via mashable.com
Wednesday 15 December 2010
Wednesday 24 November 2010
Monday 18 October 2010
Google Struggles to Build Social Features
And changing that is one of the company’s biggest business challenges these days.
Google depends on having its finger on the pulse of the entire Internet, and maintaining its status as the primary entree to the Web. But as people spend more time on closed social networks like Facebook, where much of the data they share is off limits to search engines, Google risks losing the competition for Web users’ time, details of their lives and, ultimately, advertising.
“Google’s made a lot of money helping people make decisions using search engines, but more and more people are turning to social outlets to make decisions,” said Charlene Li, founder of Altimeter Group, a technology research and advisory firm. “And whenever people make decisions, there’s money involved.”
Google has been trying to create social components, most recently with Buzz, a service that gives Gmail users the ability to share status updates, photos and videos. But that, and earlier efforts, have not been hugely popular.
Now the company will try again, with tools to be unveiled this fall, said Eric E. Schmidt, Google’s chief executive. Although the details remain murky, Mr. Schmidt and other Google officials sketched a broad outline of their plans in recent interviews.
Some of the tools are still being developed, they said; others will add features to existing products, like search, e-mail, maps, photos, video and ads.
The company plans to “take Google’s core products and add a social component, to make the core products even better,” Mr. Schmidt said.
But some wonder whether Google understands enough about social connections to create the tools people want to use.
“Google’s culture is very much based on the power of the algorithm, and it’s very difficult to algorithm social interaction,” Ms. Li said.
For example, the introduction of Buzz in February caused a wave of criticism from privacy advocates and everyday users, because it automatically included users’ e-mail contacts in their Buzz network. Google quickly changed the service so that it suggested friends instead of automatically connecting them.
Before Buzz’s release to the public, it was tested only by Google employees.
“There is some belief at Google that their DNA is not perfectly suited to build social products, and it’s a quite controversial topic internally,” said a person who has worked on Google’s social products who would speak only on the condition of anonymity.
“The part of social that’s about stalking people, sharing photos, looking cool — it’s mentally foreign to engineers,” the person said. “All those little details are subtle and sometimes missed, especially by technical people who are brought up in a very utilitarian company.”
Google has a social network, Orkut, but that never took off in the United States, although it is popular in Brazil and India. There are also Google profiles, which let people link Google to LinkedIn and Twitter, for example, so that information their friends have published online can appear in search results. Only a small percentage of Google users have created these profiles.
And as Facebook gains in popularity, it grows as a threat. Google sites, including the search engine and YouTube, get more unique visitors than Facebook. But in August, for the first time, people spent more time on Facebook than on Google sites, according to comScore, the Web analytics firm.
Some people are beginning to turn to their friends on Facebook for information for which they had used Google, like asking for recommendations on the best sushi or baby sitter.
Through a new partnership with Microsoft, an investor in Facebook, the things your friends like on Facebook can show up in the search results from Bing, Microsoft’s search engine.
The threat goes straight to the bottom line, too. Facebook is increasing its sales of display ads with images, which Google is counting on as its next big business.
Google has assembled a team of engineers to work on social networking, led by two executives who worked on Buzz — Vic Gundotra, vice president for engineering responsible for mobile applications, and Bradley Horowitz, a vice president for product management overseeing Google Apps.
“Google, as part of our mission to organize the world’s information, also needs to organize and make it very useful for you to see the interactions of your friends, to participate with them and benefit,” Mr. Gundotra said.
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via nytimes.com
Monday 11 October 2010
Thursday 7 October 2010
Tuesday 5 October 2010
4 Steps to Creating a Great Hospital Marketing Campaign | Hospital Financial and Business News
4 Steps to Creating a Great Hospital Marketing Campaign
As increasing patient volume becomes tantamount to staying financially viable, hospitals must think about how they market their services to potential referring physicians and patients. Dan Weinbach, executive vice president with The Weinbach Group, discusses four steps hospitals should follow to create an attractive marking campaign for a set of service lines.
1. Conduct market research. Before you start deciding how to market your hospital, you need to know what your competitors are doing and who your audience is. For example, if your hospital is located just down the road from Cleveland Clinic, arguably the hospital providing the best heart care in the country, it might be difficult to market your hospital as a cardiology leader. When your board looks at patient volume for a particular service line and feels dissatisfied, they need to benchmark that data against national and local hospital data to determine how effective a marketing campaign will be. "You may discover you have 95 percent of the market in our particular service line, so your expectations for growth need to be mitigated against what you can get out of the market," Mr. Weinbach says.
Market research should also look at the needs of your community. What are the greatest care demands in your community, and how does your hospital plan to meet them? If your community has a high incidence of heart disease or diabetes, you might start a campaign to market your cardiology line or diabetic care program. If your patients are primarily frustrated by their inability to get an appointment, you might market your hospital's "same day appointment" policy. Mr. Weinbach says hospitals often get too caught up in advertising the assets that the hospital values rather than those the customer values. "Your hospital might be proud of a specific clinical technology, but sometimes those aren't the things that matter most to patients," he says.
Your research should also examine how your hospital is currently perceived. "Once you have information on how [the market perceives you], you can start setting goals for messages and decide whether the campaign will repair [negative] conceptions or amplify [positive ones]," he says. If the public views your hospital negatively, you need to either make changes in your hospital or plan a marketing campaign to correct misconceptions.
2. Prioritize marketing goals. Once you have conducted market research, you need to take a systematic approach to marketing as opposed to a reactive approach. "You shouldn't engage in a campaign to promote cardiology services because the chair of the department has asked for a campaign," Mr. Weinbach says. "Marketing service lines should be [based on] empirical studies." Instead of allowing every physician and administrator with an agenda to prioritize for you, base your decisions on tangible factors such as:
• How much capacity does a particular service line have?
• What does the service line contribute to the hospital's bottom line?
• What is the market potential for growth in the service line?
• What technological resources can the service line offer patients?In deciding which service lines to market, Mr. Weinbach says hospitals should look to the advice of David Ogilvy, the father of advertising: "Milk your winners and kill your losers." That doesn't mean eliminating service lines, necessarily, but you should focus on service lines that are generating demand and increasing volume. If you have service lines that haven't received as much attention but have great market potential, those lines are also candidates for a marketing campaign. The lines that you shouldn't focus on are those with little room for market share growth, little contribution to the hospital's bottom line and few relationships with referring physicians. Focus on those lines that can really make a difference to your revenue and physician relationships.
3. Figure out your budget. Once you've decided which service lines you will use for your campaign, you need to plan your budget. This may mean tweaking your service line decision somewhat depending on finances. "You may discover you don't have the budget to market five different service lines," Mr. Weinbach says. "The budget and your priorities are very reliant on each other." When you set the budget, you need to make sure you provide room to market for three audiences: referring physicians, internal audiences and consumers. Prioritize the budget for each audience based on how much volume each campaign might drive. "If you think about it, one healthy physician referrer can translate into literally hundreds of patients," Mr. Weinbach says. "You may determine you can get more mileage out of your budget by focusing on service lines that have a strong physician referral component."
Several decades ago, Mr. Weinbach says marketing budgets were determined based on a percentage of total revenue that was relatively similar from hospital to hospital. Now "the budgets literally cross the gamut," he says. In the recent trying economic times, he says many hospitals have made cuts to their marketing budgets as a way to save money — a move Mr. Weinbach says is a mistake. "Marketing is not any more disposable than human resources, accounting and finance and food services," he says. "Even if marketing doesn't have a direct correlation to patient care, a hospital without patients can't provide good patient care."
4. Create a tactical plan. Once you have a strategic plan in place detailing the service lines you will target, you need to create a tactical plan to figure out the "nuts and bolts" of your campaign. "That tactical plan will be repeatable steps, like print ads, direct mail pieces, TV campaigns and radio campaigns that are influenced by your strategy," Mr. Weinbach says.
This means going back to your budget and deciding how you will target each audience. "The internal marketing team or an outside healthcare marketing firm can determine the best approach for each audience," he says. "You might want to send direct mail, do TV campaigns, do radio campaigns or put up billboards, but it all depends [on how your audiences receive the majority of their information]."
He says the tactical plan is essential for when physicians and other staff members approach you with requests for additional campaign material. "In hospital environments, we're constantly being barraged with requests from departments, physicians and administrators for specific support for programs and doctors and technologies," he says. "If you don't have a plan to wave in someone's face, the more likely they are to yell louder about their needs and the more likely you are to say yes."
Learn more about The Weinbach Group.
To receive the latest hospital and health system business and legal news and analysis from Becker's Hospital Review, sign-up for the free Becker's Hospital Review E-weekly by clicking here.
Saturday 25 September 2010
Thursday 23 September 2010
Buyers in New York Purchasing iPhones That Are Resold in China
These are not typical Apple fans. Instead they are participants in a complex and curious trade driven by China’s demand for Apple’s fashionable gadgets — products that are made in China in the first place and exported, only to make the long trip back.
Participants in New York and Shanghai say the process works like this: People wait in line at an Apple store to buy the newest iPhone for $600, paying a premium to skip the AT&T contract. They then sell the phones to middlemen, usually at electronics stores in Chinatown, for about $750.
The phones are shipped off to China, where the iPhone 4 is not yet on sale, and are distributed to local shops and e-commerce sites, where they sell for as much as $1,000. Once the phones have been “unlocked” to break their ties to AT&T, they can be used with local carriers.
But a change to this practice is coming. On Saturday, the iPhone 4 will go on sale in China, priced at about $750 for the 16-gigabyte version.
Most people in China can only dream of being able to afford an expensive phone. But millions of Chinese are developing a taste for luxury goods, and Apple products have joined Louis Vuitton bags as totems of wealth, said Shang-Jin Wei, director of the Jerome A. Chazen Institute of International Business at Columbia Business School.
“These trading networks have been around for a long time,” Professor Wei said. “They have recently become a lot more pervasive due to rising incomes in China — partially as a result of exports to the U.S.”
An Apple spokesman would not discuss the systematic iPhone purchases at Apple stores, but the company has tried to put a stop to them — and has found it difficult to do so.
In June, the company came under fire in New York State for refusing to sell the iPhone 4 to some Asian customers. Andrew M. Cuomo, the New York attorney general, opened an investigation into the matter, and Apple apparently backed off.
Those waiting in line in New York were not eager to talk about their mission or to identify themselves. When asked what they are doing, the stock answer was always the same: “I’m buying the iPhone for a friend.” Some buy a phone, conceal it in a bag and go back into the store to buy another. A man who was asked what the second phone was for explained: “I have two friends.”
Apple limits purchases to two iPhones a person, and to discourage repeat visits it keeps a record of credit cards used, though cash purchases are not tracked. Apple says the limit “helps us ensure that there are enough iPhones for people who are shopping for themselves or buying a gift.”
The iPhone 4 went on sale in the United States in June, but it is still in such demand that many stores quickly sell out of new shipments.
The buy-and-export scheme is not limited to New York. There have been anecdotal reports of similar efforts elsewhere. Kate Peters of Durham, N.C., said she was visiting an Apple store in a mall there last month when she saw “an Asian woman with a group of college-age Chinese men,” perhaps eight of them. They all bought iPhones and iPads, paying with $100 bills, though they seemed unfamiliar with the currency, Ms. Peters said.
The iPhone trade appears to be widely known in New York’s Chinese community. An older Chinese man sitting on a stoop in the Sunset Park neighborhood of Brooklyn, who said he worked seven days a week as a cook, said the opportunity was too enticing for low-income immigrants to pass up.
“Many workers make a few dollars an hour working in restaurants or factories,” he said. “If they wait in line for an hour at the Apple store to buy and sell phones, they can make $300 in a single morning.” For many, he said, this is equivalent to an average week’s pay.
IPhone sellers in China say the phones are often brought into the country by people who hide them in their bags or even tape them to their bodies. More organized smugglers will bring in 100 or more iPhones a day, and some will put phones into a shipping container with other goods.
“It’s all about connections and channels,” said one seller at the Sleepless Mall, a big electronics market in Shanghai where wholesalers distribute phones to sellers in small stalls. “Once you have good relationships with customs and airline companies, you can ship whatever products you like. We smuggle it both by air and by boat.”
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David Barboza contributed reporting. Chen Xiaoduan and Flora Zhang contributed research.
via nytimes.com
Monday 20 September 2010
Thursday 16 September 2010
Sunday 12 September 2010
Thursday 9 September 2010
Monday 6 September 2010
3 ways to improve entrepreneurial success
John Osher, developer of the low-cost spin toothbrush, was a successful entrepreneur because he thought differently. William Sahlman, professor at Harvard Business School, breaks down the three most important factors in Osher’s success in this entrepreneur thought leader lecture given at Stanford University in 2007. The key to improving your fortunes, he says, comes down to:by
Tuesday 17 August 2010
Sunday 15 August 2010
Tools to monitor your website
You can’t just put your website on the net with right keywords and all the right touches and expect your traffic and ranking will remain constant. As the web is an ever changing landscape, you have to keep track of your own web results like what is happening with the competition and also the best and highest ranked sites. There are many useful tools to help you find out what exactly is happening.
1. A tool which you can use to test your own website links or other websites for broken links:
http://home.snafu.de/tilman/xenulink.html
2. With this tool you can check search engines for the number of back links to your URL i.e. other web pages linking to your site:
http://www.digitalpoint.com/tools/backlinks/
3. It sometimes becomes important to know where the servers of your hosting company are physically located. Because, some search engines like Google have the ability to filter search results based on their physical location called geotargeting. This could be used to determine why your site is showing in only a certain country. This link can also be used to research the country location of a particular competitor’s website:
http://www.digitalpoint.com/tools/website-country/
4. In order to track the location of the visitor or a customer to your website:
http://www.digitalpoint.com/tools/geovisitors/
5. In order to check the Yahoo! web ranking of your’s or your competitor’s website use :
http://www.digitalpoint.com/tools/webrank/
6. Here is a link to check the web ranking of a website using a Mac or Apple computer:
http://www.digitalpoint.com/tools/pagerank-mac/
7. You need a Google AdSense account for using this. This link provides you with charts and reports which will help you analyze traffic, clicks, and results from your AdSense advertising
http://www.digitalpoint.com/tools/adsense-charts/
8. If you have an AdSense account, you can analyze your website address or another website address to see what Google ads will be displayed when the customer selects certain website names or keywords:
http://www.digitalpoint.com/tools/adsense-sandbox/
9. This link will take you to a cooperative advertising network where you can join to display and
share your ads with other website owners:
http://www.digitalpoint.com/tools/ad-network/
10. You can add the Search Functionality on your website which uses Google. This works only if your site is listed in the Google Index.
http://www.digitalpoint.com/tools/search/
11. Here are some links to free website counters which you can use on your website to track your traffic and hits:
http://www.digitalpoint.com/tools/counter/
http://www.amazingcounters.com/?ref=gad033
http://www.cyber-counter.com/signup.php
http://www.statcounter.com/free_hit_counter.html
social2ms@gmail.com sent you a link to content of interest
social2ms@gmail.com sent you a link to the following content: A Hint Of A Chrome OS Product With Verizon
http://techcrunch.com/2010/08/14/chrome-os-verizon/ The sender also included this note: Useful information!!
http://techcrunch.com/2010/08/14/chrome-os-verizon/ The sender also included this note: Useful information!!
Saturday 14 August 2010
Why CEOs Should Be More Social
by Curt Finch
George Colony of Forrester Research believes that CEOs should be more social. By this he means that CEOs should consider blogging, tweeting and otherwise putting a human face on their company brand. He has made his case through a series of posts at his blog, Counterintuitive CEO, as well as through a presentation at Forrester's Marketing Forum. He argues that CEOs should be more social if:
• The CEO has something valuable and distinctive to say.
• The CEO is prepared to navigate thorny and unique restrictions.
• There is an audience that will, over time, tune in to the CEO's social message.
Yet he also notes that many CEOs are not social for good reasons. Most CEOs are over 50, and many might not be comfortable with new technologies like Twitter. Others may use and enjoy Twitter but really don't have time to contribute the requisite 6 tweets per day.
As this conversation continues, advocates of Social CEOs will have to find concrete statistics on how this new type of marketing directly contributes to the bottom line. That's the only way to get Unsocial CEOs to pay attention.
Personally, I've been writing articles, blogging and tweeting for years now. I have the advantage of heading a software company, so we're all about innovative technology. For me, the problem is not lack of interest or ability. The problem comes in creating new, interesting content all of the time on a constrained schedule. (That, and when I get a flustered phone call from my Marketing department about something I've posted.)
by Curt Finch
George Colony of Forrester Research believes that CEOs should be more social. By this he means that CEOs should consider blogging, tweeting and otherwise putting a human face on their company brand. He has made his case through a series of posts at his blog, Counterintuitive CEO, as well as through a presentation at Forrester's Marketing Forum. He argues that CEOs should be more social if:
• The CEO has something valuable and distinctive to say.
• The CEO is prepared to navigate thorny and unique restrictions.
• There is an audience that will, over time, tune in to the CEO's social message.
Yet he also notes that many CEOs are not social for good reasons. Most CEOs are over 50, and many might not be comfortable with new technologies like Twitter. Others may use and enjoy Twitter but really don't have time to contribute the requisite 6 tweets per day.
As this conversation continues, advocates of Social CEOs will have to find concrete statistics on how this new type of marketing directly contributes to the bottom line. That's the only way to get Unsocial CEOs to pay attention.
Personally, I've been writing articles, blogging and tweeting for years now. I have the advantage of heading a software company, so we're all about innovative technology. For me, the problem is not lack of interest or ability. The problem comes in creating new, interesting content all of the time on a constrained schedule. (That, and when I get a flustered phone call from my Marketing department about something I've posted.)
Wednesday 11 August 2010
How tailored news feeds will work for you
Tailored news feeds give you and your company the ultimate flexibility to meet your publishing needs for your website, intranet, newsletter or archive.
Our content co-ordinator will work with you to define your final requirements and our editorial team will use the latest technology to prepare your news based on the following framework:
The creation of bespoke news articles for your audience.
An article length of between 150 to 200 words, approximately 5 paragraphs. Different lengths can be arranged at variable rates.
Live, updated content throughout the day or time specific delivery.
Articles tagged by multiple keywords and topics for easy manipulation on your website and content management systems.
Up to three web links per article.
Content in either plain text or xml format.
Delivery via email or FTP.
Pictures can be supplied in addition to the standard news service. http://social2ms.com
Tailored news feeds give you and your company the ultimate flexibility to meet your publishing needs for your website, intranet, newsletter or archive.
Our content co-ordinator will work with you to define your final requirements and our editorial team will use the latest technology to prepare your news based on the following framework:
The creation of bespoke news articles for your audience.
An article length of between 150 to 200 words, approximately 5 paragraphs. Different lengths can be arranged at variable rates.
Live, updated content throughout the day or time specific delivery.
Articles tagged by multiple keywords and topics for easy manipulation on your website and content management systems.
Up to three web links per article.
Content in either plain text or xml format.
Delivery via email or FTP.
Pictures can be supplied in addition to the standard news service. http://social2ms.com
Sunday 4 July 2010
How Do Search Engines Work - Web Crawlers
It is the search engines that finally bring your website to the notice of the prospective customers. Hence it is better to know how these search engines actually work and how they present information to the customer initiating a search.
There are basically two types of search engines. The first is by robots called crawlers or spiders.
Search Engines use spiders to index websites. When you submit your website pages to a search engine by completing their required submission page, the search engine spider will index your entire site. A ‘spider’ is an automated program that is run by the search engine system. Spider visits a web site, read the content on the actual site, the site's Meta tags and also follow the links that the site connects. The spider then returns all that information back to a central depository, where the data is indexed. It will visit each link you have on your website and index those sites as well. Some spiders will only index a certain number of pages on your site, so don’t create a site with 500 pages!
The spider will periodically return to the sites to check for any information that has changed. The frequency with which this happens is determined by the moderators of the search engine.
A spider is almost like a book where it contains the table of contents, the actual content and the links and references for all the websites it finds during its search, and it may index up to a million pages a day.
Example: Excite, Lycos, AltaVista and Google.
When you ask a search engine to locate information, it is actually searching through the index which it has created and not actually searching the Web. Different search engines produce different rankings because not every search engine uses the same algorithm to search through the indices.
One of the things that a search engine algorithm scans for is the frequency and location of keywords on a web page, but it can also detect artificial keyword stuffing or spamdexing. Then the algorithms analyze the way that pages link to other pages in the Web. By checking how pages link to each other, an engine can both determine what a page is about, if the keywords of the linked pages are similar to the keywords on the original page.
http://social2ms.com
There are basically two types of search engines. The first is by robots called crawlers or spiders.
Search Engines use spiders to index websites. When you submit your website pages to a search engine by completing their required submission page, the search engine spider will index your entire site. A ‘spider’ is an automated program that is run by the search engine system. Spider visits a web site, read the content on the actual site, the site's Meta tags and also follow the links that the site connects. The spider then returns all that information back to a central depository, where the data is indexed. It will visit each link you have on your website and index those sites as well. Some spiders will only index a certain number of pages on your site, so don’t create a site with 500 pages!
The spider will periodically return to the sites to check for any information that has changed. The frequency with which this happens is determined by the moderators of the search engine.
A spider is almost like a book where it contains the table of contents, the actual content and the links and references for all the websites it finds during its search, and it may index up to a million pages a day.
Example: Excite, Lycos, AltaVista and Google.
When you ask a search engine to locate information, it is actually searching through the index which it has created and not actually searching the Web. Different search engines produce different rankings because not every search engine uses the same algorithm to search through the indices.
One of the things that a search engine algorithm scans for is the frequency and location of keywords on a web page, but it can also detect artificial keyword stuffing or spamdexing. Then the algorithms analyze the way that pages link to other pages in the Web. By checking how pages link to each other, an engine can both determine what a page is about, if the keywords of the linked pages are similar to the keywords on the original page.
http://social2ms.com
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