Mobile Fusion encompasses the company’s enterprise server technology for BlackBerry devices and combines it with mobile device management capabilities for Android and iOS devices, such as the iPhone and the iPad, to enable IT departments within organisations manage multiple devices from a single web-based ‘control room’.

The technology is still in the early stages of beta testing with a limited number of customers. Full availability is expected to launch in late March 2012.

Now, you can have a full analysis about your followers. Schmap has launched an automated free service which called “Know Your Twitter Followers” for any individual, company, or brand to easily get access for the demographic information about their Twitter followers. It will be very useful especially for brands and companies as they will be able to know more about their consumers.

To demonstrate its ability, Schmap has analyzed some top celebrities’ profiles such as Lady Gaga, Oprah Winfrey, Sarah palin, Justin Bieber, Tiger Woods, Charlie Sheen, and Donald Trump. The result is Charlie Sheen’s followers are mostly iPhone users who tweet a lot and like to party, while most Bill Gates’ followers are using Firefox. However, you will need to pay in order to get the full analysis.

Paul Hallett, CEO for Schmap, said, “If they [users] are using it for business, they can gain valuable insight into their audience that they can use commercially to produce content and services to their followers.” An in-depth analysis costs between $39.95 and $149.95 for most brands.

Social media is not as simple as ‘money in – money out’. Very often it is nigh on impossible to establish a direct link between the money you invest in a social media campaign and the money you get out of it, but that’s not to say that you can’t do it. What you need to do is look at the role it can play in the buying process and measure its performance according to the way it fulfils that role. In other words, social media is often part of the process that leads to ROI and should be judged as such.

So how do you measure the contribution your social media marketing is making? Start with the objectives you have set:

• Raising awareness: first and foremost, social media is an excellent awareness tool, enabling you to create and distribute content, start conversations, and engage in existing ones, all with the aim of creating additional ‘buzz’ around your brand. If this is your goal, then your contribution will be measured in terms of the amount of ‘buzz’ you succeed in creating, and also the mood of this ‘buzz’.
• Engaging with your target market: the next step involves taking your activities further down the funnel. You must aim to engage with your customers and potential customers, inviting participation in your social media activities. In this case, your contribution is measured by the level of engagement you achieve – how many people respond to your communications and in what way?
• Driving traffic: it may be to your site or to another platform, but social media can be used to drive traffic. This objective is simple to measure as it’s purely a case of numbers.
• Generating leads: using social media to generate leads probably involves one or more of the above objectives as well. First you need to drive traffic, and then you need to encourage the visitors you generate to leave their details. Again, success is easy to measure, as it will be linked to the number of leads you generate.

In addition to your objectives, you also need to look at the tools you have selected to achieve them. The success of each tool can be measured in different ways depending on what you are trying to achieve:

- If you’re using Twitter, your metrics will develop over time. When building ‘buzz’, you are looking to recruit followers and get your message out there by tweeting regularly, but engagement, driving traffic and lead generation involve positive action in the form of retweets and clicks on links.
- Blogs are obviously there to be read, but ideally you are looking for engagement in the form of comments, traffic driving in the form of clicks on links, or even lead generation via a form linked to a blog.
- Networks such as LinkedIn enable you to create discussions, highlight content to read and even send targeted mails to your members. These different actions provide different metrics depending on your objectives.
- Video sites such as YouTube are primarily measured by the number of videos viewed, but there are deeper forms of engagement, such as comments and (if you allow it) embedding of your videos on other web sites, plus visitors to your site or other content via links you place alongside videos.

Speak the right language
Once you have confirmed your overall objectives, tools, and metrics, you need to set clear goals based on defined the metrics. These should be actual performance figures based on current benchmarks, and you also need to be sure that the relevant tracking is in place in order to measure results. The important point, however, is that these are numerical targets you can show to your boss to prove that your campaign is measurable. During the campaign, you can also look to translate them into a format that is more familiar – many people present the results of social media campaigns alongside an equivalent media spend’, an estimation of how much it would have been necessary to spend in order to generate a similar number of impressions / clicks or to reach a similar number of prospects.

Measuring the ROI of a social media campaign is rarely based on a standard formula – it all depends on what you are trying to achieve and how you are trying to achieve it. The key is to set goals based on the tools you will be using, and to make these goals numerical and easy to understand. While these goals will often not be financial, you will be in a position to say whether or not you have achieved your objectives and thus a successful return on your investment.

(Content originally created by B2B Marketing)

Google earns the bulk of its US$24bn turnover from paid search advertising, which represents less than 10% of the clicks on search engines.SEO is about capturing the remaining 90 per cent and is an investment that can yield enormous returns to your organisation, if you understand the critical success factors. These factors can be implemented across your online profile in short order and there’s never been a better time to do so. Investing in SEO will ensure your business is maximising your online investment, is more visible and ranked higher by Google and ultimately help you reach more potential customers.

The seminars will be presented in our media suite by Jonathan Smith, MTM’s SEO project manager, who has over a decade of experience in the discipline. While the technology constantly evolves the principles do not. The goal of this seminar is to arm you with enough information to understand the core of SEO from which you will be able to make more informed decisions about how your organization can tap into the single largest media channel in the world.

By the end of the workshop the participants will:

• Understand the fundamentals of SEO and its benefits

• Have an insight into Keyword Research and its importance

• Have an understanding of how Google prioritises the search results

• Perform a basic SEO Audit

• Set a priority list of actions

• Have an awareness of Google Analytics

RSVP essential. To book, email info@merchanttechnology.co.uk… continental breakfast included!

Consider this scenario, you have just opened a small office in New York  to manage your US business interests, but after a year you decide to send half your UK workforce over to the Big Apple to manage all your international sales. Suddenly hundreds of staff members are now in a new city with little or no understanding of the practical challenges they will face, both work related and recreational. Historically, a relocation pack could be produced. Often designed by the HR department, it would contain helpful information and contact numbers, etc…but it is effectively a closed document, unable to be changed depending on an individual’s circumstances and experiences.

So what is the alternative? MTM was recently asked this question when one of its clients made the decision to relocate its corporate headquarters to Germany. Following the successful relocation of the organisation’s management team, a larger proportion of its employees were offered the opportunity to sample life on the continent. With that in mind, the company approached MTM to devise a simple but effective platform to share information, somewhere both the organisation and the team already on the ground could share their knowledge and experiences with those fresh off the plane. And not only that, the client also wanted those arriving to be able to pose questions, which could in turn be answered by those who’d been in the situation for some time.

The solution

After careful consideration , MTM presented a series of ideas, ranging from a micro-site designed specifically for those who had moved to the new country, to a dynamic online Flash based application, where users searched a question database and viewed predefined answers gathered from an extensive survey of those already on the ground.

Neither option quite captured the sense of collaboration and peer-to-peer sharing MTM and the client wanted to create and convey so a third option was chosen. This was a self-contained, locally hosted wiki site, developed by MTM using open source technology, specifically for the client. This route allowed anyone to pose a question, create a response or add their own views to an existing topic but with the advantage of being specific to the client and with added security to ensure only company employees and their families could use the site. The open source nature of the wiki package also enables useful add-ons, such as translation services and video embedding, which have been developed by third parties, to be used.

For those not familiar with a wiki based site and how it works, Wikipedia themselves define it as: ‘A wiki is a website that allows the creation and editing of any number of interlinked web pages via a web browser using a simplified mark-up language or a WYSIWYG text editor. Wikis are typically powered by open source wiki software and are often used collaboratively by multiple users.’

So what are the benefits to your organisation over other platforms?

Wikis can serve almost any purpose and examples of their use include community websites, corporate intranets, knowledge management systems and note services. Wikis provide an incredible opportunity for sharing knowledge between company colleagues, those working within the same industry – regardless of organisation, designers and developers, teams working on a specific project or even as a tool to maintain relationships with the community in which your organisation operates.

The flexibility of the wiki platform, combined with web professional development means the control stays with you, the administrator. You are able have the final say over almost every aspect of the site’s functionality (levels of access). For example, you can define editing rights to permit changing, adding or removing material. Others may permit access without enforcing access control. Other rules can be imposed for organizing content. And that is one of the best things about a wiki; if you want everyone to be able to edit all the content, fine. If you would prefer that only a select number of administrators are capable of making changes, also fine. If you would like a number of core articles to be restricted but allow new members to still pose questions or respond to an existing question – not a problem, you are in control.

If you have a requirement to cost effectively communicate with your team or a desire to create a programme for collaboration and discussion, give us a call and let MTM demonstrate what this globally accepted and understood platform could do for your business.

Arguably, presenting is the most important setting in which to forge a business relationship. Foul it up and it’s all over. However a presentation is not just an opportunity to share information. A successful presentation needs to align with a defined purpose or goal in order for you to deliver something that actually achieves the required results. The main objective of the majority of business presentations is to clearly express your company’s expertise in relation to a specific issue, but most importantly your content must be relevant to your audience. It is imperative that you understand your crowd so that you can build in relevant points that will interest the listener and relate to their business goals or objectives.

Presentation graphics

Today smart businesses are placing as much emphasis on the look and feel of their presentations as they would any other part of the communications mix. In a constantly connected business environment, audience attention spans are short and business presentations must excite and stimulate the audience, not turn them off. Incorporating 3D visual design such as stills, illustrations and animation can give a presentation stand out and is a critical tool for today’s marketer. 3D graphics can be a powerful way to help sell products and is particularly useful when showcasing a product for the first time. It is very important to note that this type of visual graphic doesn’t replace traditional photography, but gives you greater flexibility with your communications. That said, poorly executed visuals can detract from the content and make slides look unprofessional. Powerful imagery will enhance a PowerPoint presentation but it is essential that the slide design is given adequate consideration and that any imagery – animated or stills, is well executed and closely aligned with the subject matter.

Make every word count

To ensure that each slide makes an impact and strengthens the point that you are trying to communicate, aim to use no more than six words per slide and a strong visual. If written content is essential, limit yourself to a maximum of seven lines of text with no more than seven words per line. However, if your slide presentation has a lot of content and requires multiple paragraphs and several bullet points, it indicates that you need to reconsider the format and a corporate document is probably more suitable. Statistics and data are another vital component of business presentations – graphs and charts are an obvious way of displaying this sort of information in an easy to interpret format. Displaying charts in creative ways can help clarify your point or move the audience’s attention on to the next focus, for example by fading a bar chart into the horizon line before showing the next graph. There is no substitute for taking time to plan and prepare a presentation. If you want your audience to engage with what you are saying you need to spend time finding examples and supporting evidence. One way to do this is to quote specific statements or statistics to back up your content. Incorporating third party expertise or endorsement into presentations can also be a very powerful way of framing your goals so that they appear credible. When you approach the construction of your presentation in this way, your content will align with your goal to build awareness of your brand, solution or expertise.

Keep your presentation front of mind

B2B buying is still largely about building a relationship with your audience and proving that you can deliver on what you promise. However, commercial decisions are rarely taken there and then. There’s usually a huddle a few hours, days or weeks afterwards where content is shared before external approval is sought. In today’s constantly connected digital world this is easier than ever before through both email and social media channels such as Twitter and Flickr. You can make the circulation process even easier for your audience by using websites such as Slideshare and Slide.com which offer a quick and easy way to share presentations and video to help you reach your secondary audience and maximise the longevity of your content. Slideshare is also a great way of optimising your content online as it has a high SEO ranking, sending your presentation to the top of the search listings. What’s more if a customer or colleague needs to review the content once it has been presented they can access it easily, removing the need to send FTP links or large files across the Internet. Today’s digital world of high speed Internet and instant messaging will certainly help to ensure that your content isn’t forgotten once the presenter leaves the room, however this is only half the job. You need to be confident that your presentation slides will communicate your key messages without the presenter, and handouts will support the communication at this stage. They shouldn’t be a duplication of the presentation slides but should act as a narrative document that contains all of the key facts and figures that you discuss during your presentation. This will help your audience to recall key information once the presentation is over and they are back at the office and will also make the content more powerful for those that weren’t there first time round.

The campaign is designed to encourage other ISPs, web companies and hardware developers to update their systems ahead of IPv4’s expiration.

To highlight the new possibilities opened up by IPv6, there will be, among other things, a public cat feeding, where cats will be fed remotely using an IPv6 connection.

This is very new technology and it is anticipated a great many new avenues and new online experiences will be made possible once its adoption is widespread.

Richard Fletcher, chief operating officer at Plusnet, explains, “The address space used by the current version of Internet Protocol is expected to run out this year.

“There are a lot of companies doing great work in preparation for the change but without further action, we run the risk of stifling access to new web based services, which could reduce customer choice and limit functionality and access for web-users across the world.”