Posted by Michael Kieran on May 10, 2012
Cloud computing isn’t just for the enterprise – many small businesses are starting to move some of their content to the cloud, typically through public cloud solutions such as Box, Dropbox, Google Drive, and others.
With today’s release of Pogoplug Teams, really small companies looking to get into cloud storage have an even cheaper, though slightly geekier option – turning an existing computer or server into a private multi-user cloud. To use Pogoplug Teams, you install the software on any computer or server running Windows, Mac or Linux, and then assign various folders on the machine to the employees needing access.
Files are locally hosted, so there are no file size limits, and onsite transfers move at LAN speeds, not cloud speeds. Remote access lets you view and download files from any PC, web, mobile or tablet device, and the user interface can be customized and branded to better match your company’s other online properties. To increase storage capacity, you simply add another hard drive to your computer or server.
This approach isn’t for everyone – you’re relying on a local machine that needs to be maintained and backed up, not on a third-party service with plenty of built-in redundancy. But for some companies, the price advantages are compelling (especially if you already have a spare computer available).
Pogoplug Teams costs $75 per year for 2TB of storage and access for up to 5 people, or $150 per year for 4TB and 10 people. It’s impossible to compare this directly with public cloud service providers, but similar storage capacities on Box, Dropbox, or Google Drive would be at least $1,000 to $2,000 or more annually (though these vendors are providing additional services, including the hardware).
If you’ve explored a DIY cloud solution, I’d love to hear about it in the Comments.
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Categories: cloud computing, collaboration, content management, implementation, private cloud |
Tags: Box, cloud, DIY cloud, Dropbox, Google Drive, onsite cloud, Pogoplug, Pogoplug Teams, private cloud, small business | 
No Comments »
Posted by Michael Kieran on May 9, 2012
When to use Twitter
Bitly was one of the first, and remains one of the most popular URL-shortening sites, making it easy to collect, organize, shorten and share links.
In addition to its open public API, one of bitly’s nicest features is the analytics pane where you can track what happens when a link you’ve shortened gets shared around the web.
These links are shared across all the major social networks, so the bitly people have a unique viewpoint on differences between these networks. They track metrics like the main type of content being shared on each network, the geographic locations of the people sharing and viewing the content, and how the popularity of the network has risen and fallen compared to other networks.
When to use Facebook
In a blog post called Time Is On Your Side, the bitly team has aggregated this data and visualized it in a way that highlights some stark differences between different social networks with regard to the effectiveness of content sharing. They look at how content propagates (goes viral) through social networks, particularly how the day and time something is posted affects the amount of attention it will ultimately receive.
For instance, Tumblr has a drastically different pattern of usage from Facebook and Twitter. If you’re trying to maximize sharing of your content, the best times to post on Facebook and Twitter are from 1:00 p.m. through 4:00 p.m. (Eastern time), Monday through Thursday. But on Tumblr, it’s best to post after 4:00 p.m., and Friday evenings are a great time for sharing.
When to use Tumblr
As the bitly data makes clear, if you’re trying to stimulate people to share your content, it’s crucial to factor in timing, in conjunction with the specific social network your audience is using.
Bonus! Jonah Peretti, a co-founder of the Huffington Post (and thus a guy who knows something about making content go viral), says it’s essential that your content is “easy to understand, easy to share and includes a social imperative” so that it appeals to the most powerful group of viral agents – people who are bored at work.
[In case you're wondering, bitly actually reported this data yesterday, but it was late in the day before I got to it, so I waited until now to share it.]
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Categories: best practices, big data, content management, metrics, research, social media, strategy |
Tags: analytics, bitly, content distribution, Facebook, like, metrics, retweet, sharing, social media, social networks, Tumblr, Twitter, URL shorteners, viral content | No Comments »
Posted by Michael Kieran on April 30, 2012
When I worked at Socialtext in Palo Alto, one of the brightest people there was Alan Lepofsky, then director of marketing. Alan, who’s based in Toronto, now works at Constellation Research where he covers the enterprise collaboration software market.
In a recent blog post on File Sharing and Synchronization Services, Alan lists many of the key vendors that he’s tracking in this nascent space, including all the usual suspects (Box, Dropbox, Google, etc.)
But what really caught my eye was the list that he’s put together of the key factors companies must consider when choosing a vendor:
- The terms of service around ownership of the content you upload.
- Are there collaboration options (ex: comment, Like, etc), built in file viewers, or is it just cloud based storage?
- What OS/devices are supported: Windows? Mac? Linux? – Web? iPhone? iPad? Android?
- What other products/tools/services is it integrated with? Is there an app store?
- How much storage is offered? What is the max file (upload) size? How does this change at various price points?
- Do synched files have to be in a specific parent directory on your computer?
- What type of sharing permissions are available? (view, edit, etc.) Folder level and/or file level?
- What security/encryption options are available? (storage on your computer, in transit and in their data center)
- Do they offer an API? If so, how well documented is it? Are there samples? Is there a developer support community? How are objects references, via pointer to a location or does each have a unique identifier?
- How does sync occur? Is the entire file replaced or are just changes sent?
What do you think? Anything you would change or add?
Categories: best practices, cloud computing, strategy, Uncategorized |
Tags: API, architecture, cloud storage, collaboration, encryption, file synchronization, security, sync | 1 Comment »
Posted by Michael Kieran on April 12, 2012
David Armano of Edelman Digital has posted a thoughtful piece about the changes roiling the agency world, especially for agencies moving to compete in the “digital-social” space (that is, all those wanting to survive).
He focuses on five key vectors – adaptation of skill-sets, importing and exporting talent, supply and demand, integration, and ecosystem development. So on reading this, I naturally thought of … better-fitting pants!
That’s because of this morning’s news that Nordstrom, the monolithic high-end retailer, is leading a $16.4-million investment round in Bonobos, the upstart web-based vendor of better-fitting men’s pants. Sure, it’s a nano-sized deal by Instagram standards, but it’s a smart move by both companies, leveraging these same five vectors:
Adaptation of skill-sets – Nordstrom was founded in 1901 and had over $10-billion in sales last year, yet despite more than a decade of efforts has had trouble establishing a significant online presence. Bonobos is less than five years old, but could teach Nordstrom a lot about email marketing and online brand building. In return, with minimal expenditure on its nascent retail strategy, Bonobos gets maximum exposure, and alignment with one of retail’s most storied brands.
Importing and exporting talent – On top of the cross-pollination between the two company’s retail and online marketing experts, injecting some of Bonobos’ high-energy talent into Nordstrom’s executive suite could liven things up. And Nordstrom has a century of surviving shifts in fashion, which could prove essential to Bonobos’ rapid-fire growth strategy. Plus, on a recruiting level, it’s great for both companies.
Supply and demand – Nordstrom gains some street cred among their current customers’ adult kids, not just those who’ve bought Bonobos online, but the much larger audience who’ve been exposed to their cheap but effective media relations campaigns. Bonobos gains distribution in 20 of Nordstrom’s stores as well as on nordstrom.com, and Nordstrom customers get cool pants. Plus there’s the $16.4-million in financing for future expansion, led by Nordstrom with full participation from Bonobos’ existing venture capital investors.
Integration – Many men don’t like to go shopping, but they also don’t like to buy clothing without seeing what it looks and feels like. Both Nordstrom and Bonobos are known for being fanatical about customer service, and are gambling this venture gives them a head start on a hybrid model combining the best of online shopping and the retail experience.
Ecosystem development – This is the big question. The ecosystem Nordstrom is eager to develop isn’t Bonobos’ customer base of trendy young men, it’s the inventive data-driven email campaigns and web analytics that so effectively engage this audience. Bonobos has big ambitions, and hopes to use Nordstrom’s expertise to crack retail as effectively as it’s mastered marketing automation.
It will be interesting to watch this relationship unfold.
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Categories: best practices, collaboration, eCommerce, enterprise 2.0, implementation, retail, social media, strategy |
Tags: apparel, Bonobos, clothing, digital agencies, email marketing, fashion, marketing automation, Nordstrom, online marketing, pants, retail, social media, social media agencies | No Comments »
Posted by Michael Kieran on April 4, 2012
Those clever folks over at TabJuice have put together an excellent infographic summarizing the psychological factors influencing social marketing.
Companies leveraging social media to make you buy something are taking advantage of well-known cognitive biases – the mental rules of thumb that speed the decision-making process, though not always in your best interest.
In particular, social media marketing plays on your built-in inclination toward:
- Proof – Looking at the behavior of others when deciding what to do.
- Authority – Believing “experts”.
- Scarcity – If there’s isn’t much available, it must be good.
- Like – You like it because people like you like it.
- Consistency – Reliance on past behavior, especially in the face of something new.
- Reciprocity – Innate desire to repay favors in order to maintain social fairness.
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The infographic is based on data from socialcommercetoday.com, blog.squeakywheelmedia.com, interbranddesignforum.com and factsurf.com.
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Categories: best practices, implementation, metrics, professional services, research, social media, strategy |
Tags: authority, cognitive bias, consistency, e-commerce, Facebook, like, marketing, proof, psychology, reciprocity, recommendations, scarcity, social commerce, social media, social shopping, Twitter | No Comments »
Posted by Michael Kieran on March 28, 2012
Altimeter Research has released a new report on The Rise of Digital Influence, written by respected social media analyst Brian Solis. The report provides a good overview of an important, emergent topic in social business, and I’m grateful to Brian and his colleagues for sharing their original research.
For now, however, I’m taking this whole field of digital influence measurement with a huge grain of salt (–>).
There’s no question that digital influence is a real phenomenon, and that it’s increasingly important in sales, marketing, and customer service. Like everyone, I live and work in overlapping networks of people, and in every group there are invariably a few people we all regard as mini-celebrities for their deep knowledge and passion in some domain, whether it’s Italian food or improvisational jazz. And yes, social networks provide brands with new ways to identify and connect with these disproportionately influential people.
But having reviewed the methodologies behind the algorithms used, I’m pretty skeptical of the current value of these services.
Part of the problem is that none of the services available today measures true influence, including the really important stuff people do in the offline world. Instead, their software algorithms are limited to tracking social capital and topical authority based on specific kinds of online activity.
Also, no one has yet provided data proving the effectiveness of any of the influence metric systems available, in part because even the vendors aren’t really clear on what’s being measured. I’m sure this will improve greatly over the next few years; we’re just not there yet.
Bonus! The report includes an appendix comparing the products from 14 vendors in the digital influence space (Appinions, eCairn, Empire Avenue, Klout, Kred, mPACT, PeerIndex, PROskore, Radian6, Traackr, TweetLevel, TweetReach, Twitalyzer, and TwitterGrade).
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Altimeter Research report: http://www.slideshare.net/Altimeter/the-rise-of-digital-influence
Rock salt crystal image courtesy of włodi via Flickr.
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Categories: big data, enterprise 2.0, metrics, research, social media, strategy |
Tags: analysts, Appinions, digital influence, eCairn, Empire Avenue, Klout, Kred, metrics, mPACT, PeerIndex, PROskore, Radian6, ROI, social business, social media, Traackr, TweetLevel, TweetReach, Twitalyzer, TwitterGrade | No Comments »
Posted by Michael Kieran on March 26, 2012
On GigaOm recently, Barb Darrow reported that reducing costs is not the main reason companies are moving from on-site deployments to cloud computing.
According to a survey of 600 large companies by Tata Consultancy Services (a huge IT service provider), the ability to standardize software and business processes across the enterprise is the most important factor cited by companies in the U.S. and Asia-Pacific regions, while the ability to quickly ramp systems up or down is the main driver in Europe and Latin America.
These results make sense:
- When implementing cloud computing systems, many companies focus on specific use cases and benefits, such as the ability for a mobile work force to access and sync content regardless of location, rather than strictly on cost issues.
- It’s more important than ever that companies be flexible, and cloud computing is fundamentally more flexible than on-premises systems, whether implementing a single application or an entire large-scale system.
- They reinforce a similar study from Computer Science Corporation in December 2011 that identified mobility and efficiency to be more important benefits in moving to cloud computing, compared with cost savings, which in many cases were minimal.
Besides, cloud computing offers IT managers a different kind of financial incentive: it’s considered an operational expense that can be spread out over the lifetime of the deployment, rather than a huge up-front capital expense requiring all kinds of approvals.
Although some studies show that cloud computing can be more expensive than on-premises deployment over the longer term (5+ years), most CIOs are now moving an increasing percentage of their operations to the cloud, not simply for financial reasons, but because it offers their users benefits they can’t get anywhere else.
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Categories: cloud computing, collaboration, enterprise 2.0, implementation, metrics, strategy |
Tags: analysis, cloud, cloud computing, enterprise 2.0, GigaOm, IT trends, mobile | No Comments »
Posted by Michael Kieran on February 10, 2012
The cloud storage community is aflutter this week with news that Google is planning to release a service, called “Drive” or “G-Drive”, that would let you store images, videos, music and documents on Google’s servers, making your content accessible from any device. Reports suggest users would receive five or ten gigabytes of storage free, with options to purchase more.
The online storage and backup market was worth $830-million in 2011, according to Gartner Inc., and is expected to grow 47% to $1.2-billion this year. Would Google’s entry into this market cause problems for competitors like Dropbox, Box, and Apple? I think the answer is yes, no, and maybe.
- Yes, a free Google service aimed at consumers and small groups would be bad news for Dropbox, YouSendIt, and other consumer-oriented cloud storage outfits. A Google cloud drive would be a natural fit for people already using Google Music, Google+, and maybe Google Docs, especially if Google can approximate Dropbox’s ease of use.
- No, Box (formerly Box.net) probably has little to worry about, as it has been aggressively moving upmarket into the business and enterprise segments, with advanced security and administration features, a robust set of APIs to help developers build cloud-based applications, and a growing professional services team.
- Maybe Apple should be a little concerned. Its iCloud service tries to play nicely with non-Apple content and devices, but irritates users with a $25 yearly fee for access to music purchased anywhere other than the iTunes store. And as the Android mobile operating system has shown, lots of people will choose a feature-rich open ecosystem over the iOS walled garden.
Oh, and um, by the way, Microsoft has been providing a cloud storage product called SkyDrive since 1997.
Categories: best practices, collaboration, content management, professional services, strategy |
Tags: Apple, Box, cloud, cloud storage, Dropbox, Google+, iCloud | 2 Comments »
Posted by Michael Kieran on January 20, 2012
This starkly beautiful beach house south of Santa Cruz, CA was designed by renowned California architect William Turnbull in 1971 for Sandy and Barbara Tatum and their six children, the youngest of whom is now my wife.
Watching our four-year-old son playing with an old dollhouse recently, I was struck by how cool it would be to build him a dollhouse embodying the essence of the beach house where he too now plays. Though I lack even the most basic drawing skills, and have no experience with CAD (computer aided drawing) software, it occurred to me that it might be possible to use Google SketchUp to design a dollhouse-scale beach house and generate the necessary shop drawings. Three months later, I can report that it’s definitely possible.
My version of the beach house is cherry and hard maple, and is about 24″ high, 24″ wide, and 28″ long. Rather than copying each architectural feature of the actual beach house, the doll house aims to recreate the way it feels to be there. To withstand a hundred year’s of play by active kids, the house is glued and screwed together, with the screw holes counter-bored and plugged.
There are twelve windows in the front panel, and though they’d been easy to create in SketchUp, I realized they would be considerably more work in hard maple. That’s what spurred me to try out the ShopBot computer-controlled router at a nearby rental facility, which can be driven by AutoCAD DXF files from SketchUp Pro. It took a couple of hours to get everything properly configured and tested, but ten minutes later the robot had perfectly routed out all twelve windows and the perimeter.
In the actual Tatum beach house, you’ll usually find Barbara and Sandy reading in wicker chairs by the potbelly stove in the living room, or perhaps Barbara will be upstairs playing the piano while Sandy’s out playing golf. Thanks to eBay, the dollhouse now contains tiny little wicker chairs, a potbelly stove, and a white upright piano just like the real thing. To complete the illusion, I took photos of a few key scenes in the real beach house, such as a bedroom wall plastered with books, and had them printed onto glass tiles, which I glued into place in the appropriate rooms of the dollhouse.
Every new woodworking project teaches me something, but this time I had to learn about California beach house architecture, 3D modeling, SketchUp, and robotic routers. It’s been my most difficult – and most fun – woodworking project ever.
Categories: prototyping |
Tags: architecture, CAD, design, Google SketchUp, robotics, SketchUp, woodwork | 4 Comments »
Posted by Michael Kieran on January 4, 2012
In a new blog post, How Pinterest Will Transform the Web in 2012: Social Content Curation As The Next Big Thing, serial tech entrepreneur Elad Gil brings into focus one of the key trends now roiling the Web – the value added by people assessing the relevance of content.
Gil describes how, over the last decade, the trend in social media has been “from long form content, which has high friction of participation (both on the production and consumption side) to ever lower requirements placed on a user to participate in a conversation.” As Pinterest has shown with their one-click Pin It and Repin buttons, people are a lot more likely to aggregate and share stuff if you make it really easy for them.
Equally important, Pinterest doesn’t treat all this data as a stream, but rather as structured collections, which other users can easily view, contribute to, and share with yet others. Socially curated content is also migrating to news and information sites (snip.it, quora.com), e-commerce (thefancy.com, piccing.com, shoply.com) and narrative communities (cowbird.com, storify.com).
From my perspective, the enabling technology here is the ease of sharing with others – not just the people you know on Facebook or Twitter, but others who happen to care about the same things you do, whether that’s woodworking, cooking, or planetary science.
But moving forward, there emerges an adjacent possibility that holds even greater potential, as social curating collides with another of 2012′s major trends – big data:
– Facebook lets me learn from the people I already know;
– Pinterest lets me learn from people who like the same things I do;
– Emergent tools will know enough about users’ likes and interests to automatically curate content, combining explicit gestures (such as “pinning” or “repinning” content) with massive data sets, enabling laser-like precision in identifying and recommending relevant new content.
Categories: big data, content management, metrics, research, social media, strategy |
Tags: big data, chocolates, Cowbird, Elad Gil, Fancy, Google+, moderation, Piccing, Pinterest, Shoply, social curation, social shopping | No Comments »
Cloud computing isn’t just for the enterprise – many small businesses are starting to move some of their content to the cloud, typically through public cloud solutions such as Box, Dropbox, Google Drive, and others.
