50 Ideas on Using Twitter for Business
Posted by: Faisal Farooqui in Uncategorized on June 6th, 2009
We really can’t deny the fact that businesses are testing out Twitter as part of their steps into the social media landscape. You can say it’s a stupid application, that no business gets done there, but there are too many of us (including me) that can disagree and point out business value. I’m not going to address the naysayers much with this. Instead, I’m going to offer 50 thoughts for people looking to use Twitter for business. And by “business,” I mean anything from a solo act to a huge enterprise customer.
Your mileage may vary, and that’s okay. Further, you might have some really great ideas to add.
First Steps
- Build an account and immediate start using Twitter Search to listen for your name, your competitor’s names, words that relate to your space. (Listening always comes first.)
- Add a picture. ( Shel reminds us of this.) We want to see you.
- Talk to people about THEIR interests, too. I know this doesn’t sell more widgets, but it shows us you’re human.
- Point out interesting things in your space, not just about you.
- Share links to neat things in your community. ( @wholefoods does this well).
- Don’t get stuck in the apology loop. Be helpful instead. ( @jetblue gives travel tips.)
- Be wary of always pimping your stuff. Your fans will love it. Others will tune out.
- Promote your employees’ outside-of-work stories. ( @TheHomeDepot does it well.)
- Throw in a few humans, like RichardAtDELL, LionelAtDELL, etc.
- Talk about non-business, too, like @astrout and @jstorerj from Mzinga.
Ideas About WHAT to Tweet
- Instead of answering the question, “What are you doing?”, answer the question, “What has your attention?”
- Have more than one twitterer at the company. People can quit. People take vacations. It’s nice to have a variety.
- When promoting a blog post, ask a question or explain what’s coming next, instead of just dumping a link.
- Ask questions. Twitter is GREAT for getting opinions.
- Follow interesting people. If you find someone who tweets interesting things, see who she follows, and follow her.
- Tweet about other people’s stuff. Again, doesn’t directly impact your business, but makes us feel like you’re not “that guy.”
- When you DO talk about your stuff, make it useful. Give advice, blog posts, pictures, etc.
- Share the human side of your company. If you’re bothering to tweet, it means you believe social media has value for human connections. Point us to pictures and other human things.
- Don’t toot your own horn too much. (Man, I can’t believe I’m saying this. I do it all the time. – Side note: I’ve gotta stop tooting my own horn).
- Or, if you do, try to balance it out by promoting the heck out of others, too.
Some Sanity For You
- You don’t have to read every tweet.
- You don’t have to reply to every @ tweet directed to you (try to reply to some, but don’t feel guilty).
- Use direct messages for 1-to-1 conversations if you feel there’s no value to Twitter at large to hear the conversation ( got this from @pistachio).
- Use services like Twitter Search to make sure you see if someone’s talking about you. Try to participate where it makes sense.
- 3rd party clients like Tweetdeck and Twhirl make it a lot easier to manage Twitter.
- If you tweet all day while your coworkers are busy, you’re going to hear about it.
- If you’re representing clients and billing hours, and tweeting all the time, you might hear about it.
- Learn quickly to use the URL shortening tools like TinyURL and all the variants. It helps tidy up your tweets.
- If someone says you’re using twitter wrong, forget it. It’s an opt out society. They can unfollow if they don’t like how you use it.
- Commenting on others’ tweets, and retweeting what others have posted is a great way to build community.
The Negatives People Will Throw At You
- Twitter takes up time.
- Twitter takes you away from other productive work.
- Without a strategy, it’s just typing.
- There are other ways to do this.
- As Frank hears often, Twitter doesn’t replace customer service (Frank is @comcastcares and is a superhero for what he’s started.)
- Twitter is buggy and not enterprise-ready.
- Twitter is just for technonerds.
- Twitter’s only a few million people. (only)
- Twitter doesn’t replace direct email marketing.
- Twitter opens the company up to more criticism and griping.
Some Positives to Throw Back
- Twitter helps one organize great, instant meetups (tweetups).
- Twitter works swell as an opinion poll.
- Twitter can help direct people’s attention to good things.
- Twitter at events helps people build an instant “backchannel.”
- Twitter breaks news faster than other sources, often (especially if the news impacts online denizens).
- Twitter gives businesses a glimpse at what status messaging can do for an organization. Remember presence in the 1990s?
- Twitter brings great minds together, and gives you daily opportunities to learn (if you look for it, and/or if you follow the right folks).
- Twitter gives your critics a forum, but that means you can study them.
- Twitter helps with business development, if your prospects are online (mine are).
- Twitter can augment customer service. (but see above)
Source: Chris Brogan
Apple Offers Free iPod Touch To Mac-Buying Students
Posted by: Faisal Farooqui in Reviews on May 28th, 2009
Apple on Wednesday launched its annual back-to-school promotion offering Mac-buying students and teachers an iPod Touch at no additional charge.For many years, students and schools have been an important market for Apple, and the company wants to keep it that way with its annual giveaway. This year, students and teachers buying any Mac, other than a Mac Mini or a refurbished model, and an iPod Touch on the same invoice qualify for a $229 online rebate, which is the price of the 8-GB iPod Touch.
In addition, educators and students will still get Apple’s education discount, which can amount to as much as $200.
To qualify for the iPod promotion, purchases have to be made before Sept. 8 and buyers have to submit their rebate claims by Oct. 8.
VMware Buys A Piece Of Terremark
Posted by: Faisal Farooqui in Virtualization on May 28th, 2009
Terremark today said VMWare would buy 4 million shares of newly issued stock at $5 apiece, or $20 million worth of stock in total, to acquire a 5 percent stake in the company.
Miami-based Terremark runs Internet exchanges and offers services such as data storage and operating systems management. Its shares rose 33 cents, or 7.4 percent, to close at $4.80. VMware shares gained 76 cents, or 2.7 percent, to $29.26 in the regular session, and lost 8 cents after hours.
EMC: Virtualization is ready to run the world’s biggest applications
Posted by: Faisal Farooqui in Virtualization on May 22nd, 2009
Typically, when IT departments decide to use virtualization in the data center, the big question is which workloads to virtualize. The conventional wisdom has been to avoid virtualizing anything that was too I/O-intensive, such as databases and e-mail systems.
However, EMC wants to put that idea to rest. The company, which owns virtualization market leader VMware, spent a lot of time at EMC World 2009 this week driving home the point to IT professionals that the entire data center can be virtualized.
“Virtualization is now ready to run the biggest applications,” said EMC CTO Chuck Hollis (right). “It’s ready for the biggest applications today.”
In fact, Hollis said that virtualization is already running a lot of the biggest applications for many of the world’s largest companies. America’s top auto makers are one example. Driven by intense economic pressures to reduce costs, the auto makers have recently accelerated their adoption of virtualization.
Another industry that is extensively using virtualization is oil and gas, where they have to deliver the same enterprise applications to both desktops and supercomputers. Plus, they also have a wide diversity of sites across the globe that need access to these applications. As a result, they’ve embraced virtualization to get the kind of flexibility they need on the backend.
Virtualization cost savings hard to come by, Interop survey finds
Posted by: Faisal Farooqui in Virtualization on May 22nd, 2009
Network Instruments polled 120 network managers, engineers, and IT executives at Interop to learn how IT organizations are putting server and desktop virtualization technology to use. Fifty-five percent reported they virtualized mission-critical servers, including e-mail and Web servers, and another 50 percent said they run DNS and DHCP servers on virtual
machines. And nearly 40 percent have already extended virtualization to their desktop environments.
Yet 55 percent told the network analysis vendor they experience more problems than benefits with the technology, while the remaining 45 percent said they had realized the
benefits of virtualization. Among the problems were a lack of visibility and tools to troubleshoot performance problems in virtual environments for 27 percent of respondents. More than one-fourth of those polled at Interop cited a lack of training on virtual infrastructure, and 21 percent expressed concern over an inability to secure the infrastructure.
Analyst: An Apple tablet is coming to shake up netbook market
Posted by: Faisal Farooqui in Reviews on May 22nd, 2009
Apple is likely to launch a tablet similar to the iPod touch, but larger in the first half of 2010. This tablet would then be Apple’s entry into the netbook race, according to Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster.
In a research note, Munster handicaps the gaps in Apple’s product lineup. The gaping hole: There’s nothing between the iPod touch and the MacBook. Enter this iPod touch on steroids for $500 to $700. Meanwhile, Apple operating chief Tim Cook called netbooks junky, but never dismissed the consumer demand for them.
Xen 3.4 Launch Announcement
Posted by: Faisal Farooqui in Virtualization on May 22nd, 2009
Xen.org is pleased to announce the latest release of the Xen hypervisor, the open source industry standard for virtualization. Xen.org is a global community of independent and industry developers, university researchers, users, and virtualization gurus who regularly contribute to the shared design, development, support, and improvement of the Xen hypervisor platform.
The new release, Xen 3.4, furthers the vision of creating a powerful, efficient, and ubiquitous virtualization hypervisor. As part of the Xen community’s commitment to continuous improvement, the new hypervisor offers significant enhancements in the following areas:
• Xen Client Initiative (XCI) Enhancements –Xen.org continues develop industry virtualization standards for desktop and client devices. Xen 3.4 contains the initial XCI code release providing a base client hypervisor for the community to extend and improve. This new version of the Xen hypervisor expands the hardware options for the leading open source virtualization platform.
• Reliability – Availability – Serviceability (RAS) – In addition, Xen now delivers a collection of features designed to avoid and detect system failures, provide maximum uptime by isolating system faults, and provide system failure notices to administrators to properly service the hardware/software. The combination of these services provide for a robust Xen hypervisor with fault-tolerant and back-up capabilities built-in.
• Power Management – Xen 3.4 improves the power saving features with a host of new algorithms to better manage the processor including schedulers and timers optimized for peak power savings.
What We Know About The Apple Tablet So Far
Posted by: Faisal Farooqui in Reviews on May 21st, 2009
More evidence of the Apple Tablet surfaced today. We first wrote about the device at the end of last year when OEMs in China started hearing about the device. Details are still thin, although probably not because of a lack of leaks. Rather, Apple may still be locking down important specs like screen size.
We’d heard 7 – 9 inch screen size late last year, but today’s reports range up to 10 inches, which we’ve also heard from our sources as a possible size.
We don’t know what the final price point will be, but somewhere between $500 and $1,000 makes sense. We’ve also heard that the launch date was pushed from this Fall to early next year, and we’ve confirmed that significant human assets from the iPod and iPhone team have been dedicated to the project.
In other words, the project is very real.
VMware Delivers VMware vSphere™ 4, A Quantum Leap Forward
Posted by: Faisal Farooqui in Virtualization on May 21st, 2009
“With VMware vSphere 4, we are once again raising the bar significantly for businesses that desire to dramatically improve IT performance,” said Raghu Raghuram, vice president and general manager, server business unit, VMware. “The cost savings associated with virtualization are undeniable, and as more customers standardize on VMware to drive 100 percent virtualization, they are realizing the additional benefits that our solutions deliver, including increased flexibility and agility.”
VMware vSphere 4 extends the previous generation VMware platform – VMware Infrastructure 3 – along three dimensions: it delivers the efficiency and performance required to run business critical applications in large scale environments, it provides uncompromised control over application security and service levels, and it preserves customer choice of hardware, OS, application architecture and on-premise vs. off-premise application hosting.
VMware vSphere 4 enables transformative capital and operational expenditure cost savings over and above what was previously achievable, including 30 percent increase in consolidation ratios, 50 percent storage savings, and 20 percent additional power savings. With VMware vSphere 4, even the most resource intensive business critical applications will benefit from the built-in service level assurance capabilities for availability, security and scalability.
Customers are already harnessing VMware vSphere 4 to bring the benefits of cloud computing to their datacenters, creating a practical approach to their own private clouds – cloud computing infrastructures that span internal IT with external cloud service providers.
“VMware vSphere 4 is the core of our cloud computing initiative because it gives us the cost savings and scalability benefits of cloud computing, with the choice to deploy any application or OS without getting locked into any particular architecture,” said Christopher Rence, CIO, FICO.
3Tera To Facilitate Cloud Computing Adoption with the 3Tera AppStore
Posted by: Faisal Farooqui in Virtualization on May 21st, 2009
3Tera, Inc., the leading innovator of cloud computing technology and utility computing services, announce the introduction of the 3Tera AppStore – the first
marketplace for cloud components where enterprise users, software vendors and datacenter experts can exchange production-ready, scalable and highly available cloud components on a pay-per-use basis.
3Tera’s AppStore is a globally available portal offering enterprise-class, supported software stacks, packaged for use in public, private and hybrid AppLogic® cloud deployments. The AppStore catalog spans all
types of datacenter infrastructure elements and complete applications, from networking components (such as load balancers, firewalls, routers, traffic managers, content switches), server components (such as Web
servers, directory servers, databases, application servers) and storage solutions, as well as application software stacks, management and monitoring tools.
“We’ve been enabling Cloud Computing for the past three years,” said Barry X Lynn , Chairman and CEO, 3Tera, Inc. “With the introduction of 3Tera’s AppStore, we’re enabling a community of
software providers to make their products easily available in the Cloud and accessible on-demand.” Users of the 3Tera AppStore can find pre-configured, ready-to-use
appliances to add to their 3Tera AppLogic catalogs provided by trusted software vendors.
Many are free or offered on a trial basis, while others are offered on a pay-per-use basis. For ISVs, the AppStore provides a way to publish and distribute enterprise-class, production
ready, cloud components and generate revenue every time users run them in public or private clouds powered by AppLogic. Datacenter architects and consultants can package and publish complete application
infrastructures to the AppStore that are ready to run, complete with value-added capabilities such as clustered solutions, high-availability, disaster recovery, on-demand scalability or automated backups and security.