Salesforce.com tries to bring social networking to the workplace
Salesforce.com built a billion-dollar company by allowing companies to ditch their CRM software and bringing CRM to the cloud. Now it has its sights set on perhaps an even bigger feat: bringing social media to the enterprise.
Yesterday, the company announced that it will be launching a new service called Salesforce Chatter in 2010. Think of it as Facebook for the enterprise: a social networking service for companies with an application platform to boot.
How NOT to be The Social Media Guru
It's a tough time to be a 'social media guru'. Despite the rise of social media in general, there's a lot of skepticism when it comes to high-paid consultants who claim to have mastered it. From where I sit, that skepticism only seems to grow by the day.
That skepticism is reflected well in an amusing NSFW animation called 'The Social Media Guru', which has racked up over 100,000 views on YouTube since being posted at the end of September. It portrays a 'social media guru' as a snake oil salesman who claims to be more skilled than he is and who preys on foolish small businesses.
Eyeblaster: Video ads don't work in social media
Online video may be providing some much needed ROI for advertisers desperate to reach online viewers, but video ads do not work universally across platforms online. According to ad server EyeBlaster, video ads are not performing well in social media.
Why is that? Well, for starters, people don't spend enough time lingering on specific pages in social to view them.
3am site goes from swearing off SEO to keyword stuffing in 3 months
The Daily Mirror's 3am.co.uk gossip site has gone from disavowing SEO and promising to concentrate on building a loyal audience - to stuffing its HTML titles with as many keywords as it can think of. And then adding some more. Before finally making sure Britney is in there.
Q&A: Andy Hobsbawm and James Alexander from Green Thing
Green Thing is a non-profit public service that aims to inspire people to lead a greener life.
Founder Andy Hobsbawm and CEO James Alexander will both be speaking at Econsultancy's Online Marketing Masterclasses event tomorrow. (There are currently a few places left...)
I've been asking Andy and James about Green Thing's approach to marketing and social media...
Why newspapers need brand managers
It's a subject that turns the stomachs of most journalists. After all in journalism, "marketing" and "branding" are dirty words. But given the media fall out as a backdrop for the global recession, it's time that newspapers, and the journalists who write for them, realise that the masthead of their paper is a brand.
Knowing what people think and feel when they see your newspaper's brand is more important than ever.
Q&A: Pluck's Stephanie Himoff on social media for publishers
Pluck provides social media platforms for brands and publishers, including News International, The Guardian, and Trinity Mirror.
I've been talking to Stephanie Himoff, who directs Pluck's European sales, about the company's social media tools, and how publishers can use UGC to drive traffic and increase engagement...
The ugly side of the social web
Stephen Fry, a couple of weeks ago, decided to stop using Twitter. He was offended by one of his many followers calling his tweets “boring”. Thankfully, he is back and even though he was annoyed by the comment he has since DM’d the chap who made the criticism, and we are led to believe everyone is happy again and normal service has been resumed.
In a similar, but much less grander scale, I was nominated as “Pr*ck of the Year” on Twitter; have being associated with a pregnant goldfish; and had both my intelligence and parenthood brought into question. This was all down to a blog post (not on Econsultancy I might add) in which I had written about how a political party was using Twitter at their party conference.
Many organisations have been on the receiving end of similar comments, which stick around for sometime on the web. But is there anything that organisation can do to tap into this behaviour and turn it to their and their customers' advantage?
Salon bets on ecommerce for Black Friday and the future
As media sites around the internet contemplate erecting paywalls to make up for lost revenue, Salon.com is moving in the opposite direction. Long a proponent of the subscription model, the politics and culture site today announced a redesigned website that backs off of its subscription model in favor of more engaged advertising and shorter content. The company is hoping to increase its readership with shorter, faster posts and make up for lost revenues in a new place: ecommerce.
Starting the day after Thanksgiving, Salon will launch a permanent online store that sells retail items the publisher thinks will dovetail with its readers' interests. While it's not clear that Salon will be able to counter recent revenue losses, the move represents a step that many media companies are likely to make: revenue diversification.
Email marketing: six steps to improving customer engagement in 2010
Despite the naysayers claiming email marketing is on the way out thanks to the snowballing impact of social networking and new forms of communication, the facts are very different. Email continues to play a vital role in both business and customer communication.
According to Epsilon, email is used more regularly than social networking for personal communication, while 30% of organisations in Econsultancy’s Email Marketing Industry Census claimed an ROI from email in excess of 500%.
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
