Author Archives: Matt Kapko

Social media is becoming a preferred channel for business-centric sales and marketing professionals, according to a new report from Forrester Research. While B2C marketers have been using social for years, it is now a crucial access point for establishing new and rewarding relationships in the enterprise, the report says. 

B2B marketers still lag behind their consumer-focused peers, according to Forrester, but the gap is closing, and more businesses will likely follow the trend as the ROI of these programs becomes more apparent. Forrester says B2B companies should incorporate social selling into their marketing strategies through tighter collaboration between marketing and sales, and also devise game plans that automate as much of the process as possible.

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Messaging is the most frequently used form of mobile communication among consumers today, but the majority of businesses fail to effectively use mobile messaging services to communicate with their customers, according to a new report from Forrester Research. The firm surveyed 1,943 U.S. smartphone users between October and December of last year to identify the messaging they consider to be the most effective and contextually relevant. 

While 96 percent of U.S. smartphone owners receive some type of messaging-service notifications (excluding email), more than half of those surveyed opt-out of receiving alerts because they’re irrelevant or arrive too frequently, according to the report. Only 23 percent of online businesses use push notifications for mobile message services to engage customers, Forrester found, and most don’t use real-time or contextual data to increase the relevancy of their messaging. (The report refers to all push notifications from businesses via any messaging service, not including email, such as alerts from SMS messages, dedicated messaging apps, and bots within messaging apps, including Facebook Messenger.) 

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MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. — Google this week took a big leap toward blending its two biggest OSes: Android and Chrome. The company did not merge the platforms, as was rumored last fall and subsequently denied by Google, but the distinctions between Chrome and Android apps will effectively expire starting next month. 

Chromebooks will get more powerful and more useful for enterprises as the devices gain access to a vast catalog of Android apps, according to Google. A trio of Chromebooks — the Asus Chromebook Flip and Acer’s Chromebook R11 and Pixel — will receive updates next month that will let them run Android apps, and the company says it will expand support to more Chrome devices later this year.

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Switching from one marketing automation platform to another is a headache most organizations would probably rather avoid. Such transitions are often costly and can sap the motivation and morale of sales and marketing teams tasked with learning new programs. A change of providers can also delay brands’ abilities to launch new campaigns, and it sometimes takes time to incorporate the appropriate data into the new systems.

Despite those challenges, changes of marketing automation tech are often necessary. These four tips can mean the difference between a smooth switch and some bad decisions that cannot be undone.

1. Involve key stakeholders in marketing automation decisions

One of the first things a company should do before deciding on a new marketing automation system is get all of the key business leaders into the same room and on the same page, according to Paige Musto, director of communications at Act-On Software, a marketing automation vendor. Executives in marketing, sales, IT and data should all be at the table to help define and implement a successful project, Musto says. 

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Apple’s credibility in the enterprise has never been stronger. During the 22 months since the company inked a once unthinkable alliance with IBM, Apple turned a corner with IT professionals by simply extending its established strengths in consumer user experience, interface design and hardware to the market, which it hasn’t historically prioritized.

“To a certain degree it’s one of those successful partnerships that’s a well-kept secret,” says Van Baker, research vice president at Gartner. Both companies currently take a generally low-key approach to their MobileFirst for iOS initiative, and without splashy efforts to drum up interest or highlight momentum, much of the related activity happens behind the scenes, he says. 

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Apple’s 13-year revenue growth streak has come to an end. The company this week reported its first year-over-year decline in revenue since 2003, down 13 percent in the first quarter of 2016 from the same period last year. 

The downswing, which comes almost five years after former CEO and founder Steve Jobs passed away, is fueling some negative perceptions of Apple amidst the realization that companies cannot continue to grow in perpetuity. The reason Apple’s improbable period of growth ended is largely the same thing that fueled it for so long: the iPhone.

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SAN FRANCISCO — Facebook isn’t worried about biting off more than it can chew and it’s making that abundantly clear here at F8 this week. During the span of an 85-minute keynote yesterday, company executives trotted on stage to discuss chat bots and artificial intelligence (AI) for business customer care, live video, virtual reality and a series of developer tool enhancements to bolster its mission of connecting people.

Facebook is looking to simplify mundane and repeatable tasks for businesses with new APIs that enable bots and AI to be built into Messenger, which  CEO Mark Zuckerberg called “the next big platform for private sharing.” With 900 million people using the app at least once a month, Messenger is one of fastest growing products in the world and the second most popular app on iOS globally, behind Facebook, according to David Marcus, vice president of Facebook’s messaging products.

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SAN FRANCISCO — Google is looking to strategically tackle the enterprise cloud market by open sourcing some of its internal technologies, embracing a multiplatform design principle and setting what it thinks are reasonable expectations for what its customers should move into the public cloud. The company hopes to continue making strides in the crowded market, which Amazon dominates, by helping enterprises identify business processes that can rapidly transition to the cloud and deliver the fastest ROI.

Now that companies can store all the data they want in the cloud for as little as $0.01 per GB per month, figuring out what to do with it all is a significant challenge, according to Greg DeMichillie, Google Cloud Platform’s (GCP) director of product management, who spoke with CIO.com at the GCP user conference last week. “It’s the needle in the haystack,” DeMichillie says. “Companies are drowning in data that they know, or that they suspect, there’s value in … but they don’t know how to get the value out of it.”

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