A recent study getting media attention discussed why people get unfriended on Facebook is getting a lot of media attention.
#1 The number one reason people get unfriended in Facebook is that they write frequent and uninteresting posts. If you're using social media or email marketing for frequent communications that are not likely to interest people; you need to change your strategy.
Don't just use your list of contacts with a spam-like strategy. Make their day more interesting, and when you do talk about your offerings - you're customers will be sure to listen
#2 The second topic that drove unfriending was rants of a political or religious nature. I can't imagine that corporate bloggers are making this mistake that frequently - but the greater message is: know your audience. If your audience is made up of people who are traditionalists, don't send out blasts bemoaning Luddites who buy the print newspaper. If your audience is cost focused, don't speak on and on about how 'green' your solution is. If your CTO is worried about his job or his business existence, he's not going to really care about your constant posts on the 'greenness' of your product.
#3 "Being rude" was the 3rd bad behavior on facebook. This seems relatively self explanatory - but in a business marketing sense it is really the most important. You want to make sure that customers or potential customers who have a question can get an answer - no matter who they are.
iDEAL is an Internet payment method in The Netherlands, based on online banking. Introduced in 2005, this payment method allows customers to buy securely on the Internet using direct online transfers from their bank account. iDEAL processed 4,5 million transfers in 2006, 15 million transfers in 2007, 28 million transfers in 2008 and 45.4 million in 2009[1]. iDEAL is owned by the Dutch organization Currence, which also owns PIN and Chipknip.
The participating banks in iDEAL are: ABN AMRO, ASN Bank, Fortis, Friesland Bank, ING Bank, Rabobank, Royal Bank of Scotland and SNS Bank[2]. Together these are serving the vast majority of the Dutch online banking market.
Giropay is an Internet payment System in Germany, based on online banking. Introduced in February 2006, this payment method allows customers to buy securely on the Internet using direct online transfers from their bank account. The system is similar to the Dutch iDEAL payment system, the Interac Online service in Canada and Secure Vault Payments[1] in the United States. giropay is owned by giropay GmbH.
Web Hosting Companies like SoftLayer and their competitors usually fit into one of these three categories:
Nokia is discontinuing the Ovi Files service, effective October 1, 2010.
We apologize for the inconvenience.Please make sure to uninstall the Ovi Files Connector installed on your personal computer. To do this, execute the standard Windows or Macintosh uninstall procedure that came with your computer. You will not lose any files as a result of this service discontinuation. Ovi Files simply creates an 'online mirror' of the files saved on your Windows PC or Mac, so your original files will remain intact. The files on your computer are always treated as the master version, even if some are selected as 'Anytime Files.'You will still be able to share content between your phone and PC using another Nokia product, Nokia Ovi Suite. With Nokia Ovi Suite installed on your PC, you can do the following: sync your contacts and messages; transfer videos, photos, and music; back up your Nokia and update your device software. Please note that this is not a direct substitute for Ovi Files as Nokia Ovi Suite requires a wired connection between your PC and mobile device. For more information visit www.ovi.com/suite.
1- Brand Recognition: Using social media allows your company to reach the highest number of potential customers possible. Getting your name out there is incredibly important - studies have suggested that customers need to hear a company's name at least seven times before they will gain the trust and respect needed to become a customer.2- Brand Monitoring: Having a social media presence allows you to better understand what current and potential customers are saying about your product or services. Through active social media monitoring, you have the opportunity to address negative comments and correct false or inaccurate information about your brand.3- Be Forward-Thinking: Your target audience is becoming savvier when it comes to the using social media sites in their daily lives. If you want to appear relevant and in-step with the latest advances in technology, your potential customers will want to see you on these sites as well.4- Find New Customers Through Friends: You shouldn't neglect your personal social media accounts as potential avenues to promote the activities of your business. Posting regular updates relating to your business and activities can remind your friends of what your company does and either to use your services or refer one of their friends.5- Find New Customers Through a Company Profile: Your company profile is a great opportunity for you to post regular updates on your activities, but also about important news and trends in your industry. This will catch the attention of new customers interested in your industry and increase your reputation as an expert in the field. It's critical to post regularly if you want to increase your followers or fans and convert them to potential leads.6- Generate Site Traffic: By updating regularly on sites such as Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn with posts that link back to your site, you can create additional traffic to your site. Social media bookmarking tools like Digg, Stumbleupon and Slashdot can also generate additional traffic to your site if you create frequent articles and blog posts.7- Links for SEO: Many social media bookmarking sites use NOFOLLOW tags that limit the outbound link value of posts made on their sites. There are still many leading social media sites that allow DOFOLLOW tags including Slashdot, Digg, Furl, Mixx and FriendFeed. However, you can see benefits from posting to social media bookmarking sites that use NOFOLLOW tags if people read your posts and link back to your Website.8- Increased Search Engine Rankings: Social media profiles frequently rank highly with major search engines. Using brand names and keywords in your profiles can help you to generate traffic for your social media sites and company homepage.9- Integrated Social Media Results in Search Engines: Search engines like Google and Microsoft Bing are increasingly interested in indexing and ranking posts and other information from social media sites. Videos from popular Internet sites like YouTube can also be optimized for indexing by the major search engines.10- Niche Marketing: Social media allows you to reach very specific subsets of individuals based on their personal preferences and interests. You can create social media strategies based on reaching individual interests or even create unique social media profiles to target these audiences.
Review the basic objectives of the study. What are you trying to discover? What actions do you want to take as a result of the survey? This helps you double check the validity of the data collection mechanism. Online Surveys are just one way of collecting and quantifying perspectives.
Visualize all of the relevant information items you would like to have. What will the output report look like? What charts and graphs will be prepared? What information do you need to be assured that action is warranted?
Rank each topic in items 1 and 2 according to the value of the topic. List the most important topics first. Revisit items 1 and 2 again to make sure the objectives, topics and information you need are appropriate. Remember, you can't solve the problem if you ask the wrong questions.
How easy or difficult is it for the respondent to provide information on each topic? If it is difficult, is there another way to obtain the information by asking another question? This is probably the most important step. Online Surveys have to be Precise, Clear and Concise. Due to the nature of the "Web" and the fickleness associated, if your questions are too complicated and are not easy to understand, you will have a high "drop out" rate.
Create a sequence for the topics that is unbiased. Make sure that the questions asked first do not bias the results of the next questions. Sometimes providing too much information, or disclosing purpose of the study can create bias. Once you have a sequence of topics, you can have a basic layout of a survey. It is always prudent to add an "Introductory" text to explain the project and what is required off the respondent. It is also professional to have an ending "Thank You" text as well as information about where to find the results of the survey, when they are published.
Determine the type of question that is best suited to answer the question and provide enough robustness to meet analysis requirements. This means do you use open-ended text questions, dichotomous, multiple choice, rank order, scaled, or constant sum (ratio scale) questions. There is a fine line you need to walk here - Generally tougher analysis requirements will lead to more complicated questionnaire design. However there are a couple of tools available to make life easier: -
- Page Breaks - Avoid having a huge scrolling survey. Introduce page breaks as necessary. Please also refrain from just having one question per page. This increases the time to complete the survey as well as increases the chances for "drop outs".
- Skip Login - Use Page Skip Logic to make your surveys "Smart". Avoid using text like, "If you answered No to Q1 then Answer Q4" - this causes respondent frustration and increases the "drop out" rate. Design the survey using the Page Logic so that the correct questions are automatically routed based on previous responses.
Write the questions. You may need to write several questions for each topic, selecting the best one. You might also be better off dividing the survey into multiple sections.
Sequence the questions so that they are unbiased.
Repeat all of the steps above to find any major holes. Are the questions really answered? Have someone review it for you.
Time the length of the survey. A survey should take less than five minutes. At three to four questions per minute, you are limited to about 15 questions. One open end text question counts for three multiple choice questions. Most online software tools will record the time taken for the respondents to answer questions.
Pretest the survey to 20 or more people. Obtain their feedback... in detail. What were they unsure about? Did they have questions? Did they have trouble understanding what you wanted? Did they take a point of view not covered in your answers or question?
- An easy way to do this is to create another survey, with a few "open ended" essay questions along with your main project. Let's call this the "feedback survey".
- Email the "Project" survey to your test group and then email the "feedback" survey also after that.
- In that way, you can have your test group send you comments regarding the functionality as well as usability of your "Project" survey by using you "feedback survey"!
Revise your online questionnaire incorporating the feedback that you got.
Send the Survey out to all your respondents!
Here are general recommendations:
- Keep it simple. Your customers want to respond to your survey, but you should make it as easy as possible for them. How you invite them to participate, the way you ask questions and what design template you use will affect participation rates. In many regards, the simpler the better. Also, write your questions clearly so that people who are not native speakers of your language can understand the questions.
- Keep it short. Choose the length of your survey based on the type of product or service you sell, how much they spent for your product or how often they use the product or contact your company. Generally speaking, about 20 to 30 questions are appropriate for an image-based survey and no more than ten are appropriate for a transactional survey (more on what these two types of surveys are in the next section). Any survey over 40 questions will have a high abandonment rate.
- Keep your implied promises. If your goal is to identify what your organization can change to improve satisfaction levels, you need to be willing to respond to survey results. Your customers will view the survey as a mechanism by which they can affect change. If they don't see any improvements, they will become disillusioned and will view the company negatively. This means you need to concentrate on measuring concrete factors over which you have control, such as response time, delivery policies, support professionalism, and order accuracy. Avoid generalized questions such as "Do you think XYZ is a good company?" One respondent may think "good" refers to skill, while the next may think it means morally good. In both cases, you can't learn enough from this type of question to make any concrete changes.
A five-step process can be used to make these longer-term improvements.
Step 1: Spot the gap
- Look at the customer satisfaction data to see where there are low absolute scores and low scores relative to the competition
- Pay particular attention to those issues that are important to customers
- Assume the scores are correct unless there is irrefutable evidence to the contrary – and remember, perceptions are reality
Step 2: Challenge and redefine the segmentation
- How do satisfaction scores vary across different types of customer?
- Are segments correctly defined in the light of the customer satisfaction findings?
- How could a change in segmentation direct the offer more effectively and so achieve higher levels of satisfaction?
Step 3: Challenge and redefine the customer value propositions
- Are customer satisfaction scores low because the customer value proposition (CVP) is not being communicated effectively to the market?
- Are customer satisfaction scores low because the CVP is not being effectively implemented?
- Is the CVP right for the segment? How could a change in CVP achieve a higher customer satisfaction index (CSI)?
Step 4: Create an action plan
- Describe the problem
- Think through the issues that need to be addressed and list them out
- Identify the root cause of the problems
- Identify any barriers that could stop the improvement taking place
Set measurable targets- Allocated resources (usually money and people)
- Assign people and time scales to the tasks
- Measure and review progress
Step 5: Measure and review
- How has the customer satisfaction index (CSI) moved?
- Is the movement significant/real?
- Has the action recommended in the plan, taken place? Has it been enough? Has it had enough time to work?
- Revisit the steps – spot the gap, challenge the segmentation and CVP, more action
Many of the issues that affect customer satisfaction span functional boundaries and so organisations must establish cross-functional teams to develop and implement action plans. One of the best ways of achieving this involvement by different groups of employees is to involve them in the whole process.
In customer satisfaction research we seek the views of respondents on a variety of issues that will show how the company is performing and how it can improve. This understanding is obtained at a high level (“how satisfied are you the ABC Ltd overall?”) and at a very specific level (“how satisfied are you with the clarity of invoices?”).
High level issues are included in most customer satisfaction surveys and they could be captured by questions such as:
- What is your overall satisfaction with ABC Ltd?
- How likely or unlikely are you to buy from ABC Ltd again?
- How likely or unlikely would you be to recommend ABC Ltd to a friend or colleague?
It is at the more specific level of questioning that things become more difficult. Some issues are of obvious importance and every supplier is expected to perform to a minimum acceptable level on them. These are the hygiene factors. If a company fails on any of these issues they would quickly lose market share or go out of business. An airline must offer safety but the level of in-flight service is a variable. These variables such as in-flight service are often the issues that differentiate companies and create the satisfaction or dissatisfaction.
Working out what questions to ask at a detailed level means seeing the world from the customers’ points of view. What do they consider important? These factors or attributes will differ from company to company and there could be a long list.
The twitter train is pulling up, are you on board yet? Twitter is one of the most revolutionary messaging systems to come out in my opinion since AOL Instant Messenger back in 1997. It allows groups of users to simultaneously engage in conversations all at the same time, similar to being in a “chat room” in AOL. As a marketer this can be a golden tool if utilized properly for personal reputation management reasons.
Many underground conversations go on within Twitter that never make it to the blogosphere or news sites. It can be a dynamite location for link bait ideas, breaking stories, and general topics you might not think about on a daily basis. You might even find yourself obtaining clientèle through it. I really could go on and on with what you could do with Twitter.
Now with that said, it is worth pointing out that one of the more frustrating things with Twitter is that there isn’t much organization within the social profiles themselves. Aside from the visible friends list, it is hard to capture who is within your industry, and who might be twittering about relevant things that you want to follow.
Do you Twitter? Are you visible? If your answer is yes, continue reading.
As you know by now, Twitter is one of the most revolutionary messaging systems of the moment. You’ve probably already heard about some amazing Twitter stories.
So if you Twitter, follow people who knows what they are talking about. Here’s a list of 55 top Internet marketing gurus you should follow:
Over the past few years Facebook has witnessed a dramatic rise in new user adoption and with that rise has come the opportunity for brands to interact directly with existing customers and engage new ones. At the end of 2007, Facebook announced the launch of Facebook Pages and last week they launched a revised edition which includes a number of significant upgrades. This week, those pages will be going live for all. There are numerous ways for brands to leverage Facebook but the overall branded experience is becoming increasingly integrated into a single offering as the new Pages product highlights. So what are the primary benefits and changes for the new branded pages?
Pages Are Profiles for Brands
One of the primary reasons for launching Facebook Pages was that many companies were using user profiles for their companies, in turn violating Facebook’s terms of service. While I’m sure there were many other reasons for launching Pages, the easiest way to understand them is through viewing them as “Profiles for Brands”. This means brand pages can essentially do everything that users can do.Pages Have Access to Users’ Feeds
This is probably the single most important feature within the new Facebook Pages product. Many in the press have described this as Twitter for Facebook. It’s an accurate description but for those that don’t understand what Twitter is, this makes things more confusing. Essentially when Facebook users become a “fan” of your branded page, they will be notified of your status updates anytime you update the status on your brand page, via the primary news feed on the homepage.The News Feed is Now Real Time
This is actually an update to the site homepage but it will have a significant impact. Previously Facebook cached the homepage for at least 15 minutes in addition to automatically filtering all feed stories. This means that any feed story which made it to the news feed previously would stay there for a fairly long period of time. The news feed has since been redesigned to stream stories instead displaying the automatically filtered stories as “Highlights” on the right hand side of the page.Pages Can Integrate Multiple Applications
Earlier this week I posted the example of a robust branded Facebook page which integrates an application into the experience. Pages could previously integrate basic applications but now there is space to integrate applications that are just as robust as those with standalone canvas pages. Not sure of what “canvas pages” are? A canvas page is the space in Facebook below the Facebook header and to the left of Facebook’s sidebar ads. Essentially you can now post applications which take up the full width of the page. I’ve gone ahead and posted a photo of the canvas area in the photo below.
Realta – En Gözde Şirketler 2010 anketi sonuçlarına göz attığımızda ilk sırada yer alan firmaların çok da değişiklik göstermediğini görüyoruz. İlk beş firma, Turkcell, Turk Hava Yolları, Unilever, Mercedes Benz, Microsoft, Turkiye İş Bankası olarak sıralanmış. Diğer taraftan, Forbes Türkiye dergisi de Haziran sayısında Türkiye’nin En Büyük Şirketleri araştırmasını yayınladı. Bu iki araştırmayı karşılıklı değerlendirdiğimizde ilk sıralarda yer alan firmaların ve sektörlerin yakınlığı dikkat çekiyor. En Gözde Sektörler sıralamasında; Bankacılık, Hızlı Tüketim, Bilgi Teknolojileri, Otomotiv, Gıda, Telekom şeklinde sıralanıyor.Türkiye’nin en büyük şirketleri de Garanti Bankası, İş Bankası, Akbank, Koç Holding, Sabancı Holding, Yapı Kredi Bankası, Halk Bankası, Türk Telekom, Turkcell, Vakıflar Bankası şeklinde olduğuna göre iki araştırma adeta birbiriyle örtüşüyor.
Everyone learns differently. Social media marketing has a lot of moving parts and processes which make it hard to get up to speed. This challenge is only compounded by the ever-changing nature of the market, in which new applications and opportunities arise daily.
Reading tons of blog articles, while important, takes a lot of time. Sometimes it is easier to see concepts visually to get a basic understanding and then do further research on the topics that are most relevant to your business. In today's post we collected some great visualizations of social media concepts including monitoring and content distribution.
Our Mission, Our Values, Our Brand
9rules is a place where members and readers can connect, build relationships, and learn new things. 9rules started in 2003 with a set of 9 rules:
- Love what you do.
- Never stop learning.
- Form works with function.
- Simple is beautiful.
- Work hard, play hard.
- You get what you pay for.
- When you talk, we listen.
- Must constantly improve.
- Respect your inspiration.
Fairmont Hotels & Resorts operates luxury properties in countries all over the world, from the U.S. and Canada to Asia the Middle East and Africa. Aside from traditional promotions, one of the ways it connects with current, past and future guests is via its main Twitter account. Several accounts are also maintained by individual properties.
"We push out news and information; we think that's valuable," Mike Taylor, Fairmont's public relations manager, told the Hotel Marketing Strategies blog. "We include package and rate offers. We don't see Twitter primarily as a distribution tool. But if we have something that's a great deal we're going to let people know about it."
In terms of results, it has seen hotel occupancy rates rise after tweeting "online only" discounts, and it's been able to reach out and promote its brand.
"Twitter has introduced us to people we otherwise wouldn't have a relationship with," he said. "So it's sort of that global neighborhood concept where these people wouldn't have reached out to us or vice versa if we were not participating."
Other Twitter PR success stories include Comcast, Dell, JetBlue and Shaquille O'Neil. They have all reinvigorated their brands using the service. All are near becoming social media case study cliches.
Some in the hospitality industry take it one step further: The Roger Smith Hotel, for example, is connected to every corner of the social web. But its innovative use of Twitter is where it really shines. The New York City boutique hotel attracts travelers based on its regular -- and charming -- use of Twitter.
"I really found the genuine ability to connect with people valuable," Brian Simpson, the hotel's director of social hospitality, told Techipedia, "and we have continued to use this as just one of many pieces of the funnel hopefully driving people to be more involved with us outside of just booking a room."
These successes are well documented. However, many businesses, organizations and individuals have trouble converting the case studies of others into success for themselves. As it turns out, public relations thought-leaders suggest it's less about the tool itself and more about learning to adapt and adjust to the new medium.
From the perspective of experience = brand however, it is worth taking a look at the 10 lessons these CEM pioneers taught us. Good food for thought.
AMD's Worldwide Standards of Business Conduct
AMD's Worldwide Standards of Business Conduct (WWSBC) support our commitment to high ethical standards and compliance with laws, regulations, and company policies. These standards apply to all AMD directors and employees worldwide and are one of the key components of the company's compliance and ethics program. They reiterate our values and outline guidelines on a broad range of workplace, business practice, and conflicts of interest principles such as employment and labor practices, privacy, employee safety and health, business and accounting practices, political activities and contributions, insider trading, antitrust laws, and the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. The WWSBC are currently available in eight languages: English, Japanese, German, Malay, Chinese (Mandarin), Spanish, Portuguese, and Russian. All employees worldwide receive copies of and training on the WWSBC.
About Blue Ocean Strategy
中文 | Deutch | English | Español |Francais | Italiano | 한국어
Companies have long engaged in head-to-head competition in search of sustained, profitable growth. They have fought for competitive advantage, battled over market share, and struggled for differentiation.
Yet in today’s overcrowded industries, competing head-on results in nothing but a bloody “red ocean” of rivals fighting over a shrinking profit pool. In a book that challenges everything you thought you knew about the requirements for strategic success, W. Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne contend that while most companies compete within such red oceans, this strategy is increasingly unlikely to create profitable growth in the future.
Based on a study of 150 strategic moves spanning more than a hundred years and thirty industries, Kim and Mauborgne argue that tomorrow’s leading companies will succeed not by battling competitors, but by creating “blue oceans” of uncontested market space ripe for growth. Such strategic moves—termed “value innovation”—create powerful leaps in value for both the firm and its buyers, rendering rivals obsolete and unleashing new demand.
Can Data Centers benefit from Supply Chain Management concepts? - Green (low carbon) Data Center Blog
Land is not an expense, it is an investment. So, land should be looked evaluated on its ROI, not it's overall cost, including land improvements.
Which then led me to think why is it data centers don't use more supply chain management concepts which would address issues like land cost in the overall solution and most likely save you much more than the cost of the land?
Supply Chain Management is defined as.
Supply chain management (SCM) is the management of a network of interconnected businesses involved in the ultimate provision of product and service packages required by end customers (Harland, 1996).[1] Supply Chain Management spans all movement and storage of raw materials, work-in-process inventory, and finished goods from point of origin to point of consumption (supply chain).
Another definition is provided by the APICS Dictionary when it defines SCM as the "design, planning, execution, control, and monitoring of supply chain activities with the objective of creating net value, building a competitive infrastructure, leveraging worldwide logistics, synchronizing supply with demand, and measuring performance globally."
The mega-data center has become a staple of our global technology infrastructure, serving as the backbone of the digital economy. The growth of the Internet is driving an enormous appetite for network capacity and data storage, creating a new class of data centers that can scale along with the Internet.
So who has the world’s largest data center? We’ve seen a lot of huge data centers in our travels, and have identified 10 that we believe are the largest found anywhere. These data fortresses range between 400,000 and 1.1 million square feet.
The ElectroMagnetic Pulse (EMP) effect was first observed during the early testing of high-altitude air burst nuclear weapons — a rather radical way of creating an E-bomb. The threat of the E-bomb increased in 1994 when Gen. Loborev, Director of the Central Institute of Physics and Technology in Moscow, distributed a landmark paper at the EUROEM Conference in Bordeaux, France. In this paper, Dr. A. B. Prishchepenko, the Russian inventor of a family of compact, explosive-driven RF munitions, described how RF munitions might be used against a variety of targets including communications systems. The concepts “went public” in articles in Russian naval journals and in other professional journals and magazines.
On June 17, 1997, the US Joint Economic Committee (JEC) held a hearing called Economic Espionage, Technology Transfers and National Security, in which it heard about a new class of weapons — radio frequency weapons (RF) — and the impact of these new weapons on the civilian and military electronic infrastructure of the United States. This was followed up by a further hearing in February 25, 1998. In June 2000, James O’Bryon, deputy director of Live Fire Test & Evaluation at the US Department of Defense, flew to a conference in Scotland to address the issue. “What we’re trying to do is look at what people might use if they wanted to do something damaging,” he said. The UK magazine, New Scientist published a popularist article on the subject on 1 July 2000.
The Tec
Cost-Per-Thousand
CPM pricing was actively promoted by the big portals such as Yahoo and AOL. It was a great revenue generator for them that had the added bonus of being largely risk free. That is, the advertiser did all the creative work and made the payments while the only thing the portals had to do was display the ad as often as they could until the advertiser's budget was exhausted. It's this one-sided nature of the CPM model that has pushed advertisers to seek an alternative that can offer them some sort of guarantee of performance.Cost-Per-Action
CPA then seems to offer the best guarantee for advertisers. After all, with such a set up, the advertiser only pays when the prospect has performed a specific action such as registering or requesting information. And just to be explicit, the upside of this is that an ad can be displayed and clicked on many, many times with no cost to the advertiser. The problem here is that now all the risk has been shifted to the publisher since they now must give up their ad inventory and hope that the advertiser's message is compelling enough to result in "actions".Cost-Per-Click
CPC sits in the middle of the online pricing spectrum. It involves risk from the advertiser's side in that they pay for every click on their ad. This forces them to make sure that the ad is relevant to what is being offered so that a click has a good chance of turning in to an action. At the same time, the publisher takes on the responsibility of displaying the ad in appropriate places so that it will receive clicks. No clicks, no revenue. It's a very simple formula for both sides.
Sales forecasting, an Introduction:
Forecasts are the raw material of planning. For most businesses, the sales forecast is the first step. It can be the basis for developing plans to run the business and plan future strategy. If sales can be reasonably anticipated, costs and inventory can be controlled, and customer service enhanced. Sales estimates provide this help.
Even if much of the content in this paper is familiar, a review will probably provide additional information that is helpful in learning about forecasting strategy and tactics. In recent years sales forecasting has become an important business endeavor. It is essential that company personnel and small business owners understand forecasting methodology.
Forecasts can be classified in several ways: by purpose, as either operational or strategic; by type, as quantitative (statistical) or qualitative (judgment); or by method, that is, by forecasting technique.
Work Out What Information You Need Before You Start
Market research is no different from any other research project. To be successful, your research project needs a clear scope and that includes a problem statement.
What question are you looking for an answer to?
In the case of a new product or a new business, the question or questions are generally:
- Who will buy the product,
- Why will they buy it, and
- How much are they prepared to pay?
Before you start knocking on doors and showing people your product, take some time to really think about what it is that you want to ask of the market and design your research project accordingly.
Traits of Self-Hosted Exchange Server
- Large initial investment - You will have to purchase the hardware, software, acquire IT engineers and resources, and properly train all of the staff that will be managing your Exchange server. You may also experience a significant amount of time from when you make the initial investment to when the server goes live and becomes functional, especially if your staff is not completely training on how to handle the server.
- Ongoing expenses - The responsibility of maintaining and upgrading the Exchange server is yours, and after a while it can prove to be a surprisingly expensive server to maintain and run.
- Complete freedom over the customization and performance of your exchange server - Where managed servers have to deal with specific limitations placed upon them by their providers, running your own server will allow you to have total control over yours. You will be able to add, remove, and customize features as you see fit.
This will allow you to offer enhanced mobility services, VoIP, internet faxing, Outlook Web Access.
- Large personnel commitment – Take a moment to analyze the size of your company. How many staff members are you willing to dedicate solely to your Exchange server? Large companies may already have a large IT department that it can use to assign resources to the Exchange server with, but if your business doesn’t, you will have to bring on the staff to do it.
It is not that a self-hosted Exchange solution is always a poor choice or a bad option, as it certainly can fit the bill if a business has the resources to allocate to it. The reality is that you will have greater control and freedom when hosting the server yourself, but you will also have to dedicate more time and resources to it.
Traits of a Hosted Exchange Server
- Low start up investment - You may have to pay a small startup fee, but compared to the large investment required to purchase the server, software, and hire the appropriate staff, it is a drop in the bucket. As well, Hosted Exchanges are often set up in a matter of minutes once you’ve paid your startup fee, giving you access to your new toys quicker.
- Financial predictability - You will generally be given a monthly, quarterly, or yearly price. This makes budgeting a much easier task as there are fewer variables to consider and less guesswork involved. On that level, it’s nice to know exactly what your financial obligations are.
- Completely managed server - Just as the advantages of a managed web host include the fact that you don’t have to maintain the server or the software, a Hosted Exchange server generally comes with maintenance included. This absolves you from the responsibilities of monitoring security, uptime, server resource usage, and software upgrades.
- No outside commitments - You will not have to worry about staff allocation or the hiring of additional staff with a Hosted Exchange server. The company that owns the server takes care of all of the support obligations, including staff training and certification.
There are advantages and disadvantages to each type of hosting solution. If you prefer the control and knowledge knowing that you and you alone handle the processes and maintenance of your server, the additional expenses and requirements shouldn’t be much of an issue. However, if you prefer for something to ”just work” and don’t want to have to deal with the hassle of maintaining it or making the large initial purchase, you are going to want to use an exchange server that is provided by an external company.
Celebrate your successes: When a situation in which you doubted yourself turns out better than you expected, don’t just nod and smile and move immediately on to the next thing. Take a moment and reward yourself for a positive outcome. Do something you enjoy like going to your favorite restaurant or eating a delectable dessert. Taking the time to cement positive emotions in your mind will hopefully make the doubt disappear more quickly next time.
Zenith's Ready to Drink Coffee 2007 report provides full country market totals by volume and value, five year forecasts and company/brand profiles. The report provides a comprehensive market commentary that addresses: a broadening of target groups, product characteristics, health issues, functionality and RTD coffee, future developments and an assessment of strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats.
From Starbucks to Campina, Douwe Egberts, Emmi, Kraft and Nestl� � RTD coffee has seen increased focus, especially in West Europe. The resulting marketing boost and product launches are expected to help drive forward growth over the coming years.
Zenith's 2007 Ready to Drink Coffee report covers:
- Market context: global beverage volume shares by sector and segment, 2006
- Market context: soft drinks shares by volume and value, Japan, North America and West Europe, 2006
- RTD coffee volume sales by country: West Europe, North America, Japan, 2004-11
- RTD coffee value sales by country: West Europe, North America, Japan, 2004-06
- RTD coffee consumption per person by country: West Europe, North America, Japan, 2004-11
- Organic RTD coffee summary
- Fairtrade RTD coffee summary
- Analysis of caffeine content in popular beverages
- Examination of caffeine/coffee consumption benefits
- Regulation of caffeine content
- Functional RTD coffee innovations
- Full regional overviews addressing: product history, key indicators, companies/brands, distribution, trends, innovation and packaging
- Leading company/brand profiles
