Are you the next Nike?

How do you build a brand around your name, your ideas and opinions? The power of social networking, blogging and micro blogging has provided a platform that makes reaching out to millions of people easy. However there is a catch to this method and as the saying goes “you only get out what you put in”. As spoken previously in my blog about leveraging the long tale the internet has provided a platform for true exposure for any niche if marketed correctly. So what are some of the techniques that are being used to get your name out on the internet.

• Seamless integration of social networks, and build your name on various social networking services


With there being hundreds of different services available at ones disposal, generally the well established and popular services are the best to invest time into. Currently Facebook and twitter have the strangle hold of users and are excellent ways to leverage your digital identity. I’ve found that mashable.com posted two excellent posts on how to uses facebook and twitter to build your brand.


• Establish relationships with others in your niche, adn Market your Product


There is your audience, and the power of recommendation from peers in your niche can only be an advantage.


• Active Blog, and Own your Content


With most of the attention today being drawn to appeal of micro blogging, the blog is still a very important selling point in your overall identity. As it is an extension of your ideas and opinions and acts as a portfolio/resume. With increased activity and community around your blog builds foundation of strong search engine results.


• Monitor Personal Branding




• Simply Google the blog/company/name whatever your are marketing as your product, as it gives an idea of where you site against the rest
• Market your blog through various other aggregation services, like technorati, Yahoo! updates and blog lines.
• Monitor followers and comments on social networking services like twitter and facebook, look at followers statistics after updates via blog

Unfortunately there is no set way of marketing one self online, however taking advantage of the trends online (go where the people are) and provide a reason why people want to listen to you, your blog and only increase in traffic.

~Matt

Cloud Computing = Normal regular network + hype???

Currently it seems we are in this form of transformation phase and a battle between software as a service and locally run applications. As the much quoted cloud computing terminology being associated and marketed as the next big internet revolution. Google has built their business based on offering services online either through Google Docs or Gmail. Where Microsoft is acknowledging the importance to be in this field and releasing their own revision of office 2010 in a from where it is marketed as a service available online.

This can be seen by Larry Ellison, the CEO and founder of Oracle during the TechPulse360 conference. Where Larry points out very strongly that what really is meant by the term cloud computing, a re-invention of the word networking.

Some key points of what Larry feels about cloud computing

1. Cloud computing has been the past and present of computing not only seen to be the future.
2. The cloud is still a computer network
3. As long as there is an internet there will be hardware and local based software, because what runs these services online.
4. Software as a service is not new, his example Netsuite

However in all this i think the industry has got caught up in the idea that cloud computing is a new technology. Where the focus has been drawn towards the marketability of offering these services online. Where the real story is not that cloud computing as a platform is new, but through technologies like ajax, RSS, XML, KML and API’s have been used to expand the capabilities of what the internet cloud computing is truly capable of. Perhaps what is shifting is the approach that consumers are no longer required to have powerful machines, but access to high speed broadband internet, and the massive explosion of netbooks and smartphones in the market can be a sign of things to come.

~Matt

Enterprise Blogging Practices

To build a strong online presence and to take full advantage of what Enterprise 2.0 offers, lies in how a company regards the importance of blogging. As this is what builds a community around the company or product you want to highlight. Where the everyday blog has now transformed into a powerful avenue for marketing, advertising, product discovery, customer engagement and online branding. What has exploded is the adoption of micro blogging services, for quick and easy relay of information or content to a large group of people.

So how are some companies using bogging services to their advantage. One company that i want to highlight is Intel. Alongside their company blog that has been in operating since 2006 (which is updated daily), they have taken to micro-blogging and twitter as one their main enterprise blogging tool. A post from Intel highlights the different accounts that they are currently using on twitter to promote their various departments and interests. A couple of examples show that they have an account that is used to update their developers and participants to the Intel Developers Forum with latest news, an account that highlights the influences that Intel as a company has had one some people and highlighting their efforts in research or product development, where more can be seen here.

So what are the main advantages and disadvantages to a company having a open blogging approach, well Intel’s main blog and twitter accounts, provided readers with a rich sense of community and encourage involvement of those who are interesting in the company. It also provides a way that investors and stakeholders of a company can look into how the company is going in a non official sense. Twitter provides a constant stream of information for those who are following, as well as use the information and traffic as a real-time market intelligence tool.

One of the down falls this this amount of information sharing is the idea that competitors are looking at what Intel are doing and replicating what works well. However this is expected to happen and should never stop progress online. Another main down side to running a popular corporate blog is that, the information that is post must be heavily reviewed. As hundred of thousands could be reading a single post, anything out side of the blogging guidelines could have some very serious consequences to the overall identity of a company.

Overall i think that Intel has managed their online identity very well with an excellent range of Enterprise tools.
~matt

Improving the DigitalOrgs Community

First off i would like to say that as a unit it is looking that we have quite a large number of people who have been very active and constantly contribute very informative posts. Located on the units wiki, there is a page that has been dedicated to listing to various number of web 2.0 services and sites.
I have personally taken the approach of expanding my del.ic.ious posts to cover topics that are related to this unit, where by i have been tagging sites with “inb346”. I think that is one of the easy way to sort through the large number of sites we view while researching and that could come in hand for others as well (I have a post that has more details about this).
What i think could be a very interesting exercise, is implement the same approach of many of the professional blogging sites like engadget and lifehacker, and have one blog with all of us contributing in the one place. Each week there could be a pool to topics that could be covered and individuals can take charge of that post. Where it wouldn’t be long until be have a constant stream of content made available, hopefully referenced and draw a lot of traffic.

~matt

Twitter in content distribution

As more and more business are looking to increase their digital identity, twitter has seemingly become one of the most effective tools in achieving this. Where numerous company’s are using twitter to get their core messages across to a large number of people. An excellent reference is the Twitter 101, that highlights what twitter can do for many businesses. Elaborating on practices that businesses should consider when building their digital identity. Not to mention case studies that outline what practices some business have used to maximized their potential online.

Sound and Vision Mag has compiled a list of companies that are using twitter as a form of digital distribution of their content, as well as promotional offers and reviews on products. This only highlights that twitter is more than a way to share “What are you doing?”. The links below are examples of some of the companies that have been using twitter to expand their content.

http://twitter.com/Disneypixar
http://twitter.com/SonyPlayStation
http://twitter.com/SamsungTweets

Make sure that you check out the Sound and Vision Mag link as well.

~matt

Companies embracing web 2.0

Here is what i think is one company that is taking full advantage of Enterprise 2.0 practices, while following the model of both wikinomics and Andrew McAfee’s SLATE model.

BestBuy

SLATES Model

BestBuy is an consumer big box consumer electronic company and one of the largest specialty retailer of its kind in the United States. Where they have looked to Enterprise 2.0 practices to maximize their leverage over their competitors.

Search: There is a large amount of additional information located on the company’s run forum, as well their presence on many web 2.0 platforms have made them a very searchable company.

Links: Provides relevant information or links covering both internal and external projects, product updates and competitions.

Authoring: This is shown through their contributions and responses to customers on their twitter accounts and as well through facebook and a internal site that gathers all the feeds from all employees on many platforms in one site.

Tags: This can be seen through their use of twitter and incorporating the use of hash tags (#twelpforce), as a way to provide an easy way for employees to search for post by customers who want to directly talk with them.

Extensions: To a degree they are able to look at the traffic created through twitter to see what patterns are developing by the way customers are using this service.

Signals: BestBuy allows users to track update through RSS feeds, for forum activity, site updates even Twitter and Facebook updates from bestbuyconnect

Wikinomics Model

Peering: This is shown in the adoption of a service called loopt, where this allows a avenue for BestBuys employees to post a new idea and share it and corroborate with other employees. Where this is served as a breading ground for new innovations that can be offered by BestBuy.

Being Open: Through the use of Twitter, Facebook, and forums to extend the knowledge of the company as well as provide an additional level of service to customers. This is also carried out internally with the use of staff wikis, and idea sharing services that promote freedom of information within the company.

Sharing: Information is shared very similar to peering, through the use of internal services, between all stores(wiki’s, KeyTrade and WaterCooler).

Acting Global: BestBuy has expanded their physical presence overseas to Puerto Rico, Canada, China, and Turkey. However utilising the advantage social networks they are able to have a global presence to their customer base.

~matt

Del.icio.us feed is up

I’ve decided to post a link to my delicious account on my blog where i hope to constantly update it with interesting general tech news as well as sites that reflect on information we are learning in inb346. I think this is a perfect resource tool everyone could embrace as a class, as it offers a great way to catalogue the hundreds of sites we visit. I’ve been tagging all my links with inb346, I hope you find them useful!!

~matt

Personal Brand

I’ve just downloaded the wordpress app on my iPod touch and seeming I have my iPod always on me this will definatly come in handy during the semester!

After work and training tonight I’ve decided to have looked into the website rockthejob.com. The episode that have been posted I’ve found to be very relevant and informative in critically thinking about how we should manage our online presence. I enjoyed their recent episode about how to own the first page of google. As everyone should, I googled myself and found that majority of the page is mine. Listed is my facebook, linkdin and Twitter pages (no sign of wordpress as yet), and then 5 or so random links that had nothing to do with me persoanlly.

This brought me to Jason’s question, how do we build our own digital presence? One example is using the service wefollow.com, that allows twitter users the ability to search for other users easily via categories and by the number of followers. This would make it easier for people to either find you, or for example enjoy sports and want to follow another person in the sports category.

I shall be keeping an eye on this website for future episodes. As they will be relevant for future assignments in this unit.

I blog therefore I am

The most that i have come to blogging is updating my facebook status and any activity i have on forums I’m a member of, which isn’t really blogging. But i do see how it can help me get my name out onto the internet with the other 1.5 billion computer users. I joke, but this will be a good personal experiment about publishing what I feel about this unit as well as anything else, I guess that’s the purpose of this. It should be an enjoyable 13 weeks.

Going from the intro lecture, I looked at Sacha Chua’s Blog and she has incorporated an easy way for readers of her blog to post her entries on some of the most popular social media sites, del.icio.us, digg, reddit and stumble upon. You wont see a blog or site without some form of linking to these social media sites. Where many of these sites get what is know as the digg effect, and by the sheer amount of traffic get taken down, in a mini DoS attack.

I’ve also notice that she has linked her friend feed account to her personal blog, this is a good idea to bring people from her feed account and blog account together.  I’m still playing around with the free version of wordpress and yet to see how I can incorporate facebook connect in the sidebar, could be interesting.

In the tech community, you cannot go past the big blogs of engadget and gizmodo. It is very rare to see a daily Digg feed of top stories that doesn’t include a post from these sites. Both sites have a massive user based and comments on a particular post can go well over 500 posts at a time. Which shows the true drive for any successful blog is content for your audience!

Hello inb346 please to meet you!

This is my first attempt at having my own blog. I can safely say that I am a very heavy internet user, spending countless hours reading rss feeds, posting on facebook, forums and just wasting time on youtube, digg and the like. However I really never felt that i have had the need to manage a blog. That brings me to QUT , inb346 and now.

As I mention in the introduction lecture the reason why I’m taking this subject is to expand on the knowledge that i learnt from inb347, which dealt with web 2.0 applications and the Patterns displayed by sites we used as our case studies. Where i am hoping that inb347 Enterprise 2.0 can expand on these concepts and relate them to how organisations are looking to expand their web presence.

With the even growing trends of cloud based services and social networking, it is the perfect time for me to have a deep understanding of these concepts in an enterprise sense, and with it being my last semester at QUT this puts me in a good place when looking at jobs that need people skilled in these areas.