How Bill Nye the Science Guy Would Monitor Social Media

There is a scientific method that can be applied to monitoring social media. Businesses must first learn about their efforts and then fine tune them to prove their time and money is well spent.

Determining how much of an investment social media is worth is a topic that comes up again and again. I wrote recently about how, in my view, calculating social media ROI is missing much of the point of social media. I realize that not everyone agrees with my opinion that social media is more about engagement, customer service and developing brand loyalty.

I also realize that some people who invest in social media, or who must answer to a CEO or CFO about social media efforts, need certain proof that their time and money are well spent. There are companies that can do this (including Radian 6 and Eloqua), but for those who don’t have access to analytics, beyond what can be gleaned from something like Facebook Insights, YouTube or Twitter’s analytics tool (available to business accounts) I have a challenge for you: try using the scientific method — or a version of it — to see first what you can learn about your efforts and then how you might fine tune them.

Here’s my abbreviated version of the scientific method, amended for social media. I think Bill Nye the Science Guy would approve.

1. Establish a Baseline, aka a “Control”

This should be easy. What are your numbers today? How many Likes do you have on Facebook? How many do you average per day and per month? How many followers on Twitter? How many new followers do you average per day versus per month? How many subscribers to your newsletter? How long has it taken you to get to these numbers? How many hours and/or money do you spend on social media? How long did it take you to get to these numbers — or are you starting from scratch?

Set up a Google Docs spreadsheet or simply jot the numbers down on a piece of paper, and note the date. One of your goals with social media should be to increase daily numbers and reduce the amount of time it takes you to reach specific numbers.

2. Create a Hypothesis

Let’s say your gut feeling is that when you post humorous content you get the best engagement and Likes or followers go up. Your hypothesis would be, “I believe that my audience likes humor.” Or maybe you sense that your audience likes tips or other informational content. In this case your hypothesis would be, “I believe that my audience likes ‘How To’ content.”

This is sort of tangential, but when you are creating content, think outside the box. For humor, don’t just tell knock-knock jokes. If you’re a company that makes fitness or sports gear, look at what GoPro does: post funny crash videos (where no one gets hurt, of course). If you’re a bakery, post footage of kitchen disasters — and ask your users to send you theirs while you’re at it. If you’re a dentist, perhaps some dental disasters that you’ve fixed? A car dealer might post photos of cars that should be traded in. You get the idea.

3. Test

 

Continue reading this article:

1 2 Next Page >

 

 

Source : cmswire[dot]com

How Dwolla Works

Dwolla cuts credit cards out of transactions. But why does that make payments cheaper?

Here’s the short version of how Dwolla works: It transfers money directly from your bank account to the bank account of someone who you want to pay. For free--if the transaction is less than $10. And for $.25 if it’s more than that. That is less than a credit card company would charge you.

But wait. Aren’t credit cards essentially just moving money from bank account to bank account, too? Shouldn’t they run into about the same fees for doing so? Get ready for the long answer.

“That 16-digit card number, when it’s left behind, or when it’s used at all, one, the fees to essentially move the money can't really go away, because they have to support that infrastructure, and a huge part of that infrastructure is not necessarily the reduction of fraud on the front end, it's already a loss baked into the entire cost of the whole network,” Dwolla founder and CEO Ben Milne said at a meeting in New York City this August. “You just can’t remove it. It’s not coming out.”

A credit card transaction isn’t simple. It’s a complicated process (I often imagine a Rube Goldberg machine) involving players you’ve never heard of that have functions such as “merchant service provider” and nonsensical charges such as “acquirer processing fee.” Dwolla cuts all of this out with the credit card number.

Huh?

“It’s like if you have a landline phone, you can’t not use the copper in the wall,” Milne says. “If you want to reduce the cost of copper, you need to use a wireless phone. You remove hardware. You remove infrastructure.”

It took Milne, he admits, years of seriously geeking out to figure out how payments work. If you don’t have that long, this infographic helps.

Source : fastcompany[dot]com

Risk Management: Understand Vulnerabilities First

Determining suitable controls to effectively mitigate risk is a balancing act. More money can always be spent. More effort can always be put forth. But the right choices are all too often elusive and recognized in hindsight. 

To avoid suffering unfortunate repercussions, it is best to practice a flavor of risk management that is at once as business minded as it is technically savvy. Too little or much of one or another most often leads to the realization of risks better otherwise controlled.

Factors in Risk Assessments

Based on the Payment Card Industry (PCI) Data Security Standard (DSS) version 2.0 requirements and the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) Special Publication (SP) 800-40 version 2 Creating a Patch and Vulnerability Management Program, mature vulnerability management processes require careful consideration to appropriately assign risk ranking and mitigation strategies.

An understanding of Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS) version 2 calculation methodologies, established subsequent to the 2005 publication of SP800-40 version 2, directly assist in supporting the reasonable diligence necessary to effectively assess identified vulnerabilities.

CVSS base elements consider vulnerability access vectors, complexity, authentication requirements and the potential impact to confidentiality, integrity and availability. The temporal nature of vulnerabilities further considers exploitability factors affecting the ease with which a vulnerability may be exploited and the difficulty of remediation.

Additionally, environmental aspects of the affected environment including damage related impact, the prevalence of affected systems and established organizational confidentiality, integrity and availability prioritized security requirements are considered.

Security Controls Do Not Equal Invulnerability

With this in mind, it should be understood that though it's true many implemented security controls and supporting processes offer protection for organizations, it can not also be reasonably fathomed that their existence alone consistently mitigates the impact of identified vulnerabilities.

For example, suppose a database server is identified as being prone to one or more SQL injection vulnerabilities. It is isolated to a dedicated network segment with established access controls restricting communications to authorized internal hosts and the entirety of network assets protected by host-based and perimeter security controls including, respectively, both anti-virus protection and an intrusion prevention system. While the probability of exploit is arguably contained, the vulnerability remains. 

Further, many if not all of the authorized hosts permitted communication with the server in this scenario are likely granted Internet access in addition to participating in email communications. As a result, despite the implemented security controls, compromise of any one authorized host via phishing or other Internet-born threat may still lead to the exploit of the database server’s vulnerability.

Ask RSA. In the case of their widely reported breach, the source proved to be a phishing attack which ultimately rendered all preventative technical controls moot.

Start with Understanding the Vulnerability 

To effectively manage vulnerabilities and their associated risk, the vulnerability itself must first be understood prior to consideration being given to the potential effect of implemented controls and processes. While NIST SP800-53 derived probability and impact factors certainly should prove instrumental in final risk rating, CVSS-based calculation criteria should also be taken into account to better quantify and support the process. The resulting overall risk rating and determined mitigation strategy may only then be substantively applied.

 

Continue reading this article:

1 2 Next Page >

 

 

Source : cmswire[dot]com

Ensighten Raises US15.5m To Develop Enterprise Tag Management Reach, Expand Market

If any one had any doubt that there is money in tag management, then the announcement today that enterprise tag management vendor Ensighten has managed to raise US$ 15.5 million in Series A financing should knock those doubts right on the head.

Ensighten's Enterprise Tagging

The funding round was led by Volition Capital with a number of other investors including Eastern Advisors and Floodgate Fund to top it up.

We have come across Ensighten in a small way in the past by a way of a free do-not-track tool. It is a company that clearly has ambitions — ambitions that others believe in too — to deliver tags as a service. It has also made that service scalable and lightening quick.

If it can provide effective tag management for enterprises then it is clearly onto a winner. Tagging, while essential, is really slow and infuriating, but if it’s not done correctly, it can have a really negative impact on your webpages and site.

Building Ensighten

Now it seems Ensighten has managed to provide a service that has captured the attention of the venture capitalists. With the money, it says it will accelerate product development and expand sales and marketing operations, as well as expand its workforce as it enters what it describes as its “next phase of growth” without actually describing where it hopes that growth will bring it.

That said, Ensighten has already developed a market for itself. Among its clients it already claims to have 10% of the Internet Retailer 100 companies, including two of the top five, along with global companies like Sony, Microsoft Dell and Thomson-Reuters.

At this point, and across this customer portfolio, Ensighten is being used in websites, but is also getting a lot of attention from vendors that are providing solutions for the integration and optimization of digital marketing services like Web analytics, social sharing and conversion pixels.

The result, is that is has rapidly spread form the US into the EMEA region with the opening of an office in the UK in May of this year. That office is also expected to grow rapidly in the coming months.

Currently, Ensighten's global Tag Delivery Network provides over 750 billion tags annually to more than 25,000 Web domains across 150 countries that cover US$ 25 billion in transactions. At least that’s what Ensighten’s figures say, and there’s no reason to dispute those figures.

 

 

Source : cmswire[dot]com

InsideSales.com Raises $4M to Hone Predictive Analytics for Sales Force Automation

InsideSales.com, a provider of a Saas-based sales force automation platform, has completed a round of funding totaling US$ 4 million. The company says it will put the money toward accelerating growth into enterprise markets and developing predictive analytics capabilities.

The InsideSales.com platform takes what the company calls the “high velocity sales model,” which it says is a data-driven approach to sales. Using cloud-based technology, InsideSales.com seeks to improve productivity, visibility and analytics with a metrics-based “preferred inside sales model.”

This sales model leverages rapid lead response qualification and cold-calling teams paired with experienced closers who conduct sales using the phone and Internet, as opposed to the traditional face-to-face outside sales model that InsideSales.com says is more expensive and less efficient.

Engaging Modern Consumers

InsideSales.com is attempting to tackle what is becoming a widely-recognized challenge for today’s sales professionals — engaging a much savvier and more connected consumer. Dan Schleifer, EVP of sales enablement for enterprise sales collaboration software provider SAVO Group, recently explained in an interview with CMSWire how he sees Web-based communication technology as holding the potential to revolutionize sales in today’s environment.

Schleifer said by automatically collecting data in real time while a sales rep is making a presentation or pitch, via mobile device, sales enablement tools can eliminate organizational silos and fill the gaps in B2B sales data quickly enough for sales strategies to be altered as soon as problems can be identified. “The clinical moment of truth in any sales process is when the rep is sitting with the customer. Sales enablement allows you to understand that moment of truth.”

While InsideSales.com is geared more toward identifying leads for real-time sales calls than for increasing the personalization of site visits, the underlying strategy of automating a process and improving its effectiveness with real-time data and predictive analytics is the same. InsideSales.com generates and stores quantitative call data linked directly with qualitative lead process and flow information.

Some Days are Better than Others

As an example of how InsideSales.com’ technology can be applied, LeadResponseManagement.org used data from the InsideSales.com system to conduct a study into telephone sales issues such as what day of the week is best to call back a web-generated lead for optimal contact and qualification rates. The study determined Wednesdays and Thursdays are the best days to call for making contact with and qualifying leads (with Tuesdays the worst day for making contact and Fridays the worst day for qualifying).

This type of feedback can be invaluable for companies trying to successfully reach prospective customers who have become adept at both filtering out information and conducting extensive research on products, brands and services.

Hummer Winblad Venture Partners led the funding round, with co-investors including Josh James, founder and CEO of Domo and cofounder and former CEO of Omniture.

 

 

Source : cmswire[dot]com