More Interesting Links and References

The beauty of the web is the amount of information at your finger tips, the horror of it is finding anything interesting to read.  Here goes a few suggestions of recent articles that you may find interesting, enjoy.


The Cloud is always controversial, here are few perspectives:
Leading Developers Dismiss Charge That Cloud Is 'Vapor'
By Charles Babcock, InformationWeek

Hadoop originator Doug Cutting, NASA CIO Chris Kemp, and other cloud pioneers defended cloud computing during a CTO Forum panel and pointed to an emerging generation of enterprise applications.  



Cloudy With a Chance of Transformation: New Microsoft Server and Tools Head Satya Nadella Speaks
By Kara Swisher, All Things Digital

After he was appointed the new president of Microsoft’s Server and Tools Division from his top engineering post at its come-from-behind Bing search unit, Satya Nadella now finds himself a leader of a business that also needs to keep catching up.  


A Bit of Social Media and New Age talk:
As collaboration goes social, where will it thrive?
By Dion Hinchcliffe, ZDNet

Social business is starting to get serious attention as an industry, like social media recently has in the investment community. Find out where the action has been when it comes to the places Enterprise 2.0 is most likely to thrive.  


Should Information Be On The Balance Sheet?
By Chuck Hollis

EMC VP of Global Marketing Chuck Hollis is calling for enterprises to put information on the balance sheet.  


What the Facebook Message Platform Means for Businesses
by Shannon Suetos, Social Media Examiner

Facebook's message platform gives marketers more options to directly engage group members faster.

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Video Marketing: DIY or Take It To a Pro?
by Neil Glassman, SocialTimes

Whatever you do, don't get too caught up in the production -- authenticity is most important.

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How Small Businesses Are Using Social Media
by Erica Swallow, Mashable

Small businesses are getting more direct engagement on Twitter, but Facebook drives much more traffic for them.


What Apple's 30% Charge Teaches Us about the Attention Economy
by Garry Tan, Posterous

It's great to be the owner of a successful company, but it's much more valuable (though much riskier) to own the infrastructure on which that company is built.

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There Are No Rules in Customer Development

by Andrew Skotzko

Lots of people are getting hung up on the "process" of customer development. There is no set process, only set principles -- question your assumptions and talk to your customers.

Practical Use of Social Media

Readers of this blog know that I am a proponent of social media in business. However candidly there is a great deal of activity and investment in social media that is wasted. You have seen them in action; fancy Facebook pages that are nothing more than a rehash of of the web site or tweets that tell you what the president had for lunch.

Well recently I came across an article that answered the question: How would a pragmatist leverage social media?  The theme of the article was about how to gain insight into your competitors via the social media outlets, brilliant!  With the transparency demanded of participation in these communities, companies freely share a load of information directly with specials on products or fixes to bugs or indirectly via the comments from users about great feature of a product or issues with support.  The article is worth reading:
         http://www.socialmediaexaminer.com/how-to-gain-competitive-insight-with-social-media/

Well in that vein, I have uncovered a number of publishers of solid information and are interesting to read, let me share a few:

1. The publisher of the article mentioned above; WWW.socialmediaexaminer.com is a great source of information on...drum roll please...Social Media.
2. I like WWW.thesocialcustomer.com also it focuses on social as a tool to support your customer interaction.
3. For something completely different, WWW.gilsmethod.com.  It is a how to blog for the computer user.  The articles are clear an concise, very useful.

Enough for now, Happy Presidents Day.