Alex Barankevych, Author at Barankevych.com

Unlearn your MBA. A word of wisdom for those getting their business degrees

Posted on May 16, 2011by Alex Barankevych

Excellent advice to those graduating business schools and looking to join workforce. I personally, did not realize that lack of touch with reality is an international plague that haunts business schools across the world.

In his talk at Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders Lecture Series at Stanford’s Entrepreneurship Corner David Heineimeier Hansson, the creator of Ruby on Rails and partner at 37signals in Chicago, says that Business education with its management theories and 20-page reports is irrelevant to what people actually do in real life.

“Real life is about making a good product, pleasing customers and making profit as business,” said Hansoon who for three years attended Copenhagen Business School.

“Your 20-page report on Five Forces is just irrelevant. All of the tools that you learn in the business school are juts for you. They are not going to impress anybody else,” he added.

Unlearning your MBA according to Hansoon starts with a key spot – WRITING. “When you come out of the business school your writing sucks! Because your writing is targeted at pleasing professors who want you to see you demonstrate theories and write a certain amount of work.”

There’s no bonus points for writing one page report. But learning to write exactly what you need is a key to success in business today.

5-minute highlights of Hansoon’s talk

David Heineimeier Hansson: Unlearn Your MBS highlights

The complete podcast of the talk can be found on iTunes or on Stanford’s Entrepreneurship Corner’s website.

Full video of the talk

Digital Marketing

Insanely useful tips on searching Twitter

Posted on May 11, 2011by Alex Barankevych

As a marketing tool Twitter gets much more interesting and useful when you can filter out 99 percent of the junk that doesn’t apply to your objectives and focus on the stuff that matters.

The basic search.twitter.com functionality is fine for finding out what’s being said about your search terms. The advanced search function offers more ways to slice and dice the stream, but still leaves some room for improvement as it only searches what’s being said and where. From a communication standpoint, who is saying it might be more useful.

Now that the search engines offer real time search, you can create some powerful searches and alerts combining Google and Twitter.

1) Target by occupation

Let’s say you have a business that sells an awesome service to attorneys. A simple search on Twitter will turn up thousands of mentions of the word attorney, but many of them will be from people talking about this or that attorney or the need to hire or not hire one. That’s probably not very helpful.

However, if you cruise over to Google and use a handful of operators from the Google shortcut library you can create a search that plows through Twitter and gives you a list of all the users that have the word “attorney” in their title (username and/or real name). Click on this search phrase—intitle:”attorney * on twitter” site:twitter.com—and what you’ll find is a handy list of attorneys of one sort or another on Twitter.

Without getting too technical, this search basically asks Google to look in the title of profile pages on Twitter. The * tells Google to find the words “attorney on Twitter” without regard to order or other words. And “on Twitter” appears in the title of every profile page, so we need that term to make sure we search profile pages only.

2) Target by bio
In some cases, searching through the optional biographical information can be more helpful than combing the username or real name fields. Maybe you’re looking for a specific term or some of the folks you are targeting only reference their profession in their bio.

Google search to the rescue again. This time add the intext attribute, the word bio and our key phrase to search bios. For example, a search for Web designers would look like this: intext:”bio * web designer” site:twitter.com. When you look at this list, you might notice that none of the people on the list would have been found by searching in their title, as in the first tip, for Web designer. Try it both ways to test for best results.

3) Target by location

Location search by itself is simple using the Twitter advanced search tool. If you want a list of people in Austin you would use this: near: “Austin, TX” within:25mi and Twitter would use the location field to show you Austin tweeters.

But if you wanted to target salons in Austin or all of Texas, it’s back to Google to mix and match: intitle:”salon * on twitter” OR intext:”bio * salon” intext:”location * TX” site:twitter.com. We search the title, bio and location to get a targeted list of salons in Texas on Twitter. Note the OR function for multiple queries.

4) New signups

Another handy thing about using any of the searches above is that you can also use them to create Google Alerts. By going to Google and putting in your search string as described above you’ll get everything they have now, but by setting up an alert you’ll get an e-mail or RSS alert when a new attorney (or whatever you’re targeting) joins Twitter.

5) Keep up on your industry

Some of the best information shared on Twitter comes in the form of shared links. I love to use a filtered Twitter search to further wade through research on entire industries, but reduce the noise by only following tweets that have links in them and eliminating retweets that are essentially duplicates—“small business” OR entrepreneur OR “start up” filter:links—this gets that job done and produces an RSS feed if I want to send it to Google Reader. Don’t forget to put quotation marks around phrases of two or more words, or you will get every mention of small and business.

6) Competitive eavesdropping

Lots of people set up basic searches to listen to what their competitors are saying and what others are saying about the competition. I suggest you create a search that includes the conversations they are having and not just what people are saying about them. For example, if you’re competitor is Comcast, you’d search from:comcastcares OR to:comcastcares.

7) Trending photos

If you want to find an image related to a hot trend, or anything for that matter, simply put the search phase you have in mind followed by one of the better-known Twitter image uploading services such as TwitPic, and you’ll get nothing but images. So, your search on Twitter might be olympics twitpic OR ow.ly. (You can add more photo sharing sites to expand the search.)

Twitter just got way more interesting didn’t it?

This article originally appeared on American Express OPEN Forum.

e-Media

Case Study on value of social media: How Dell Learned to Listen

Posted on May 10, 2011by Alex Barankevych

Interesting case study in Wall Street Journal on use of social media by Dell to generate new business. According to the article Dell estimated that it had generated $6.5 million of business through Twitter activities alone.

That would be nice to see how much revenue other channels have generated. I, for once, would love to know how that estimate was made. Despite all the talk, I have not seen the issue of ROI from social media been addressed properly.

And one other thing. I’d pay a lot to get a glimpse into Dell’s Social Media Listening Command Centre.

Anyway, here’s the case.

Dell was in trouble. Not only had it lost its position as the world’s leading manufacturer of PCs, but its reputation was in tatters following a court case which showed that between 2003 and 2005 it had sold millions of computers knowing them to be faulty and told staff not to be forthcoming about the problems. Also in 2005, veteran blogger and City University of New York Graduate School of Journalism teacher Jeff Jarvis published a blog article under the heading “Dell Sucks” in which he complained about the quality of the laptop he’d bought from the company and the service he’d received afterwards. Thousands of disgruntled customers brought a storm of bad publicity by adding their dissatisfied comments to his posting.

Today, the previously opaque nature of Dell’s dealings with its customers has gone. The company appears to have embraced the transparency inherent in social media – a process it started first by reaching out to critical bloggers and then by launching its own blog Direct2Dell.

Early last year Dell started to offer customer support through Facebook and Twitter using the @dellcares address. The next step, in December 2010, was the creation of the “Social Media Listening Command Centre” which tracks an average of 25,000 topic posts a day related to Dell. In 2009, Dell estimated that it had generated $6.5 million (€4.5 million) of business through its Twitter activities.

It had already established “Ideastorm” in 2007 as a place where customers could suggest new products, services or features and discuss them with Dell. Of 15,000 ideas, the company now says it has implemented over 400.

It has taken a similarly open approach with customer reviews creating a “Tag Team Facebook” app which simplifies the process of finding independent customer ratings of Dell products. There are now over 100,000 of these reviews.

Within the company, there is increasing use of social media tools. Dell chief executive, Michael Dell, last year Tweeted enthusiastically about the use of the Seesmic app for Twitter, Facebook and the cloud CRM company Salesforce.com’s Chatter social media service.

“Engaging in honest, direct conversations with customers and stakeholders is a part of who we are, who we’ve always been,” Mr. Dell says.

“The social web amplifies our opportunity to listen and learn and invest ourselves in two-way dialogue, enabling us to become a better company with more to offer the people who depend on us.”

e-Business e-Media

Microsoft eyeing Skype

Posted on May 10, 2011by Alex Barankevych

Microsoft is in advanced talks to acquire Skype, which revolutionized telephone calls over the Internet, for $8.5 billion, including the assumption of debt, according to people involved in the transaction.

A deal is expected to be announced on Tuesday morning, these people said, although they cautioned that negotiations could still fall apart.

The acquisition would be Microsoft’s largest ever and it is the software giant’s effort to gain a foothold in the world of voice and video communications. Microsoft would be able leverage Skype’s more than 600 million registered users into using its other Internet products like Bing, its search engine, which competes with Google. It may also be used to bolster Microsoft’s fledging mobile telephone offering, which lags far behind Apple’s iOS and Google’s Android operating systems. And Skype is likely to integrated into Microsoft’s flagship product, Office, as a way for business users to better collaborate.

e-Media

Business Still Thinks Social Media Is A Fad. I wonder why

Posted on May 8, 2011by Alex Barankevych

Here is a fun graphic that tells the tale about social media, created by Angela Nielsen, of One Lily Creative Agency, a full-service web and print design company.

Angela blogs, “Almost every day I talk with business owners who think social media is a fad, and if they just hold out long enough that it will go away. Or others that think social media is only used for sharing pictures of grandchildren and telling the world what you made for dinner. In a time where people are using their Blackberry to check-in at a client meeting, their iphone to record a video from a seminar and post it on Facebook, or CEO’s reaching out to connections on LinkedIn to find a new employee – social media is now more business than ever.”

Myself, I observe that business is too “business” to notice that its customers, and their own meatware selves, have adopted and become accustomed to an online, mobile, and social blend of communicating and interacting. In other words, it’s perfectly acceptable for me to do this as an individual, but to think my business might adopt this – what are you, a nutcase? Do you work in marketing?

While business yawns about the lack of an ROI model for a channel it does not invest in, half of the 600 million Facebook users log on every day, spending 700 billion minutes per month – absolutely NOT thinking about the businesses NOT interested in them.

If ROI meant “return on interest,” the revenue would be zip. Oh yeah, for the yawning businesses, it actually is zip.

As Angela furthers points out: “If you aren’t using social media to connect with your audience, you can bet your competition is. If you need proof in the pudding or know someone who needs it, take a look at the following infographic illustrating the reach of social media.”

Amen, sister. ‘Nuff said. Check out Angela’s full post here.

e-Technology

8 WordPress CRM Solutions for Your Business or Nonprofit

Posted on May 8, 2011by Alex Barankevych

Keeping track of your leads, contacts and community members is of the utmost importance for growing and communicating with your customer base. Many businesses are turning to CRM (Customer Relationship Management) solutions to help them keep in touch. If your site runs on WordPress, you will be able to save quite a bit of time by using a CRM that directly integrates with your contact form and site membership. This is especially helpful if you have a strongly sales-oriented business or donor-driven nonprofit. Streamline your communication flow and never let your prospects fall through the cracks again.

We’ve prepared a a list of CRMs that integrate with WordPress. All of the options here are updated and ready to go with WordPress 3.0.

WordPress-to-lead for Salesforce CRM

WordPress-to-Lead for Salesforce CRM creates a solid integration between your WordPress install(s) and your Salesforce CRM account! People can enter a contact form on your site, and the lead goes straight into Salesforce CRM. Learn more about how you can capture more leads with WordPress and Salesforce CRM.

Download Plugin

RoloPress

RoloPress is an Open Source Contact Manager, licensed under GPL v2, and built on the WordPress. It uses standard WordPress features like Posts, Custom Fields and Custom Taxonomies to transform WordPress into a contact Manager. You can also expand its functionality with themes and plugins

Download Theme

WP Highrise

This plugin generates a form which you can drop on any page or post. When a visitor fills the form, the data will be sent to you via email and it will also be sent to your 37signals Highrise account so that you can easily manage and record information from contacts through your website.

Download Plugin

Capsule Web2Lead

This plugin provides a widget that allows the user to place a web to lead form in their side bar. When a visitor fills in the form a lead is inserted into the users Capsule CRM account.

Download Plugin

WICE Contact for WordPress

The WICE Contact for WordPress plugin allows you to build a contact form that you can place on your site via a shortcode. The plugin will send the data to WICE CRM-Groupware, a web-based solution for customer relationship management. WICE CRM-Groupware automatically adds the new address and contact person and starts a new ticket for further contact management.

Download Plugin

CRM4WordPress

This plugin does something a little different. Anytime a visitor posts a comment on your blog his details will be captured in the BatchBook CRM system.

Download Plugin

WP Sugar CRM API SOAP

SugarCRM is a commercial open source CRM software for sales force automation and customer support. This plugin enables you to access SugarCRM using its SOAP interface.

Download Plugin

Gravity Forms plus Constant Contact

Gravity Forms makes the bridge between WordPress and Constant Contact, which is becoming more than just an email marketing service and now includes event and social media marketing to your contacts.

Download Plugin

If you’re aware of any more third party CRMs that have tools for integrating with WordPress please feel free to share in the comments.

Digital Marketing e-Media

RIM and its problem

Posted on April 28, 2011by Alex Barankevych

Research In Motion’s PlayBook hit stores April 19 and is the first tablet computer targeted at business users. And yet, surprisingly, RIM shares fell by 10 per cent or so several weeks earlier following the combined announcement of a 32-per-cent increase in profits and the PlayBook availability. Why is this?

Somehow I am not surprised.

At its heart, marketing is all about matching products to markets. If you can’t articulate your value or define your target audience, no matter how much you spend, any success you have is going to be an accident.

Defining your value and target market is one of the most challenging aspects of bringing new products to market. And even when firms take the time to do this research, you can see them “losing the plot” during the launch. This usually takes the form of companies getting so mesmerized by a competitive product that they end up positioning against the competition instead of positioning to their target market.

This is clearly happening with the launch of RIM’s new PlayBook tablet.

RIM plans on selling 70 per cent of its PlayBooks to enterprise customers, and yet its launch has fallen into the trap of focusing on how it stacks up against a competitor, rather than on the value it brings to the target market.

As a businessperson, the first question I have about any system is what it runs. Can I run my existing applications on it, or will I have to change my whole application suite? And I’m not getting those answers from RIM at the moment.

Instead, its early positioning focuses on browser speed, Adobe Flash support and HTML5 performance, which are only marginally relevant to the main value proposition of “enterprise-readiness.”

e-Media e-Technology

Lessons from GoDaddy mishap

Posted on April 5, 2011by Alex Barankevych

Domain registration company GoDaddy came under heavy criticism from animal rights activists after its CEO Bob Parsons posted a video online where he hunts elephants in Zimbabwe.

Parsons defends himself by saying that he only hunted those species that they destroy farm crops and could potentially cause starvation of local farmers and their families.

Several human rights groups decided to call it quits with GoDaddy with PETA reportedly closing their account with GoDaddy.

Among the few benefiting from GoDaddy’s misstep are its competitors, such as NameCheap.com, that is offering a transfer of domain names from GoDaddy for $4.99 of which 20 percent will go to SaveTheElephants.com. Clever!

Now, I’ve never been a fan of GoDaddy’s. Their prices are not so good (com domain for $12 and up when you can buy one from Google for $10), their customer support is responsive but not that all that helpful, and the glorious hosting is not all that great (a total of 1 hour of downtime over the past month on one of my websites). And hey, what’s up with your hosting control panel? How can they still be using that custom made usability misfortune when there’s something called CPanel? But I digress.

In this day and age how silly can you be to post photo and video of sensitive nature to the public? Of all the people should have known that once that info gets out of control there’s no way of stopping it.

GoDaddy’s lack of valid explanation to this date is another reason for concern. Bad news these days travel with the speed of wild fire. The longer you wait the more work you will have to do later dealing with the consequences.

As I said, I am not a big fun of GoDaddy, but this whole situation certainly does not make me want to recommend it to my clients. I’d rather choose NameCheap.com instead.

Digital Marketing e-Media e-Technology

How do develop an awesome mobile app

Posted on April 4, 2011by Alex Barankevych

Every computer science kid these days seems to have some kind of ‘app idea’. I’m sure you have one too. But how do you know if your idea is going to fly? Is there any way of trying to idea out against some sanity checks before investing time and money into development.

Realtor.ca - good example of Information, Communication, and Localization components implemented in one app

I’m sure there’s plenty of stuff online on the topic. But here’s my 5 cents. The tip comes from professor Umar Ruhi who teaches Mobile Marketing class at the University of Ottawa.

At one of the classes Umar introduced a C-L-I-P components framework for mobile commerce. The framework describes theoretical approach to functionalities of a mobile app helps developers decide which features should be added or eliminated on the stage of conceptualizing.

C-L-I-P stands for Communication, Locatabiltiy, Information, Payment. According to Ruhi’s assumption, a combination of any three of these components will boost your app’s chances for success on the market. So what are those components?

Communication has to do with the kind of communication channel your apps will be using: text, voice, video, data, one-way, two-way, wireless, browsing. A good practical example will be an ability to send an email, chat or fill in a form or leave comments. Skype’s mobile app, IMO.im or any other app that allows sending emails straight from its interface are the examples.

Locatability. Will your app know where you are and what sort of environment you’re in? Can it adapt itself to these settings? I.e. provide text-only version if the connection is bad, or offer a list of nearby restaurants if I am looking for a place to eat. To cut it short, the app should make use of inbuilt GPS-capability or any other location-determining functionality of your device (BlueTooth, WiFi triangulation, etc.) Square, Facebook (places), Google Latitude.

Information. Does your application provide access to unique set of data or presents data in an original way? Any database-driven functionality will be a good example. News apps will fit here too. App examples: Autotrader.ca, ZooCasa, Realtor, Reuters, Metro.

Payment. Is there a way to pay or receive payment using a particular device or application? This feature may be embedded into device/application itself or there should be some sort of convenient way to make use of another payment provider to enable commercial transactions. PayPal, ZoomPass or ScotiaBank mobile app are good example of this component being implemented.

Most of the apps I’ve mentioned have at least this functionality. As I previously said, this framework may come handy when app is being conceptualized or maybe used to identify the direction for adding new features.

Apple’s App Store is an excellent example of almost all four components being implemented. It provides a way for users to communicate with developers and other users by leaving comments and rating the apps. You can also register in the store through your iPhone by filling out the registration form; its location component is somewhat weaker and is based on your registration information (food for thought, Apple). Yet, it’s enough to allow the app to offer specific products for specific markets.

Its information component is huge and consists of humongous database of apps with searching and filtering capabilities;

and last but not least the payment module linked to your credit card which transforms Apple App Store into a standalone, fully functional money making machine.

e-Technology

Backup your Gmail… Now!

Posted on February 28, 2011by Alex Barankevych

I bet you did not know you could backup ALL your gmail correspondence with one nifty application. I did not either. Until today, when about 150 000 gmail accounts representing less that 0.08% of all Gmail users were reset to ‘0’.

How did that happen? – Not even Google engineers know, but they swear they are working hard to correct the problem.

In the meantime, those concerned about safety of their gmail accounts may use app called Gmail Backup. It is available for Mac, PC and Linux. It might take a while to back up and download all the mail you’ve got but it’s definitely worth a shot. I know I am downloading it already.