Harmon.ie Unveils Top 25 Online SharePoint Influencers for 2012

Today, Harmon.ie announced its list of the Top 25 online SharePoint Influencers. This second annual list brings together bloggers, writers and other industry professionals who have made a substantial impact on the SharePoint industry.

Harmon.ie, a company that creates software solutions to improve the social experience for users, commissioned to see who within the SharePoint community was not only the most innovative, but who also were the most informed and influential in terms of building a strong collaborative and social enterprise. They looked at over 700 potential candidates and eventually whittled the list down to 25 people.

The Top 10 SharePoint Influencers, according to the list from Harmon.ie
 

How Does the List Work?

When Harmon.ie was trying to determine who would make their list, there were certain factors that played a key role in who was chosen. These factors which were weighed and then determined the rank of the candidate include:

• How frequently their tweets were re-tweeted
• How much visitors they had to their their blog and how far it reached within the SharePoint Industry.
• How many citations they were given by other bloggers and colleagues.

Two things are coming into play here — SharePoint has become a more strategic platform for businesses, while users are looking for better social solutions, adoption strategies and innovative approaches to business problems,” said Mark Fidelman, CEO of Evolve!, a social business consultancy, and leading social strategist of the Top 25 Influencer Award. “These 25 individuals are passionate advocates, who are re-defining the value of social community and collaboration.”

Who Topped the List?

The individual scores of the top 25 range from 5455 to 3025. While the list is available on the Harmon.ie website, the following are those who ranked in the top five.

• Joel Oleson: Joel, who has 5455 points in the ranking system, is a SharePoint content and collaboration solutions manger for LDS Church, a former Microsoft senior technical product manager and was part of a team who designed Microsoft’s global search, intranet and teams sites. In 2011, he was in second place on Top 25 SharePoint Influencers List.
• Mark Miller: Mark, with a score of 5450, is the founder and editor of EndUserSharePoint.com. He also helps organizations with their social media development and building their online community.
• Andrew Connell: With a score of 4975, Andrew is ranked third. He is a SharePoint developer and instructor who has a also co-founded Critical Path Training, which educates and trains individuals in SharePoint. He is also a Microsoft MVP for Office SharePoint Server.
• Laura Rogers: Laura has a score of 4520. With eight years experience in the industry, she is now a senior SharePoint specialist at Rackspace Hosting and is a Microsoft MVP. She’s also written a variety of books in the subject including: Microsoft SharePoint 2010 Step by Step and Beginning SharePoint 2010: Building Business Solutions with SharePoint.
• John Mancini: With a score of 4490, John is ranked in fifth place. He is the president of the Association for Information and Image management (AIIM), which is a document and content management non-profit association.

A Big Year for SharePoint

With its 2013 version scheduled to be released this month and a conference next week, the list comes at an important time for those in the SharePoint industry. More and more products are being announced for the platform or are being updated so they are compatible with this new release. 

Recently, BA Insight announced use its Longitude Connectors to connect the newest version of SharePoint to about 30 different business related enterprise systems. And when Metalogix renamed its Migration Manager tool to Content Matrix they also announced that it could be used to move content from an older version of SharePoint to the 2013 version. But that's only a taste of what's to come.

 

 

Source : cmswire[dot]com

Making the Most of Your Marketing Funnel #rdm12

The impact changes in the consumer marketplace and technology are having on the marketing funnel and how marketers can adapt were major themes in early sessions of the Revenue Driven Marketing Summit hosted by Aberdeen Group in Boston, MA.

New Technology Empowers Customers, Creates ‘Hidden Sales Cycle’

Trip Kucera, Senior Research Analyst, Marketing Effectiveness and Strategy for Aberdeen opened today’s program with an introductory talk about what marketing is experiencing today. “There are new technologies, new mediums and new targets,” he said. “You’re engaging with empowered customers in both the B2B and B2C marketplaces. “

In response, Kucera said marketers are “digitizing processes from the top of the funnel to the topline. There is much more data, and more buzz around Big Data but probably more action around predictive analytics.” In addition, Kucera said a “hidden sales cycle” has entered the traditional funnel of lead generation, lead management and opportunity management. This hidden cycle, which often occurs later in the buyer’s journey, consists of influences like social media, communities, content and peers. “You need to put your listening ears on,” advised Kucera.

Turn Your Funnel into a Pipeline

Following Kucera’s remarks, Russell Fujioka, VP of Enterprise Solutions and Business Marketing, Dell, urged marketing and sales executives to move beyond current best practices in order to reshape their funnels into free flowing pipelines. “If you’re at best practices right now, you’re probably behind,” stated Fujioka. “If you haven’t met a mathematician lately, you need to go hug those folks.”

Fujioka said there is so much data now available, tools alone cannot do enough to uncover actionable information. “Algorithms can determine cause and effect,” he said. “Some tools can’t answer why certain things work. But there are some people at MIT that probably can.”

Fujioka said that by changing its marketing model from quickly providing customized hardware to delivering full-scale IT solutions and developing ongoing customer relationships, in three years Dell has increased marketing-led revenue by 125% every six months and increased the growth of social media-driven dollars in the marketing pipeline by 20% every quarter, among other results.

Fujioka also focused on the funnel and how marketers can alter its shape from a typical “cannoli” (he gave a nod to the world-famous Mike’s Pastry in Boston’s traditionally Italian North End neighborhood) to a more streamlined “pipe.”

“The key part is the fulcrum,” he said. “What are the pressure points, amplifiers and things getting in your way? If you keep filling the left side with fuel and your win rate doesn’t improve, you won’t be more successful but will spend more money.”

In addition, Fujioka said marketers must closely analyze the right side of the funnel. “Those things that made it through got there for a reason,” he said. “Predictively analyze why they did.”

By properly analyzing what happens in the fulcrum and why some leads are converted, Fujioka said marketers can create an “aspirational” funnel where targeting is so good the lead-to-success ratio can wind up being “something like two to one instead of 10,000 to one.” And in the future, “the right side will be wider.”

Fujioka gave two final pieces of advice to marketers seeking to create an aspirational funnel. One is to create the position of vice president of customer success. “If you don’t do that, you don’t have a chance,” he said. The second is to remember that word of mouth always has been and always will be the strongest influencer on consumer decisions.

“It doesn’t matter what the audience or product is,” he said. “The difference is we now have tools to amplify word of mouth so instead of telling two friends who tell two friends, you can go on LinkedIn and pretty quickly spread the word to 25 million contacts.”

 

 

Source : cmswire[dot]com

The Social Science of Your Social Business #socialintel2012

The science of digital media proposes to translate abstract qualities into numerical values. Influence, sentiment and loyalty are all major factors in determining the impact of social media on your business, because hard numbers and ROI come later. Should we really rely on these algorithms, and will we ever be able to trust them completely?

Are they just a new way to automate the customer experience, like auto replies and automated phone menus? The consensus is that the human element will always dominate in the practice of interpreting human interactions, at least in terms of reliability. And you can manage to operate a social media presence for your business without putting all of your eggs into that basket.

Social Media Tools of the Trade

The other problem is that sentiment analysis is almost entirely useless. Even among massive companies with huge data sets, hard negative/strong positive sentiment is a very small percentage as compared to "neutral" interactions. So, if you have the "luxury" of being a small enough company, maybe try to measure these things manually. Combining Google Analytics with the built-in measurement tools of Twitter and Facebook can give you a very good idea where you stand at no cost at all, especially if you're tracking month-to-month growth and incorporating multivariate testing into your basic social strategy. You can use Klout to gauge influence, or just rely on that good old common sense you've got lying around somewhere.

If you're getting too big to leave things to chance, a few significant companies in the market of big data keep popping up. Radian 6 is an industry leader in social media data collection/analysis. Metrica does the same, with a slightly more human-centered approach. Hadoop is a recommended file management system to store and organize your data. You'll pay real money for these services, but you'll be doing it because you're at a point where you have no choice but to invest in that side of the business, and you don't want to throw money at a crap shoot.

Analyzing the Ever Changing Social Network

Scientifically speaking, you'll be analyzing an environment that is in constant flux, and the action of observing it has an effect on it. People are more likely to complain when you make it that easy. You'll have your chin out there taking blows and you'll need to react swiftly. It's important to have a solid advocate at the top of the company and a direct line (Bat-phone) that can allow you to solve any problems immediately. If your social media director is not completely empowered, then they must have close contact with the CEO or someone who is. Red tape destroys a company's ability to operate an effective social presence.

Also, don't spend countless hours or excessive dollars trying to determine the "why" of every negative interaction. There's a vast spread of strange stuff out there and we can't attach meaning to everything and everyone. When negative reactions start to add up, you can begin to understand a common theme within your data or from your observation that can result in a business action. Prior to that, the most you can do is treat people like people, not digital units. You might find them reacting in kind, and you'll start to see that intangible quality of loyalty creeping in.

 

 

Source : cmswire[dot]com