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Posted 20 Nov 2009
Posted 20 Nov 2009
Posted 20 Nov 2009
Posted 20 Nov 2009
Posted 20 Nov 2009
Posted 20 Nov 2009
Posted 20 Nov 2009
Posted 20 Nov 2009
Posted 20 Nov 2009
Posted 20 Nov 2009
Posted 20 Nov 2009
Posted 20 Nov 2009
NEWS FEATURES
You would be hard pressed to find a company where the bulk of employees are not on LinkedIn, Twitter, or Facebook—likely all three and possibly many more. As organizations begin to grasp how to make social media tools part of an effective business strategy, many are developing specific guidelines for how employees can use—or not use—social media, both in the workplace and at home. Some, though, are doing it more successfully than others; recently, The Washington Post garnered criticism when its social media policy, which many perceive as draconian, was released.
Rob Tarkoff, senior vice president and general manager of business productivity solutions at Adobe, did little to cushion the blow when he said to attendees earlier this week at the Enterprise 2.0 Conference: "Enterprise software is failing."
LTU Technologies started out as a small Franco-American company set to blaze a new trail in the ecommerce industry, but ended up as a classic example of how things don't always work out as planned. According to founder and CEO Alexandre Winter, the company's original business model was to offer image recognition software for mobile ecommerce. Despite some twists and turns, LTU announced on Monday, Nov. 2, the release of LTU engine/ON demand-a far cry from how the technology was originally intended to be used.
Every 2.6 seconds, the CAS (Chemical Abstracts Service) REGISTRY logs a new entry that defines and describes a recently discovered chemical substance. This statistic boggles the mind both for what it says about the pace of progress in scientific research and for what it says about CAS's ability to keep up with that pace.
A series of recent moves has focused attention on search and social networks. Social networks have turned their attention to enhancing search features on their sites, but what they really may be searching for is the way to effectively monetize their services.
FEATURED STORIES
Social networking is making significant inroads into the business practices of major organizations, not the least of which is improving customer support. Companies are using social media as a tool to allow customers to engage with each other to get their technical and customer service questions answered—impacting traffic to existing customer service and help desk functions and, even more importantly, improving service and cementing relationships in the process.
As we eagerly await each successive advance, we've gotten used to thinking that when it comes to content, richer is always better. More audio, more video, more animation-this is the stuff that makes today's web attractive and exciting, though not necessarily more efficient or more useful. Since most of this eye candy is either part of or is sponsored by advertising, it seems safe to assume that the richness of the content correlates to the outcome desired by advertisers, which is, by and large, to induce us to make some kind of purchase. However, while that assumption makes sense on the surface, it turns out that the reality is more subtle and complex than suggested by the simple proposition that "rich content sells."
At one time, knowledge management (KM) purely encompassed the library-style research-and-documentation endeavor required to organize knowledge-primarily for companies that trade in knowledge, such as law firms and consultancies. Early in its life, KM was defined by Thomas A. Stewart in a Fortune magazine article entitled "Mapping Corporate Brainpower," as "Efforts to transmute the accumulated knowledge of individual employees into a corporate asset." Today, KM has grown well beyond these original boundaries, and its tenets are leveraged by organizations of all kinds to manage information and intellectual assets.
Bigger, better, faster-for more than a century we have been driving toward greater efficiency by creating routine or automated processes that cut time, costs, or both. While this single-minded focus has spurred continual growth, it has also blinded society to where the true value lies. Moving forward, perfect processes will not be of paramount importance. Future progress and prosperity may well hinge on the ability of our organizations and institutions to connect the right people with the right ideas at the right time.
Until fairly recently, if you wanted to publish a news article or magazine feature, it required a large staff and huge presses housed in vast buildings. It took great wealth to buy the means to publish and a factorylike process to sell the ads, produce the news, and distribute the product. Because newspaper production was well beyond the means of most people, we relied on newspaper and magazine publishing companies with the requisite resources to produce the news for us, and in return, they charged large sums of money for display and classified ads-and they thrived. Today, that's all changed.
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EContent BEST PRACTICES
Technology providers who not only recognize the necessity and difficulty of the local and global content marketplace, but are there to help: From analytics to location awareness, content management to translation management, translation services to language specific search solutions, there are a range of solutions that will enable organizations to adapt to the needs of the new consumer.
Appropriate and effective content management solutions not only enable ease of use, effective interactive communication, and dynamic marketing experiences, they deliver what all organizations seek: measurable return on investment.
PRODUCT REVIEWS
Even in a world of high-powered search tools, re-finding exactly what you've already discovered on the web can be challenging. Bookmarks sound so old hat. But what if they functioned like archives? Norman Schreiber shares his insights on iCyte in this product review of a tool that can take you back to the site you first saw.
COLUMNS
I don't know of a single major enterprise that isn't experimenting with social computing behind the firewall. Every one of those organizations is also surely trying to figure out the best way to obtain business value at a time when "Enterprise 2.0 best practices" seem very circumstantial. I'll propose a simple way to look at the challenge: The things you need to do for successful social computing within the enterprise are the exact same things you need to do to build an effective intranet (and vice versa).
I wish I had a buck for every time somebody who works in the financial markets or the healthcare and pharmaceutical industries said something like this to me: "We can't get into social media, blogs, Twitter, and the like because of the regulations in our industry." Nonsense!
CASE STUDIES
JackBe sought a solution that would help consumers have a good user experience with its new product, which was part of the emerging mashup market segment. The company chose to work with Acquia Drupal to launch a community in order to meet the needs of inquiring customers, as well as to give them a gentle and productive introduction to mashups in general and JackBe's solution in particular.
When the Rhode Island School of Design began populating its website with video content, problems began to arise. The videos were isolated from each other and difficult to manage. It quickly became clear that RISD needed a video platform solution to manage its content, and the school turned to Brightcove for help.
FACES OF ECONTENT
"I was once at a customer site for a few days and noticed that a printer had been running continually, requiring an employee to feed it reams of paper. I finally asked what was printing and he said, ‘The vice president wants a copy of every employee's time card.' With 30,000 employees, and a two- or three-page time card for each, I asked him how big his wheelbarrow was. He agreed that the VP probably wasn't expecting a 70,000 page report."
"I'm currently preparing an exhibition on Darwin [that] will open soon in our gallery."
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