Tag: social computing

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Happy Holidays from CooperMann

Ninjabread cookies in the kitchen, an appearance by the Christmas Elk, and Minty Fresh (fresh cat, not canned) looking for Frangos all clearly indicate that the holiday season is here.  2013 has been an eventful year – some would say it was “fraught with peril” while others see opportunity in change. It’s all a matter of perspective – pursuing goals and taking action rather than resting on ones’ laurels and trying to wait it out.  This cloud stuff isn’t going away.

With technology and social computing adoption increasing at almost alarming rates, I can’t wait to see how 2014 goes!  This certainly isn’t a time for the tech-timid, as it appears as though the nerds and geeks do rule the world (aren’t we all a little nerdly, really?).

I hope you and yours have a wonderful season.

jmbunnyfeetCheers

J

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Read the Best of CooperMann.com from 2013

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Angry Customers, Angry Tweets | Social Media Gives Customers A (Loud) Voice

twitter-dump-on-airlines

Social Media is the new form of communication, and appears to be having more impact on business behavior than an email or letter to the company president ever did. Whether it is through personal interaction or on a public forum, social computing has given a voice to consumers around the world – and that voice is often an angry one.  In previous years, consumers would fight their customer service battles directly with the vendor – quiet battles that, more frequently than not, left the participant feeling like they were the only ones experiencing problems.  But not any more.  Social brings the conversation to the masses, and the masses are more than willing to speak up.

from Entrepreneur.com:

‘ British Airways is getting a sharp reminder that social media is a bully pulpit that welcomes big companies and little guys alike, after one disgruntled customer used promoted tweets to complain that the airline had lost his father’s luggage.

Promoted tweets are typically used by brands to gain visibility for their products and promotions. But Hasan Syed, whose Twitter handle is @HVSVN, used them to call out the airline for allegedly ruining his European business trip and failing to address the issue.

Syed reportedly bought his tweets in the New York City and United Kingdom markets, aiming to reach other British Airways customers on both sides of the Atlantic. As the hours went by and the airline did not respond, his one-man campaign attracted attention, much of it admiring and supportive.

According to The Guardian and other news outlets, the airline finally woke up to the problem and made haste to address it, saying in a statement Tuesday: “We would like to apologize to the customer for the inconvenience caused. We have been in contact with the customer, and the bag is due to be delivered today.” ‘

Read More: http://www.entrepreneur.com/article/228175#ixzz2drcRCj8k

via Angry Customer Used Promoted Tweets to Chastise British Airways | Entrepreneur.com.

Social media is a sword that cuts both ways, offering a platform for both positive, and not so positive, discussions and conversations.

Using social media for customer service has become just as, if not more beneficial than, having an army of agents in the contact center. This is especially true when a crisis hits a company. Gone are the days when a customer service issue was aired solely between a consumer and the company’s contact center (and maybe a few friends within earshot). When things go wrong, consumers take to a brand’s social media channels for several reasons. Forbes.com

Particularly when you factor in the viral nature of social media interactions, and the amazing speed with which ANY message can gain broad visibility, businesses should understand that all those “friends” can turn into an ugly mob pretty quickly if an effective communications strategy isn’t in place.

read more at https://coopermann.com/2012/08/16/getting-results-social-media-for-customer-service-is-a-sword-that-cuts-both-ways/

via CooperMann.com | Getting Results: Social Media for Customer Service is a Sword that Cuts Both Ways

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Cloud Computing and Online Accounting for All? Some Markets Are Still Waiting for Broadband

Cloud Computing and Online Accounting for All? Some Markets Are Still Waiting on Broadband

As the information technology industry espouses the benefits of the “paradigm shift” in computing and the move to cloud computing platforms and models, there are folks out there in the world who just aren’t seeing it happen like that.  Not everybody’s working online. For many, the Internet and online working models simply haven’t intruded into their lives and businesses as it has for others.  While this may be partially rooted in conservative mentalities and beliefs which are resistant to change, the more likely reality is that options for high-quality and affordable broadband service is simply not available to them.  Without choices for affordable and useful connectivity to the Internet, online just doesn’t have the attraction it does for those who are “connected”.

When businesses look at cloud solutions and the Internet dependency that comes along with them, having more than one connection to the outside world becomes the imperative rather than a luxury.  Unfortunately, some markets are still waiting for broadband (or have very limited options for service), rendering the cloud nearly unreachable.

It may come as a surprise to some, particularly to those in East and West coastal regions, that high speed broadband just isn’t as available in other zones.  In fact, the *National Broadband Map clearly reveals limited availability and choice in numerous regions of the US.  Broadband Internet access is a necessity to support the IT industry’s shift from localized IT to “cloud” IT.  But the shift is only evident to those who are involved in it or who have that option.  For those who the industry is beginning to refer to as the technology “have-nots”, this lack of available and affordable access will ultimately create more than simply an inability to participate in broadband-reliant IT solutions.  The fast pace of innovation and evolution in IT almost guarantees that the technology have-nots will fall even further behind, possibly to the point of not being able to catch up.

 “A Growing Gap Between IT Haves, Have-Nots. There will be a growing gap between the IT haves and have-nots in 2013. The latter will fall behind the former on a wide range of business technology fronts such as mobile, cloud, social, virtualization, and analytics…” 7 SMB Technology Predictions for 2013 | InformationWeek.com

As business (and personal) technology models continue to evolve, and as new solutions and services begin to displace the old, those who remain disconnected will begin to directly experience much more impact.

Consider something as simple as using QuickBooks desktop software for small business bookkeeping.  As Intuit continues to remove elements from the installed software product, turning them into web services instead, customers with limited or no broadband access will find themselves without the features and functionality they need in the software.  And the only possibly comparable alternatives to QuickBooks desktop accounting products are Internet-based alternatives, making them not really alternative options at all.

It is also likely that lack of sufficient broadband is one of the factors motivating many solution providers to seek clients in other markets – outside of the United States, and in regions where broadband availability is more prevalent and service speed and quality is higher.  Yes, it’s true.  The United States is not the leader in broadband availability, or even in quality.

“For many people, their broadband connections are their lifelines. So what is the state of broadband in the U.S.? Well, when it comes to speed and price and adoption, we’re certainly not a leader — “middling” is a better way to describe our position.

Currently 119 million people that live in the U.S. don’t have broadband connections (for many reasons, including not wanting it or not being able to afford it) while 19 million don’t even have the option to get it. Our rate of broadband adoption (62 percent) lags behind countries such as South Korea, the U.K.,and Germany, according this year’s Federal Communication Commission report. (We’re closer to the penetration rates to Japan, Finland, and Canada.) These numbers are not likely to change soon, given that broadband growth is slowing and providers are moving away from wireline infrastructure. “ GIGAOM:The state of broadband in the U.S. [infographic]

Accountants and other professional service providers serving clients in regions lacking sufficient choices for access must recognize that their approaches to doing business will not necessarily match their peers in more fully connected areas.  Certainly, accounting and legal professionals are dealing with this reality as practice coaches and industry leaders push for IT- and cloud-enabled models for improving practice performance and creating differentiation, even as their proven applications and business solutions morph into or are replaced with SaaS applications and online service.

The take away from this is that there are still large numbers of businesses and individuals doing things with legacy tools, managing spreadsheets on standalone PCs, or writing with pens and using paper – even in areas where broadband access is plentiful.  Regardless of how forward moving the rest of the world may be there remains a need to provide service and support these IT have-nots.  Perhaps this becomes a means for differentiation, finding ways to work with businesses who are connected and those who are not, and leveraging the firm’s access and capability to deliver what the client cannot obtain directly.

Make Sense?

J

*The National Broadband Map is a tool to search, analyze and map broadband availability across the United States

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Surprise! Consumer apps get IT approval in small businesses: GIGAOM.com

Surprise! Consumer apps get IT approval in small businesses: GIGAOM.com

In a recent article on GigaOm, author Barb Darrow discusses the findings of a survey of small businesses in the US, UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, where it was found that the use of “consumer” information technology is being more widely accepted for use in small businesses, and that many of these selections are happening without the knowledge or participation of the IT department.

“Employees are driving business apps selection in many small and medium businesses, according to new research. A good percentage of productivity, social and collaborative apps now sanctioned by IT in SMBs were brought in by workers without IT knowledge.“

Reporting that small businesses are adopting “consumer” IT, and that it is OK with IT departments, isn’t a surprising finding.  Small businesses have begun leveraging mobility and cloud solutions to their benefit, being able to take advantage of powerful technologies that previously only enterprise IT departments could enjoy.

 “.. the line between personal and workplace technologies has become all but invisible. That poses real challenges to IT departments that have to deal with all sorts of technology coming in over the transom. But it also opens up opportunities for vendors that design easy-to-use consumer apps to enter the business realm as well.”

The cloud introduces new agility and capability for all businesses, not just small business. For IT departments in larger businesses, this is a big IT management issue. For smaller businesses, the IT manager is often the business owner or an occasionally contracted on-site technician.  When faced with IT needs in the business, many small business owners will at some level rely upon the solutions they also use in their personal lives – in many cases, there simply isn’t a budget for both.  The line between business and personal has always been “blurry” for the small business owner.

Make Sense?

J

Read more: Disruptive Trends = Emerging Opportunity: Adapting to a changing technology and business environment

What will my business be worth, when I need it to be worth a lot?

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  • Read more about how accountants need business intelligence, too
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Everybody Clicks: Keeping in touch with your business online

Everybody Clicks

Keeping in touch with your business online

In today’s technology focused market, it’s hard to find a way to stand out from the crowd. Making that effort to communicate with clients is more than just sending them a quarterly newsletter or email. It’s about evolving your business to meet their needs. Everyone wants everything online these days. It’s not just convenient anymore, it’s expected.

If your business doesn’t provide your clients with the level of online service they have come to expect, they probably won’t stay your clients for very long. If you want to make sure these new expectations are being met it means building and maintaining a presence on the web. That’s right; your website is the new face of your business. It’s often the first thing new clients see so it has to make a good impression. As the old saying goes, “you only get one first impression.” This adage is just as true for your website as it is for you. Old, outdated websites just aren’t good enough anymore. People want somewhere they can go to get the latest updates on the services your business provides, and they want it to be easy to find that information. Maintaining your website, keeping it up to date and full of useful information is important. It can also be time-consuming or expensive.

As a business professional, probably a bookkeeper or accountant, you probably spend as little time as possible managing your website and composing newsletters. Now, imagine that you just got back to the office after lunch and you want to do some work on the company website, maybe check on the traffic statistics while you’re at it. Normally you’d go and log in to three or four different places, one or two to do the work on the site and the other one or two to look at your statistics. This is a waste of time and energy, but not one you can avoid. Now let’s say you have some time left before you go home for the night and you realize you haven’t sent out this month’s newsletter. That’s another site to go log into. Site after site, a new interface or dashboard each time. Not to mention the hassle of entering your new contacts into your CRM or selecting the right recipients for the newsletter from your contacts lists. Everywhere you go there is another step to the process of staying in touch with your clients, to keeping the website updated and accurate. Login after login and dashboard after dashboard. What if there was something that could streamline everything? Keep your company’s blog in the same place as your site traffic statistics or web-based CRM solution? (Wouldn’t that be neat?) One login to get to everything. Keeping your clients informed, organized, and satisfied. Everything you want at the click of a mouse.

Your time is your money, so saving time is saving money. Having all of your online tools in one place would do just that. No wasted time, no need to repeatedly log in. Just getting everything taken care of, from one place. Not to mention your clients’ needs. Every business has a website nowadays; online payment options, blogs, forms to request information, the list goes on and the need for them is not confined to accounting and bookkeeping firms.

Let’s say you’re a small hobby shop, selling model trains and cars with all the odds and ends needed to build or maintain them. Do you rely solely on word of mouth or paper ads to bring you the business you need? Of course not. You get a website. The problem is you don’t know where to start. So, you hire someone to build it for you and to make changes when needed. That gets expensive. Ok, so you build it yourself using one of the many solutions available on the web today. Now you control everything, from the colors and graphics to the content but how do you track the traffic your site gets? Or what information your customers look at the most? Analytics of course! Unfortunately that means another thing to buy and another page to log into. The same goes for CRM solutions or email domains. Each aspect of your business is locked away in its own little corner. Frustrating, isn’t it?

Wouldn’t it be grand if you could change your homepage, send a newsletter, and track today’s site visits all from one place? Well, that’s where Nakea.net comes in. Nakea.net is a solution that is perfect for any business. It has web design, analytics, email marketing, contact management, and much more all in one place. That’s right.  One login and you have your world at your fingertips.  Just click to log in, and it’s all right there, with easy to use features and templates that allow you to gear your website, and your communications, to your clients and customers.

Make Sense?

Nakea.net, delivering the smartest social website your business can build, is a sponsor of Cloud Summit 2012.

Get Cloud Summit information here.

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Disruptive Trends = Emerging Opportunity: Adapting to a changing technology and business environment

Every new day brings some new advancement in business technology, and much of this advancement relates to cloud computing, mobility, and new social computing models.  Information technology and solutions applied to business use have rapidly evolved away from paper-based or fixed-location tools, and are now oriented towards enabling mobility and anytime, anywhere access to business applications and digital data.

Trends driving change in business technology today may be reflected in two main areas: enabling solutions which are revealing benefit not previously recognized, and disruptive approaches which represent trans-formative changes to how businesses operate.   Disruption and transformation often generate new business opportunity, yet many professionals in accounting/finance and information technology fail to see the new potential available and resist anything which represents significant change.  These professionals equate change with risk, and are reluctant to entertain either.

An example of a class of solutions which enable the organization to “know more”, providing decision support through deep analysis and reporting of key business data, is the new generation of data visualization tools now available in forms and formats easily accessible by any business professional.  Previously, business owners had to rely on system analysts and accounting professionals to compile and report on various aspects of business activity.  Using spreadsheets and database driven chart-building systems, manipulation of large volumes of data was unwieldy and limited by available computer resources.  Moving beyond previously recognized boundaries in data collection and aggregation, tools now available assist users in combining data from disparate sources, and offer a rich suite of analytics coupled with the simplicity of drag-and-drop selection and exploration.

The opportunity introduced with this new capability does not rest solely in the analysis of the data.  Rather, it is in the control and the structure which must be developed to ensure that all relevant data being collected, and in the structure and control placed on those data collection and integration processes which will ensure that the information is properly associated or correlated, and accurately integrated into the model.   Completeness and accuracy of data is of critical importance, as is an in-depth understanding of the nuances of structured and unstructured data relationships.

In addition to the enabling solutions emerging on the market which are driving deep changes in how businesses see themselves are the advancements in technology which cause fundamental shifts in how business use technology to support operations.  The most evident advancement, often viewed as an approach which is disruptive to more traditional models, is the emergence of “cloud” computing models.  Cloud computing, connected services, and fully-managed outsourced IT solutions address a number of issues which have burdened enterprise IT deployments since IT departments were invented.

The difficulty for IT managers is that they are often overworked and underfunded, as information technology is not often viewed as a strategic differentiator but merely as a necessary cost of supporting operations.  Users view IT as being unresponsive and ineffective, and have little understanding of the balancing act required to meet user demands and at the same time deliver standardized enterprise computing services in a secure manner.

Mobility and the cloud has changed the landscape of business IT, and the concept of “there’s an app for that” is now fully ingrained in the user mentality.  Cloud solutions, sometimes introduced to the business by non-IT personnel and often viewed as “rogue IT” projects, have won adoption by business users due in large part to the simplicity of implementation, and often because they can deploy the solution quickly, outside of the boundaries established by internal IT management.  Information management within the organization must necessarily extend now to mobile computing devices, where an entirely new set of issues is revealed in terms of personal device management and distribution of corporate data and intelligence.  Professionals assisting the business with information management, access, collection and integration processes must now give greater consideration to incorporation of mobile device and application management, as well as the risks introduced with the broad use of personal computing devices within the organization.

The cloud represents a convergence of social and mobile computing, and introduces an entirely new class of business metrics to measure due to the significant increase in available data captured at various levels and through various types of virtual interactions.  With users being able to engage wherever and whenever they choose (“there’s an app for that”, again), businesses must shift IT focus to strategic enablement, creating standards for outsourced deployments, and infusing each effort with the security and control required, which is a mainstay of IT operations.

Big data, visualization and analysis, and mobile and social computing are changing how we do business.  As the trusted advisor to the business, the accounting professional should embrace these changes and the opportunities they present to deliver more value and service in each client engagement.  Accountants can help their clients understand how to do more with less – leveraging technology to improve operational efficiencies, and to structure, capture, integrate and analyze the relevant data which will reveal the risks and potentials of the operation under a variety of circumstances.

Disruption creates your opportunity to bring order to the chaos, helping clients compete and flourish in a difficult economy, and providing the proactive guidance and analytical support necessary to build and sustain profitability.

Make Sense?

J

  • Read more about how accountants need business intelligence, too
  • Read more about how there’s no fear and loathing in accounting
  • Read more about the pressure on accountants to deliver more value and intelligence to their clients
  • Read more about Data Warriors: accounting in the cloud