Archive | 3:00 pm

101 Small Business Web Applications You Must Check Out

11 Mar

Check out these 101 small business web applications – software in the cloud. The selections reflect the breadth of innovative ideas and new business pursuits at play in the small business technology cloud landscape.

From sales to legal to productivity tools, we can attest that the small business technology is alive, kicking and doing extremely well in 2011.

It’s getting much easier and cheaper to operate a business than ever before. Absolutely great news for small business!

Here is the list of categories we will cover on this post:

Business Development
Email Marketing
Event Marketing
Video Marketing
Social Media Marketing
Online Sales
Online Payment
Presentation
Billing and Accounting
Funding
Hiring and Team Building
File Sharing
Legal
Building Websites
Website Testing
Market Research
CRM
Productivity
Customer Service
Team Management
Voice Communication
Online Education

Adobe Adds Social Analytics Tools to Online Marketing Suite

11 Mar

Thumbnail image for adobe-logo.jpg HooteSuite wasn’t the only company to announce a social analytics suite yesterday: Adobe announced the addition of a new product called SocialAnalytics to its Online Marketing Suite. SocialAnalytics will ship in Q3 and monitor Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and many other sources.

Online Marketing Suite already features various tools for social media monitoring, but this new package extends the suite’s capabilities by adding features for determining a business’ top influencers, tracking sentiment over time and calculating how much revenue is generated by social media campaigns.

Online Marketing Suite is powered by Omniture, which Adobe acquired in 2009. It’s a part of Adobe’s ongoing “customer experience management” (CEM) strategy. Last year, following Adobe’s acquisition of Day Software we talked to Erik Larson, senior director of product management at Adobe, about CEM:

Larson’s vision for the enterprise revolves around “customer experience management,” which combines the discipline of user experience design, interaction design, process management, content strategy and customer service into a unified field for Web-based customer experience. Larson predicts in the near future, if this isn’t the case already, customers will expect to have most of their interactions with companies online – and citizens will have most of their interactions with governments online as well. To this end, Adobe hopes to position LiveCycle, Omniture, and Day’s offerings as a customer experience suite to compliment its existing web development technologies.

Adobe is going up against Cisco (which announced its SocialMiner product recently) and several established social analytics players such Radian6, but social analytics is a now a must-have feature for any sort of online marketing package.

As we pointed out earlier today, these sorts of social tools are great but the majority of customer interactions are still taking place on the phone. Despite a few well-known examples, such as the United breaks guitars incident, social analytics providers are providing solutions to problems that don’t really exist yet. There’s a crowded field of contenders, but we’re actually at a very early stage in the development and need for this technology.

Source: http://www.readwriteweb.com/enterprise/2011/03/adobe-social-analytics.php