Tag: Social Media

Is Salesforce.com Outgrowing SMBs?

Salesforce.com's Marc Benioff is a great visionary with a big appetite for change. From packaged software to the cloud, from CRM to platform-as-a-service, he's painted a color by number picture for businesses to emulate. But does his latest work, “the social enterprise" come with an easy enough guide for small businesses to paint it? The Paint-by-Numbers Social Enterprise Be...

Reflections on Dreamforce 2011: Now the Cloud Can Ride the Waves

This year, Salesforce.com's Dreamforce event--with a record-setting 45,000 attendees--got me thinking about the early days before the cloud was the cloud, how far its come, and how perfectly poised it is to ride the waves now driving technology adoption--mobile and social solutions. Traveling in the Way Back Machine ...

6 Tips to Maximize Twitter Event Hashtags

Originally published in Small Business Computing, 8-29-11. Recently, a client asked me for some tips about how to get the maximum mileage out of Twitter event hashtags. Creating Twitter hashtags for your business events is a great way to mul...

Recap of Joint Social Business Webinar with Radian6 and CRM Essentials

Today I had the pleasure of joining David Alston from Radian6 and the legendary Brent Leary of CRM Essentials for a webinar live from CRM Evolution. We had a lively conversation about some of the key social business findings that the SMB Group and CRM Essentials uncovered in the 2011 SMB Social Business Study, which Radian6 helped to sponsor. If you missed it, you can replay the

Is Your Business Suffering from Social Media Denial?

Kevin Casey, intrepid journalist for InformationWeek, rang me up this week for input on his article, "Do Nonsocial SMBs Know Something We Don’t?" In the article, Kevin’s ponders whether SMBs that haven’t bought into...

Social Media: How Does Your Small Business Stack Up?

Social media offers small businesses an inexpensive, relatively friction-free way to accomplish different business functions, from generating new leads to getting input for new product development. Consequently, it's not surprising that small businesses are rapidly moving to take advantage of it. How far along the social media curve is your business compared to your peers? We’ve picked some ke...

The New Dell and What it Means for SMBs: Takeaways from Dell’s 2011 Solutions for a Virtual Era Event

Twenty-seven years ago, Michael Dell launched Dell with $1,000 and a streamlined sales and manufacturing model that revolutionized the PC industry. Sticking with this playbook, Dell achieved similar success in the server market, once again disrupting the status quo. However, times changed, and Dell started to look like a one-trick pony. As Michael Dell himself acknowledged at last week’s Dell’...

Is There a Method to Social Media Madness?

By Sanjeev Aggarwal and Laurie McCabe, SMB Group, and Brent Leary, CRM Essentials SMB adoption of social media for sales, marketing, product development and customer service is on the rise – but how are SMBs tracking, analyzing and measuring the success of their social media endeavors? In our joint SMB Group/CRM Essentials “2011 Small and Medium Business Social Business Study,” we su...