I came across an interesting statement while browsing through conversations in a community on social software. It came from a sales communication professional working with a global hotel chain — and having seen marketing sales communications in the industry evolve in the 17 years she has worked there, she observed:

“Nowadays , no one wants another newsletter, so we’re hoping to make our online community a robust forum for sharing ideas and best practices in a conversational format.”

Marketing and sales communications are going through a change, just as they did some years ago with email and newsletters. As peoples in-boxes are flooded with marketing messages and spam, the effectiveness of these mediums have taken a beating over the last few years. Despite the practice of opt-in email marketing becoming more widely accepted, people who have been bombarded by push based marketing communication are now moving towards pull based forms, where they can search for and consume the content that they are interested in rather than receiving these communications from businesses. The other real drawback that automated email marketing and newsletters have, is in today’s context of web 2.0 and social software, where conversation is the mantra — these mediums are more one way communication.

Selling today is more about being able to solve your customers problems and less about pitching a product or service hoping they will take the bait — and this is where more traditional marketing and sales communication is losing out where online communities and social software enabled websites are making ground quickly. Communities that offer a platform for dialog between businesses, customers, and other stakeholders rely on this conversational approach and hope to solve problems and provide solutions to customers. It offers a platform to build stronger relationships with customers and helps them build trust in the businesses through this two way conversation.

Communities used for marketing conversation can help address the challenge that many businesses face today with the change that’s become apparent with the way customers respond to newsletters and similar channels. Through blogs, forums, document sharing, videos, and other rich content that customers can simply access when they have a requirement or problem they need to address, business can strike those conversations using their community platforms. It needs a dedicated effort and may not be an instant shift, but the online community is looking like the platform of choice for customers and businesses — and marketing and sales communications will be more conversation centric in the days to come.

Tweet This  Delicious This  Digg This  Reddit This  Stumble This 

Related posts:

1. Social Software For Online Marketing Of Events
2. Job Opening – B2B Software Sales Representatives
3. Social Networking Software Solutions And Advertising

There are several financial arguments for taking a social networking platform for business and investing in building an internal collaboration platform or internal community for an enterprise or business. There is reduction in travel expenses, creating a better communication platform which can reduce phone expenses, allow for flexibility of employee and partner location, reducing workspace costs and more. To really be able to justify investing in an internal social software platform to the financial heads of a business there needs to be a strong case but with clear cost benefits, it comes across as a sensible move. Let’s take a closer look into just one cost that several enterprise businesses spend a small fortune on “software licensing costs”.

In a typical enterprise business environment, you’ll find different kinds of stakeholders  –including different types of employees, partners and so on. They may each have very different computing requirements : some quite basic and some may need more extensive software capabilities. Yet, most businesses issue similar hardware and provide standard installations of software across the board. Now, an employee in sales may need the latest version of Microsoft Office and Sharepoint to create and upload sales presentations and share documents, but someone in another function may not. The practice or need to install a fresh license of collaboration and communication software like Sharepoint, Lotus Notes and other groupware for every new employee or stakeholder that’s now part of the wider organizational network can be expensive. Just imagine in a larger organization how much that could add up in license fees each year? To think some of the employees may need an additional user license just so that they can use the internal messaging, instant messaging, or group notification function within the organization, is it really a justified cost?

This is where social networking and business collaboration software can play a crucial role in reducing unwarranted licensing costs. By migrating a lot of the common everyday internal collaboration and communication functions to an internal social software platform and making that the core internal interaction platform for the business the dependency on more expensive licensed copies of other software can be drastically reduced. Once that dependency  on that software is gone, it will end up being used only where it is really required and doesn’t have to be used across the board just because that’s the standard internal platform the company works on. Most businesses have been stuck in this trap of having to invest a considerable licensing fee every time they add on a user or need to scale perhaps for a lack of a better solution. Now that there is good solution that is cost effective, scalable, and makes good financial sense, should we still be paying those inflated licensing costs each year?

Tweet This  Delicious This  Digg This  Reddit This  Stumble This 

Related posts:

1. Social Software Collaboration – Addressing Todays Business Communication Challenege

Conferences, exhibitions, seminars, conventions and other events are an inherent part of the marketing world and continues to be something businesses rely on heavily to engage their customers, demo their products, kick start discussions, interactions, reach out to people and gather leads for their business. A big concern for CMO’s however was the rising costs of organizing and hosting such events and with growing competition from more cost effective online sales leads the effectiveness versus cost of these events was often questioned. The global recession didn’t help this plight and we saw more cutbacks on large corporate events. Still, a lot of these business events have years of brand building put into them and are still popular among people. In the technology world alone, names like CES, SXSW, CEBIT and other strike a chord with hundreds of thousands and similarly many businesses have managed to host successful events of their own year after year. While marketers don’t see the usefulness events fading, there is a greater pressure to drive more results from these efforts and social software may be one of the best solutions yet.

Social networking software platforms tuned for business use can closely work in conjunction with an offline business event like a conference. While these events are organized to bring people and the business together and interact, social software provides a virtual platform to much the same. When used together, that’s when their synergy is really brought out. A webinar with a large software company in the virtualization space brought out some interesting points on how they managed to extend a very popular annual conference of theirs to the online world. Their goal was to take the conference which lasted a few days online so that the discussion and community around it could continue the discussion around their technology area all year round instead of restricting it only to the few days the conference was in session. Another challenge they had was extending the value of the event that was held to others who could not physically make it to the event and the need to expand the community.

By migrating their static conference website to a social networking driven community website fully equipped with collaborative features like wikis, discussion forums, groups, resources, and more, they managed to turn it into a space where attendees as well as those who couldn’t make it to the event could sign in and continue to benefit from the event. Members could log into the community, access content and material distributed during the event, interact with other members in the community, share experiences and knowledge, interact with experts and thought leaders in the field, attend online sessions and really keep the spirit of the event alive all year round.

Some of the takeaways they managed by extending the event website to build a community are:

• Managed to include a member registration process with a detailed member profiling as one would find on social networking sites. This allowed them to profile their customers and partners better and gather more detailed information which is a great resource for sales and marketing.
• Built an online resource for content within their field from all the documents gathered during the conference as well as online sessions, discussions, forums and more which could be used by members much beyond the actual event.
• Were able to hold several expert sessions and online events throughout the year keeping a wider community engaged at a fraction of the cost of a physical event.
• Were able to expand the community and extend the value provided to customers and partners during the event to those who couldn’t make it and drive more traction from the original event.

This example can be extended to just about any business event and highlights what can be achieved by replacing a static event website with a social software enabled one which can help deliver more from a businesses offline event marketing. A simple solution, but one that can take events to a whole new level.

Tweet This  Delicious This  Digg This  Reddit This  Stumble This 

Related posts:

1. Community Social Software – Towards Two Way Marketing Communications
2. Where Do Your Customer’s Live Online?

The economic crisis and global recession that brought economies the world over to it’s knees may be showing signs of improvement, but it’s impact is far from over. While the mood is slowly turning positive, the recession has left people more skeptical or more cautious over the financial system and the way business is done, irrespective of where in the world they are. With support from the media, there is a very strong resolve among people everywhere to instill change in business practices and ensure disasters of this scale don’t happen in the future. The millions of people who have felt deceived by the large banks and financial companies will feel this way for quite some time, despite the worst being over for now and for businesses everywhere the challenge of winning the confidence of their shareholders and people in general is going to be one they need to face.

The challenge of being able to create a more transparent, more accountable work environment is a universal one. Having transparency in day to day functioning builds confidence both internally within the organization as well as externally among people — which is why businesses have to seriously evaluate how they can move to a more transparent system of working. Whether it’s your sales team working with customers, management working with employees, management communicating with shareholders, company buyers evaluating purchases, or project managers working with customers, if you’re communications are transparent and there for others (who have some association with the work you’re doing) to observe, then everything is being transacted in plain view and the scope for large scale scandals, frauds, and misuse of position is reduced.

A similar challenge was highlighted in a case study involving Canada’s trade association for airports when they were evaluating a collaboration solution which would help them work with the several member airports. They were geographically scattered and there was no visibility into the business proposals and deals being made, as most of them happened through email discussions which were privy to the parties and it was easy to exclude people from being cc’d. While document sharing and collaboration helps to an extent, documentation is one part of business communication. Social software based collaborative networks offer a better more well rounded solution as they can centralize the documents around a deal or discussion and also provide a transparent platform for the communication and working that goes with it. In a collaborative networking environment, unlike email, people interact within groups, shared documents like wikis, forums and so on, leaving a clear record of the working process — which is there in plain sight for anyone to see.

Business communications need to be more transparent and corporate culture is slowly being driven by peoples need for more accountability towards being more open. There is a lot we can take from social networking and collaboration software technology there. Trade associations, governing bodies, governmental agencies, and businesses can all benefit from developing a better, stronger collaborative communication process which makes everyone more accountable and brings back the confidence to all involved. That is a change that can bring us all one step closer to better business practices in the future.

Tweet This  Delicious This  Digg This  Reddit This  Stumble This 

Related posts:

1. Social Software For Quicker Product Development
2. Social Business Collaboration Software
3. Business Collaboration And Social Software Platforms

While this may be easier to relate to for those who work in large enterprises, regardless of what size and level a business operates at, if you are a product company, product development is core to your being and the better you can make your product development process, the more success you’ll find around the corner. The challenge facing most product companies is how to step up the development cycle and get products to market quicker while being able to innovate and give customers exactly what they are looking for. It’s not that businesses are not listening to their customers while developing products but often by the time they are ready and roll out, customers are already looking for something better or competitors have swiped market share while the product was still in the works. What’s needed is:

• A quicker product development cycle
• Customers involvement and participation in the development process
• A more inclusive process where more minds can contribute and collaborate without involving inefficiencies

The problem with the last requirement, is that the more people you involve in the process, the more inefficiencies you’re likely to invite. Inefficiencies of time, place, and communication. At the same time, if you can’t include more customers within the process, you’re gambling on the fact that the opinion of a small focus group or fewer people will reflect the way all customers will react to your final product. This is where social software for business collaboration has been able to provide solutions for product companies. By implementing a social networking based collaboration platform, a business can have a base to build a more inclusive product development process that is scalable. Employees, partners, product experts, and selected customers can be granted access to an online social collaborative environment where they can freely interact, share ideas, and jointly work towards developing new products.

Companies that have built their product development platforms on social software have seen significant improvements in their process and ability to get products to market sooner — giving a significant edge over their competitors. Here are just some of the advantages that companies have observed since they’ve adopted social software environments for their product development efforts:

• They have seen that, when placed within a company, the social architecture (that many people are now familiar with from social networking sites like Facebook, Orkut, LinkedIn, etc.) has encouraged greater interaction and activity, creating a conducive environment for collaborating. Also, the adoption of the platform was easier — and employees, project teams, and customers found they could interact freely.
• The platform is completely suitable for freely interacting with others, sharing ideas, opinions, collecting data and feedback, have open discussions, and have a very transparent working system that high level management management and just about anyone with access to the system can simply observe by just logging in and checking on current activity.
• Customers and project teams located in all places around the world can log into the same system and participate regardless of where they are. This means they don’t have to disturb their schedules and travel and also means they can have customers from the US, Germany, Hong Kong, Australia, and any other country included in the product development process and get as wide a participative group as they need.
• There is a record of all previous interactions and conversations between each member within the platform — this becomes a great resource for the company well after the interactions have taken place. The system becomes a permanent resource for anyone within the process who needs access to that information.
• It fosters a truly open communication culture for open collaboration — the product development process need not be restricted to a fixed number customers and select project teams, but others within the business can simply pitch in suggestions or share their ideas if they can contribute something useful towards the development process.
• It’s highly scalable and very inclusive allowing wider collaboration and more sharing of ideas without being inefficient.

While each business will need to build on a social networking platform and custimomize the environment to work cohesively with their specific product development strategies and processes, the advantages of having a powerful collaboration platform to drive better products out more efficiently are clear. With the ability to include customers within the deepest levels of the product development cycle and still speed up their development cycles, we are bound to see businesses truely working with their customers.

Tweet This  Delicious This  Digg This  Reddit This  Stumble This 

Related posts:

1. Social Business Collaboration Software
2. Business Development Executive Opening at Axero Solutions
3. Business Collaboration And Social Software Platforms

Social software in particular seems to be going through much of the same path as hardware did in the earlier days and at the same mind boggling speed. The need to have a virtual “space” or software that aides in collaboration has been around much longer than most would believe. As long back as the 1940’s with the Memex as Christopher Allen’s insightful article “Tracing the Evolution of Social Software” points out. According to the article:

“A memex is a device in which an individual stores all his books, records, and communications, and which is mechanized so that it may be consulted with exceeding speed and flexibility. It is an enlarged intimate supplement to his memory.”

Since then we’ve seen hypertext, information exchange, groupware, business suites, forums, discussion boards, web portals, blogs, and the social networking sites that almost everyone of us is on today. Through every phase from the start, what has been consistent is the growing number of users that have adopted these technologies with every passing year and the immense growth in the volume of content and information that is exchanged and consumed through this software. Considering that Facebook had crossed 100 million users last year, and then taking into account how many of these users use the platform for over an hour a day, the amount of data the software has to support is immense by any standard. What’s interesting to note is that it’s not just social networking sites like Facebook that need to keep up with the growing demand. Businesses all over the world, with employee strengths ranging from a few hundred to tens and hundreds of thousands are relying on social software for their business communication and collaboration infrastructure — and the information being exchanged is growing rapidly every year.

Now, considering that the hardware technology is not growing at the rate that Moore was confident will continue through the end of time, a lot of emphasis will fall upon the developers of social software to carry us through the evolution of information exchange, amidst the hardware, that will soon seem to become a limiting factor. All this is well and good on a macro view, but how does all this effect the average social software buyer or user?

When we buy or decide to use social software for our businesses, many of us tend to make decisions that fulfill our current requirements, ignoring the trend at which our information needs are advancing — and ignoring how Moore’s law also applies to social software. We tend to forget that although a particular software works well now, it may have to be customized and tweaked to support what’s expected of it along the way and into the future. All of the large scale social networks have been overhauled and modified considerably from time to time to scale with the growth — and the same applies to even the smaller networks.

Service-oriented architecture, or SOA, which software platforms like our own Communifire is based on, is seeing an increased support among developers who understand the need to leave room for enhancements and new components to be added on in the future. Back in 2005, InfoWorld published an article titled ” IBM exec: Impending death of Moore’s Law calls for software development changes,” where the company emphasized SOA and said:

Continuing with IBM’s SOA push, Booch introduced a demo of “SOA Integration Framework,” which is intended to provide for a set of services at the developer’s disposal when building an SOA. Still a research project and not an actual product, the framework generates a WSDL for a service and allows the developer to search for appropriate business components.

While we continue to use social software we need to learn from it’s evolution, and remember — even software can become obsolete quickly. It’s important to think ahead and consider the factors that offer you room to scale in the future. Users will continue to grow, usage of social software is also going to continue to grow, as is the immense volume of information that will need to be handled.

Is your social software up to the task?

Tweet This  Delicious This  Digg This  Reddit This  Stumble This 

Related posts:

1. Social Software Collaboration – Addressing Todays Business Communication Challenege
2. Social Software For Online Marketing Of Events

The entrepreneurial spirit is alive within Axero Solutions, where our business development team thrives in a professional, competitive market of solution strategies for our clients. You will sell the industries top software, training and consulting services to small & large client organizations, managing accounts and developing new business.

Please note that a background selling custom software solutions is absolutely mandatory — unfortunately, we cannot consider candidates without it.

Requirements:
==========================================

- Five years minimum of documented proven success in a product / service sales environment
- Complex business solutions and custom software experience and have excellent presentation skills to support your “hunter” approach to sales and building a client list
- Open and manage client accounts and relationships
- Interface with our project managers
- Monitor communication between our Project Managers and clients
- Follow up on leads, cold calling, maintaining and building trust relationships
- You are self-driven
- Your presentation skills are considered excellent by your peers and managers
- You are a “closer”
- You are a “leader”
- You are honest and respectful
- You are excellent at keeping customers informed, happy, and coming back for more
- You are convinced that one day you will be “running the show” in building business and clients
- You should be local to San Diego and be able to occasionally meet with our management
- Experience with Salesforce.com is a huge plus

Compensation is based on experience and can be a combination of percentage of sales, base salary, or both.

Let’s make this a win-win for the both of us.

Kindly send your resume, cover letter, at least 3 professional references, and salary requirements to hr@axerosolutions.com.

Many thanks, we look forward to your email.

Tweet This  Delicious This  Digg This  Reddit This  Stumble This 

Related posts:

1. Job Opening – B2B Software Sales Representatives
2. Axero Solutions launches CodeAsp.Net, a social network for ASP.NET developers
3. Social Software For Quicker Product Development

Context based advertising has come leaps and bounds from old school advertising where every banner or text ad seemed quite random. Now, most sites know what you’re typing, what you’re thinking and display ads that you can connect with. This is supposed to be great not just for the consumers, but for the advertisers too — and it is….in most cases. Yet, sometimes I wonder “are online advertisements on social networking websites and communities getting a little too smart?” Here’s what I mean:

You are browsing through what seemed to be a well built online community for the InterContinental Hotels Group on Facebook. It looks like the admins and creators of the community have done a great job keeping the community active, responding to posts by customers and fans, and regularly posting photos and updates with the intention of making sure they remain loyal to the InterContinental brand. Everything seems perfect untill you notice the Hyatt Hotel advertisement on the right hand side of the page! Looks kinda like the perfect customer drain hole! And the real kicker for those who put in the hours building a community for their business, is how their efforts are benefiting their rivals. With that being said — this is a risk every single business takes when opting for a hosted social  platform to build their community, where of all the space on the website is not completely under their control.

We’ve often talked about the advantages of hosting and managing your own community portal using a social software platform with source code…and how sometimes having control over the smallest details of your website can save you the frustration of having to deal with unforeseen problems at a later stage. Control over branding and advertising space is one of the aspects that needs to be given serious thought before selecting a social software platform … and it’s easy to overlook initially. At the earlier stages, it’s not really an issue, as the focus is mainly around building the community — and often the quickest way to do that, is to sign up on a hosted community site and build it there. It’s only when the number of members on your business community grows do you start to notice the value of the space on your website. That’s usually when you start analyzing which pages get the most views, what parts of the pages get the most eyeballs, and where all the clicks are focused. At that point you also start thinking about modifications to the website, adding or moving components, making space for advertising and promoting certain things. If you’ve gone with a solution that doesn’t allow enough room for customization, this is also the point where you may just find yourself at a dead end.

Building and managing your own community has a downside as compared to putting one together on Facebook or a social networking site which already has a large user base. It will mean that you have to start and grow it from scratch.  But is speed and growing a quick group of users the only objective? Online marketing pro Sonny Gill in a recent blog post said:

“Those people who are looking to help further the industry, build strong communities, help innovate, and are genuine in their actions. While on the flip side, you have the people looking for shortcuts, the easy road to infamy and a legion of thousands that they probably don’t even know. The people who think it’s a numbers game.”

Likewise, when you decide to build an online community for you business, it’s good to think beyond just how quickly you can add people to it and how many you can reach and influence. Think ahead about the branding and advertising options on your community space and the flexibility you will need in the future before selecting your platform. Does your technology allow you the space to make changes, should your community grow beyond what you anticipated? Do have administrative control over aspects that may influence your community one way or an other? …all important questions which can help you narrow down on the right platform.

Think about it before starting, or you might find your self wondering some day if your online community is really your own — or is it someone else’s?

Tweet This  Delicious This  Digg This  Reddit This  Stumble This 

Related posts:

1. Business Development Executive Opening at Axero Solutions

While business websites and portals created using social networking software platforms are known to have the “community” and “collaboration” as key objectives, there is one other “C” which is just as important and objective to keep in mind. “Consolidation“.  Consolidation of people like customers, prospective customers, and employees towards a single online location rather than have them scattered across different websites. Then you have consolidation of communication channels which again is usually done through several websites and applications. Lastly, consolidation of content which is just as good a reason to consider social networking-like business portals.

The amount of content that we absorb, go through and refer to online is immense as compared what it was even three to four years ago. The social media and social networking revolution has fueled this increase in content by making it easier for users to publish their own content, communicate online, create discussions, develop learning material, search through previous communications and so on. In a single working day, the need to access content online could drive you through several websites and applications. From having a conversation on Skype with a colleague, logging into your business email account to check mail, then moving over to Linkedin to check for messages and new group discussions, to posting project updates on an online project management software before checking your favorite blogs for new posts. From there you could login to PollDaddy.com to set up a poll which would help you get some research stats for a an online meeting with your customers on Webex but you also need to check your local company intranet to confirm if there is any update on the team meeting which may end up clashing with the customer meeting. It’s too much content spread across too many places!  INFORMATION OVERLOAD.

Sure you have rss readers and single sign on tools but there is only so much they can do. There are just too many different websites to login to and keep a tab on in our every day working lives. All these websites enable better communication, provide good content or improve collaboration — but the fact that they are at different locations online brings about some level of inefficiency with it. It’s tedious. When a business uses a social networking or social business collaboration software platform to build a more unified portal it can help do away with some of these inefficiencies. Perhaps its not possible to avoid visiting multiple sites to get different things done.  A business portal that combines forums, wikis, groups, blogs, instant messaging, polls, membership, and single sign on to “bring them under one roof” helps to consolidate the people we need to interact with, the communication channels we need,  as well as the content we need to access during the working day — and that can make life easier. Believe me, it does.

Social networking for business portals are just as much about consolidating everything into a single location as it is about collaboration and communication.

Tweet This  Delicious This  Digg This  Reddit This  Stumble This 

Related posts:

1. Social Business Collaboration Software
2. Social Software For Quicker Product Development
3. Business Collaboration On The Linkedin Platform

Soon after social networking sites started to mushroom across the web, entrepreneurs started connecting the dots around the application for businesses and professionals. That was the birth of business networking sites. There’s Xing, Plaxo, Biznik, Konnects, Ryze and several others but few of them ever picked up popularity in the business circles the the way Linkedin did. With 40 million plus users and at least 10 million plus daily active users, there is a certain charm to Linkedin which makes it so addictive to interact on every day. You can log in, connect with others  you’ve come across during your professional life, trade recommendations, send messages, create forums, start discussions, post articles and share content. There is a lot to do and everything mimics things professionals in the real world enjoy doing. Setting up an interactive environment is bound to drive activity around a website.

Most business websites on the other hand are a bit….well…. drab. Sure, you’ll find great design, a corporate look and feel, professional images and photos but do they have the charm or ability to engage a visitor and keep him/her on the website or make them return regularly? Professionals may be impressed by great design and stunning photos but these are not hooks to pull back a visitor daily. Take a few lessons from Linkedin.

Other than the basic social networking software framework and ability to connect with other users, the groups are perhaps one of the most attractive features. The ability to create a group around a business or area of interest, create discussions and comment are one of the core features of Linkedin. The more recent ability to link an rss feed to a group and share blog posts and articles is another great way to keep users on the site as the content is more dynamic. The need to come back and check updates is created by these features. Video and photo sharing is the next step made possible by Linkedin applications and although this may not be the core reason people like Linkedin, it adds to the channels of keeping them engaged.

Going back to the non interactive corporate business websites, they could use a makeover and come across as more interactive. Social networking software platforms like Communifire can easily be integrated into an existing business website and enable features like the groups, discussions, commenting, rss, blogging and practically create that Linkedin functionality to a business website. While the goal may not be to get to 40 million users for a business website, creating a smaller community will go a long way in keeping activity on the website and keeping visitors coming back for more. Could your business website use a bit more charm?

Tweet This  Delicious This  Digg This  Reddit This  Stumble This 

Related posts:

1. Business Collaboration On The Linkedin Platform
2. Making Your Business Website Sticky Using Social Networking
3. Why your business needs a damn good website