News on Social Marketing, according to Gartner: Enterprise social software allows participation through formal and informal interactions and gathers these interactions to reflect the collective attitudes, dispositions and knowledge of the participants. Blogs, communities, discussion forums, expertise location, feeds and syndication, social bookmarks, wikis, and integrated platforms/suites are included on these technologies.
According to Gartner Inc, worldwide enterprise social software revenue has almost reached a total of $664.4 million in 2010. This is an increase rate of 14.9 percent from the 2009 revenue of $578.2 million. By 2011, the market is forecasted to reach $769.2 million, a 15.7 percent increase from 2010.
By driving changes in interpersonal interactions; improving operational efficiency and effectiveness; raising organizational performance; and leveraging internal and external social networks, business value can be created through social software technologies.
One of the most important adoption factors is cloud-based and software as a service (SaaS) delivery as it has also opened up access to collaboration and social software technology to small and midsize businesses that would not otherwise consider on-premises deployments. Also, buyers of these services tend to be business executives with specific marketing, R&D or HR budgets.
Business benefits and maturity that organizations are now receiving has been associated to the technology maturation of the enterprise social software market. To obtain detailed business outcomes, including product reviews and testing, brand marketing, community development and other purposes, features such as blogs, bookmarks, discussion forums, presence, profiles, rating engines, tagging and wikis are now being combined into applications.
According to Tom Eid, research vice president at Gartner “success is to be found in managing the information and relationships in support of business initiatives and not the simple deployment of technology.”
Read more at Gartner Says Worldwide Enterprise Social Software Revenue to Surpass $769 Million in 2011
News on Social Marketing, according to eConsultancy : it seems businesses are finally taking to online collaboration as a new infographics highlights its continuous growth and online collaboration tools are now being used by most businesses as they have finally come to understand that it can form part of the solution to an inefficient working practice. Businesses never seem to have caught on to these, until now.
Rather than actually speaking to an associate, most of us choose to use email, resulting in companies like Debenhams having to store 13.8 million new emails a month. An average of 28 hours a week is spent by office workers writing emails, searching for information and collaborating internally, according to a recent McKinsey Report.
Tayfun Bilsel, Clinked’s founder, has noticed the change of attitudes in 2012. An infographic was published by Clinked.com, a UK-based business collaboration start-up, saying that during the next 12 months, 75% of businesses say online collaboration tools will be “important” or “somewhat important” to their business.
Start-ups offering freemium, cloud-based solutions that also work across mobile has also been described by Aaron Levie, CEO of Box.com as “exploding the size of the [enterprise collaboration] market.”
Box.com itself recently took another $125m in investment showing the rapid emergence of the industry. “There is a real and growing market demand for these tools,” Forrester understated somewhat in a recent White Paper.
Several reasons to the success of online collaboration tools are the recession, which is forcing businesses to do more with less. Second is we have all become more familiar with the common features of enterprise social networks because of the more than 1 billion people actively using Facebook and lastly because the tools themselves have got better and most are easy to set up and use and come with simple monthly tariffs.
Read more at 75% of businesses to use social collaboration tools in 2013 [infographic]
News on Twitter Marketing, according to Twitter Support: you have a choice to keep your Tweets public or protect your Tweets when you sign up for Twitter. There are differences between protected and public Tweets.
A click on the gear icon at the top right of the page will help protect your Tweets. This allows you to go to your account settings. And then select Settings from the drop down menu. In the Tweet privacy section, check the box next to Protect my Tweets. At the bottom of the page, click the blue save button and enter your password to confirm the change. A notice reminding you that your Tweets are now protected will be seen when you navigate to your homepage after protecting your Tweets. The Protect my Tweets box will appear as checked in your account settings.
When you want to unprotect your Tweets and make your Tweets public, uncheck the Tweet privacy option in your account settings and then save your changes. Before making your Tweets public, make sure to review your pending follower requests as any requests left pending will not be accepted automatically and those users will have to follow you again.
Read more at How to Protect and Unprotect Your Tweets
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