Summary: The goal of this white paper is to provide a framework for choosing among virtualization, multi-database, and multi-instance consolidation strategies for SQL Server Database Engine OLTP applications by highlighting some of the key decision points based on technical analysis. Some foundational topics and terminology will be included to provide the basis for the discussion, because some terms or strategies might be worded differently in other papers.

Consolidation Guidance for SQL Server.

Title: Stop stalking. Start talking. Hoe ervaren Belgische journalisten de samenwerking met pr-verantwoordelijken en -bedrijven? Hoe efficiënt zijn de meest gangbare methodes om te communiceren met de pers?
Company: Quadrant Communications
Introduction:

“Hoe ervaren Belgische journalisten de aanpak van pr-verantwoordelijken? Worden ze wel op de juiste manieren benaderd? Wat vinden ze handig, wat stoort hen, wat kan beter? En hoe populair zijn social media (blogs, Twitter, Facebook en dergelijke) eigenlijk bij journalisten? Uit onze dagelijkse contacten met de pers kunnen we weliswaar een en ander afleiden, maar het kon volgens ons geen kwaad om het eens rechtuit te vragen.”

Type: Study / Whitepaper
Download: Whitepaper_journalistenenqute-NL
More info: Quadrant Communications

Eine Online-Umfrage von 123 Führungskräften im Bereich B2B-Marketing befragte die Teilnehmer, wie sich deren Werbespendings nach dem Ende der Wirtschaftskrise entwickeln werden. Die Befragung, die von Media Business im September 2009 durchgeführt wurde, kam zu folgenden Ergebnissen:

• 36,6% der B2B-Marketingverantwortlichen sagten Sie werden nach dem Ende der Wirtschafskrise wieder genau so viel in Print-Werbung investieren wie vor der Krise.
• 19,5% werden mehr in Print-Werbung investieren als vor der Krise.
• 43,9% beabsichtigen nach dem Ende der Wirtschaftskrise weniger in Print-Werbung zu investieren als zuvor.

Zudem sollten die B2B Marketing-Verantwortlichen auf einer Skala von 1 (sehr wichtig) bis 4 (weniger wichtig) acht Marketingkanäle bewerten. 

Die Ergebnisse waren wie folgt: Online (1,51), Veranstaltungen (1,90), Webcasts (2,19), Whitepaper (2,24), Messen (2,36), Corporate Publishing (2,51), Print (2,53), Virtuelle Messen (3,13).

Anmerkung: Da Media Business aus den USA kommt, ist mit großer Wahrscheinlichkeit anzunehmen, das der überwältigende  Teil der Umfrage-Teilnehmer ebenfalls aus den USA kommt. Daher sollte man die Ergebnisse keinesfalls 1:1 auf den europäischen B2B-Markt übertragen.

Quelle: Media Business, October 2009, Seite 9

Barack Obama’s Social Media Toolkit

Looking back at the lessons from the Obama Social Marketing Success

Barack Obama won the presidency in a landslide victory (by a margin of nearly 200 electoral votes and 8.5 million popular votes) by converting everyday people into engaged and empowered volunteers, donors and advocates through social networks, e-mail advocacy, text messaging and online video.

The campaign’s proclivity to online advocacy is a major reason for his victory.

Since the election, the social media programs adopted by Obama’s transition team have foreshadowed significant changes in how Obama, as president, will communicate with – and more importantly – through the mass of supporters who were collected, cultivated and channeled during the campaign. Obama wants to be the first president to govern with BlackBerry in hand; he will certainly be the first with a legion of 13 million advocates at his fingertips.

Obama Campaign Social Media Lessons

Social Marketing Success Story, Social Marketing Whitepaper / Research Post by Warren Raisch: November 12, 2009

As for today one of the most complicated tasks for a person is a problem of searching of specific information. As for me as a technical engineer working with network equipment of such vendors as Cisco and Juniper, it had been a problem too.

It seems to me that today I was able to find all the whitepapers on the site juniper.net. It was possible due to order of document placement on this site. On the cisco.com on contemporary, there is a complete mess of whitepapers – you can find them in all parts of the side.

In order to find all of them, you can use google search – simple things are really the best things

Just try to search the following: filetype:pdf site:http://www.juniper.net/solutions/literature/white_papers/
and you’ll be surprised what you find

Drawings are the foundation of any patent application, whether it is a provisional or non provisional application. Therefore, it is imperative to abide by the guidelines of the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) to ensure that the drawings are clear and the patent passes examination.

To understanding the differences between the two drawing approaches, we first need to know what provisional and non-provisional patent applications are.

Provisional patent application basics:

• Provisional patent applications require a low USPTO filing fee and are less expensive than the regular non provisional patent applications.
• Provisional patent applications last only for 12 months. You still have to file a non provisional patent application within 12 months of your provisional application in order to retain the advantage of the provisional’s filing date. This is just like fi ling an extension on your tax return; you still need to pay the taxes and file real tax returns.
• Claims are not required for a provisional patent application.
• Provisional applications are not examined. A follow on non provisional goes to the back of the examination line. So if you are racing against time and want your patent issued quickly, a provisional application is not ideal.

To be successful, any provisional application must include thorough details of the invention, just as in a non provisional application.

Non provisional patent application basics:

• A non provisional application establishes the filing date of your patent application and begins the examination process by the USPTO.
• Non provisional applications are comprised of a specification (description and claims), an oath or declaration, a drawing (when necessary), and a fee.

Patent illustration drawings are critical and can determine the success of any patent application. Therefore, it is important that all drawings are in accordance with USPTO rules.

By law, all patent applicants are required to provide a drawing of the invention if it increases the understanding of the
invention. Exceptions may include for matter compositions or processes where drawings are irrelevant for comprehension.

A Whitepaper about the possibilities in Web Analytics with Sharepoint. Attention, the document is in the XPS Format, you need the XPS Viewer…..

http://blogs.technet.com/sharepointexperts/archive/2009/10/30/hot-off-the-press-web-analytics-with-sharepoint-whitepaper.aspx

Cloud computing is gaining popularity in the lexicon of many in the IT world, but many have yet to fully move into the cloud.

The reasons vary, especially when it comes to federal agencies. Some are concerned with cost, while others are wary about security.

A number of whitepapers have recently been released regarding federal cloud computing and IT infrastructure. We examine them all and pull out the essential information just for you.

Less Is More

The Federal Enterprise Architecture (FEA) is certainly not new to anyone in the IT sphere, but different challenges arise each fiscal year because agencies are being asked to do more with less.

That is, IT managers are supposed to work to reduce the duplication of services while sharing information across government without letting costs go up.

Whew. I’m tired already.

In a recent whitepaper, Enhancing the Efficiency of Your IT Infrastructure, William Clark, CTO at CA, outlines how some agencies have already started doing this.

“Government agencies have already taken steps to reduce IT costs. Many agencies have begun deploying shared services and service centers to support human resources, payroll, financial services and more. They are consolidating data centers to reduce their numbers and associated costs. Agencies are even reducing the numbers of Internet connections to simplify security.”

In addition, Clark says most IT organizations today spend over 70 percent of their resources on maintaining existing systems.

Therefore, if an agency or organization can figure out how to use existing resources more efficiently, it can free up dollars for new projects.

This is where e-Gov comes in.

In another whitepaper, Make Your IT Organization More Effective, Clark says:

As a result of E-Gov government to government initiatives, many government agencies have begun to buy managed services such as human resources, financial management, payroll,
and so on from other agencies instead of executing them within their own operations.

In this paper, Clark outlines another reason consolidation and automation might be beneficial.

Youth.

He asserts that younger workers are often more ambitious and therefore won’t be content performing mundane maintenance tasks on legacy systems.

Automated IT management systems improve IT resource utilization and can help reduce your hiring requirements. Installing automated solutions also makes recruitment easier. By utilizing the latest management applications, you can create better jobs and support opportunities for staff, allowing them to play more strategic roles. In this way, automation can improve both
knowledge retention and recruiting efforts.

Thus, through careful examination, cloud computing could help an organization or agency do more with less.

Back in the Day

Cloud computing is by no means a new-fangled idea. (According to Wikipedia, The Cloud borrows from telephony, if you can believe it.)

But it is currently being used in newer, more expanded ways. As we said earlier, more people, organizations and agencies are operating within it, which means it’s becoming more popular.

In addition, the concept of virtualization has changed.

A recent whitepaper from IBM, Seeding the Clouds: Key Infrastructure Elements for Cloud Computing, outlines the metamorphoses.

In the 1990s, the concept of virtualization was expanded beyond virtual servers to higher levels of abstraction—first the virtual platform, including storage and network resources, and subsequently the virtual application, which has no specific underlying infrastructure. Utility computing offered clusters as virtual platforms for computing with a metered business model. More recently software as a service (SaaS) has raised the level of virtualization to the application, with a business model of charging not by the resources consumed but by the value of the application to subscribers.

As technologies like virtualization continue to grow, cloud computing will probably become more widely used.

Enter the Cloud

In his whitepaper, The Perfect Storm for Enterprise-Class Clouds, Dr. Michael Salsburg, Distinguished Engineer at Unisys, examines what he calls the ‘perfect storm’ that has created the ideal atmosphere for cloud computing.

One of the main features – and many would say benefits – of cloud computing concerns the flexibility of services offered.

Indeed, the “killer apps” for cloud computing have been Software as a Service (SaaS) applications. The expectation is that, without installing a “fat” application, the user can access the service immediately through any device that supports a ubiquitous web browser. So, simply stated, the cloud is basically a processing plant for services that can be consumed worldwide by other software or end users.

Because there is no way to predict who will need certain services or when certain services will be needed, real-time infrastructures (RTI’s) developed. RTI’s led to the creation of real-time enterprises (RTE’s), which can respond in real time to a sudden change in business conditions.

The capabilities that are necessary to provide an RTI are relatively new and have caused this “perfect storm” of technological development in the last ten years so that clouds could appear. Whether the development of RTIs caused the formation of clouds – or the other way around – is a debate for another day. But there is no doubt that the “perfect storm” includes the emergence of some key technologies: server virtualization, extreme automation and service-oriented architectures.

The last element – service-oriented architecture – is perhaps most important to the enhancement of cloud computing.

The key is that the infrastructure is architected to deliver and manage services, which is at the heart of software as a service. Because the infrastructure’s elasticity is driven by the need to provide quality of service, services need to be identified, monitored and governed. Emerging technologies are starting to appear that manage the “product” being delivered by clouds – services.

And, again, we are back to efficiency. The business model of a cloud allows for the more efficient use of existing resources.

IBM’s whitepaper says this helps IT organizations to repurpose resources that might be going unused or have been forgotten.

Clouds provide request-driven, dynamic allocation of computing resources for a mix of workloads on a massively scalable, heterogeneous and virtualized infrastructure. The value of a fully automated provisioning process that is security compliant and automatically customized to user’s needs results in:

• Significantly reduced time to introduce technologies and innovations;
• Cost savings in labor for designing, procuring and building hardware and software platforms;
• Cost savings by avoiding human error in the configuration of security, networks and the software provisioning process;
• Cost elimination through greater use and reuse of existing resources, resulting in better efficiency.

Show Me the Money

This brings us to the budget at your agency.

According to a recent whitepaper by Ted Alford and Gwen Morton of Booz Allen Hamilton, The Economics of Cloud Computing, the President’s budget for FY10 includes $75.8 billion in IT spending.

While this might sound like a lot, and is a 7 percent increase from FY09, the times are a-changin’.

The FY11 IT budget is projected to be almost $88 billion – and it’s clear that the government can’t sustain such a spending trajectory.

There are three groups, according to the whitepaper, that encompass what’s going on in the federal government right now: public cloud adopters, hybrid cloud adopters, and private cloud adopters.

Each group is moving at its own pace for a variety of reasons, but the paper suggests that the costs of moving to the cloud ideally should be wrapped in with an agency’s data center budget.

Data centers capture the most significant portion of the costs associated with moving IT infrastructure to the cloud. However, agencies publicly report only their “consolidated” IT infrastructure expenditures, which include end-user support systems (eg: desktops, laptops) and telecommunications. Additional spending on application-specific IT infrastructure is typically rolled up into individual IT investments.

Throughout the paper, the authors explain how they developed their own data profile that they feel best represents actual agency IT spending.

Their conclusion is that, while some agencies such as the Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA) are already well on their way to implementing cloud computing, many agencies will have to wait one to two years because of the way budgets are developed and implemented.

The timeframe for reprogramming IT funding to support cloud migrations is likely to be at least 1 – 2 years, given that agencies formulate budgets 18 months before receiving appropriations. Specifically, IT investment requests are developed each spring and submitted to OMB in September, along with an agency’s program budget request, for the following government fiscal year (GFY). OMB reviews agency submissions in the fall and can implement funding changes via passback decisions (generally in late November) before submitting the President’s budget to Congress in February. Theoretically, the earliest opportunity for OMB to push agencies to revise their IT budgets to support a transition to the cloud will be fall 2009; however, agencies typically only have about 1 month to incorporate changes to their IT portfolios during passback. To give GSA and OMB time to develop more detained guidance, as well as necessary procurement mechanisms and vehicles, it is more likely that OMB will direct or encourage agencies to plan for cloud migrations during the FY 12 budget cycle (starting in the spring of 2010).

In short, it won’t simply be up to agency IT managers to push for cloud computing.

Certain agencies within the federal government, such as OMB, GSA and NIST will have to continue to monitor the situation and give IT managers clear guidance concerning all aspects of migration to the cloud.

3 recent redbooks on the MQ FTE (File Transfer edition), the most reliable file transfer you might need.

IBM WebSphere MQ File Transfer Edition Solution Overview -
IBM WebSphere MQ File Transfer Edition provides an enterprise-grade managed file transfer capability that is both robust and easy to use. WebSphere MQ File Transfer Edition exploits the proven reliability and connectivity of WebSphere MQ to transfer files across a wide range of platforms and networks. WebSphere MQ File Transfer Edition takes advantage of existing WebSphere MQ networks, and you can integrate it easily with existing file transfer systems.
This IBM Redpaper publication provides an introduction to the design, function, and use of WebSphere MQ File Transfer Edition and describes how it relates to existing file transfer technologies and other business systems. Later sections of this paper describe the management, auditing, and reporting capabilities of WebSphere MQ File Transfer Edition.
- 29 July 2009

Managed File Transfer for SOA using IBM WebSphere MQ File Transfer Edition
For many organizations, the exchange of files between business systems remains a common and important integration methodology. Files are the simplest unit of data to exchange and often represent the lowest common denominator to connect disparate systems for an enterprise infrastructure.
A managed file transfer system introduces control, management, and auditabilty to address problems that arise when ad-hoc file transfers are used to integrate or connect business systems in the enterprise.
IBM WebSphere MQ File Transfer Edition provides an enterprise-grade managed file transfer capability that is both robust and easy to use. WebSphere MQ File Transfer Edition exploits the proven reliability and connectivity of WebSphere MQ to transfer files across a wide range of platforms and networks.WebSphere MQ File Transfer Edition takes advantage of existing WebSphere MQ networks, and you can integrate it easily with existing file transfer systems.
- 03 August 2009

Getting Started with WebSphere MQ File Transfer Edition V7
WebSphere MQ File Transfer Edition provides an enterprise-ready managed file transfer capability that is both robust and easy-to-use. WebSphere MQ File Transfer Edition exploits the proven reliability and connectivity of WebSphere MQ to transfer files across a wide range of platforms and networks.
In this IBM Redbooks publication, we provide a complete guide for getting started with WebSphere MQ File Transfer Edition. In Part one of the book, we provide a technical overview of the product and provide installation, configuration, and administration guidance for distributed and z/OS platforms.
In Part two, we provide a series of scenarios to show how you can use WebSphere MQ File Transfer Edition to create managed file transfer solutions. These scenarios range from simple point-to-point transfers through to resource monitoring and complex scripted transfers that include the use of Apache Ant. We describe each scenario step-by-step, which allows you to follow along in your own environment.
In Part three of this book, we discuss topics, such as security, user exits, and the integration of WebSphere MQ File Transfer Edition with other products and solutions.
- 23 August 2009

Dear Friends of Kovair,

Here’s a whitepaper that I recently wrote in response to a potential customer query about the value of Omnibus Integration Solutions from Kovair.  It provides a brief summary of the reasons why customers should consider the value of integrations of best of breed tools from multiple vendors using the Kovair Omnibus Integration Bus and Platform. Your ALM and ITSM solutions will be greatly enhanced as a result of these integrations. 

I hope you enjoy reading it and look into it further if you think it will be of interest to your company or organization. As always, your comments are keenly sought and appreciated!

Click to get your free whitepaper now! Value Propositions for Tool Integrations Whitepaper

Best,

Bipin Shah
CEO & Chairman
Kovair Software
www.Kovair.com

I don’t often write posts that simply say “hey, did you see this post over here?”. These echoes in the blogosphere don’t really add much value, and are sometimes symptomatic of people being measured by how many blog posts they write to meet some arbitrary marketing activity metric, rather than adding quality.

(Aside: the same applies to a series of posts about 6 related features of some software or comparing 5 alternative products which would have made much more sense written as a single cohesive article, but failed to tick the box for 10 blog posts per month. You get what you measure, or WYMIWYG)

But today, I though this was important enough to just say – have you seen this post on the Excel Team blog about improvements to functions in Excel 2010? Now that one’s a week or so old now, but today there was an even more important post with a link to a draft whitepaper with more information.

I have linked to the post , not the pdf file directly as it is only a draft, and hopefully the post will get an edit or at least a comment when a newer or final version is available. This document is for those who like to understand the details, and for any sceptics who might say “well, they said it was accurate last time, how do we know it’s any better now?” – it does sound a bit like washing powder ads who always tell us that this time round it will get things even whiter and brighter and cleaner than ever (just like they said before).

There are a couple of typos in the draft (the floor.precise function for example has an obvious chunk of copy and paste from the ceiling.precise function for example), and there are some things not made very clear (for example in most cases it only describes the new behaviour, not the old for comparison or for explanation of the difference and why the new way is more accurate).

It lists the MOD function in the section on functions whose accuracy has been improved. Did you know that MOD gave inaccurate results on older versions of Excel? I didn’t. In fact, it doesn’t – it gives a completely accurate result or fails with a #NUM error if the divisor goes into the number more than 2^27 times as described here. I think this is distinct from being inaccurate in the way the statistical functions have often been criticised.

Similarly the RAND function is listed but its problems not described in any detail – I can only assume that the function is flawed in that it does not give a perfectly even distribution of results and is therefore “weighted” to some extent. Since I only ever use it to produce dummy data for examples used in my Excel training courses, it does not really matter to me if it not truly statistically pure, but I am sure to others it is vitally important what algorithm is used to generate the results (it’s now the Mersenne Twister, for those who care, but this fact is not from the whitepaper, it’s in a comment to the original post made by Jessica Liu).

Anyway, the bugs and inaccuracies that are discussed in the whitepaper are all now fixed (but it does not say this in the whitepaper, merely leaves it implied), and already works in the Technical Preview. Some of the other changes came too late for TP but should be in the public Beta when that gets released.

I expect the changes to naming conventions will also help people who use the statistical functions a lot (I’m not one of those) or have to make sense of others’ work. The convention of .precise added to a function name seems to mean “according to a precise definition” rather than “inherently more accurate”. I would have though .strict might be less ambiguous and similar to the use of the term in other fields (eg web design using XHTML versus XHTML strict).

Has anybody had real issues with these inaccuracies in the past? (and had you even noticed?)

Are you using other software tools to avoid the problem in Excel, and will these changes allow or encourage you to switch back?

Social Media Marketing is all about niche markets, it’s not about numbers. Nor is there a standardized metrics method. Therefore the methods for measuring campaign successes vary. When creating the metrics for a campaign, it is important to measure  what matters most to CWF: donations, visits, actions. For SMM, you measure actionable information. It’s in real time — as an organization, we must monitor and respond to conversation stream in services like Twitter

Resources required

• Large-scale campaigns often done through agencies, but community manager is in-house
• not a one-time campaign: requires ongoing maintenance and management

ROI

• numbers of posts/comments/linked/visits / PV/donations/ subscriptions/ shop
• profiles of people to show ROI
• 20%  on market research

Success matrix

• Create your own: Google blog search, twitter search, Google trends (keywords), delicious (have staffers link with specific tag – set as RSS news), Backtype – comments
• PV, # posts, comments, sentiment of discussion, Google page rank, technorati, number of event attendees, authenticity on technorati, sales by site
• PV on news releases
• emails: 25 – 40% click through rate

Actual ROI

• drove traffic & sales
  • $
  • percent ROI
• true sales
• increase organic search

What to measure

• Gestures
  • vote, publish, comment, tag, forward, view, link
• Qualities
  • frequency, tone, prominence

• Composite Indices
  • engagement, influence, community

How to know if engaging audience (5 c’s of engagement)

1. Creating
2. Critiquing
3. Chatting
4. Collecting
5. Clicking

Timelines

• Daily
  • Review feeds & metrics to identify trends & need for immediate action
• Weekly
  • Report on trends with recommendations for action

I’m working on the first draft of an update of a white paper I wrote years ago. I will be crowdsourcing the edits on it. As soon as the first draft is up it will be posted here for download.

Also I am working on another special project that is alluded to in the tags section of this blog. Stay tuned and hopefully I’ll have pictures and other things here. I would love help with that as well once it’s up and running as to ideas to improve it all.

In the runup to the Web 2.0 Summit later this month, Tim O’Reilly and John Battelle have been outlining their vision of what comes after Web 2.0.  Their answer: Web Squared.  They’ve set this out in a white paper (also available as a 1.3Mb PDF), a webcast,  and a Slideshare presentation:

They say:

Ever since we first introduced the term “Web 2.0,” people have been asking, “What’s next?” Assuming that Web 2.0 was meant to be a kind of software version number (rather than a statement about the second coming of the Web after the dotcom bust), we’re constantly asked about “Web 3.0.” Is it the semantic web? The sentient web? Is it the social web? The mobile web? Is it some form of virtual reality?

It is all of those, and more.

They set out a vision in some detail – it’s well worth a read if you’re interested in what the leading lights of Web 2.0 think happens next.  In a nutshell (as you’d expect from O’Reilly) it’s  ’Web 2.0 meets the world’. The boundary between the web and the real, physical world is in some ways clear, but in other ways very blurred, and the transition across it is one I am fascinated by.

As with Web 2.0, of course, lots of the things they proclaim as part of Web Squared can be seen going on right now.  As William Gibson said, the future is already here, it’s just not evenly distributed.

There’s smarter algorithms to infer collective intelligence from the ‘information shadow’ of real-world objects, cast in space and time by more sensors and more input routes; and smarter ways of visualising and exploring the outputs, and delivering them to people in more contexts and situations.  And all of this happening in ever-closer-to real time.

The ‘information shadow’ and ‘new sensory inputs’ is exactly the potential that Speckled Computing is mining and looking in to (and I’m very interested in pursuing for learning).  And the increased sensors/input routes, building collective intelligence from many individuals collaborating with low effort is the sort of thing that iSpot is doing – using geolocations and photos from a wide range of individuals to build a bigger picture.

(As a bit of an aside, one ‘key takeaway’ is that ‘A key competency of the Web 2.0 era is discovering implied metadata, and then building a database to capture that metadata and/or foster an ecosystem around it.’ – I’m certainly convinced that’s a more scalable system than one where humans do the hard work of marking data up semantically by hand.)

The potential for the web to learn more and better about the world is huge – and as the web learns more, we too learn more.  As they say, we are meeting the Internet, and it is us. And we’re getting smarter.

note: this piece was originally published on behalf of bnet at http://blogs.bnet.co.uk/sterling-performance/2009/09/23/five-tips-for-b2b-social-media-marketing/

Business brands using social media are starting to see the benefits. But are there any best practices they can use? Guessing that the average businessperson may not know where to start, George Krautzel and Bill Connfrom online agency Toolbox.com have issued a whitepaper on that subject. Here are some ideas:

1. Set objectives first. Don’t head on towards social media just because it’s hip. Who is your target audience and what are you trying to achieve. Are you using the right media outlets for the audience you want to reach?
2. Build a roadmap to engagement. Start advertising on social media platforms and then slowly engage in conversations. “Entry in social media can be as simple as advertising in an online community”, as Conn and Krautzel point out.
3. Examine the costs and benefits of building your own community, as opposed to tapping into existing communities.Building your own community is a lot more costly and exacting than joining an existing one that fits your needs.
4. Transparency is a must. A marketer has to say that he is a marketer, and that’s that. A comprehensive guide to disclosure, as it’s often called, courtesy of the Social Media Business Council. So-called Flogs (fake blogs) are a no-go area,
5. A good marketer listens to what is said about their brand. It’s inppropriate to control feedback, so you should be able to withstand criticism and use negative feedback to improve your service.

I agree with most of Toolbox.com’s advice, but I’d add a couple of caveats:

• Words like “campaign” and “targeting” aren’t really appropriate for social media, in my view.
• And whereas Toolbox advises you to get started with online advertising and then to learn how to engage in conversations, I’d do just the opposite. My ultimate best practice advice would be to ask permission and learn by doing, slowly but surely, one step at a time.

I’ll be picking this theme up in a post soon, but in the meantime, you can download the toolbox social media whitepaper here.

Let me know if you have any other tips to share.

I’ve been thinking about the situation the organizers of the New Media Atlanta conference are in today. They held an event last Friday that was well run, but criticized broadly for it’s misses in content and format. The use of tool called BackNoise and it’s value, or lack thereof, has been the star of the conversations.

I’m sure the organizers worked hard to put the event together and should be proud of themselves for pulling it off. I’ve never tried to organize something that large and respect those who are up to the challenge. They’ve continued to be engaged in the post-conference twitter stream and I’m glad they are. But what should they do now? What lessons should they learn?

I think companies get into these kinds of situations a lot. A product launch is good but not what you hoped. Or, you’ve made a change to a service that some like and others don’t. How do you energize your fans while admitting you could have done things better? Is it wise to defend yourself against unfair criticism and lies or do you just fuel the fire? Should you care most about your loudest critic, your biggest fan, or everyone in the middle? (A panel weighing in on issues like this would have made New Media Atlanta better.)

I’d love the organizers of New Media Atlanta to continue to show they are listening. I think they need to stay engaged with the conference’s fans and mentioners on Twitter to reinforce the good and build a following for next year’s conference. I’m not sure they should try to answer their critics now. I’d love to debate it, but I feel like the risk of sounding petty or whining isn’t worth it since your biggest critics are going to have a longer, more involved conversion path. So, I think they should wait until the negativity dies down and then do the unexpected– re-open the “In what ways did we suck? ” discussion. Only this time they’d own it.

I think they need to sit down and write a lessons learned whitepaper and offer it for free to the social media community. They should find their biggest critics and interview them. They should look at the various channels (Twitter, BackNoise, blogs, flickr, twitpic, etc.) to see what information was most shared to find out what they did right. There should be success metrics like, “65% of social media mentions during the conference were quotes from speakers” and “BackNoise was used 30% more during Brogran’s talk which 75% of people enjoyed.” Oh, and, “Speakers who used PowerPoint were 600% less popular than those who didn’t.”

They should talk about how their business sees a need to gauge audience preferences ahead of time and use social media to fine tune during next year’s conference. The title could be, “Social Media: Never be Blind-sighted.” It would be awesome and I’d definitely be back next year to see what they learned. Otherwise, I’ll probably pass.

What do you think?

 Today’s AppExchange newsletter includes a whitepaper called, “What to Look for When Evaluating Cloud Integration Solutions.”

When you’re evaluating integration-as-a-service solutions in the context of cloud computing and within the context of your architecture, the paper outlines the following as essential:

1. True multitenant versus hosted offering
2. Ease of use
3. Try and buy / rapid deployment
4. IT or LOB usability
5. Scalability
6. Vendor viability

You can download the paper here (registration required) and sign up for the AppExchange newsletter here.

This IBM Redguide publication is a supplement to the Future of Learning: Executive Insights Report. It provides an in-depth investigation into three enabling technologies and provides actionable guidance to aid CIO strategic and investment planning efforts. Specifically it discusses the value and role of consumer IT, open technologies, and cloud computing in the future of education. In addition, this guide provides real-world examples of the how these technologies work.

This IBM Redpaper publication is one in a series of service-oriented architecture (SOA) papers that feature a case study involving a fictitious company named JKHL Enterprises (JKHLE).

The focus of the case study in this paper is the Web 2.0 SOA scenario, and how JKHLE uses three realizations from this scenario to transform the company’s travel agency business. This paper focuses specifically on the following Web 2.0 realizations:

• RESTful Service Creation
• Rendering and Consuming RESTful Services
• User Interface (UI) Composition and Communication

Suggested Framework

a)  Outline Concept

• Determine the objective – decide what want to accomplish with this campaign using SMM
• How SMM ties into the promotion of the campaign

b)  Audience

• Identify exact target audience based on campaign’s criteria
  • Matched to specific demographics, psychographics, affinities, locations
  • Identify segments and their expected behaviors:
    • Awareness – ‘Readers’
    • Support for the Cause – ‘Signers’
    • Recruitment – ‘Encouragers’
    • Mobilization – ‘Participators’
    • Action – “Influencers”
  • Determine target audience’s affinities – What are they into?
    • Music groups, sports, movies, books, TV, brands, etc.
  • Identify Key Influencers or VIP within this community
    • Usually fans with most Friends, posts, tweets, etc.

c) Metrics

• determine what will be a successful campaign

d) Determine best reward

• Incentivize Influencers to expose brand to their fan bases
• provide incentives
  • gifts, cash, acknowledgement, rankings, points
• Maximize engagement, max rewards (ranked):

1. Cash
2. Gifts
3. Discounts
4. contests
5. Points
6. Rankings
7. Badges/visibility

e) Determine best SM to pursue for campaign

• Determine level of interaction required
  • Scale of smallest to largest: view, rate, review, react, create (CWF eg: wikis, videos, widgets, WAG notebook)

f) Set guidelines for delivery

• be genuine, unique, true, consistent
• commitment – participate, bring others in
• supporter feedback

g) Act & Promote

• Deliver campaign
• Create landing pages on CWF

h) Maintenance

• Requires resources, time, dialogue, conversation
• set criteria on actionables:
  • what to respond/what not
• Steph and Stacey responsible for responding
• ongoing rewards and incentives

Keys to success

• release control
• they are our representatives
• how to start community
  • kickstart – social ads on FB

Social Media Options

• Twitter
• E-blasts

• Facebook
• Wikis on CWF

• Q&A
• Flickr & Photos

• Google maps
• Delicious

• Social contesting
• Blogs

• Mobile

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