Monday, December 20, 2010
Tuesday, December 14, 2010
Get Your Jingle Mingle On!
Ho ho ho Social Media Club!
In your rush to get your holiday shopping done, don’t forget about tonight’s Jingle Mingle for CASA holiday fundraising party – and while you’re in the stores, be sure to pick up a toy for CASA’s toy drive! Everyone who donates a toy will get a super special bonus – a raffle ticket for the snazzy “regift” basket valued at more than $250!
See you at The Brink Lounge tonight at 6 PM – and bring your friends, parents, aunts – you name it – the more the merrier! There will be drink specials, special drink specials (no redundancy here!) and more holiday cheer than you can shake a stick at – and that’s a heck of a lot of holiday cheer!
If you haven’t registered yet – do it now. C’mon, it’s a Tuesday night – you’ve got nothing going on. And Glee is a rerun!
Friday, December 10, 2010
Madison Marketing Communications» Madison Marketing Communications Cause Marketing Social Media Facebook Like
Want to do some good for others this holiday season (in a really easy way!!) and get some great content/information as well?
If so, I need you to please help me do 2 things that will in turn help a Madison, WI-based charity (I’ll explain in just a moment!).
All you have to do is:
(1) like my company’s Facebook page – Madison Marketing Communications (MMC), which provides some insightful articles and information about communications – and
(2) help spread the word so more people can also join in. (I’ll be you can think of ways!! Twitter, FB, a blog, even an email….)For each Facebook fan the MMC page has by 12/31/10, MMC will donate $1 to a yet-to-be determined charity (but discussion will take place to decide on the MMC Facebook page). This is an opportunity for you to get some great marketing- and communications-related content via your FB feed, and as a bonus you will be helping someone else who needs help.
Why am I doing this? Frankly, I am #1 looking for ways to increase the reach of MMC’s Facebook page and its social media reach, and #2 I am actively looking for ways to help others this holiday season. My family is sponsoring a family this holiday season, and I wanted to figure out some way to that my company could also do some good. This seemed like something cool to try.
BUT….for it to work I need help in spreading the word. (And I thank you in advance for this.)
So please check out the MMC Facebook page by clicking here – “like” MMC and then join the discussion about posts and ideas that are put forth. I hope we can all enjoy some great dialogue moving forward in 2011!
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Filed under: Branding, Cause Marketing, Marketing Campaigns, Nonprofit, Social Media, Word of Mouth on December 9th, 2010
This is a great example of a couple things:
1. Cause marketing in action
2. In action, with outcome TBD.
Many people (and the businesses they work for/with) feel they need to have the entire project laid out, start to finish, before they start. It's more important to just go - do - and keep moving, with communications. We're a nimble society, and the social media tools at hand give us the ability to assess, pivot, adjust where necessary.
Go - do. Thanks, Laurel, for this fine example.
Wednesday, December 8, 2010
Salesforce’s Database.com: Fat SaaS Here We Come!
Salesforce’s Database.com: Fat SaaS Here We Come!
Posted by smoothspan on December 7, 2010
Salesforce is skating to where the puck will be ahead of the other players once again–there’s a reason they’re so much bigger than the rest of the SaaS players. This time it’s all about their latest development in the hotly contested PaaS (Platform as a Service) market. They’ve introduced a fascinating new offering called “database.com” (what do you suppose they paid for that domain?).
What is this database.com offering?
Larry Dignan pegged it best, among the various posts I read. He says it’s a full frontal assault on the incumbents like Oracle, and that Salesforce is building out a stack, only the stack is delivered as a service that lives in the Cloud. That’s exactly what’s happening. Imagine writing software that talks to your database server via an API. That part isn’t hard, because that’s how it already works. Now imagine that you don’t own the database server; it lives in the Salesforce Cloud and you rent. They take care of it and promise to use all the tricks they learned scaling Salesforce.com to make your database scale like crazy too. Pretty cool!
The initial responses from the rest of the blogging world are also interesting:
- Phil Wainewright says they’ve squashed all the little PaaS players.
- Klint Finley reports that Progress software is building out drivers (ODBC, etc.) so your apps can directly call Database.com as their DB.
- Sam Diaz and many others are focused on the Oracle rivalry. Can this be good for Oracle’s share price? Will their database hegemony finally start to crack? And what does it mean to the budding NoSQL world?
Obviously there is a lot of crystal ball work to be done here, and a lot of study of the available information. Most of all, we’ll have to wait to get our hands on Database.com before we can really understand what it means. But I did want to finish this post by talking about Database.com’s relationship to what I’ve been calling “Fat SaaS”.
We’re moving beyond the debate about SaaS versus On-premises. On-prem isn’t dead, but it sure isn’t getting any stronger, while the SaaS world keeps gaining momentum. The truth is that it is a superior model. There used to be a lot of feeling that IT was afraid of it, and that this is what was holding it back. But we’re starting to see considerable evidence IT not only doesn’t fear it, but that they’re embracing it wholeheartedly. More importantly, we’re seeing the SaaS world start to move beyond simple questions (to multitenant or not to multitenant is actually a pretty simple question) and onto how to evolve to the next level.
Fat SaaS is a model that pushes as much business logic into the client as possible and leaves the server-side largely acting as a data store. Given the availability of rich User Experience tools like Adobe Flex with AIR (for creating desktop apps), as well as the onset of the mobile app phenomenon, together with the difficulties of scaling in a multicore world, it’s a logical development. After all, if you survey an Enterprise, do they have more cpu’s tied up in client devices, or in servers? Which cpu’s are more over worked and which ones have more bandwidth available?
I’ve written about the Fat SaaS idea before, and I think it’s one of the logical next developments we’ll start seeing like crazy. Database.com just opened the door to making it even more logical, because what else would talk to such a thing but a Fat SaaS application? Doing a bunch of centralized number crunching won’t be nearly as happy as a Fat SaaS app with the inevitable latency that comes with having your database in a different Cloud than the software that’s consuming the data. The client is already used to that being the norm.
Now, getting back to Phil Wainewright’s proposition that it has squashed the other players, I don’t think so. It may be hard on the little players, or it may not. Remember, Benioff is trying to out-Oracle Oracle. But even Oracle hasn’t succeeded in squashing the Open Source DB movement, not even after acquiring MySQL. It’s more popular than ever. In the end, neither Salesforce nor Oracle have to squash these littles guys. They’re after the higher end anyway.
What I want to see is competition. Who will be the first to put up a service on Amazon AWS that delivers exactly the same function using MySQL and for a lot less money? You see, Salesforce’s initial pricing on the thing is their Achille’s heel. I won’t even delve into their by-the-transaction and by-the-record pricing. $10 a month to autheticate the user is a deal killer. How can I afford to give up that much of my monthly SaaS billing just to authenticate? The answer is I won’t, but Salesforce won’t care, because they want bigger fish who will. I suspect their newfound Freemium interest for Chatter is just their discovery that they can’t get a per seat price for everything, or at least certainly not one as expensive as they’ve tried in the past.
I’ll be watching to see whether the prices come down and whether competition develops. I fully expect both will be underway before we know it. Meanwhile, Bravo Salesforce–you’re showing the rest of the world how it’s done!
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This entry was posted on December 7, 2010 at 9:08 pm and is filed under business, cloud, saas. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
Tuesday, December 7, 2010
bliss
Three-quarters of marketing chiefs say in-house PR should not ...
David Woods, prweek.com, 07 December 2010, 9:08am
3 article comments.
Marketing directors do not rate the role of PR in managing social media, with less than one-third thinking the PR department should oversee social media in their business, according to new research.
Canvassed: 250 marketing chiefsThe survey of 250 marketing directors and heads of marketing by Wildfire PR even found that one in five marketing chiefs believe the IT department should have control of a firm’s blogging and tweeting.
Some PROs expressed shock at Wildfire’s findings.
Rob Dyson, PR manager at children’s charity Whizz-Kidz, said: ‘Clearly a number of marketers believe social media are technical tools or an extension of the company website that IT should manage. But it is not just a bit of software and needs to be run by a part of an organisation that is personable.
‘Twitter is not just about putting out ads, it is about building relationships. There needs to be a clear PR strategy behind it and someone in the business needs to have the inclination to use it for conversation regularly, or not use it at all.’
Pete Goold, MD of tech PR agency Punch Communications, said: ‘Marketing directors who do not involve PR because of a personal dislike of Twitter are less able to do their jobs than they were five years ago.’
The study found that only 27 per cent thought the in-house PR team should manage company social media policy including Twitter and Facebook profiles. Only two per cent believed this should be the responsibility of an external PR agency. Twenty-nine per cent of respondents said they planned to invest more in social media during the next year, but while almost half of the businesses polled have adopted social media, ten per cent claimed they did so only because their rivals had.
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All Comments
ROSS FURLONG - 07 December 2010
Does 27% make PR depts top of the list of depts that they think could handle PR though? 10% say IT department - guffaw, wait while I pick myself up of the carpet. Rob is spot on when he says Twitter needs to be backed by PR - it's probably the most important element of a social media campaign. Classic misunderstanding that technical know how should qualify a dept to carry out a comms strategy.
Alastair MacDonald - 07 December 2010
I think we have many talented marketers in the UK, so am amazed that even one of them would want to entrust a key stakeholder relations activity to IT. IT is essentially the enabler of the social media delivery channel, not its controller - just as printers are the enablers of the printed channel. Good channel enablers can, of course, make a difference between success and failure, but their role is not to manage the overall comms activity.
Simon Francis - 07 December 2010
This sounds too ridiculous to be true! What questions were Wildfire asking the marketing directors?
Social media has an intrinsic link to corporate reputation and consumer engagement. Handing this role to non-marketing professionals is dangerous, if not negligent.
Sit it in PR, marketing, digital or customer relations in house or at an agency \(or a combination of these), each client will be different, just surely not the IT crowd.
It'd be like leaving your marketing team in charge of your IT system!
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