Google Analytics API
Do you eat, sleep and breathe web analytics? Do you find yourself constantly checking how many visitors your websites have received today? Is scouring your analytics in search of new wisdom a hobby?
If you answered yes to any of these questions, you'll love what Google just announced. If you answered no, there's still probably something of value in it for you too.
MySQL 5.4 looks hot
MySQL is the most widely-used open-source database in the world. Many popular open-source applications, from WordPress to SugarCRM to Joomla!, use it. And popular websites like Facebook and Twitter rely on it as well.
The popular database system is offered by MySQL AB, which was purchased by Sun Microsystems in 2008. Sun Microsystems, of course, was just purchased for $7.4bn by database and enterprise software giant Oracle.
Pirate Bay: guilty as charged, arghhh!
The much-awaited verdict in the Pirate Bay trial is in.
The Swedish website, which hosts indexes of pirated BitTorrent files, was confident that it would beat charges of copyright infringement, and things didn't exactly look great for Swedish prosecutors when some of the charges against Pirate Bay were dismissed.
The cost of content: pick your poison
Content may be king but many companies have found that producing and distributing quality content requires a royal bank account.
The plight of the newspaper industry is a good example: news hasn't gone out of style but, for many newspapers, the cost structures associated with producing the news is incompatible with today's market. Costs simply exceed revenues.
Dark clouds on the horizon for cloud computing?
'New Economy', 'Web 2.0', 'social media'. These are but a few of the prominent buzz phrases that the internet has produced over the years. Some have deserved the buzz, some haven't.
One of the rising stars in the buzz phrase-o-sphere over the past couple of years has been 'cloud computing'. The concept, at its core, is simple: 'stuff' - be it applications or data - sits on a server on the internet and the users of those applications and data access it over the network.
OpenX launches online ad market
OpenX, the London-based startup that offers the open-source ad server by the same name, is moving into the sales side of the advertising business with the launch of a new online ad market.
OpenX Market enables advertisers to bid for impressions on participating websites using an auction format.
Is it time to wave the white flag in the war on spam?
Spam. It's the scourge of the internet yet we just can't seem to get rid of it. The more sophisticated our defenses get, the more sophisticated the spammers become. The war on spam is the quintessential cat and mouse game.
And right now, it looks like the mouse is staying one step ahead of the cat.
Social media: the best and worst of 2009
Email marketing: six steps to improving customer engagement in 2010
Web 2.0
Graham Charlton
Strategy & Planning
