Kickstarter

The book I read to research this post was Kickstarter For Dummies by Aimee Cebulski which is a very good book which I read at

http://safaribooksonline.com

Kickstarter is a venture capital or crowdfunding website. Basically you write about a project you want to start which can be a book, a film, a start up business or even something like a charity thing and people pledge to help fund it and usually if you make a profit they get a share of the proceeds. You have to designate how much you wish to raise and what percentage you will give them. You first of all tell them in one word what type of project it will be. You then tell them about the project in less than 135 characters. There is another part where you can tell them about the project in more detail. You need a title for the project, a photo or video & maybe even a website or blog for them to visit for more information. Investors aren’t always paid in cash, you might in the case of a book send them a signed copy or another reward for investing a set sum. It’s customary to thank your backers whether you achieve your target or not and of course you pay the website a percentage. The default deadline is 30 days although you can adjust that. Kickstarter is at http://kickstarter.com & they have a tumblr blog also called kickstarter. You need to be a USA citizen and have a social security number and payments are done through Amazon.com. This is a very interesting book and if you are a potential investor the projects are categorized on the website.

Digital Marketing

The book I read to research this post was Digital Marketing by Godfrey Parkin which is very good and which I bought from kindle. This book doesn’t add a huge amount of information to what I already know about this subject although I read quite a lot about it and am quite knowledgeable. The most interesting parts are where it describes some less well known social networks like Trulia & Writely which I might check out. There is also some mobile based ones like Grrl & Loopt. It also rather interestingly contrasts some of the not good websites including some of the big players like Selfridges with other sites that are more successful online like Gap. One thing Selfridges do wrong is there is no clear privacy policy. A lot of people nowadays are reluctant to do business with a site that is compiling a mailing list to sell to 3rd parties and expect the site to make that quite clear. One thing Gap do is let people buy certain items from competitors that go with the clothing they offer saving them having to visit several sites. Also they display what you have bought on the same page you browse items so you don’t have to keep going from one page to another. The most successful online businesses are the ones that have both an online presence and a bricks and mortar store for convenience but many businesses are going entirely online. I did quite enjoy reading this book which is a reasonable length as well. Believe me I am anything but impressed when a so called book is only a few pages. Finally there is also quite an extensive glossary of terms in the back of the book.

Online Reputation Management

The book I read to research this post was Online Reputation Management For Dummies by Lori Randall Stradtman which is a very good book which I read at

http://safaribooksonline.com

This book does cover everything about this topic as I think a bigger book would be necessary but it does a good job of covering the essentials. In this day and age particularly for businesses it’s more difficult to keep a uniformly good image. Also if someone libels your product it’s not straight forward taking them to court for damages especially if they are in another country. A lot of potential abuse comes from trolls which all you can do is ignore them, delete their comments and get them banned from that particular site. Other folk you should reason with and if they have a strong greivance take the conversation to another medium like email or phone. You should also keep them informed of any developments in dealing with their complaint. Many smaller companies have only 1 person who deals with their online image but bigger companies have a team who each specialize in different aspects. Something suggested is a website called Klout.com where they let you search on social media on topics connected to your products or services. I may join a site called http://getglue.com which lets you review films, books and music and of course is loosely connected to the book topic. There is also a service at http://wordtracker.com that lets you find the most commonly used search terms. I did enjoy reading this book and did find the topic quite interesting.

Chatter

The book I read to research this post was Developing Applications With Salesforce Chatter by Rakesh Gupta which is a very good book which I read at

http://safaribooksonline.com

This book is rather short but is part of the same series the book on Yammer which I did yesterday was also part ot. It can be split into 2 halves with the first portion about using Chatter & the rest on writing apps. Chatter is similiar to Yammer in that it’s a program you can run on a company server that allows a corporate social network normally for employees at a company. You can have 1 main group and then lots of smaller groups for maybe different departments. You can have a community group which allows in trading partners and customers to participate in a group. You can also have hybrid groups where part of the network is stored on cloud computing and the rest on a company server. Like Facebook & Yammer each member of a group has a feed to keep them updated as to what is going on. In addition to group members there are a group owner and a group manager both with additional powers. This program integrates and is owned by salesforce.com and there suite of products. Your customers can buy either a standard licence or plus licence that allows them to participate in your Chatter group. Obviously the plus licence grants more powers. In addition as well as the standard version of Chatter there are developer, professional, enterprise & unlimited versions. The developer edition is for people learning Chatter and app writing. I think most companies can get by with either the standard or at most professional version. I enjoyed reading this and it’s an interesting subject but is somewhat short. There don’t seem to be many books about Chatter which is a shame.

Yammer

The book I read to research this post was Yammer Starter by Ralph Roberts which is a very good book which I read at

http://safaribooksonline.com

This book is a bit on the short side but is on an interesting subject and I think alot of the information is quite relevant especially to IT people in businesses. Yammer is the original corporate network solution and there is a free version along with a premium and enterprise versions. For most businesses all they need is the free version. It integrates with Microsoft Dynamics CRM & MS Sharepoint and obviously there is probably going to be hosting fees involved if it doesn’t run on a company server. Microsoft bought the Yammer company for $1.2 billion several years ago with a view to promoting Dynamics & Sharepoint. You can’t have subgroups in Yammer but you can have 1 big corporate group and then lots of separate smaller groups. Obviously when you join a group you need your company email address and this has to be authorized by the network administrator as an allowable member. Of course there are alternatives to Yammer like Chatter & other companies like Sugar CRM & Salesforce.com are eager to promote their own CRM solutions.Also Yammer integrates with Twitter & Facebook and has things like newsfeeds which are similiar to the latter. I think a lot of the program which is downloadable from Yammer.com is quite intuitive especially if you have experience of Facebook. I did quite enjoy reading this book although I thought it’s a bit short.

Social Media Security

The book I read to research this post was Social Media Security by Michael Cross which is an excellent book which I read at

http://safaribooksonline.com

This book looks at the subject of social media security mostly from a business point of view although a lot of it is relevant to home users. Many companies are giving their employees access to social media as a part of doing their job. This can be things like promoting the company on social networks but also increasingly they are using it to stay in touch with clients and of course blogs are self explanatory. Much contact relationship management software integrates with sites like facebook & twitter. An interesting point raised is when you join a site and they ask to look in your email account for clients  already on that site they usually have access to those peoples email addresses which is a potential security breach. 13 million users on facebook in the USA alone use minimal privacy settings which is great for anyone contemplating identity theft. They suggest using a separate Gmail or Yahoo for activating and using with social media sites. You should think of social media sites the same way you think of the city you live in, in that there are nice people as well as total undesirables like the posh areas & ghettoes in a city. You should think before writing anything do you really want to share information with all and sundry. I really enjoyed reading this book which is as you can see on a very interesting subject that I have barely scratched the surface of.