Archive for May, 2009



Want To Hear About Your Business Complaints? There’s An App For That.

May 29th, 2009 by Erin Posted in Business, Small Business, Stature Projects, Twitter | No Comments »

We live in an app-crazed, social networking world folks.

I thought I had heard it all last week when the “drunk dial” app was unveiled for the Apple iPhone. Now comes word of a yet another new app –  one that could really help small businesses.

Introducing “Salesforce CRM for Twitter.”

When people talk about you and your business – Salesforce let’s you know.

Here’s how is works:

Salesforce plugs into the Twitter API, and customer care reps can start Twitter searches from within Salesforce’s service, bypassing search.twitter.com. If a company discovers someone tweeting about them (good or bad), a button click can import the entire Twitter thread into Salesforce’s software. From there the Twitter user is notified via software, giving them the precious opportunity to respond to the original Tweet.

This is a brilliant idea, given that Twitter users can’t possibly monitor what is being said about them in real time and respond to people’s questions. Twitter is just too large now. Too powerful.

Thankfully, Salesforce can help business owners sleep at night by giving them the tool they need to track complaints – and compliments.

This is beyond better customer care. This is could very well be the life jacket that saves many of our small businesses.

Twitter.

What would businesses do without it?

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Cloud Computing For Business– The Good and The Bad

May 19th, 2009 by Erin Posted in Business | No Comments »

Everyone’s working in the clouds these days.

Having access to web-based business functions is, well, downright convenient.

But even though everyone’s using it – no one really knows what their using.

Case in point:

My colleague took an inner-office poll last week, asking everyone if they knew anything about “cloud computing.” Most everyone looked at my colleague, shrugged their shoulders, and said it was “some sort of IT thing.”

Cloud computing, when applied to business, is having computer applications – such as payroll, accounting, sales management, data backup, even word processing – hosted on a Web-based service rather than on a desktop or server computer.

If you use a web-based email program (like Yahoo Mail, Gmail), you are using a form of cloud-based computing. Your email data is stored on the Web.

Sounds simple enough, right?

Wrong.

As sweet as it sounds to be riding the Web-based clouds of cyberspace, there are advantages and disadvantages of cloud computing.

Tech columnist at Hartford Business, Rhonda Abrams, offers up this:

Cloud Computing Advantages:

- Always have the latest upgrade, without paying extra.

- Predictable costs, usually a low monthly subscription.

- More features than you could devise yourself.

- No internal tech staff required.

- Can access and use from any computer with a fast Internet connection.

- Information secure and backed up.

- Reduces need for an office computer network.

- Easy to learn and use.

Cloud Computing Disadvantages:

- Need fast, reliable Internet connection.

- Ongoing monthly cost, even when you don’t use it.

- Privacy concerns, especially if you’re not careful.

- If the company goes out of business, you may lose your data.

As you can see the advantages of cloud computing outweigh the disadvantages, even the all-important privacy issue.

Virtualization and web-based applications are our future. Embrace it – Be thankful for it.

In the end, once you go “cloud” you’ll never go back.

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Open vs. Free : The Battle Over IT Semantics

May 15th, 2009 by Erin Posted in Technology | No Comments »

I’ve seen this question a lot in IT chat rooms -  Is free software the same as open source?

The responses are usually varied,  yet none of them offer a definitive answer.

Curious myself, I Googled to find the answer which led me to one enlightening blog post on the matter at InformationWeek.

The title: You Say Open, I Say Free … Let’s Call The Whole Thing Off 

Now c’mon… that’s funny.

The author, Serdar Yelgulalp, addresses this vocabulary war by sounding off on the context with which these labels are used.

Is a vendor that offers both an open source and a commercially-licensed edition of a product an “open source vendor?”  Some would argue no. They would say OSD refers to the software itself – not the vendor or the business strategy.

On the other hand, some say that vendors with hybrid licensing models could be called “open source vendors” depending on their licensing terms and agreements.

So there you have it.

Still no definitive answer – yet a mighty entertaining dialogue.

In the end, I would have to agree with Yelgulalp.

Does all this even matter? Why should we care how the software was developed or licensed? The focus should be on whether the product is any good.

Still though, some of this petty semantic stuff is worthy of a good think – and a laugh.

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CRMs – A Blessing For Small Business

May 8th, 2009 by Erin Posted in Small Business | 1 Comment »

It’s a dog eat dog world out there and small businesses are doing just about anything they can to save – and build – their client base.

While various cost-cutting measures have hurt some business-customer relationships – CRM applications have taken some of the edge off in at least a portion of the business sector.

Small businesses have embraced these applications and, for some, they’ve become their bread-and-butter.

Stefania Viscusi of TMCNet.com writes that CRMs are the key to success simply because they can leverage overall benefits of better customer relations. CRM applications, like Highrise and Kapture, can also help sales professionals target potential customers, and help them keep track of their interactions with customers.

Bottomline: CRMs save time. They save money. And, even better – their user-friendly interfaces make data entry a breeze. 

Customers want loyalty, quality and personalized service.

With CRMs, small businesses can give them that.

Seriously, they’re all that – and a bag of chips.

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