Eating better and exercising more are no brainers when it comes to new resolutions for the New Year. But setting resolutions just because the calendar year changed isn’t always a good idea. Individuals – and businesses – must ensure that they’re making changes for the right reasons. For some retailers, a disappointing holiday shopping season has them reassessing their focus and executing on their own New Year’s resolutions. For some of those retailers, new initiatives include replatforming their current eCommerce solution,... Category - It Just Makes Good Business Sense
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Eating better and exercising more are no brainers when it comes to new resolutions for the New Year. But setting resolutions just because the calendar year changed isn’t always a good idea. Individuals – and businesses – must ensure that they’re making changes for the right reasons. For some retailers, a disappointing holiday shopping season has them reassessing their focus and executing on their own New Year’s resolutions. For some of those retailers, new initiatives include replatforming their current eCommerce solution,... 
If you ask a client about compensation for his or her business’s technology partners, no matter what service is being provided, there’s often a disdain for time and material contracts. And that’s because the client is carrying all of the risk. They’re burdened with front-end uncertainty before a single dollar is made on their investment. To a certain degree, the end result is left to chance. Unfortunately, it’s not rare for an estimate to come out at a price much higher than... When consumers hit that thumbs-up button, what do they get out of it? There’s the social aspect of it, of course, but then there’s also the exposure to new products, deals and news. Concerning the executives issuing the social media funds, however? What do they get out of a like? Beyond a growing collection of fans, sometimes the answer isn’t as clear-cut.
In the video above, those questions were posed to a handful of social media professionals from the likes of Edelman Digital, Cisco and the Altimeter Group. Unsurprisingly, the frustrations of the ever-elusive ROI made their way into the conversation.
Having the ability to track the overall customer experience is something that even the biggest brands have struggled with. When all of those consumers hit the thumbs up, there’s some level of proof that a social media campaign is gaining ground. However, at a certain point, executives need more – an incredibly palpable challenge for the person who has to defend social spending to a company’s CFO.
Thanks to software giant Adobe and its social media management platform, determining a return on investment is possible. Adobe Social combines listening and engagement tools to create a social measuring stick.
“With Adobe Social, marketers can monitor mentions for their brand on Facebook and Twitter, find out which customers are the key influencers on each of these networks and track how much revenue is being generated from specific social media campaigns and posts,” explained the editors of a recent Mashable.com article. “The platform also makes it easier to target ads to certain audiences, personalize a website based on how the user interacts with it and even build apps for Facebook, effectively making it an all-in-one marketing tool for companies.”
At NetSphere Strategies, we tout the value of the Adobe platform because it helps us link up your social media initiatives to tie them back to an ROI. Not only will it give you peace of mind, but it also serves as a way for us to validate that our work effort is producing business value for your company.
As two-income households become the norm, children are going to school earlier than ever. Instead of taking kids to daycare, parents are now looking into alternatives that will kick-start a child’s education. In programs like Montessori, for example, kids are entering formal learning environments as young as 3 years old. Similarly, post-graduate degrees have become essential in the competitive corporate world, keeping individuals in school into their late 20s. So after more than two decades of feeding our brains, why... 
Today’s technical age presents us with a lot of distractions – whether it be satellite television with a million and one channels, smartphones that are now able to talk back or our e-readers, which have the capacity to keep us wrapped up in reading until the end of time. While all of these things can provide us with new information, new conveniences and new ways to communicate, straightforward communication is becoming a casualty amongst all this technology. No matter how mundane... 
Because of the work of two men more than 10 years ago, we as a society are able to pinpoint the most decisive factor in employee retention. And surprisingly enough, it’s not pay. It’s not benefits, either, or the company work environment. It’s the boss. In 1999, Marcus Buckingham and Curt Coffman, two researchers from The Gallup Organization, published the results of in-depth interviews with more than 80,000 managers in more than 400 companies. The book was titled, "First, Break All... There’s no better feeling than the one that comes from meeting a really nice person at a networking event. You know the type – someone who has a knack for making others smile and letting everyone else just be themselves. And despite the occasional butterflies that can come from networking, business events are a good place to find these hidden gems. When faced with the mission to mingle, Michael Margolis of GetStoried.com relies on storytelling tactics to ease the nerves of...
Questioning whether Facebook is worth the time and cost for your small business is a valid concern. It wasn’t that long ago, after all, when Facebook was nothing more than a distraction for most employees. So when searching for the answer to that question, we realized we couldn’t hear it from anyone other than a news giant like Forbes. And as it so happens, just yesterday, Forbes published the article titled, “The Facebook Lesson About Value Of Users.” In it, Forbes... There are two ways to build the biggest building in town. One way is to simply build it, brick by brick, whereas, the other way, is to tear down all of the buildings around you so as to leave yours as the only – and tallest – one standing. The former option speaks to the entrepreneurial spirit in all of us. The latter reeks of attrition. Philosophically speaking, this is the type of decision that people in business are confronted with...