Facebook Introduces New Campaign Structure
Thu, Mar 6th 2014 1:12p Mark Polly Facebook has been hailed and maligned at the same time for its advertisement features. On one hand, Facebook ads promise to reach large, targeted audiences with your message. On the other hand, Facebook ad reach is a black box that only Facebook controls. In a previous post, Why Facebook is Failing Marketers, my colleague Michael Porter wrote about Facebook ads reaching only 16% of a company’s fans.
I don’t know if the New Facebook Campaign Structure that Facebook is rolling [read] Keywords: facebook
42
Has the Knowledge Worker finally arrived?
Tue, Mar 4th 2014 10:14a Brendon Jones IBM has a fantastic explainer video this succiently explains what a connected knowledge worker (to borrow from the late Peter Drucker) is. Check it out. [read] Keywords: ibm
63
My 4 Days in the Desert with Adobe – Part 1
Fri, Feb 28th 2014 12:12p Eric Herman In mid-December, I attended the Adobe Worldwide Sales Conference in Las Vegas. It’s a time when Adobe invites its entire sales organization – along with Adobe’s key partners – to discuss the past year’s performance, celebrate the major sales successes, and layout the company’s sales and product strategies for the next year.
As Forrester & Gartner’s leader in Web Content Management, Adobe certainly has much to discuss and no lack of thought leadership within the Digital Marketin [read] Keywords:
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A Primer on CMO, CIO Collaboration
Thu, Feb 27th 2014 8:11a Michael Porter Tom Wentworth at CMSWiRE has a short but very interesting article on collaboration between the Chief Marketing Office and the Chief Information Officer. He engages you at the beginning with the reasons why the two roles are blurring. I personally of one CIO who also wears the CMO hat.
…today’s marketers have a required skillset that often overlaps with that of the CIO, who has traditionally managed and maintained a company’s IT infrastructure. For that reason, CMOs are becoming int [read] Keywords: collaboration
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97
Cool Mobile Infographic
Wed, Feb 26th 2014 5:12a Michael Porter Thanks to the Marketing Tech Blog for a reference to a cool “Future of Mobile” info graphic by Three. It’s UK focused but still a nice summary of mobile. I especially like the internet use via mobile devices now and in 2025. Click to get to the entire info graphic. [read] Keywords: mobile
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IBM Buys Cloudant Cloud Database
Wed, Feb 26th 2014 5:12a Michael Porter I’ve ranted a couple times about the gaping hole that is database in the cloud. I say that not because I don’t like Azure’s cloud service in SQL Server or Amazon’s db service. I say it because on premise solutions that run on a database don’t have an easy way to migrate to the cloud without putting up a machine image to be the database. That’s a waste of resource and a waste of money. It also makes it harder and more expensive to achieve high availabilit [read] Keywords: ibm
applications
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What’s The Difference Between Beacons and Geofencing
Tue, Feb 25th 2014 5:12a Michael Porter Thanks for John Spyers for pointing this out to me. I’ve heard a lot lately about the “contextual” experience. By that I mean, an up to the minute completely personalized experience based on more than just what a company knows about you. Now you can take into account all of the usual items like how good a customer they are, do they have a shipment on the way, and did they just call customer service. You can add to that things like, where are they and do they have a rese [read] Keywords: mobile
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What Does SoftLayer Mean for IBM?
Tue, Feb 25th 2014 5:12a Michael Porter So I’m not the cloud guy within Perficient but let’s face it, everything I see within my portal, web content, social, and marketing automation world has some cloud component. Let me give you some examples:
We see more and more requests to host IBM Portal and IBM WCM on an easy to manage external entity. Perficient uses a partner, Blue Iron because they stand up actual working instances of software and support more than just the base OS.
Sitecore has a Sitecore Azure option which [read] Keywords: ibm
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5 Signs of A PC Exodus
Mon, Feb 24th 2014 6:12a Michael Porter CRN has an article on five signs of a PC exodus. Given all the stats we’ve seen on the dominance of mobile, I’m not surprised. Here are a couple mobile stats to consider before I list the five signs.
And now the list: (Go to the CRN article to get more in depth information)
Sony’s sell-off
Is LG leaving?
Asus’ smartphone shift
Acer’s executive shakeup
Samsung dumping desktops? [read] Keywords: mobile
56
Oracle Merging It’s Marketing Cloud Into Tighter Knit Suite
Mon, Feb 24th 2014 6:11a Michael Porter As anyone who has followed the Digital Marketing world knows, Oracle bought Eloqua, Responsys, and Compendium. They all form the Oracle Marketing cloud although they haven’t gone through a lot of integration. Oracle announced some information on the alignment of product release cycles and other updates. PC World has an article about it.
Oracle is trying to differentiate itself from the pack on a number of fronts, according to Stetic. One is the “openness of our platform,” he said.
Or [read] Keywords: collaboration
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Frost & Sullivan Report on Marketing Automation Industry
Tue, Feb 18th 2014 8:12a Mark Polly CMSWire has an article that talks about a new report from Frost & Sullivan about the Marketing Automation industry. The report author said market revenues in 2013 were about $550 million and will grow to $1.9 billion by 2020. That’s a nice growth rate.
Three vendors accounted for 80% of the market activity in 2013: Eloqua, Silverpop and Marketo. I’ve blogged before about all the changes in the market with new entrants, mergers, and acquisitions, so 2014 will be interesting.
Se [read] Keywords:
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Social Media Week 14 kicks off in New York
Mon, Feb 17th 2014 9:11a Brendon Jones This looks like a promising event, with many interesting speakers from Microsoft and Google, as well as the media industry such as Don Steele of Comedy Central. We won’t be there this year, perhaps in the future. It looks like on to watch in the Social engagement space. [read] Keywords: google
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SharePoint migrations may cause consternation
Sun, Feb 16th 2014 9:10a Brendon Jones When migrating to SharePoint 2013 older assets may need serious modification to gain from the benefits of the new, lightweight, fast, and fluid user interface. These benefits come from new CSS styles, themes, and master pages.
Thus, you must re-create your custom branding by using the new styles, themes, or master pages available in SharePoint 2013, and then apply the newly re-created design to the upgraded site collection.
You can read more about the details from a Microsoft support article w [read] Keywords: css
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Multifaceted Search using IBM Web Content Manager
Thu, Jan 30th 2014 7:11a Mark Polly Maria Rauba from Asponte presented how she implemented a multifaceted search using IBM Web Content Manager in Portal. Faceted search is an often requested feature and is not something that comes out of the box in WCM. Components used:
Custom JSP
Custom Search Seedlist
WCM Search component
Custom Javascript
The HTML Form contains the custom JSP used to render the checkboxes for the faceted search. The search component is placed on the HTML form to show the results of the search. When th [read] Keywords: ibm
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IBM Connect: Tufts Health Plan -Creating a World Class Experience
Wed, Jan 29th 2014 2:12p Michael Porter Bill Pappalardo and Tim Reilly spoke about the work they’ve done with a portal at Tufts Health Plan.
About Tufts
They are the second largest health care plans in MA with over one million members. They are ranked by NCQA one of the top health plans for the past nine years. As part of this:
Provide services for three areas
Commercial membership
Medicare membership
Medicaid membership
Partner with Cigna to provide services for multi-state employers
Expanded coverage to Rhode Island in 200 [read] Keywords: collaboration
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Healthcare Portals: 5 Core Needs for a Great Experience
Wed, Jan 29th 2014 1:11p Michael Porter Mark Polly (@markapolly) and I (@porteronportal) presented here at IBM Connect on Healthcare Portals. It’s a huge subject so we chose to focus on 5 things you absolutely must do when interacting with your consumers, patients, or members. Here’s the slideshare. [read] Keywords: ibm
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Successfully Piloting Social Business Software
Wed, Jan 29th 2014 10:11a Mark Polly Rob Novak and Mac Guidera presented tips on how to make a pilot in social software successful. First why pilot? A pilot is critical to success because it provides for an experimental trial on a small scale for the future change that you anticipate.A well run pilot reduces the risk of large scale failure and improves chances of strategic success. You only have to look at the roll out of the Healthcare.gov website in October 2012 to see how a large scale failure can happen.
What are key compon [read] Keywords: collaboration
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Infusing Social into Digital Experiences
Wed, Jan 29th 2014 9:16a Mark Polly Adding social capabilities to your digital experience site can bring some nice benefits. One benefit that is often overlooked is the multiplier effect of social sharing. If you can can get people to promote your brand or product, you can reach larger audiences and save advertising costs as well. A single “Like” on your product page can translate into millions of people seeing that someone they know endorses you.
IBM spoke about combining WebSphere Portal and IBM Connections into [read] Keywords: connections
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IBM Connect: Is My Data Secure In The Cloud
Wed, Jan 29th 2014 9:16a Michael Porter Setting it all up
Who are we trying to secure against?
Think of millions of people and thousands of companies in hundreds of countries
Who?
Script Kiddies
Hackers/Thieves
Industrial Espionage
Terrorist
Most aren’t trying to protect themselves from state agencies. They have vast intercept networks and the capability to break through most security
Here’s the risk
A hack means your users or potential users know longer trust you or your data
Data leakage, corruption, deletion etc [read] Keywords: admin
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Optimizing Experiences Using IBM TeaLeaf
Tue, Jan 28th 2014 4:11p Mark Polly IBM Tealeaf is a tool that can help you optimize customer experiences with your website. Here are a couple of examples of where Tealeaf can be used:
A customer has an issue with the website and calls your service center for help. Rather than have the customer relive the poor experience, Tealeaf allows the CSR to see what happened and take corrective action.
Customers are not responding to your marketing offers. They get part-way through the desired interaction, but don’t finish. U [read] Keywords: ibm
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Enchanting IBM Digital Experience with IBM Enterprise Market Management
Tue, Jan 28th 2014 3:12p Mark Polly We’ve blogged a lot about integrating marketing with portal and we’d content sites. IBM has been working hard to provide better integration between their products, including Enterprise Marketing Management and IBM Digital Experience.
IBM demoed three scenarios. The first was a marketer setting up a cross sell site and integrate it with a campaign. On the site they have a landing page and an accounts page. The campaign’s goal is to get marketing offers onto the accounts page. T [read] Keywords: ibm
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Be a Successful Social Business in a Highly Regulated Industry
Tue, Jan 28th 2014 10:12a Mark Polly Just because you are in a highly regulated industry doesn’t mean you can’t also be highly social. You just have to be more careful about how you do it.
At IBM Connect, TD Ameritrade and IBM shared how they made became a social business despite all the regulations and compliance issues. TD Ameritrade used IBM Connections as the basis of their social business platform, but they also integrated back end systems, gamification, and micro applications.
The first major decision was to f [read] Keywords: connections
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IBM Connect: Going Deeper Into The Activity Stream
Mon, Jan 27th 2014 12:12p Michael Porter Mikkeel Heisterberg presented on a deeper dive into Connections Activity Stream. The Activity Stream in social represents a tool with high potential to make interaction easier and to get into what is most important to you. This session focused on what it is and how to interact with it. It was a pretty technical session but eye opening in terms of what you can do in the stream and how you can get external events into your social network.
What is the activity stream in Connections / SmartClo [read] Keywords: connections
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IBM Connect Actiance
Mon, Jan 27th 2014 8:11a Michael Porter Actiance provides a variety of governance tools in what they call the governance platforms. They announced the next version.
Alcatraz, the first context aware archive
Cloud based
Uses Watson analytics
captures all the social interactions in any internal and external location. (facebook, twitter, linked in)
captures emails
Puts the data in one location and then gives you access to that data.
Intriguing thoughts on governance going from a mandatory legal ediscovery need to a valuable tool. P [read] Keywords: ibm
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IBM Connect: Keynote Guest Speaker: Seth Meyers
Mon, Jan 27th 2014 7:15a Michael Porter Connect opened up with the band American Authors. Great opening. Jay Baer is the guest MC. He’s a pretty funny guy.
Seth Meyers is the keynote speaker. He’s a funnier guy and soon to start the Late Night show.
How they hire comedy writers has changed. They never hire anyone without looking at twitter and getting at least a years worth of their jokes. “It’s completely democratized the way they hire” His main writer curates a list of people who are funny. [read] Keywords: ibm
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IBM Connect: Vision and Direction
Mon, Jan 27th 2014 7:15a Michael Porter Craig Hayman, General Manager for Industry Cloud solutions came on after Seth Meyers. (Not as funny)
Energizing Life’s Work is the theme of the conference. Relevant because customer experience, work experience, and Kenexa’s talent management suite all relate to it.
There is a stark difference between work and “our life’s work” The latter harnesses creativity for your passions…….which may not include work. From IBM’s C-Suite study, CEO̵ [read] Keywords: ibm
development
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IBM Connect: Helping CMO’s Improve a Customer Digital Experience
Sun, Jan 26th 2014 10:11a Michael Porter One of the sessions at the business partner day was on how to help the digital experience. It’s more oriented to the services side but had some nice nuggets. Let me start with some stats
Here’s the day in the life of a digital marker
Launch a new site with recommendations / personalization
See what’s working and what’s not with digital analytics
Use that info and other info to target the right content to each visitor segment
Identify and remedy any c [read] Keywords: ibm
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The Future of Enterprise Computing
Sun, Jan 26th 2014 9:10a Michael Porter Here at IBM’s Connect Conference, we get to hear a lot about trends and where social is headed. Geoffrey Moore spoke about the future of Enterprise Computing. The new worlds is:
Built in the Cloud
Social
Search
Apps
Analytics
Mobile
Big Data
All this is driven by the fact that consumer IT set the bar. These consumer driven organizations create deeply engaging, empower, collaborative solutions. Systems of Engagement are the new focus. When it all comes together, the productivity [read] Keywords: collaboration
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IBM introduces new features for SmartCloud for Social Business
Tue, Jan 14th 2014 10:11p Brendon Jones On Monday (13th December 2014) IBM released an update to SmartCloud for Social Business with a focus on improving the Meetings and Chat User Interface. The new capabilities are available to SmartCloud Engage and SmartCloud Connections subscribers.
The simplified interface is intended to be consistent across rich clients, browsers and mobile applications.
Some highlights include:
A new modern look to meetings
The ability to drag files from your computer directly into a meeting
The Mac client for [read] Keywords: connections
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Kudos introduces innovative Kudos Boards for IBM Connections
Sun, Jan 12th 2014 9:11a Mark Polly Kudos is best known for providing add-ons to IBM Connections that help with and encourage adoption of the social media platform. Kudos Badges is a gamification system that includes missions, rewards, ranking and leaderboards.
Just ahead of IBM Connect 2014, Kudos has announced a new product called Kudos Boards. Boards is targeted at the Activities feature of IBM Connections. Activities is a key project management feature that allows teams to create tasks, share content, track progress, and so o [read] Keywords: connections
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IBM WebSphere Portal adds enhanced marketing features
Thu, Jan 9th 2014 6:14p Mark Polly Almost one year ago at IBM Connect 2013, IBM showed some advanced marketing integration with IBM WebSphere Portal. The demos showed marketers easily customizing portal pages with targeted content based on market segmentation. Some of the features demo’d last year have slowly crept into the product.
Today, though, IBM announced a much better integration between WebSphere Portal and IBM’s Enterprise Marketing Management (EMM) products. Through EMM products, marketers can cre [read] Keywords: collaboration
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integration
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websphere portal
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Perficient’s Top 5 Portals and Social Business Blog Posts of 2013
Mon, Dec 30th 2013 11:11a Sharon Suchoval It’s been a busy year for our Portals and Social Business bloggers with changes in the space happening daily. With so much information to absorb, we thought we’d narrow it down for you to our five most popular posts of the year, in no particular order.
Is SharePoint 2013 Good for External Websites – Mark Polly
A question that we hear a lot is, “Can SharePoint be used for public websites?” The short answer is yes, but there are both pros and cons that need to be eval [read] Keywords: ibm
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Oracle Expands Marketing Software Portfolio: Buys Responsys
Fri, Dec 20th 2013 9:21a Mark Polly Today Oracle announced they are acquiring Responsys, a leading B2C cloud-based marketing system. This acquisition is part of Oracle’s strategy in becoming an end-to-end player in the rapidly expanding customer experience space.
Earlier this year Oracle purchased Eloqua, a B2B marketing platform. By combining Responsys and Eloqua, Oracle says, “for the first time CMOs across industries will be equipped to drive exceptional customer experiences across marketing interactions and through [read] Keywords: oracle
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Social Business Patterns help enterprises engage stakeholders
Wed, Dec 18th 2013 4:10p Brendon Jones IBM has an interesting white paper out discussing Social Business Patterns. Before I highlight the white paper, I would like to briefly explain what a pattern is, and why they are useful. The Cambridge Dictionary defines a pattern as: “a particular way in which something usually happens or is done”, and so a “business pattern” may be defined as a common approach to addressing a recurring business problem.
IBM’s Social Business Patterns aim to represent a “repe [read] Keywords: collaboration
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CMO and CIO Need to Work Together
Mon, Dec 9th 2013 11:12a Mark Polly We’ve been reading and commenting about CMOs and CIOs lately (for example, see Is There a Blurring Line Between CIO and CMO?). With the maturing of Customer Experience Platforms (CXP or CXM) and Marketing Automation, the interplay between marketing and technology is rapidly growing.
Virginia Backaitis published today at CMSWire an article titled Hey CMO! Hey CIO! Work Together or Lose Everything. She argues, as we have done here at Perficient, that CMOs and CIOs need to be in lockstep w [read] Keywords:
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What is your response to Digital Disruptors?
Fri, Dec 6th 2013 8:11p Brendon Jones James McQuivey, an analyst at Forrester, discusses the concept of Digital Disruption, and has a book out by the same name. It’s also available in the Kindle Lending Library. I’ve not read it yet, but will post a review in the next few weeks. However the gist of the concept is that the traditional corporate view was that only a few very large companies had the budgets to bring a few disruptive offerings to market. Since around 2010, and the dawn of the “Age of the Customer̶ [read] Keywords: exchange
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HootSuite connecting to IBM Connections
Thu, Dec 5th 2013 9:16a Mark Polly One of the challenges with managing social media is getting your message out to the many, many social platforms, such as Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Pinterest, etc. I wrote recently how I use IFTTT to send blog post announcements to various sites from our WordPress blog. Companies like HootSuite have created platforms that solve this particular problem. So using HootSuite and others, we can easily publish and manage content across lots of social platforms.
However, none of these platforms [read] Keywords: connections
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Turns Out Companies Are Investing in Social Media
Wed, Dec 4th 2013 12:14p Michael Porter Google’s Wildfire commissioned a study on the How Brands Staff and Budget With Social. It’s far too long for me to replicate but here’s a couple nuggets:
There’s a lesson here and it’s that social media has become a defacto part of corporate life and interactions with customers. See the whole info graphic here. [read] Keywords: enterprise
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Re-energising the retail banking experience
Mon, Nov 25th 2013 11:15a Brendon Jones According to the McKinsey Quarterly, consumer-facing financial services, such as retail-banking, social technologies can help improve service delivery, reduce costs, and enhance the customer experience.
“Consumers are increasingly open to using these channels for easier, more transparent interactions with their financial institutions. New processes are surfacing across a sector often typified by organizational complexity, siloed personnel, and fragmented processes that stymie collaborat [read] Keywords: administration
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Dreamforce: Move Marketing from a Cost Center to a Profit Center
Fri, Nov 22nd 2013 8:15a Mark Polly Well Dreamforce 13 was a whirlwind and I’m glad to be home. The final session I attended was delivered by Sungard’s VP of Marketing, Christine Nurnberger. While the title of the session said something about Marketing Metrics and ROI, it really was about how Ms Nurnberger transformed Sungard’s marketing efforts over the last 18 months. While I was hoping to learn what metrics she used and how she calculated their ROI, I took away more important information than that.
My [read] Keywords: network
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Dreamforce: Developing for Google Glass
Thu, Nov 21st 2013 12:15p Michael Porter Maximiliano Firtman, author of the O’Reilly book, “jQuery Mobile” presented on some basics around development. It was less a look at the development tools and more a look at the options for development and the paradigm you take into account. He’s a a “Google Explorer” and has a chance to muck around with the Glasses for a bit.
Wearable Devices
It’s not the Get Smart phone shoe as a phone. It’s about a variety of tools like Google Glass, Sony [read] Keywords: apple
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183
Sitecore enhances CEM platform with Commerce Server acquisition
Wed, Nov 20th 2013 9:18p Brendon Jones Today Sitecore announced it acquired commerceserver.net. The “acquisition lays the foundation for the industry’s first .NET based, enterprise-grade Customer Experience Management (CXM) platform with a native, fully integrated e-commerce engine.”
According to Sitecore, “the integration of e-commerce functionality with Sitecore’s leading experience platform allows marketers to truly own the experience they deliver to every customer or prospect that engages with their brand, c [read] Keywords: application
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Dreamforce: ExactTarget Marketing Cloud Social Roadmap
Wed, Nov 20th 2013 6:18p Mark Polly Patrick Stokes, VP for Product Management at Salesforce provided highlights of the social roadmap for their Marketing Cloud. The following are the four areas that are the focus of the roadmap:
Publsih
Engage
Listen
Advertise
The social tools in the Marketing Cloud include Radian 6, Buddy Media and Social.com. These tools are integrated with ExactTarget to provide an overall platform for marketing. As an example, they are tying Social Advertising available through Social.com into the Jour [read] Keywords: facebook
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Dreamforce: Marketing Technology Landscape
Wed, Nov 20th 2013 2:18p Mark Polly Brian Andersen (LUMA Partners) and Robin Bordoli (Marketo) gave a great presentation on the Marketing Technology Landscape. This area is to broad to get into details in one hour, so they presented an overview of the market and then suggested the following three tactics to cope with the vast amount of change going on:
Accept that buyers are in control – it used to be that the buyers contacted the seller well in advance of a sale and the sales team took over to convert that buyer into a c [read] Keywords: network
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Dreamforce: YAHOO! CEO Marissa Mayer Keynote
Tue, Nov 19th 2013 7:18p Michael Porter They started off with a video of Leviev Diamonds and how they use Saleforce. The following interview includes a story about a diamond heist. They used the data in Salesforce to document the loss to the police.
Mark Benioff also interviewed the CEO’s of Men’s Warehouse and Whole Foods. Honestly, that’s quite the list of CEO’s to come to a tech conference. It includes the CEO’s of HP, YAHOO!, Leviev Diamonds, Facebook, Men’s Warehouse, and Whole Foods. [read] Keywords: community
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Dreamforce: Managing Social Conversations with Buddy Media
Tue, Nov 19th 2013 5:18p Mark Polly Barbara Meskin from Jim Beam presented how that brand learned how to engage customers through social media on a global scale. The journey that she decribed included the following steps over two years, although these things were not done linearly all the time:
Social Audit – here they had to figure out what they had and how social media was used across the world. They found 28 Facebook pages, all with inconsistent message, inconsistent branding and multiple personalities
Stakeholder Al [read] Keywords: facebook
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Dreamforce: Building Apps for the ExactTarget Marketing Platform
Tue, Nov 19th 2013 3:18p Michael Porter Exact Target can be put into broad categories
Integration: Data is important. You need to get the data from a variety of sources. Apps allow you to do that.
Automation: You can automate a number of tasks and make even complicated sets of tasks part of a new app within the platform
Application: cool widgets that do specific things
One app takes engagement data and puts it on a geographical map. (ok, that’s a cool app and yet another example of visualization)
Demo
Many Apps can be fou [read] Keywords: application
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Dreamforce: Building Custom Mobile Self-Service Apps
Tue, Nov 19th 2013 3:18p Michael Porter As you can see from the Salesforce keynote, Mobile is extremely important to them and to customers.
Why Mobile Self-Service
Mobile devices are ubiquitous. Q4 was the inflection point where more phones and tablets exist than pc’s and laptops.
Study: Frost and Sullivan analysis show that users already use mobile devices for a wide ranges of activities.
Three examples of great mobile self-service apps:
Geico
Take picture of the accident
take down license and insurance info
Home Depot
N [read] Keywords: application
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Dreamforce Keynote
Tue, Nov 19th 2013 1:18p Michael Porter While Dreamforce started on Monday, the Keynote kicked off today. Huey Lewis and the News kicked it off after a great children’s charity video. Mark Benioff started by thanking everyone and speaking about why we are all really here, to help others. ”Philanthropy is the biggest rush.”
135,000 people registered to attend the event. (include free registrants for Expo and keynotes)
Over 25 customers brought over 50 attendees each
Marissa Meyer, CEO of Yahoo, will speak at [read] Keywords: admin
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Dreamforce: Service Cloud
Tue, Nov 19th 2013 12:18p Mark Polly I mentioned Salesforce 1 in a previous post, a new platform to run Salesforce on mobile devices. Service Cloud is also being enabled for Salesforce 1, so you can run Service Cloud applications on mobile devices. Salesforce demonstrated how Philips embedded Service Cloud into an ultrasound machine. When a technician has trouble with the ultrasound machine, she can hit a support button and the device will log events into Service Cloud and connect to the Philips support center. The support [read] Keywords: applications
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Dreamforce: Marc Benioff Keynote and Salesforce 1
Tue, Nov 19th 2013 12:18p Mark Polly Marc Benioff’s keynote is the first session today at Dreamforce13. Marc and Co-Founder Parker Harris spent time this morning highlighting features and applications that are going to be available on the Salesforce platform in the “future”. Parker made a dramatic entrance dressed in a “Back to the Future” professor costume, so he showed a bunch of new mobile applications running on Salesforce, including a new mobile Administration interface.
Coming this spring, th [read] Keywords: administration
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Dreamforce: Understanding the Power of Content
Mon, Nov 18th 2013 6:24p Mark Polly I attended a panel discussion on the power of content in your marketing efforts. The panelist agreed that content is really important, but it is becoming clear that lots of content is more important than spectacular content. Content like white papers or blog posts take a lot of time to put together, so you may not be able to have a lot of white papers or blog posts. Ideally you want to create different content for your personas, different content for where the reader is in the sales funnel [read] Keywords: facebook
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Dreamforce: Mobile Community Web Sites In Site.com
Mon, Nov 18th 2013 5:24p Michael Porter Site.com has been touted as an easy way to create a portal, do simple content management, and otherwise extend your salesforce investment but still make things look good. Mobile has become a key requirement for almost any technology and anyone who can cut down the typical +30% cost to add mobile will gain in the marketplace.
They started out explaining a couple concepts like responsive design, html5, and various javascript libraries to get you there.
Site.com goals:
Agility
Mobile
Social
CRM
[read] Keywords: rich text
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Dreamforce: Crack the Code on Social Selling
Mon, Nov 18th 2013 4:24p Michael Porter So I’ve always been interested in how you sell social given that so many have problems in defining it. Hence my interest in this session on social selling. People from Salesforce, Sales Benchmark Index, Pandora, Linkedin, and others brought this session. Note also that social has officially matured that people now focus on the selling aspect of social rather than social in general. If this was a gartners expectations map, we would have just gotten past the trough of disappointment.
[read] Keywords: blogging
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Dreamforce: Social Media in Regulated Industries
Mon, Nov 18th 2013 3:24p Mark Polly We had a panel discussion today on the use of Social Media in Regulated Industries. We focused on Healthcare and Life Sciences, but the same info applies across the industry landscape. In regulated industries, social media is especially scary because conversations can be negative, can involve complex subjects and can involve regulatory compliance issues. For example, if you are a pharmaceutical and you blog about a product, the FDA might need to approve your content. If a patient talks a [read] Keywords: agent
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Dreamforce 13: Email Marketing with ExactTarget Marketing Cloud
Mon, Nov 18th 2013 12:24p Mark Polly This week I’m at Dreamforce13 put on by Salesforce.com. Salesforce has been making a strong push into the Portal and Social space in the last several years. Bryan Wade, ExactTarget Vice President of Email Products highlighted the features in the ExactTarget Marketing Cloud.
When we talk about customer experience, marketing has been playing an increasingly important role in digital experiences. Marketers want to use digital platforms for campaigns and that typically starts with a variety of [read] Keywords: email
enterprise
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exchange
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Dreamforce: Emerging Trends
Mon, Nov 18th 2013 11:25a Michael Porter Peter Schwartz, the mind behind Minority Report, War Games, and Sneakers; spoke on five emerging trends. He is also Saleforce SVP Strategic Planning. His opening statement pushes, “Tomorrow looks nothing like today.”
The world of hyper connectivity is bringing every thing together in a new ecosystem. We are creating a new world that is connected in ways we’ve never seen before.
The Process
Printing press, telephone, and television represent the natural trend of technologies [read] Keywords: wiki
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How Not To Do a Print to Digital Marketing Campaign
Sun, Nov 17th 2013 4:20p Brendon Jones Last week on the MARTA in Atlanta, Georgia I sat next to a poster advertising business courses at Herzing University. Having never heard of it, I looked it up to find that it is a for-profit establishment, as opposed to a traditional research university, which may in-part explain the approach they took.
This poster advertises a number of products and services provided by Herzing University, though it is not always clear what is meant by the terms:
Business and MBA
Single parent
Flexibility
A [read] Keywords: iphone
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9: A Patient Portal Is Mobile
Wed, Nov 13th 2013 7:12a Michael Porter For all you keeping track of my previous posts, you can find a list here.
To anyone with a smart phone (over 50% and climbing) or a tablet, stating that a patient portal is mobile is like saying that the sky is blue. Of course it’s mobile. Why wouldn’t it be. a very large portion of potential users will use that channel. However, if you look at a wide range of vendors who provide “out of the box” patient portals, you see a large majority who claim mobile support b [read] Keywords: desktop
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8: A Patient Portal Is Sticky
Tue, Nov 12th 2013 5:11a Michael Porter To see all the other posts, visit the main What Is A Patient Portal post.
In many ways, “stickiness” can be seen as a composite of everything else I’ve defined in all the patient portal posts. It merits it’s own post because getting a patient to the site and having them return multiple times represents the ultimate goal. For hospitals though, this also represents the main challenge. Let’s face it, we don’t usually think our local hospital if we have any [read] Keywords: google
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214
Hashtags for Cancer
Wed, Nov 6th 2013 8:11a Mark Polly Over on Symplur.com, Dr. Michael Katz talks about connected health care. In this blog post, Hashtags in Cancer Care: Embedding Meaning in Digital Health, he proposes a more formal set (“ontology”) of hashtags for cancer information. While hashtags have traditionally been a means of spontaneously organizing Twitter tweets, I think Dr. Katz’s idea has a lot of merit. Let me explain why I think this.
Dr. Katz points out that many of his patients are reluctant to search th [read] Keywords: facebook
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Maybe the Worst Blog Post Ever on Harvard Business Review
Tue, Nov 5th 2013 7:12a Mark Polly Its been several days now since I first saw this blog post on the Harvard Business Review site. At first I wanted to enter a comment, but I felt my reaction may have been too visceral and I would have said something stupid. I also thought that a small comment would not do my thoughts justice. But everyday that has passed since then, I haven’t been able to get it out of my head. So I’m writing a blog post today to refute it and hopefully move on.
I’m delaying providing the [read] Keywords: atlantic
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257
Liferay 6.2 Features Announced
Mon, Nov 4th 2013 6:15a Mark Polly About one year ago I blogged about what Liferay was planning for it’s next portal version 6.2. At the Liferay Symposium in October, Liferay announced that 6.2 would be available later this year. I missed the symposium this year, but Brian Ruby provided the following info on CMSWire.
Liferay has implemented Bootstrap for its theme, giving Liferay a nice modern interface. You also get access to the Bootstrap theme library making it easier to use those themes on your site.
Last year, Lifera [read] Keywords: community
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7. A Patient Portal Is Contextual
Thu, Oct 31st 2013 11:11a Michael Porter You can find the entire, What Is a Patient Portal series here.
Today’s discussion may have the most significant impact on a patient ability to understand their medical record but it’s also the most difficult to explain. So let me give you some definitions:
Contextual: The circumstances that form the setting for an event, statement, or idea. It’s also the surrounding content that help give meaning to the item in question. If something lacks context then it lacks anything [read] Keywords: wiki
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6. A Patient Portal Is Process Driven
Tue, Oct 29th 2013 9:15a Michael Porter You can find the entire series here in the initial post.
You may wonder why I even mention process for a patient portal. I mean, a patient logs on, does his or her business, and logs off. There’s not much process. From that viewpoint, you are correct, there’s not much process. However, in order to support a great patient experience, a hospital has many potential processes they must change. Keep in mind that we are talking an healthcare organization already driven by existing [read] Keywords: policies
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215
Digital Marketing is Dead?
Tue, Oct 29th 2013 9:15a Michael Porter Melody SmithJones (@MelSmithJones) has a great article on the newest evolution of Digital Marketing. No, it hasn’t flatlined. Instead it’s matured to the point where digital marketing is marketing.
Here are the points he was making in summary:
The average amount of time consumers spend with digital media every day could surpass television viewing this year.
As a result, as the world’s largest advertiser, P&G now spends more than 1/3 of its U.S. marketing budget on digital [read] Keywords:
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Why Facebook Is Failing Marketers
Tue, Oct 29th 2013 8:15a Michael Porter Forrester and Nate Elliott just released a short but insightful paper on Why FaceBook is Failing Marketers. He and the other authors include survey feedback from the value marketing professionals receive from Facebook. It’s worth it to read the whole article if you have access to Forrester.
What I like best is his analysis of the promise of Facebook marketing vs the actual result.
Facebook no longer supports social marketing. Yes, you heard us right. Sure, the company still teases mark [read] Keywords: connections
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How To Do Social Marketing Wrong and Pay a $340,000 Fine
Mon, Oct 28th 2013 6:14a Mark Polly According to Christian Ziberg in the iDownloadBlog, Samsung was recently found guilty of violating fair trade rules by hiring a large number of writers and having employees trash-talk their competitors. It looks like Samsung asked these people to post anonymous comments on various websites talking up Samsung and talking down other phones.
Samsung admitted guilt, stopped this marketing activity and blamed it on an “insufficient understanding”. However, says ZIberg, the Taiwan [read] Keywords: policies
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5. A Patient Portal Is Social
Thu, Oct 24th 2013 6:12a Michael Porter Continuing on with the series, I want to talk about the social aspects of a patient portal. I will freely admit that some of what I describe skirts the line of what security and privacy experts will call acceptable. However, I think it’s possible to be social while not releasing protected health information that will lead to significant fines.
Most people think of social as facebook, pinterest, and twitter. It’s more than that. Social tools enable you in many ways. I can th [read] Keywords: applications
community
email
facebook
google
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Is There a Blurring Line Between CIO and CMO?
Thu, Oct 24th 2013 6:12a Michael Porter @lizasisler asked me to post over on the Microsoft Blog about the blurring line between line between Chief Information Officers (CIO) and Chief Marketing Officers (CMO). Worth a look.
New World
CMO: Everything they did before but use the social media and digital marketing channels to do so. Make key technology decisions while getting advice from the CIO and IT. Wield a larger budget to meet the ever changing digital world and ensure you have a place in it. Hire savvy employees with skills [read] Keywords: javascript
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4: A Patient Portal Is Personalized
Wed, Oct 23rd 2013 7:13a Michael Porter You can see my other posts on what is a Patient Portal here.
While not the most complex aspect of a patient portal, personalization may well prove the most important. When I talk to hospitals about their portals, they all speak of one thing, the need to drive people to their site and the need to convert consumers to patients. You don’t drive people to your site and keep them coming back unless your site provides the right functionality and you make it easy. That’s where persona [read] Keywords: application
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Thank You IFTTT for Making Our Lives Easier
Tue, Oct 22nd 2013 9:12a Mark Polly I am enamored with IFTTT (pronounced as IFT). IFTTT is like that parent or spouse that does things for you. If you are sitting on the couch, you can call out, “Can you turn the lights off?” and that person will do it for you. You want a sandwich? ”Honey can you get me sandwich?” and whoosh there it is. IFTTT is like that.
You haven’t heard of IFTTT? It is an internet service that you lets you connect systems together to do something for you using the simpl [read] Keywords: email
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Adobe’s State of Mobile Benchmark
Tue, Oct 22nd 2013 6:15a Mark Polly Adobe is making a name for itself in the area of digital marketing. Marketers know that data is necessary to make key decisions and I’m glad to see Adobe providing leadership in this area. When it comes to data about mobile usage, Adobe has published their State of Mobile study on their website, available to anybody.
This study highlights some important data about mobile usage, including the following:
Tablets have overtaken phones in the amount of traffic they drive. Think about that [read] Keywords: desktop
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3: A Patient Portal Is Integrated
Mon, Oct 21st 2013 10:12a Michael Porter Continuing on with the series on what is a patient portal, I want to talk about integration. This represents a large effort for any true patient portal. By integration I mean, the effort and services necessary to pull data and complete transactions to one or more back end systems. In other words, a patient portal shouldn’t house the data for any one system. It’s goal should be to pull the right data from the system that already owns that data. In today’s more connected [read] Keywords: application
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7 Top Content Marketing Trends For 2014
Mon, Oct 21st 2013 10:12a Michael Porter @lizasisler pointed me to the Forbes Article on Content Marketing trends. Jayson DeMers provides a pretty good analysis on the trends and why you should pay attention to them. I like articles like this because they focus on how important value add content from blogs, twitter, etc can drive people to your site and eventually convert them into loyal customers. I’m not going to steal Jayson’s Thunder but I will give the teaser:
Businesses Will Finally be Able to Define Content Market [read] Keywords: google
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IBM Content Template Catalog 4.1
Mon, Oct 21st 2013 10:12a Mark Polly IBM has been hard at work updating their Content Template Catalog (CTC) for WebSphere Portal and Web Content Manager. CTC is a collection of content templates, pages templates, content, site builder and editing tools that greatly improves the usability of IBM’s Web Content Manager.Click here to view the embedded video.
In the video shown here, IBM demonstrates the new features available in CTC 4.1 Some of the new features described in the video include:
Site content has been added so [read] Keywords: ibm
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Content Targeting in WebSphere Portal 8
Fri, Oct 18th 2013 11:11a Mark Polly Content targeting is a hot topic in marketing circles these days. Actually content targeting has always been a hot topic, but many content management systems didn’t support it or made it too difficult to implement. IBM WebSphere Portal has long included the concept of content targeting through its personalization engine. But, in the past, IBM made it difficult on the business user to actually create and implement targeting rules.
As of version 8, IBM is attempting to make it much eas [read] Keywords: ibm
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2: A Patient Portal Is Secure
Wed, Oct 16th 2013 9:16a Michael Porter Today I’ll continue with a related theme to yesterday’s discussion on regulation. Specifically, a patient portal is secure. You can interpret security in a variety of ways but let me give my own spin.
The data is secure
The access point is secure
Setup is secure
The system will track anything that happens on the portal.
The Data is Secure
Because any protected health information (PHI) must be encrypted at rest, you already have one level of security. A well architected portal [read] Keywords: password
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1: A Patient Portal Is Regulated
Mon, Oct 14th 2013 11:12p Michael Porter So this is the first true part of what is a patient portal. I introduced it yesterday but that was only to pave the way for the topics. Remember, my purpose is to define the complexities of a portal and not the features and functions. So on to the subject at hand.
A lot has been said about the various regulations but let me tell you about the key regulation and the key acronyms that keep popping up. Keep in mind that I’m a portal expert and not a healthcare expert so anyone who catch [read] Keywords: security
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Lamar’s Webinar on An Engaging and Mobile Website
Mon, Oct 14th 2013 9:13a Michael Porter Coming up this Wednesday, Lamar talks about how they created an engaging and mobile website. You can register here. I helped them do some initial strategy and their approach to using one site to address multiple markets was pretty interesting. They ended up choosing Sitecore as their Digital Marketing / Web Content Management suite of choice.
Lamar Advertising has experienced impressive growth and diversification in the last two decades. When the company decided it needed to improve its exis [read] Keywords: mobile
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What is a Patient Portal?
Mon, Oct 14th 2013 6:14a Michael Porter I’ve been working on a variety of portals this year but Patient Portal tops them all right now in terms of interest and effort. I’ve learned that patient portals represent some of the most complex portal sites out there today. They are complex for a variety of reasons. This and my next few posts on the subject will focus less on the features and functions of a patient portal and more on what makes it so complex. So without further ado, let me give you the reasons why itR [read] Keywords: apple
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5 Most Secure Enterprise Cloud Apps
Thu, Oct 10th 2013 8:12a Michael Porter CRN has an article about Netskope, a startup security policy firm, who reviewed and ranked enterprise cloud apps. Here’s the quick list:
Salesforce
Box
Crashplan
Amazon Web Services
Easy Vista
While some you may not have seen before, others like Amazon and Salesforce already garner many headlines. As I review a lot of options for portal, web content, and social, I get the chance to dive into some of these. I’m not surprised by Salesforce’s rank after reviewing their f [read] Keywords: enterprise
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Google’s Investment in Enterprise
Thu, Oct 10th 2013 7:12a Michael Porter This isn’t new news given that this article was published back in July. But hey, if you missed it like I did then it’s new to you. CRN has an article with some quotes from a business partner and some stats. Basically, Google continues to expand it’s enterprise play with Google Search Appliance, Google Apps, Google Drive, etc. The part regarding Google’s estimated revenue in the enterprise arena.
Technology Business Research estimates that the Google Cloud Platform [read] Keywords: enterprise
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Conversation Prism Highlights Our Marketing Challenge
Wed, Oct 9th 2013 2:12p Mark Polly Online marketing is a challenge. When you think about having a conversation with your customer or potential customer, where you communicate can have a dramatic impact on whether your message gets through. Many people can identify Facebook and Twitter as two common social media outlets.
The Conversation Prism by Brian Solis and JESS3, shown here, does a good job of showing the vastness of our internet and the many, many ways to have a conversation. I’m sure the diagram doesn’t s [read] Keywords: facebook
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Forbes on Why Salesforce is Winning the Cloud War
Tue, Oct 8th 2013 8:12a Michael Porter Forbes has a nice article on why Louis Columbus and Alex Williams thinks Salesforce is Winning the Cloud Platform War. They have a lot of great points but one of the most telling is Louis’ focus on developers.
I’ve started to look at the developer area as the crucible or foundry for future apps. While the Cloud Expo shows how vibrant the partner ecosystem is, the developer area is where tomorrow’s apps are being coded today. The Force.com Workbook, an excellent reference for Force. [read] Keywords: application
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Consumers are more open to sharing some data about themselves
Wed, Oct 2nd 2013 3:13p Mark Polly Here in the U.S. we take privacy seriously and often go to great lengths to avoid asking customers for personal information. It appears that global consumers are more open to sharing personal information about themselves than maybe what everyone assumes. Sandy Carter recently posted on her blog Social Media to Social Business about an interesting study IBM recently conducted on this topic.
According to the study, 75% of consumers are willing to share data about their media usage and demo [read] Keywords: ibm
exchange
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DisneyWorld School Break Advertising and Content Personalization
Fri, Sep 27th 2013 4:11p Mark Polly I peeked in my U.S. Mail mailbox this morning and found a nice ad from Walt Disney World in there with all my other mail. Normally that piece of mail would have been thrown out with all the other junk, but something caught my eye. The item is a colorful, three-fold, heavier stock flyer with Goofy on the font cover and the tag line “Planning a vacation during the school year is as easy as 1-2-3″. What interested me was that planning a vacation with kids in school is always a challen [read] Keywords:
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Gartner Magic Quadrant for Horizontal Portals 2013
Wed, Sep 25th 2013 12:12p Mark Polly On September 12, 2013 Gartner released their latest Magic Quadrant report for horizontal portals. Overall, the Magic Quadrant hasn’t changed much from last year with the vendors staying in the same quadrant as they were in 2012 (yawn…). You can see my blog post from 2012: Gartner Magic Quadrant: Horizontal Portals 2012.
In the leader quadrant, Liferay has jumped ahead of SAP on the ability to execute scale, but the big three – IBM, Microsoft and Oracle – seem to be t [read] Keywords: ibm
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microsoft
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Gartner Releases Social Software in the Workplace Magic Quadrant
Mon, Sep 16th 2013 6:11p Michael Porter Gartner just released their Social Software in the Workplace Magic Quadrant. (warning login and $$ required to gain access.) Alternatively, Jive also offers it with your company information. I don’t want to just copy what Gartner has to say so let me just focus on the use cases for Social Software and the leader quadrant. Previously I differentiated between social software and social media where social media focused on getting users to your site or product and social software focu [read] Keywords: connections
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Community done right: Eloqua Topliners for marketing
Fri, Sep 13th 2013 10:11a Mark Polly Marketing automation is a hot topic today, but can be very confusing. There have been a lot of entrants to the market in the last few years, with lots of features coming online daily. In addition, marketing tools rarely stand alone and need to be integrated into your website, your portal, your social communities and other systems. If you are interested in digital marketing, you may feel overwhelmed by the amount of content and vast number of products available to you.
One excellent marketi [read] Keywords: applications
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Cars.com 60 Second Social
Mon, Sep 9th 2013 6:13a Michael Porter Short but fun video about a client of ours. I have to admit that Cars.com continues to make the car buying experience better. We recently bought a car and the best place to find enough valid information to figure out where to go and buy a used car is cars.com. Their use of custom built tools, portal, and social is what makes it a better experience.
Click here to view the embedded video. [read] Keywords: ibm
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Interesting Post on SharePoint vs Sitecore
Mon, Sep 9th 2013 6:13a Michael Porter Rich Wood (@sharepointrich) has an interesting article on when to choose SharePoint and why you would choose Sitecore for your consumer or customer site. I don’t want to steal his thunder so just let me say that I agree.
This might be a fairly surprising statement from a guy whose public Twitter handle references SharePoint directly. I love SharePoint and I’ve built the last eight years of my career on it. Why would I say such a thing?
Well, simple—because I see it coming true.
S [read] Keywords: microsoft
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