SAP Unveils Windows Phone 8 Apps & New Enterprise Security App For Windows 8 #SAPTechEd

Enterprise software and software-related services company, SAP, has released changes to the SAP Mobile Platform, security features for SAP Afaria and a new product: SAP 360 Customer Solution.

Over the last year, SAP has introduced new employee collaboration and social enterprise tools, such as the social collaboration strategy "Project Robus" and Jam, a product that aims to improve how enterprise social software works. 

Apps and Windows 8

This week at the SAPPHIRE NOW + SAP TechEd event, SAP unveiled new products and mobile updates. One of the updated features includes advanced security and authentication features for the SAP Mobile Platform. With these updates, the product will not only be more secure, but have user/device/app provisioning, and push notification.

The company has also announced six new mobile apps for Windows 8 users. These apps are are based around enterprise functions and aim to help companies with their training, recruiting and sales departments. The apps are expected to be released as both full and trial versions available from the  Windows Store and SAP Store. They include:

• SAP WorkDeck: This apps gives employees the chance to be more interactive with their managers as they will be able to initiate requests, oversee events and monitor event progress. For managers, they have the tools to look over and process workflows when they are away from the office.
• SAP Manager Insight: SAP Manager Insight is an employee profile app that gives managers and HR departments access to relevant data such as employee profiles, diversity in departments and employee talent by location.
• SAP Learning Assistant: Learning Assistant is a training app that gives workers access to online classes.
• SAP Interview Assistant: With Interview Assistant, managers will be able to easily manage and prepare for interviews, while having access to relevant candidate information.
• SAP Customer Financial Fact Sheet:  This is a ‘customer profile’ app geared toward account executives, as it provides financial data, invoices and important sales orders.
• SAP GRC Policy Survey: Policy Survey gives employees to access to changes in company policies and respond with any questions they may have.

A More Secure SAP Afaria

The Mobile Platform isn't the only product from SAP that is becoming more secure. It has been announced that SAP Afaria, an enterprise security product, is now available for Windows 8 and is able to support intel-based tablets with the new operating system.

 

 

Source : cmswire[dot]com

Forrester Report Finds Enterprise Embracing Open Source WCM

Cloud services provider Acquia has commissioned a Forrester report on open source WCM, and while the results are not overwhelming, it does show more enterprise companies are employing open source systems.

Nearly 60 percent of the 160 companies surveyed said they had at least considered open source for their WCM programs. The report also found that executives who make these kind of decisions are also the ones who are least likely to be very satisfied with their choice. 

Open Source Successes

Acquia certainly has a stake in the findings in this report. As a cloud services provider specifically for the open source Drupal ecosystem, Acquia would love to see more large companies adopt the open source ethos. Forrester found several large vendors who have successfully adopted open source CMSs, and there were a few reasons why those companies enjoyed that success.

Company infighting seems to be what is holding enterprises back when it comes to successful WCM implementation.

Company culture and classic marketing versus IT fighting may be the biggest reasons businesses failed to implement a new Web CMS, but let's look more closely at the number two reason: lack of a company wide strategy. This obviously goes hand in hand with number one, but at least Forrester has some recommendations for how to build that strategy. They are, in order:

• Required a solution that allowed for more customization and flexibility.
• Prioritized integration between WCM and other solutions to support digital customer experiences.
• Focused on more than just cost reduction.
• Made specific plans for supporting the open source WCM deployment.
• Understood the myths and reality surrounding open source security concerns.

First, most companies agreed that open source allowed for more flexibility and customization. One survey respondant, a UK educational institution, told Forrester that when using a proprietary system, it took nine to 10 months to add a new feature. With open source, they were able to add functionality within days.

As for combining systems, the all-in-one solutions often offered by vendors does not seem to fit with those companies who had adopted open source. These companies preferred a best of breed approach, and often realized the power of the developer community to assemble system components.

How to Choose an Open Source Web CMS

If you've been skeptical of open source in the past, you have nothing to fear from what Forrester says:

Open source has by and large achieved a higher level of technology maturity over the past several years and have demonstrated some success in large-scale web deployments."

It's not just entertainment, media and traditional education that are finding success with open source, the report reads. Governments, pharma and retail are having success with it as well, a sure sign it should not be excluded when evaluating Web CMSs.

Because open source allows for downloading entire systems for test driving, this is a decided advantage when doing an evaluation. Be sure to try out those prospective systems and contact the developer community for extra insight and validation.

Open source is not perfect, of course, so areas like support and implementation should be explored carefully. There are developers and system experts out there who have built networks on top of open source software. That way, many IT aspects can be outsourced including core platform support, module support, module creation and enhancement, system upgrades, integrations and 24 x 7 x 365 infrastructure and uptime.

Acquia, of course, offers just these kinds of services for the Drupal-based platform. The company has even begun diving into digital marketing with its latest release, called OpenWEM. Tell us in the comments if you've had reservations about open source in the past or if there are some concrete reasons it simply won't work for your purposes.

 

 

Source : cmswire[dot]com

Empathy: The Web Professional's Greatest Skill

The trend towards greater and greater customer empowerment requires a deeper and deeper understanding of customer needs.

“When people, teams, and organizations develop new products and services, they tend to have endless discussions about what users or customers need, who customers are, and what features the design of their offering should have,” Tomer Sharon, Search UX Researcher at Google and author of recent book, ‘It’s Our Research’, states. This is what I call designing with five smart people in a room drinking lattes syndrome.

“Steve Blank, a serial entrepreneur from Silicon Valley and a Stanford university professor, says there are no facts inside the building,” Tomer says. “Development teams cannot make decisions without developing customers first. Not products, not technologies: Customers. He coined the mantra, "Get Out of the Building". What he means by that is that developers of products should get up from their comfortable chairs and proactively seek opportunities to learn from their customers about their needs to be able to understand what the company's business model should be.”

Tomer cites “intuition” as one of the primary reasons people don’t get out of the building. In a modern, complex, constantly changing world, intuition is a dangerous thing. Intuition is essentially learned behavior patterns. It speaks to the past. If the same basic event keeps recurring then intuition is great. But if the world is changing rapidly, intuition can be disastrous.

“Some people are just scared of what they'll hear,” Tomer states. “They are afraid of failing and of invalidating their assumptions. Actually, they don't consider their assumptions as such. They think they are facts. It is our jobs (UX practitioners) to help people recognize their assumptions.”

One very interesting technique Tomer uses to combat ‘stay in the building’ syndrome he calls Field Fridays. “Field Fridays are an excellent opportunity for software engineers to meet users face to face, see how they use their products, and learn about their behavior. During these events, a team of engineers moderates 20-minute interview sessions with real users, speed dating style, on a Friday morning once a month. I started this program since I was amazed to learn that some engineers work on products for 3 years without meeting a single human being who actually uses their code.”

Tomer says that divergence between what the team thinks the customer will do and what the customer actually does happens on a daily basis. And don’t trust what customers tell you, either.

“Navigational search queries are ones where users use Google to search for websites or webpages,” Tomer states. “For example, when I enter "netherlands wikipedia" into the search box, I am conducting a navigational query. When I am entering "population size netherlands" into the search box, it is not a navigational query since I don't have a specific site in mind. When you explain this concept to Google users and ask them if they conduct navigational queries, they usually tell you they hardly do them. Yet, when you ask them to complete a certain task or if you analyze usage logs or even the same person's web search history (after getting their permission of course), you find they do many navigational searches. Humans are very bad at analyzing their behavior (past, present, and future) and they tend to rationalize it so they look good, reasonable, and smart. I try to focus my research on observing behavior rather than listening to what people say.” 

About the Author

Gerry McGovern, a content management author and consultant, has spoken, written and consulted extensively on writing for the web and web content management issues since 1994. His latest book is titled The Stranger's Long Neck: How to Deliver What Your Customers Really Want Online.

 

 

Source : cmswire[dot]com

Acquia Introduces Open Web Experience Management For Drupal

Acquia, a provider of paid cloud services specifically designed to support the Drupal open source web content management platform, is introducing a new concept it calls “Open Web Experience Management” or OpenWEM. It looks like digital marketing has officially come to Drupal.

First, let’s examine exactly what Acquia is trying to accomplish with OpenWEM. The vendor says OpenWEM is a combination of Acquia cloud services, the Drupal platform and the Acquia app marketplace that allows users to “create immersive, digital content and campaigns [and] socialize them across multiple communities and channels,” based on an open standards web architecture.

OpenWEM also allows Drupal modules to integrate with most major marketing automation and social analytics solutions. Acquia says other WEM tools are based on proprietary third-party architectures that make them “slow to adapt to changing business needs and keep pace with the speed of the social web.”

Filling the OpenWEM Toolbox

In addition to offering the OpenWEM architecture, Acquia is also launching beta versions of two new tools supporting it: Drupal Commons 3.0 for Drupal 7 and Media Cloud. Drupal Commons 3.0 is designed to allow the creation of online communities for collaboration and content sharing. Acquia says the latest upgrade features enhanced mobile support, analytical capabilities and user experience improvements.

Meanwhile, Media Cloud is a new media management service designed to support native management and sharing of rich media content within the Drupal environment. Acquia is also partnering with gamification software provider Badgeville to include Badgeville for Drupal as a key supporting component of OpenWEM.

To further ease access to OpenWEM, Acquia is partnering with more than 400 digital agencies and developers and integrating APIs for the top Drupal development tools used most frequently by Acquia customers.

Acquia Opens Up to Developers

Through a combination of open source and free services, Acquia is angling to become the standard means of managing activities on the Drupal platform — the company refers to itself as the “enterprise guide to Drupal."

In addition to its new OpenWEM concept and supporting solutions, back in August, at DrupalCon Munich 2012, Acquia said its Dev Cloud will be permanently free for developing sites. The developer accounts will include all the features of Acquia Cloud: automated developer workflow, separate development, staging and production environments as well as backups, SSH access, Drush integration, Cloud API and Cloud Hooks for continuous integration and more.

Getting In the Digital Marketing Game

Acquia's introduction of OpenWEM, is the real opening of the door for companies to leverage Drupal as a complete customer experience platform. There's the Web CMS, Drupal Commons for Communities, Media Cloud for rich asset management and the ability to integrate digital marketing and social analytics solutions.

This is the kind of end-to-end platform story that many companies are looking for. It's what Sitecore does, Ektron does and a dozen other web content management (aka web experience or customer experience) vendors are doing.

Does the fact that Drupal is open source give them a leg up? These days selling the open source story isn't really a big thing. Some open source solutions can work just as well in an enterprise as proprietary solutions. With a community as large as Drupal's, an enterprise support company like Acquia, and this list of new capabilities, Drupal is well equipped to support the digital marketing needs of an enterprise.  

 

 

Source : cmswire[dot]com

BitNami Eases Path to the Cloud for Liferay Customers

Installing Liferay on Amazon Web Services (AWS) just became a little easier thanks to a new partnership between Liferay and BitNami.

One-Click Install to AWS & Bitnami

BitNami, well known for its “stacks” that make deploying popular open source web applications like SugarCRM and WordPress a one-click process, has added Liferay to the list of software it supports. In addition to enabling single click deployment for both the Community and Enterprise editions of Liferay to AWS, BitNami also added support for the open source portal on its own cloud-hosting platform, BitNami Cloud Hosting.

BitNami’s cloud platform eliminates a significant amount of the administrative overhead required to manage Liferay (and other supported software) in an enterprise environment by providing capabilities such as:

• automatic, incremental backups with configurable retention policies
• one-click servers restores
• one-click server resizing
• ability to save customized configurations as templates for new installs
• multi-server and account administrative console
• basic system performance monitoring of metrics like CPU, memory and file system utilization

The Easy Path to the Cloud

The popularity of BitNami reveals something most cloud vendors don’t advertise — moving to the cloud doesn't mean organizations no longer need workers with technical skills. Organizations that leverage lower level cloud services like the infrastructure-as-a-service platforms provided by vendors like Amazon and Rackspace require resources with many of the same skills, like operating system configuration and tuning, necessary for organizations managing their servers on premises.

This need has spurred the emergence of solutions like Amazon’s Elastic Beanstalk  and BitNami. Although these services promise to remove barriers to technical entry, organizations should always test outside of production to ensure automated setups and configurations meet their needs.

 

 

Source : cmswire[dot]com

Spread a Positive Brand Message Via Social Media Influencers #rdm12

Whether you are operating in a B2C or B2B channel, the odds are your customers no longer look to you as a primary source of information about your products and services. Instead, they look to social media to find “other people” to tell them about your brand. You need to identify and connect with these “other people” to help ensure they are saying the right things.

Everyone Is a Publisher

At a late afternoon session during the Revenue-Driven Marketing Leadership Summit hosted by the Aberdeen Group in Boston, MA, Alan Belniak, Global Director of Social Media Marketing for manufacturing software provider PTC, described how marketers can tap into third-party social media influencers to help spread positive brand messaging and gain credibility with consumers.

“Conglomerates used to produce content,” he said. “Now anyone can publish about anything.” Belniak used the immensely popular online news site Mashable, founded by a 19-year-old in his mother’s basement in Scotland, as an example of how individuals can use the Internet and social media to establish themselves as authorities without any outside support or assistance.

Influencing the Influencers

The job of the modern marketer, according to Belniak, is to elevate their brand’s status with the social influencer community — and to focus on providing thought leadership in that space. While brands ultimately have less control over influencers than they do over media channels such as brand journalism or paid advertising, Belniak said influencers offer more credibility, because they are seen as more independent.

Belniak advised companies to connect their subject matter experts to influencers. “You need to respond to inquiries from the right people,” he said. “The typical PR response is not sufficient. You need to nurture and maintain the relationship.” By creating relationships with influencers, Belniak said companies can then reach out to the influencers’ networks.  “Take influencers along for the ride while you introduce yourself to new characters,” he said.

A Primer on Social Media Influence from Alan Belniak

All Influencers Are Not Created Equal

Whether an influencer is providing positive or negative commentary, Belniak said it is crucial for time- and resource-strapped marketers to focus only as much attention on them as their sphere of influence justifies. "Look at their reach (number of fans/followers), resonance (how often they are reposted/retweeted, etc.) and relevance (how often they are cited as an expert by other media outlets),” said Belniak.

As an example, Belniak told the story of a “wildly negative” blogger who was consistently bashing PTC online and praising their competitors. At the CMO’s request, Belniak and his team investigated the blogger’s influence and discovered that rather than having a “pulpit,” he actually had a fairly small audience. “So we let him go,” said Belniak.

Measuring Social Influence

PTC uses a combination of online influence-measuring tools and manual scoring to determine the importance of influencers' comments on the company. Belniak cautioned that automated sentiment analysis tools are mostly “junk,” but said third-party online influence/measurement services like Traackr and Klout can be highly valuable in helping to determine which influencers are most worth focusing on.

 

 

Source : cmswire[dot]com

Acquia Cloud Wins Government Approval with FISMA Certification for Secure Websites

Cloud services provider and major Drupal partner Acquia has won U.S. government certification for providing secure Web services, the company's latest step in its march toward giving customers a measured level of protection and control.

Acquia won SSAE 16 (SOC1) certification in June, and the latest move not only provides the company access to the lucrative world of increased government contracts, but also signals it is serious about standards. 

What is FISMA?

Acquia is now approved under the Federal Information Security Management Act of 2002 to provide secure Web services in the cloud, a key process for highly sensitive customers like the government. 

Specifically, Acquia is a FISMA Authorization to Operate (ATO) approved vendor, and that means federal agencies can more easily redesign their Drupal Websites while maintaining stringent security standards and cost efficiencies.

The White House uses Drupal for its Website, as does NASA and the FCC. 

Acquia says it is the first provider to offer an enterprise class Drupal hosting service that is FISMA moderate certified. Acquia Cloud uses Amazon EC2, and that system had already won FISMA Moderate ATO certification. 

“This effort demonstrates Acquia’s commitment to exceeding our Federal customers high expectations for security and availability in the cloud," Mike Lemire, Acquia’s director of information security said.

The Importance of Standards

Cloud provider Huddle also recently won FISMA approval, but the company had already been popular among European governments. IBM's SmartCloud for Government is FISMA approved, as is Google's Apps for Government.

FISMA provides a framework for government IT purchasing and security protocols, but it also gives potential customers a chance to see how rigorous a company's products are. It might be painful for companies like Huddle and Acquia to go through the certification process, but once they are through it, potential new customers have a new window into those companies' internal processes. 

However, FISMA and SSAE 16 are narrow standards with somewhat limited applicability. IT buyers of all stripes really need more broad based standards to avoid combing through the virtually endless world of Web based apps now available. 

 

 

Source : cmswire[dot]com

The ROI of Digital Channel Shift

Today's businesses face the challenge of ensuring customers can access their services and products through whatever means they choose. Channel shift moves customer transactions to the most effective and efficient channel of engagement, creating satisfying customer experiences while delivering savings and increasing revenue.

In times of reduced budget and more savvy shoppers, channel shift is seen as an essential method of delivering better services and increasing sales to people looking to buy or seek information.

Channel shift, or web transformation as some people call it, is applicable across all industries. In this post I have highlighted the challenges and successes some businesses in the Financial Services, Travel and Transportation and Public sectors are experiencing.

Web transformation technology is not just about slick looking websites. Digital channels can:

• Deliver more sales
• Reduce the cost of sale
• Reduce customer service cost
• Increase customer conversion
• Increase intelligence about customers.

The good news is that many vendors have proven success in this area. When selecting partner agencies, be sure to check that they can deliver at least 250 percent ROI. In other words for every £1/US$ 1 spent, you should aim to see a cash return or benefit of £2.50/US$ 2.50.

Channel Shift in Travel and Transportation

French ferry operator Brittany Ferries, prides itself on a commitment to provide an excellent online customer experience which has delivered increased bookings, outstanding levels of customer satisfaction and a reduction in contact center costs for this quality-focused cross-channel ferry operator. To date, the firm has moved 75 percent of ferry bookings online with a 275 percent ROI and have recently launched a mobile website to further assist travelers.

National train operator Virgin Trains faced a specific challenge — a significant increase in demand over the recent Olympic Games held in the UK. They quickly deployed a LiveChat facility before the games to enable customer service operators to chat online with up to 6 customers concurrently. This allowed them to help customers with quick questions they had about Virgin Trains’ operations and services whilst increasing conversion rates and customer satisfaction.

Channel Shift in Public Sector

Within the public sector many organizations are facing very clear budget cuts. In the UK there are clearly defined channel costs. According to Socitm, a face-to-face meeting costs £8.62/US$ 14.00, phone contacts are £2.83/US$ 4.59 whereas web transactions can be as little as £0.15/US$ 0.24. This clarity has ensured that channel shift is now widely adopted, but sadly still remains under invested.

An example of an organization that understands the need to invest to save, and have a clear eye for tracking ROI is Basildon Borough Council, located just outside London. They are targeting over £1m/US$ 1.6m channel shift savings.

Like every local authority in Britain, Basildon Borough Council is under pressure to reduce its operating costs without effecting the quality of service delivery. For the council, that has meant exploring ways in which its website can work harder to reduce the administrative burden on council staff, whilst protecting front line service to the borough’s 172,000 residents. This channel shift project is achieving improved service delivery and has seen ROI well in excess of expectations.

 

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Source : cmswire[dot]com

CloudCraze Brings E-commerce to Salesforce #dreamforce

CloudCraze has released an e-commerce services bundle on the Salesforce platform.

Bill Loumpouridis, founder of CloudCraze and CEO of EDL Consulting, said in an interview with CMSWire that a decade of serving as a Java e-commerce consultant (CloudCraze LLC is a wholly owned subsidiary of EDL Consulting) made him realize an opportunity existed to help Salesforce users perform e-commerce.

May Force.com Be With Your E-commerce Efforts

“As Force.com matured, we saw a good opportunity to take our knowledge of e-commerce in the traditional Web environment and apply it on the Force.com platform,” said Loumpouridis. “We created a product so that the entire front office can include online interactions on a single platform.”

According to Loumpouridis, the new CloudCraze Salesforce bundle combines sales, customer service, marketing and e-commerce capabilities. Users from the same organization can all see the same customer, product and pricing data.

“There is no integration and no redundancy of information,” said Loumpouridis. “CloudCraze sits within the Salesforce cloud and has the scalability and elasticity natively inherent to the Salesforce platform.”

During the three years CloudCraze has been offering solutions to Salesforce users, software has been deployed in an “unmanaged” mode, meaning it served as an add-on without official Salesforce involvement. However, CloudCraze is now available to Salesforce users as a “managed package,” meaning CloudCraze is serving as a Salesforce OEM and emulates the benefits of Salesforce’s CRM capabilities in its bundle.

“The customer receives seamless patches and automatic upgrades,” said Loumpouridis. “There are no professional services or coders needed.” The bundle also includes native integration to the Salesforce Chatter tool, and the user interface architecture provides granular control and is divided into five dimensions: style, branding, layout, data controls and navigation.

“Style provides cascading style sheets, while branding is a flexible architecture layer,” explained Loumpouridis. “Layout provides a visual Force.com template and data controls are a traditional CMS. Navigation leverages custom objects from Salesforce, such as menu and category panes.”

In addition, Loumpouridis said CloudCraze offers social media functionality such as the ability to pin any cataloged product on Pinterest and built-in controls for Twitter and Facebook. “The table stakes of social e-commerce are provided,” he stated.

Spinning Off Salesforce

The ubiquity of the Salesforce platform makes it an appealing application for third-party vendors to add functionality to. In expanding Salesforce’s CRM capabilities to encompass full-scale e-commerce, CloudCraze is following in the footsteps of many other IT solution/service providers who have made efforts to let Salesforce users do more without leaving the platform. Most recently Aprimo, a provider of cloud-based automated marketing solutions, released Aprimo Service to Sales, an interactive inbound marketing application that works with Salesforce.com. Aprimo Service to Sales utilizes customer interaction data from the Web, call centers and retail points-of-sale in real-time to provide targeted offers for cross-sell and up-sell programs. The solution is designed to continuously learn and become more intelligent over time as customers respond to customized offers.

 

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Source : cmswire[dot]com

PublishThis Gives Content New Life, Previews Future of Content Marketing Strategy

When the founder of paid content, Rafat Ali, started his new venture Skift, he wanted not only to provide news, but data, tools and services, as well. To make this happen, he turned to the folks at PublishThis.

Four Critical Content Elements

Skift, a travel intelligence media company, brings together four elements that have become the hallmark of PublishThis — aggregation, content curation, licensed and original content — all of which aim to add value and a customizable experience for the user.

We met up with PublishThis last week at Content Marketing World and got a glimpse of the what the content curation platform can do.

Create, Curate and Customize Content

During the conference we learned that a majority of content marketing professionals think their biggest challenge is producing enough content. PublishThis helps to diffuse this challenge by offering a plethora of content tools that help publishers keep their users engaged even if they don’t have enough original content to fill their feeds.

The idea is that publishers can supplement their sites with information that’s not only relevant to their audience, but easy to update and customize. The web-based app allows users to customize the content that feeds into their site based on unique keywords, conditions and outlets.

When we think of social media marketing, we emphasize the need to assert your authority by not just talking about what you do, but by incorporating information from other sources, as well. When it comes to content marketing, the same strategy applies. The goal for many sites isn’t just to provide the best original content, but also to serve as a hub for best content from across the web. This way, customers don’t get bored — and they find a reason to come back.

The Future of Content Marketing, Publishing

Currently PublishThis is available through an API or via their app. Soon, however, it will serve as a home base for clients who wish to host their sites with it, giving them the ability to build microsites. Additionally, PublishThis is working to improve the quality of content with a social trending algorithm that measures what is trending or popular in social based on the number of retweets, shares and likes based on your specific topic filters. This helps with content discovery for the curator, and the algorithm can be leveraged on a website topic page to publish automated content that defaults to what is "trending" rather than the more traditional "most recent" category.

Whether or not you agree that curation and aggregation is the future of content marketing, there’s no denying that the way users interact and engage with content is changing the face of web publishing. PublishThis gives content publishers a means for discovering and optimizing content, while giving content creators an opportunity to extend their reach of their words.

 

 

Source : cmswire[dot]com

Twitter Gives Stamp of Approval With New Certified Products Program

Twitter is rolling out a Certified Products Program that offers Twitter-based products and services from third-party developers and partners to businesses. The program is launching with three verticals — engagement products, analytics products and data reseller products.

Twitter Seeks Engagement, Analytics, Data Resale

Twitter is aligning its three initial certified products verticals as follows:

• Engagement Products — Helping brands keep in touch with their customers. This includes activities such as providing workflow or advanced sorting, delegation and assignment of replies, as well as alerting users to high-priority events or tweets requiring immediate action. Developers must make Twitter and Twitter account management and network engagement part of the core product experience and offering.

• Analytics Products — Helping businesses learn from their customers on Twitter. Examples include historical analytics of how previous campaigns unfolded on Twitter and industry-specific analytics that tie activity on Twitter to success metrics. Developers are required to encourage further engagement with Twitter, clearly attribute Twitter as a data source and make Twitter a core part of the product experience.

• Data Reseller Products — Platforms for innovation on top of large numbers of tweets. These include APIs that allow analytics companies to study past conversations and with customers' private data to tie activity on Twitter to proprietary business processes. Developers need to offer API features that are significantly differentiated from Twitter's own, actively encourage customers to build products which drive engagement with Twitter and staff a sales and support organization to meet enterprise customer service expectations.

Twitter Incentivizes API Development

As reported by CMSWire, earlier this month Twitter publicized plans to release version 1.1 of the Twitter API in the coming weeks, and it involves a number of new user restrictions. Changes will include required authentication on every API endpoint, a new per-endpoint rate-limiting methodology, and tighter “Developer Rules of the Road,” especially around applications that are traditional Twitter clients. 

Twitter said these restrictions and requirements are intended to prevent “malicious” use of the Twitter API and to gain an understanding of what types of applications are accessing the API. However, many observers have been skeptical about how altruistic Twitter’s intentions really are. According to VentureBeat, the Certified Products Program is a good start to Twitter’s new API policies.

“For some time now, in private meeting rooms and on public stages, Twitter has urged developers to make these kinds of products — noncompetitive products that would give their makers a real business opportunity,” stated a VentureBeat posting. The article went on to say it is “somewhat encouraging to see Twitter creating incentives for building the right kind of Twitter apps, not just punishments for building the wrong kind.”

Twitter is launching the Certified Products Program with 12 initial partners: Attensity, Crimson Hexagon, Dataminr, DataSift, ExactTarget, Grip, HootSuite, Mass Relevance, Radian6, Sprinklr, Social Flow and Topsy.   

 

 

Source : cmswire[dot]com

Does Social Media Really Matter for Financial Services?

Financial services are a key aspect of our lives, used every day for one reason or another. So why aren’t social media and finance widely perceived as compatible? Why aren’t financial service brands using social media to its full potential?

Social media has become an integral part of people’s lives: with 82 percent of the world’s population engaged with social networks, social media is now instrumental for brands, whether communicating with mass audiences or engaging on a one-to-one basis. Through social media, people are able to connect with friends and family, keep updated with news, and interact with brands that affect their daily lives.

Which brings us back to financial services.

According to Ian Morgan, Google’s UK Head of Financial Services, almost half the UK adult population used the internet to research or purchase financial services last year. Despite this, financial service institutions are slow to engage on social media, and as such are missing key opportunities to drive business.

As a channel for multidimensional, real-time communication, financial brands can use social media to engage consumers and answer specific queries. With 18 million UK consumers turning to social media for customer service reasons, and 83 percent of consumers who make a complaint on Twitter liking the response from the company, it is obvious why social media is such an important communications channel.

From a company’s perspective, engaging with customers on a one-to-one basis via social media enables a more in-depth understanding of individual customers to develop, increasing personalization and relevancy of products and services.

What Restricts Financial Services from Using Social Media?

One of the main factors financial service institutions face when debating the implementation of social media strategies is the extensive regulation they must comply with. Both the Financial Services Authority (FSA) and the Financial Industry Regulator Authority (FINRA) have expressed a desire to track what regulated brands are saying on social platforms, and how they’re using them.

Compliance with extensive guidelines* from regulators is time consuming, and difficult to understand. Internally systems haven’t yet adapted to the social age, and it often takes time for communications to be approved by rigorous compliance teams, and marketing managers are struggling to overcome compliance issues.

Customers don’t want to use social media to conduct financial service transactions, as these often involve sensitive data. Given the transparency of social media, customers are understandably concerned about protecting their data. This means that even where financial service institutions are using social media, their customers may choose alternative means of communication.

 

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Source : cmswire[dot]com