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

Why SharePoint 2013 Isn't for You

There’s a lot of noise on the street since the announcement of SharePoint 2013. We’re headed towards the largest SharePoint conference of the year in Las Vegas this November and it’s only going to get louder. Where does that leave you, the end user of SharePoint? About where you were before the announcement came out, I would think. It should not affect you at all.

Where Is All the Noise Coming From?

If you listen closely to the groundswell, what you hear is a bunch of developer geek speak about SharePoint 2013. There is the marketing coming out of Microsoft, but the Man-on-the-Street conversation is mainly from developers and IT Pros who are talking to each other about how to set it up, how to optimize it, how it is different from 2010. This has absolutely nothing of relevance for people using SharePoint on a day to day basis.

The day to day talk is a distraction to SharePoint end users. In general, the users are not interested in the technology, they are interested in the solutions the technology can provide. This is nothing new. We had the same type of situation after the release of SharePoint 2010. At that time, I took the same position: It’s going to take two to three years for SharePoint 2013 to become relevant to the daily user.

The Current Situation

SharePoint is not an app that gets upgraded every month as part of an update cycle. It is a development platform for providing business solutions. Large clients who rolled out SharePoint 2010 in the past two years are going to find it hard to justify moving on to 2013 in the near future, unless they can find a business justification for spending the time and money it will take to make the transition.

At conferences where I speak, I ask people what SharePoint version they are currently using. Over the past year it has been mostly 2007, with half of those using a hybrid solution that combines with 2010. Those clients who are implementing SharePoint for the first time will start with 2010, but those with existing infrastructure are going to stay with that until there is a real business reason, real financial justification, to run an upgrade.

So Who is 2013 For?

With that said, who should be interested in SharePoint 2013? Why, developers of course! 2013 is still in beta. Enough said. Stop reading and get back to work. Unless you are a developer, an author or a training company, why are you concerned about SharePoint 2013?

I’m not being facetious. I think it is a real distraction for day to day users to be concerned about the “new” functionality of SharePoint 2013: Social, My Sites enhancements, Managed Navigation, the App Store. To upgrade to 2013 is a business decision that will have to be justified at a much higher level than the end user. Will the business gain enough impact to make that upgrade worthwhile?

Final Words

What’s my advice to people actually using SharePoint to get their work done? Keep your head down and out of the line of fire. SharePoint 2013 isn’t for you. For now, let the developers and IT Pros work through the bits and see what’s there. When your company is ready for it, they will let you know.

Editors Note: If you're intersted in another view on SharePoint 2013:

— SharePoint 2013: 7 Features Users are Going to Love by @andrewbish
 

About the Author

Mark Miller is recognized internationally as a Senior Storyteller, weaving engaging tales to simplify the explanation of complex, technological solutions. His current mission is to save the planet from the default SharePoint 2010 interface at NothingButBranding.com. He is the founder of two of the largest, online SharePoint communities in the world: href=”www.nothingbutsharepoint.com”>NothingButSharePoint.com and href=”https://www.nothingbutsharepoint.com/sites/eusp/Pages/default.aspx”>EndUserSharePoint.com.Mark is a founding member of href=”http://sharingthepoint.org/Africa/Home.aspx”>Sharing the Point, a group of SharePoint evangelists who travel the world bringing support and encouragement to underserved SharePoint communities.

 

 

Source : cmswire[dot]com

Manolo Espinosa Wants To Know Why Your Mom's Not On SoundCloud Yet

In 2006, one of the most vibrant social networks in the world was the photo-sharing site Flickr. By November, Google had purchased the video-sharing site YouTube for 1.65 billion. But lost in that year's community-content boom was a little company called Ear-Fi that hoped to do for audio what Flickr and YouTube had already done for photos and video. Founder Manolo Espinosa says, “Our idea was, ‘Hey how about setting up a platform that helps people tell stories as simple as talking, sharing as simple as clicking a button, and listening as easy as picking up a phone or computer?’”

It was an inspired notion. After all, in the broadcasting revolution of the previous century, radio came before TV. Why shouldn't there be a platform where professionals and non-professionals can share sound clips as easily as photos or video clips? And the timing was perfect, or so it seemed–-the financial crisis hit the following year, and Ear-Fi never made it through 2008.

Now Espinosa has a second chance to revolutionize how the web listens to itself. Last September, he became the “Head of Audio” at SoundCloud, the sound-sharing platform famous for its orange and blue audio player that lets listeners comment directly on a clip's waveform. First marketed toward musicians as a cleaner alternative to MySpace, SoundCloud wants to expand its user base to include anyone with a microphone connected to the Internet (which, thanks to smartphones, is now nearly half of American adults).

So what’s a non-musician’s SoundCloud page supposed to sound like? Some clues can be found on Espinosa’s own sound stream. There’s a minute-long clip recorded at a San Francisco Giants game capturing crowd noise, stadium music, and the cry of a food vendor yelling, “Peanuts!” Espinosa also recorded a short thank-you message to the organizers of #wjchat, a weekly journalism discussion group which Espinosa guest-hosted a few weeks ago. Dig deeper and you’ll find off-the-cuff recordings of lectures and presentations given by media heavyweights like the New York Times' Brian Stelter and Columbia University's chief digital officer Sree Sreenivasan.

None of it sounds professional, and that’s the point. “You get a fair amount of authenticity when you record someone’s voice," Espinosa tells Fast Company. "You get the background noise which helps with informal sharing of thoughts and ideas.” In a world where texting, tweeting, and chatting have all but replaced the traditional phone call, SoundCloud’s focus on the human voice is filling a gap not only in the digital space but in our everyday lives. Wouldn’t you rather your friend post a spoken birthday greeting on your Facebook wall than a perfunctory block of text or, even worse, an e-card? “We’ve had people who have recorded stories about their unborn kid and shared that with their family," Espinosa says. “About two or three weeks ago we found out (a couple) had proposed on SoundCloud. There was a collective hooray across the office. We’ve worked with big artists, but when we have a story like that, we’re just like, ‘Wow, this is amazing.’”

Journalists are another group not using sound to its full potential, Espinosa says. “When the Supreme Court had their health care debate, numerous news outlets referred to the fact that they were recorded, you could listen to them. But even a smaller percentage of those actually embedded the audio of that.” Beyond obvious uses of audio, Espinosa also encourages journalists to use SoundCloud like they use Twitter, to broadcast stray thoughts or to include interview clips or other sound content left on the cutting-room floor.

The biggest challenge for Espinosa’s team is convincing audiences that sharing and preserving sound is as worthy an endeavor for everyday people as it is for musicians, podcasters, and radio stations. The best ways to do that, Espinosa says, is to make SoundCloud compatible with as many platforms as possible (which it's already done so through recent integrations with Facebook and Flipboard), and to make the act of recording, uploading, and sharing sound clips as pain-free as Instagram makes photo-sharing.

[ Image: Flickr user Evan]
Source : fastcompany[dot]com