CMSWire's November Tweet Jam: Meet the Panelists #CXMChat

On Wednesday, November 28th, it will once again be Tweet Jam time. This month we'll be concentrating on Socializing Customer Relationship Management and have lined up a great group of panelists.

The Questions

Businesses are moving beyond using social media to gather followers and likes. They are turning to social media channels to engage their audience in dialogue, take care of customer questions and concerns and personalize the customer experience with their brand.  Take a look at the questions our experts will tackle below: 

1. How do you define the core mission of Social CRM?
2. What are the key technologies/practices changing customer service today?
3. What role does Social CRM play in a larger Social strategy? Is it necessary to have the one before the other?
4. List 3 reasons why Social CRM projects fail to achieve expected value.
5. How do you see customer support strategies changing in 2013?

The Panelists

Anyone interested is welcome to join the event and connect with our panelists. The easiest way to join the conversation is by following or including the #cxmchat hashtag.

This month's knowledgeable participants will include: 

• Denis Pombriant — CEO, Beagle Research Group — @DenisPombriant
• Hyoun Park — Principal Analyst, Nucleus Research — @hyuonpark
• Julie Hunt — Solution Strategist, Julie Hunt Consulting — @juliebhunt
• Kate Leggett — Principal Analyst, Forrester Research — @kateleggett
• Megan Murray — Director of Collaboration Strategy, Moxie Software — @MeganMurray
• Mitch Lieberman — Managing Partner, Discover/Reinvention/Integration —  @mjayliebs
• Ray Wang — CEO, Constellation Research — @rwang0
• Rob Howard — Founder and CTO, Telligent Systems — @robhoward
• Vala Afshar — CMO and Chief Customer Officer, Enterasys — @ValaAfshar

The Details

To hear our expert's weigh in, join us Wednesday, November 28th, at 10 am PST / 1 pm EST / 1700 GMT. The easiest way to follow is to use the #CXMChat hashtag. We will be setting up a chat room and sending out the details via Twitter on the day of the Jam. See you on the 28th!

 

 

Source : cmswire[dot]com

Optify Connect Improves Lead Management: Links Behaviors, History to Website Visitors

Last month, Optify revealed the secrets of digital marketing performers. Today, they’re announcing a new capability that presents the entire behavioral history and detailed information about a lead in one place. Talk about a secret performer.

With Optify Connect, marketers will be able to connect new contacts with their anonymous visit history, in an effort to create a 360-degree view of their leads. Built on its digital marketing platform, Optify Connect allows marketers to increase their response rate and evaluate leads better than ever before.

Like the marketing platforms we've seen from Demandbase, Optfy seems to be stepping up their ability to identify website visitors so that sales and marketing teams can not only identify better, more reliable leads, but they can also learn more about customer behaviors. This can help sales and marketing teams improve their targeted advertising strategies.

More Info = More Effective Followup

Optify Connect can be used to enhance the following Optify applications:

• Email Manager: Marketers can view how many contacts opened, clicked or unsubscribed from each email, and receive detailed information on each individual for insight into future campaigns. Users can also compare email performance based on key metrics through in-depth marketing reports.

• Contact Manager: Each record in contact manager can be seen, from source to website visits to personal and company information. This lets users assert more control over their customer relationship management strategy. By using customized fields in landing pages or emails, marketers can better segment, prioritize, filter and follow up with contacts based on their profile and behavioral data.

• Landing Pages: Marketers can capture information without the use of traditional landing page forms. They can also use A/B testing on landing pages using Google experiments and integrate with any CMS system.

It’s clear that Optify is committed to helping marketers become more invested in the customer experience — by giving them the tools that make it easier to develop personas and identify relevant behaviors.

 

 

Source : cmswire[dot]com

Amazon In Running For Texas Instruments' Chip Division

A report on an Israeli website claims that Amazon is in serious negotiations to buy Texas Instruments' mobile chip division. The firm announced last month that it was doing away with its chip operations and instead focusing on embedded platforms. It's a logical step forward for the online retail giant with a sideline in hardware, as it means that Amazon will have direct influence on what goes into its Kindles, and, perhaps, its future smartphones.

Source : fastcompany[dot]com

Jahia Wise Preview: Versatile, Streamlined Document and Social Collaboration

At the end of this month Jahia will introduce a new open source solution called Jahia Wise that combines document management and social collaboration. Easy to use, it has all the functionality required to enable workers to integrate all their information sources and populate their websites or intranets with enterprise content.

Jahia already offers a number of solutions for working with data (including documents), but this solution is designed to make it easy for business users to share documents, exchange them, work on them collectively, and ultimately publish them in a controlled and ordered fashion.

Jahia Wise has been doing the rounds of some of the tech shows, particularly in France. Recently, Elie Auvray CEO of Jahia and Anne de Forsan, director of Communications, sat down with CMSWire and gave us a look at the new product.

Jahia Wise: Gallery View
 

Jahia Unity, Jahia Wise

Jahia is keeping some of the functionality under its hat until the product launch, because, Auvray says, some things are unique and well, why give competitors a chance to pre-empt you?

But that’s all by-the-by. When Jahia Wise is released it will have been in the works for about a year, according to Auvray. The driving principal behind it, he says, is the same principal that drives all Jahia’s other products — notably, unity.

Expanding on the concept of unity, he pointed out that Jahia has, as its driving principal, the delivery of agile open source technologies. This delivery pushes enterprise application convergence as far as it can possibly go by pulling together web, search, document, social and portal technologies.

And Jahia has already managed to achieve this, he says, with some of their other products — like their content management system eXtended Content Management (xCM), their visual experience builder Jahia Studio, their content core platform and a number of other JahiApps (Jahia applications).

When it comes to enterprise collaboration and document exchange, companies expect more and more integration with the information they share online on their intranet or website. Many solutions on the market are cumbersome, complex and costly — especially in terms of integration.

Jahia Wise: Secure Collaboration

Jahia Wise Evolution

Jahia Wise offers an alternative to this complexity, Auvray says. It is the first time that Jahia has produced a product focused entirely on the document, file sharing and social collaboration market. It is a completely new product, based on the same underlying platform as xCM is, but has evolved to ensure that the distribution of content across the enterprise is easy and intuitive. To do that it comes with numerous modules and packages.

While Jahia Wise can work as a complementary product to the core platform, it does have a separate installer, which means that it can also be set up and run independently of the core platform for enterprises that are looking for a distribution platform on its own.

It evolved in this way, Auvray says, because when they went looking at distribution management systems they saw a wide range of products that can manage a wide range of content. However, they also found that once an enterprise started building an intranet based on existing company information, located in different silos, the nightmare of integration began.

 

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Source : cmswire[dot]com

DreamForce 2012: Closer Towards the Cloud Based Intranet? #df12

In last month's column I took a generic look at whether an organization could move its intranet to the cloud, lock stock and barrel. As ever, my conclusion was "maybe" as it very much depends on your organization and what exactly you want to do. While at DreamForce, I had the opportunity to return to this question.

Last week I, along with allegedly 90,000 others, attended SalesForce's DreamForce conference in San Francisco. This was my first DreamForce and it was interesting for many reasons: for example the product announcements and consolidation of acquired products and functionality into the SalesCloud, ServiceCloud and MarketingCloud product streams. But I was there with my work hat on, there to dig into and learn more about Chatter as a specific product, and to meet with other users and learn from them about their implementations.

The SalesForce teams definitely split the Chatter news into two broad categories: external facing use of Chatter in the form of the new Chatter Communities and the internal enterprise use of Chatter, which was largely focused on the ChatterBox file sharing offering. They even went so far as to have two distinct product road map sessions built around these two specific use cases.

Chatter for External Use - Communities

The SalesForce press release for Communities firmly places the functionality in the context of the ServiceCloud offering.

The story is all about enhancing existing customer facing web portals with social interactivity; it foresee's user based communities where customers can go to ask questions which may be answered by your staff, or by other communities members (wisdom of crowds and all that!).

In one session, the presenter used the term "next generation portal" in conjunction with the Service Cloud offering and istated that this would be based on Chatter Communities, Site.Com and applications built on the underlying Force.Com platform. I had an interesting discussion about the intranet possibilities of this combination with a SalesForce person, but we'll come back to that later.

Chatter for Internal Use - Chatterbox

ChatterBox is a file sharing solution able to sync documents between desktop, cloud and mobile devices. There is a simple FAQ online.

It should be noted that the apparent sweet spot for this product is the synchronization service. Unlike some others, I really don't see this killing off SalesForce's relationship with partners like Box.net or Spring CM. I can see ChatterBox's synchronization being useful if its use is built into certain processes, and of course if those processes are largely based on the base CRM (Sales Cloud) or Service Cloud, or Marketing Cloud etc, then so much the better.

Chatter IS your Intranet?

So as I mentioned, I had a quick chat with a SalesForce person about where the use of its platform and products could go from an intranet perspective. He stated that Chatter IS the "social intranet." I disagree. Some organizations are just not ready to make that leap!

I understand that Chatter is delivered via the portal layer of the Force.com platform, via the VisualForce user interface development tool kit, and thus you can use the (confusingly named) Force.com Sites capability to publish data into new tabs in the Chatter interface.

 

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Source : cmswire[dot]com

Motorola and Nokia Nudge the Smartphone Bar With New Devices

 This month is pretty much draws a line under what has come before for smartphones, and defines where the market heads in future. Today saw Nokia and Motorola launch bigger, better models, with new features. But, will the public bite and will they matter in just a few months time as Apple awaits?

Motorola on a Roll

One time kings of the mobile market, Motorola has been looking to win back users with a series of increasingly impressive devices since the original Razr. The new Droid Razr HD from the now Google-owned Motorola comes with a larger 4.7-inch SuperAMOLED HD screen, a bigger battery (unless you own a Razr Maxx) and the promise of 24 hours usage.

Packing Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich, and Google's Chrome browser, there is a lot of power inside the executive-styled design, but is that enough to make anyone rush out for an upgrade, or to abandon their rival device for a Motorola? Even the promise of an imminent upgrade to Jelly Bean is just par for the course. 

Nokia Not Out, Yet

Pretty much as seen yesterday, Nokia took to the stage and launched the Lumia 920, despite a hiccup with the webfeed that left viewers in the cold. Powered by Windows Phone 8, Nokia has good reason to hope for a serious boost to Lumia sales which have now hit 7 million in a little under a year.  

To cover a wider section of the market, there is also the Lumia 820, a mid-range and more compact device. But, you know a company is kind of lost when it thinks announcing deals with airlines to put wireless rechargers in their lounges is important. Just how tiny a percentage of the potential user base does that sort of gimmick really appeal to?

Nokia will be hoping to make more of an impact with its free music streaming service, that was announced before the main event. But, again, most users already have a sizeable music collection or are happy with existing services, signing up for another one is just a hassle many don't need. Nokia's stock price plummeted after the reveal, suggesting investors aren't convinced either. 

The Falling Apple 

For Apple, whatever it does with the iPhone 5 at its 12 September event, it must be slightly boring to know they'll crush this opposition on the first day of sales. However, in the big scheme of things, the only way is down in terms of hype, market share and prestige value. A slightly bigger screen is hardly cause for a big whoop. More power? Who really needs it? Better maps? Yawn!

While Apple has a huge advantage over the likes of Nokia and Motorola, a sizeable percentage of iPhone 4S owners are part way through their two-year contract. With the move to tablets (on recent trips, I've seen large numbers of owners taking their iPad or Nexus out and using it as a camera and social media device on the go), a new phone is less of a must-have. 

Yes, Apple will still sell many millions of iPhone 5s, but as the overall concept of the smartphone matures and stagnates, users will have fewer reasons to get excited, enthused and sucked in. Samsung seem to have hit the right note with the in-between Note device, so it perhaps in TV or another area that Apple will look too for its next multi-billion dollar business. 

 

 

Source : cmswire[dot]com

Weekend Reading: Goodbye SharePoint, Hello Web Analytics

August is over and with it goes our SharePoint focus. But we ended the month with a bang, finishing up the series that gave us a 35,000 foot view of SharePoint 2013, looking at SharePoint governance from a few angles and returned to a question asked earlier in the month: SharePoint and WCM, perfect together?

Our contributors gave us a cheat sheet for recognizing an internet charlatan (print it up before your next interview), a look at new Federal records management requirements that apply to the public sector but will reverberate throughout the records management world and one more attempt to figure out who's in charge of metadata. Poor metadata, always pushed around.

Enjoy the holiday weekend all!

It's Time to Say Goodbye

SharePoint Governance: Needed Now More Than Ever

Jennifer Mason (@jennifermason):  Last week I had the opportunity to participate in the Tweetjam about SharePoint. One of the topics that came up was the importance of Governance. In this article I want to dive deeper into this topic and stress how important governance is within your environment. 

Got SharePoint? Start with the End User in Mind

Rich Blank (@pmpinsights):When it comes to information worker tools, it’s rare I hear someone from IT say “we walk a day in the life of our end users and start backwards from there.” Seldom do they ask “how do our people want to work?” or “what tools and information do our workers need exactly?”     

Is SharePoint Integration a Mandatory WCM Requirement?

Ian Truscott (@iantruscott): There are a lot of opinions about Microsoft Office SharePoint, some favorable and others less so, but no matter the camp you sit in, there is no denying it’s ubiquity in our organizations.

According to a recent AIIM (the Association for Information and Image Management professionals) Industry Watch Report “The SharePoint Puzzle,” that ubiquity is here to stay.

35,000 Foot View of SharePoint 2013 for End Users

Brian Alderman (@brianalderman):This is the last article of a four-part 35,000-foot overview of some of the major changes expected in SharePoint 2013. What's in store for the end user?

SharePoint Business Governance Strategy: Human Forces

Frederik Leksell (@letstalkgov): You can't run a SharePoint project and expect it to be maintenance free. You need to have an organization, both during and after the project.

Interview: NewsGator's J.B. Holston on Being a SharePoint Partner, Future of Collaboration

Barb Mosher Zinck (@bmosherzinck): When you think about Microsoft partners, one of the first that comes to mind is NewsGator. A successful third party integrator to Microsoft SharePoint, NewsGator Social Sites has over 4 million paid seats and is Microsoft's premier partner for social software integration. And while this last little while has seen a number of interesting events happen for NewsGator: Microsoft's acquisition of Yammer, a new version of Social Sites, a new version of SharePoint and a new CEO, it only spells good news for the social software company. Here we offer some of J.B. Holston's (now the former CEO of NewsGator) views on these topics.

Making Enterprise Information Secure, Accessible

What You Need to Know About Incorporating Social Media Into Your E-Discovery Strategy

Sheila Mackay: An employee, excited about a new product the company is developing, mentions it on Facebook. Due to his privacy settings, a competitor gets wind of potential trade secret information. In another situation, a disgruntled employee sends a negative Tweet about his company to hundreds of followers, including company shareholders.

New Public Sector Records Managers' Challenges: Transparency, Participation, Collaboration

Cheryl McKinnon (@cherylmckinnon):When was the last time a definition of records management left a person feeling inspired? August 24, 2012 just might be that time.

Managing Metadata - Any Volunteers?

Erik Hartman (@erikmhartman): Almost every content management (CM) book, presentation or other CM-related publication talks about metadata. So most CM people know what it is, what it's for and what it looks like.

But when it comes to insights about who manages the metadata, the available sources are quite limited and contradictory.

VMware Horizon Suite Secure Mobile Access to Enterprise Information Helps CIOs Sleep Better

Virginia Backaitis: Content Management from its earliest days has been about getting the right information to the right person at the right time. This was long before there were laptops, before email, before the web, before smartphones, before e-Readers, before tablet computers, before whatever comes next.

Failures, Charlatans and Writers, Oh My!

The Three P's of Avoiding Social CRM Failure

Chris Bucholtz (@bucholtz): With the social era in full swing, we hear on a near daily basis about all the benefits a social media and social CRM strategy can bring. Tactically, they can help sales with potential leads, give service a new window into building customer satisfaction and provide marketing with fresh opportunities to engage and entice new customers. Strategically, they can help you avoid becoming obsolete and irrelevant as customers increasingly go social.

 

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Source : cmswire[dot]com

Dropbox Tests Two-Factor Authentication

Following a well-publicized security breach that was discovered last month, document sharing service Dropbox is launching a beta test of two-factor authentication with some users. The new security feature, made available on Friday, August 24 to early Dropbox adopters using Windows, Mac OS X, or Linux PC, sends users a one-time mobile security code they must enter in addition to their standard password.

Early Results Suggest Two-Factor Authentication Has Kinks

As reported by Information Week, two-factor authentication has already been previewed by Dropbox VP of Engineering Aditya Agarwal. It comes as a response to the discovery that spam being sent to user email accounts only used for Dropbox originated from hackers who had stolen passwords they had reused from other sites (see more detail below). In addition, an internal Dropbox investigation revealed that hackers stole unencrypted user passwords that were improperly stored in a Dropbox employee’s account.

Dropbox users can receive mobile security codes via text message or mobile app. Information Week reports that early public commentary on the beta test suggests it needs some fine-tuning. For example, one user posted in an online Dropbox forum that despite signing up for two-factor authentication, he could still log into his Dropbox account only using his password.

Another complaint posted online by more than one user is that currently there is no backup option if a mobile phone or the 16-digit mobile security code is lost.

Two-Factor Authentication One of Several Promised Security Fixes

In a public statement on its website, Dropbox previously said it would start requiring two-factor identification. In addition, Dropbox pledged to offer security fixes including a new page that will let users see all logins to their account, and possibly periodically ask users to change their passwords. Internally, Dropbox intends to add automated mechanisms for detecting suspicious activity.

Obviously, it will take some time for Dropbox to launch fully operational versions of all these new and improved security features (and internal features may not be publicized), but considering how quickly the company rolled out a beta test of two-factor authentication, Dropbox seems committed to rectifying the problems caused by this embarrassing security breach.

Dropbox users themselves should also take some steps to help protect not just their Dropbox accounts, but all of their various online accounts. The IT Security Office at Duke University offers some helpful tips on how to select a strong password that will not be easy for a hacker to guess. These include using at least eight characters (some systems allow up to 63), mixing upper and lower-case characters, interspersing punctuation marks and symbols, and using modified versions of words from favorite childhood nursery rhymes or foods. Duke IT Security also advises to never use the same password on more than one account and to avoid dictionary words, phone numbers and anything associated with a name.

 

 

Source : cmswire[dot]com

Mobile and the Era of Fragmented Communication

In the lead up to the Olympic Games this month, London added Wi-Fi to its subway system in an effort to help keep communications among visitors open. But last week it was clear that mobile engagement issues were taking their toll when an increase in social media began interfering with mobile networks on which the games themselves depend.

The International Olympics Committee asked viewers to "use another means" to send texts and tweets because the activity was overwhelming operator networks. Many users turned to over-the-top content (OTT) to offset the networks and streamline communications as a result.

Over the Top and In Demand

These issues may be surprising, considering the advanced infrastructures in place and our increased expectations for faster than fast networks that power our mobility. However, a new study by tyntec, found that US operators are better prepared to more effectively deal with and profit from OTT services compared to European operators.

Previously, tyntec reported there was great opportunity for younger populations to utilize OTT services, which can help users communicate more efficiently and lowers costs associated with traditional SMS technology. This new report continues to emphasize the opportunity available as well as the discrepancies that exist across countries to implement and facilitate these services.

The report by mobileSQUARED and sponsored by tyntec, OTT: How Operators can overcome the Fragmentation of Communication shows a considerable discrepancy in attitude and a huge lag in uptake between Europe and the US:

• 100 percent of US mobile operators are already partnering with OTT providers, while only 18 percent are currently doing so in Europe.
• 25 percent of European operators have already seen losses in revenue by up to 5 percent. The US has yet to see any decline in revenue.
• Almost 75 percent of European operators anticipate OTT will impact revenue losses by up to 11-15 percent in the coming years. In comparison, the US is bracing for losses of up to 30 percent.
• 42 percent of operators believe that over 40 percent of their customer base will be using OTT services in 2016.
• OTT blocking and “walled gardens” are preventing adoption in Europe; whereas, the US is well positioned to profit from OTT, in part, because of our flat rate plans and infrastructure. 

Overall, the study suggests that European mobile operators feel more threatened, with 79 percent of European operators indicating that OTT clients on smartphones are a threat to traditional SMS and voice-based services.

An Era of Proliferation and Fragmentation

When we talk about OTT services, what exactly do we mean? Applications like Skype and What’s App are best known, with Skype leading the OTT charge with over 900 million users spending over 1 billion minutes a day. And while in 2012 20 percent of global smartphone users actively use OTT services, it is predicted to reach 45 percent by 2016.

So why the fragmentation? As OTT services expand and attract more users, it’s expected that more companies and developers will look to capitalize and flood the market with OTT services. Until then however, a majority of the existing proprietary OTT (Over-The-Top) communication service providers do not permit cross-platform functionality, therefore limiting the capability of their services. As the report puts it:

Consequently, the rise of these OTT services has created an era of fragmented communications in which consumers cannot easily communicate outside the ‘walled gardens’ of their respective service/app. This weakness presents mobile operators with an ideal opportunity to adopt a key role in enabling OTT services and associated revenues, as they seek new business models to offset the decline in voice and messaging revenues."

Here, Thorsten Trapp, CTO of tyntec discusses the latest figures and forecasts of the whitepaper and what they mean for Operators.

Global events like the Olympics help to showcase the era of fragmented communications, helping us all better understand the need for more interoperability and the opportunity the industry has to improve mobile communications. But it shouldn’t require such wide-scale events to highlight the lag — anyone who has ever sent a text only to have it arrive hours after, can appreciate the utility of OTT services.
 

 

 

Source : cmswire[dot]com