A new report from global public relations firm Weber Shandwick has found that when it comes to Fortune 100 companies, they just don't get Twitter...not yet anyway.
According to the study (PDF), which looked at how the world's 100 top companies used Twitter between late August and early September, the companies have a grand total of 540 Twitter accounts owned by just 73 companies; 27 firms don't participate in the microblogging tool/social network. Some 76 percent of those 540 accounts weren't "updated often" and 52 percent were not actively engaged, as measured by the accounts' use of hash tags, links, references, and retweets.
Weber Shandwick contends that in order for a company to be successful on Twitter, it needs to engage users through five basic activities: listening to followers, participating in conversations, updating accounts frequently, replying to questions, and retweeting useful messages. The PR firm says that if companies perform those activities, they will have a large number of followers. But its research found that 50 percent of Fortune 100 Twitter accounts had fewer than 500 followers.
And companies that had active Twitter accounts weren't making their tweets appealing to followers, the firm found. Fifty-three percent of the accounts did not "display personality, tone, or voice" in their messages. Only one-third of all the researched accounts featured personality "in addition to names and/or photos of those who posted tweets." Seventy-six percent of accounts surveyed posted 500 or fewer tweets on the account. As Weber Shandwick points out, the more tweets of value, the more likely the brand will engage customers.
Big companies aren't doing enough on Twitter.
(Credit: Weber Shandwick)In the end, Weber Shandwick was concerned about company use (or lack of use) of the Twitter. The organization wrote that "for the majority of Fortune 100 companies, Twitter remains a missed opportunity." The firm said "many of their Twitter accounts, examined by Weber Shandwick, did not appear to listen to or engage with their readers, instead offering a one-way broadcast of press releases, company blog posts, and event information."
Weber Shandwick also offered a word of caution. The firm said that "the number of active Twitter users in the United states already exceeds 20 million and can be expected to continue to grow. This is a massive human database to tap; companies that understand the value of Twitter can benefit from its potential as a viable engagement platform."
ORLANDO, Fla.--Watch out, business technology managers, because Google has its eyes on your domain.
If Google Chief Executive Eric Schmidt gets his way, the line that separates the computing services used by businesses from those used by consumers will fade fast. And Google, through services such as Google Apps and the new Google Wave, hopes to accelerate the change.
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The company has done well so far with services that appeal chiefly to consumers, but Schmidt said at the Gartner Symposium here that Google likes services that become part people's lives regardless of whether they are doing work. And because the company covers its costs by charging enterprise accounts $50 per person per year for those services at work, he said it's just a matter of attaining scale before the business becomes "very profitable" for Google.
I spoke to Schmidt after a Gartner Symposium talk in which he said the enterprise market is Google's next billion-dollar revenue opportunity. Here's an edited transcript of the interview.
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Video-conferencing service ViVu announced on Tuesday that it has raised $3 million in a Series A round of funding that was led by Inventus Capital Partners. Draper Fisher Jurvetson and Quest Ventures also participated in the round.
ViVu's service enables users to create, publish, and manage video-conferencing events from the site. Users can access the meeting from a PC, Mac, or smartphone. According to the company, its software doesn't require any "proprietary downloads." ViVu said in a statement that it hopes its service will be used for "online meetings, sales presentations, training sessions, and large online events."
The ViVu video service is delivered as an interactive video-as-a-service, or "iVaaS." It enables users to schedule and invite associates to meetings. Those appointments can be integrated into Gmail and Microsoft Outlook. ViVu participants can view full desktop content and share applications between users. They can also engage in a chat through the service's instant-messaging platform or through its Twitter integration.
ViVu can be accessed now by any company that wants to try it out. It costs $49.95 per month for unlimited meetings. The company is currently offering a 30-day free trial.
If your office has given you a BlackBerry for work purposes, you may soon be accessing your Google Apps Gmail, calendar, and contacts via the BlackBerry Enterprise Server.
On Friday, Google announced that some functionality in Google Apps, its suite of premium enterprise-level applications, will now give company-issued BlackBerrys some push and sync functionality.
The Google Apps Connector promises to push Gmail messages within 60 seconds, and sync in-box actions like assigning labels and archiving messages. You'll also be able to search contacts from the company's global address list, a huge bonus for mobile workers. Synchronization between the Google Calendar and the BlackBerry calendar is one-way in this release, with Google's calendar populating your schedule on the phone. Google plans to include bidirectional calendar syncing in the future.
While the connector opens up syncing to some of the Google Apps, in this iteration it does not sync with Google Docs, the intranet site-hosting app called Google Site, and Google Video. You'll still be able to view content through the mobile browser, however.
The Google Apps Connector for BlackBerry Enterprise Server (download) is available for free to corporate Google Apps Premier and Education Editions customers, and must be implemented by an IT administrator.
Check out more details in this Google blog post.
As a follow-up to its free, 50-user microblogging product, Socialtext is launching a new paid service for large to enterprise-sized companies that lets them run the Twitter-like service behind the firewall, and with many more users.
Companies that want it can pay $1 per user, per month, alongside a monthly fee that pays for Socialtext's server appliance. This hardware runs the microblogging software locally, and can be connected to a company's backup systems for if something goes wrong, although it makes nightly backups of its own. The appliance fee also covers monthly software updates that will fix bugs and add new features.
In a call with CNET News on Monday, Ross Mayfield who is Socialtext's chairman, president, and co-founder, said that the benefits of having a system like this locally can make a big difference when doing a fresh setup on a big company. "You turn it on, and in five minutes you can start posting right away."
Your company 'tweets' would go through this box.
(Credit: Socialtext)To speed things up, the appliance can be connected to local staff directories and pull in employee information to create user accounts that have profile information including phone numbers and e-mail address already filled out. Anytime local directory changes are made, this information gets updated in Socialtext too. Administrative control is also not limited to IT staff, since certain users can be graced with admin privileges of their own that let them moderate both user content and the users themselves.
Companies will still be able to use Socialtext's free 50-user version of the service that lives in the cloud, but this option gives larger companies a bigger user cap and more control over the data. Mayfield also pushed the fact that companies that wanted to tack on additional Socialtext services won't have to get any additional hardware since they'll already have it for this service.
Socialtext is undercutting competitors like Yammer in price, as well as offering an additional way to deliver its service. Yammer has its own Web based service for enterprise power users, however it's a little more pricey at $3-5 per user, per month (depending on what plan they go for). There is, however, no hardware to buy. On the flip side, Socialtext's solution can still be used even if access to the outside world is blocked, which can often be the best time to find out what your employees are up to.
NetSuite on Thursday unveiled its SuiteCloud Ecosystem, expanding its on-demand enterprise software service to include cloud computing.
The company, which hosts enterprise software on demand, is branching out to allow customers the ability to push their core operations into the clouds.
As part of its SuiteCloud Ecosystem, NetSuite is launching a developer program, SuiteCloud Developer Network, and an online cloud-computing application marketplace, SuiteApp.com.
The SuiteCloud platform will be built on core NetSuite enterprise resource management (ERP) software, as well as its customer relationship management (CRM) and e-commerce offerings.
NetSuite is delving into cloud computing at a time when this relatively new industry is coming to grips with its own definition and purpose.
In conjunction with its S3 storage offering and other Web Services products, ever-expanding Web giant Amazon has launched a beta version of a content delivery network called CloudFront.
The service, which promises "low latency, high data transfer speeds, and no commitments," uses a global network of edge locations to keep the system humming.
Amazon announced in September its intentions to launch a CDN, with a target date of the end of 2008. It also made clear then that pricing would be consumption-based. Amazon has declared that there is "no minimum fee" for CloudFront; customers pay only for what they use.
There are loads of CDNs out there: it's an on-demand, business-focused offering for which companies are willing to pay good money. But because Amazon already has a big grip on the cloud with its existing Simple Storage Service, or S3, CloudFront is likely to be a power player from the start.
NEW YORK--When News Corp. mogul Rupert Murdoch plunked down $580 million to buy the social networking site MySpace in 2005, C.H. Low had a reaction not that uncommon among tech industry veterans.
"I said, 'This is ridiculous! Are we in another bubble?' " said Low. "But I thought, 'Murdoch is a smart man. Something else must be going on here.' "
Three years later, Low is the CEO of the software startup Orbius, one of an estimated 50 to 100 companies selling software and on-demand tools to help everyone from automakers to traditional publishing companies add social networking and improved community functions on their Web sites.
For many of the companies here at O'Reilly's Web 2.0 Expo, the approach to selling these community-building tools is downright old-fashioned: Site licenses, maintenance fees, and all sorts of enterprise software business models (of course, many with a software-as-a-services spin) that sound more like something out of the 1990s than the business plans of start-ups trying to get traction at the end of the Bush era.
But the conference taking on a decidedly business-focused tone shouldn't be all that surprising. In fact, it's a change remarkably similar (but on a smaller scale) to what happened in Web 1.0.
In the early days of the dot-com boom, many skeptics wondered loudly if the Web could offer any real business value. Sure, it was fun; the cool kids were able to brag about their cyber credentials, and it was a good way to sell things like books and CDs. But a place to do serious, global corporation kind of business? Unlikely. And all those advertising-based business models? Craziness.
Then a new generation of companies working on software to allow businesses to conduct transactions online and move their pricey corporate software to a more affordable Internet-based model. Only a few of them are still around, but they forced big corporate software names like IBM, Oracle and SAP to come up with viable Internet software that eventually helped drive the little guys out of business or into acquisitions (and a few of those companies running on ads managed to survive).
Today, Web 2.0 technology just may be passing from the "cool kid' phase to the business-to-business phase. (A little ominously for the little software companies here, IBM announced Wednesday that it's opening a center in Cambridge, Mass. to study social networking and create a set of social networking software tools it can sell to customers.)
Strolling away from the "Long Tail Pavilion" (named after Wired editor Chris Anderson's oft-cited and occasionally ridiculed book), Low recalled his career as a serial entrepreneur. He was chief technology officer at VerticalNet, one of the biggest (and ultimately disappointing) names in the first dot-com boom. After that, he founded several small companies, and was taking time of when the MySpace acquisition gave him the bug to get back in the game.
"Web 2.0 needs to be a utility" Low said. "It can't be just for fun."
An enterprise software guy" fits right in
That's exactly what Majid Abai, chief executive of Los Angeles startup Pringo, is counting on. Pringo sells community-building and management software that typically costs in the range of $20,000 to $50,000. He wasn't all that surprised so many companies at the Web 2.0 Expo were focused on selling tools for community building rather because there's a good sales pitch for it: It allows companies to improve communications with customers, distributors and employees. And the best way to do it, he believes, it to build those communities on top of packaged software.
"I'm an enterprise software guy," Abai said. "If this conference had been here last year, it would have been a completely different game" focused more on flashy companies targeting consumers.
In a conference room overlooking the show floor, LiveWorld CEO Peter Friedman was demonstrating new software that allows the managers of a Web site to quickly create a discussion group around a particularly topic, whether it's a story on a news site or a car. His company, which was founded in the 1990s and was nearly gutted in the dot-com bust, sells community-building software and management services that isn't all that different than the discussion forums Friedman helped run at Apple in the 1980s.
Don't tell the guys out there," he said, motioning to the show floor below him, "but what we're doing is basically enterprise software." He added that technology and needs have changed, 'but what we're doing isn't all that different from what we were doing years ago."
Microsoft detailed on Tuesday its road map and pricing for Web-based software suites built for big companies and growing businesses.
Enabling telecommuting, which many employers and workers increasingly favor, is likely to be a selling point for the productivity and "deskless worker" tools within the Microsoft Online Services lineup.
The move is part of Redmond's push to integrate online and desktop software, shifting much of the heavy lifting to the "cloud."
"Microsoft Online Services is a key component of the software plus services initiative, and we're seeing customers, partners and even competitors embrace this flexible approach to the cloud," Stephen Elop, president of the Microsoft Business Division, said in a statement.
Details were unveiled Tuesday in Houston at the Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference.
Microsoft's per-user monthly fees for its online business services.
(Credit: Microsoft)For $15 per month per person, the business productivity suite offers an Outlook-integrated Exchange Online for e-mail and calendars, Office SharePoint Online collaboration, messaging via Office Communications Online, and Office Live Meeting video-enabled Web conferencing.
The software giant will charge another $3 per month per user for the Deskless Worker Suite, which combines flavors of SharePoint Online and Exchange Online. The SharePoint portal offers access to internal company sites and search. E-mail, calendars, security filters, and Outlook Web Access Light are included with Exchange Online Deskless Worker.
Microsoft aims to simplify otherwise complex corporate tasks managed by engineers or IT technicians. For instance, a WYSIWYG interface would enable an IT worker to give a new employee access to the company tools in a series of steps that could be shorter than setting up, say, a free Hotmail or Yahoo e-mail account.
One can sign up online to try the beta services.
Exchange Online and Office SharePoint Online remain in beta, with final availability set for sometime in the second half of 2008, when Office Communications Online beta is also due. Microsoft plans for international availability in 2009.
The company offers to pay resellers of its Online Services 12 percent of the price of each contract secured during the first year, and 6 percent per subscription year thereafter. Interested companies can learn more at Microsoft's QuickStart Web site.
Microsoft partners and resellers of Online Services include Accenture, CDW, and Unisys. Nokia is among the companies using the online tools for messaging and collaboration.
Microsoft Online Services includes these tools.
(Credit: Microsoft)
Our buttoned-down and moneyed East Coast friends might want to check out the upcoming Enterprise 2.0 Conference from June 9 to 12 in Boston, where businesses wonks will be arguing about how to get real work done with Web tools. Like the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco last month, this conference will feature a Launchpad session that pits a few Web 2.0 companies against each other in rapid-fire pitches.
Right now, the Conference is asking for video submissions for the Launchpad, and you can check out the entries as they come in on the Launchpad page. So far, there are only two entries (Truviso and Nuospace), both of which make online services geared for corporate needs. You can also submit your own company for the Launchpad session, but the deadline is coming up fast: it's Wednesday, May 7.
You can get $100 off admission to the full conference, or a free exhibits-only pass, by signing up here with the priority code, "CMBMEB03."
