Who is the 44th President of USA?

Barack Hussein Obama II is the junior United States Senator from Illinois and President-elect of the United States of America.

Obama is the first person of African-American descent (he is of multiracial parentage) to be nominated by a major American political party for President, and the first person of African descent to be elected President of the United States of America. A graduate of Columbia University and Harvard Law School, where he became the first black person to serve as president of the Harvard Law Review, Obama worked as a community organizer and practiced as a civil rights attorney before serving three terms in the Illinois Senate from 1997 to 2004. He taught constitutional law at the University of Chicago Law School from 1992 to 2004. Following an unsuccessful bid for a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives in 2000, he announced his campaign for the U.S. Senate in January 2003. After a primary victory in March 2004, Obama delivered the keynote address at the Democratic National Convention in July 2004. He was elected to the Senate in November 2004 with 70 percent of the vote.

As a member of the Democratic minority in the 109th Congress, he helped create legislation to control conventional weapons and to promote greater public accountability in the use of federal funds. He also made official trips to Eastern Europe, the Middle East, and Africa. During the 110th Congress, he helped create legislation regarding lobbying and electoral fraud, climate change, nuclear terrorism, and care for returned U.S. military personnel. Obama announced his presidential campaign in February 2007, and was formally nominated at the 2008 Democratic National Convention with Delaware senator Joe Biden as his running mate. On November 4, 2008, Obama won the 2008 presidential election and will take the oath of office and become the 44th President of the United States on January 20, 2009.

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Further links to know who Mr. Barack Hussein Obama or the new President of USA is :-

• Who Is Obama?

• Barak Hussein Obama - Who is he?

• Obama Scrapbook

• Just who is B. Obama and what does he stand for

• Who Is Obama? What Is He Hiding?

• Who Is Obama — Blogs, Pictures, and more on WordPress

• Obama Blog

Congratulation to Barack Obama for winning the 44th Presidential Election. I hope to add onto the above list after couple of years is - “Barack Obama” report card as President so far?

Too blind to see the writing on the Social Media wall

Wikipedia defines Social Media as primarily Internet-based tools for sharing and discussing information among human beings. The term most often refers to activities that integrate technology, social interaction, and the construction of words, pictures, videos and audio. This interaction, and the manner in which information is presented, depends on the varied perspectives and "building" of shared meaning among communities, as people share their stories and experiences.

With its emergence, and high speed evolution has forced marketers worldwide to amplify the growing importance of this new age marketing. I kudos Peter Kim’s work in identifying 300+ organizations and their initiatives in the social media space. Peter’s work could be found here. Additionally Social Media seems to be an evolution that began with a revolution. Authors has already started penning down the idea of next generation social media

Even the current US election was not able to miss the Social Media trail in their campaigns. According to Amnesiablog there was an awesome live integration between Twitter, the US debate and Current.com. During the live broadcast, user comments on twitter were fed live to the video feed. Each tweet then animated subtly and dissolved into the background. Fascinating and a great sign of the future of traditional broadcast and social media. Martin Bowling at search engine people articulates that even the CNN team has several anchors who are & will routinely look to MySpace, Facebook and Twitter for comments, questions, segment ideas or even feedback.

Things like Twitter, a simple yet a powerful tool seems to have provided a new paradigm to how we communicate within a community. Twitting phenomenon seems to be catching like a wild fire. Another example of Twitter and US election is - Zdnet reported on how twitter benefited from US presidential election debates. Twitter usage and sign-ups received a healthy boost during last Friday’s first presidential debate for the 08 campaign. The official Twitter blog reports that, despite Friday traditionally being a slow traffic day:

• Friday updates jumped 18.5% from previous Friday.

• Updates during the debate increased 160% compared to same time last week.

• Signups on Friday were up 23%.

• Signups during the debate were up 135% compared to same time last week.

This may even forces us to wonder about How social media can help shape society, How Social Media Can Help Your PR Efforts, How Social Media Can Help your Business, Social Media Can Help You Build Better Blog, Social Media Forums Can Help Solve Common Ecommerce Problems, even how Social Media Can Help You Land The Job and so on. The answers are just click away.

Chris Brogan new ebook - Fish Where the Fish Are- Mapping Social Media to the Buying Cycle, on tying social media to the marketing buying cycle provides some interesting aspect for marketers venturing into the social Media space. He has further articulated 25 Ways Social Media Prepares You for the Downturn.  Louis Columbus at Cincom articulates the growth of social media and the proven ability to educate and inform more members of a team than ever before through Wikis, blogs and all other forms of social media needs to be tapped into to make call centers more effective than they are today. His take on mergence of a contact center into the social media stream can be viewed here.

Other attribute that I would like to highlight about Social Media is its ability to connect people without any boundaries, color, creed, religion, rank and so on. Not going much in philosophy, and just to highlight about how Social Media connect - I wrote a post on the weekend, INDIA Calling….are the Marketing Writers listening?, highlighting  about India’s importance for Global Marketing writers. I did mentioned about David Scott’s book and there he was commenting and comforting me with his following comments :

Hi Shiraz, I'm listening.
Wiley India Pvt. Ltd. is publishing a version of "The New Rules of Marketing & PR" for the India market. It will be paperback and at a much more attractive price than the USA import. I am not sure when it will be out.
I have been to India to speak once before and hope to come again upon the launch of my book in India.
Take care.

This not only demonstrates that David does believe and live what he writes but additionally the value of social media. Hence, kudos to him and his book – “The New Rules of Marketing & PR”. It’s surely a good referencing point for all new age marketers.

I am sure the above mentioned example does simply amplifies the importance of Social Media. But as a popular movie saying goes “this is my gift and this is my curse, who am I – I am Spiderman”, similarly this web of Social Media comes with its own set of problems and ramifications. It a true sense, any initiative(s) in the social media evolution, much like any other evolution requires an attribute of being persistently patience by company(s) or individual(s) driving it. However with its emergence on the marketing horizon, can we marketers still afford to blind fold ourselves from the phenomena known as Social Media Marketing?

Why Managing Contracts Is Essential In Channel Management

With so much pressure on marketing departments to generate positive returns on the investments they make in channel marketing and channel programs, getting the most out of managing contracts often gets forgotten about.  There is no clear return on investment calculation for contract management, and as a result it gets ignored.

Yet contract management needs to be the basis of any multichannel management strategy today. It’s not enough to just rely on the outbound marketing strategies anymore; looking instead at how to better use pricing discounts, arbitrate on pricing strategies, and how to better manage resellers to performance levels and goals all can be tied to the better use of contract management.

Looking at how Cisco was able to capitalize on putting contract management at the core of their channel management strategies is a case in point.  Instead of allowing pricing discounts and opportunities for cost savings to expire, Cisco has create an enterprise-wide contract management system that is now core to their multichannel management strategies.  Their ability to manage pricing, analyze contracts down to the clause level and also increase the profitability of their channel partners and in so doing add to their own is evident in the latest fiscal year figures reported.  An astounding $4.8B backlog and 7% revenue growth illustrates how critical managing contracts with their many channel partners. 

An Emerging Contract Management Maturity Model

The majority of companies rely on intensive contract management systems to manage their procurement and supply chain contracts, yet this same level of concentration and intensity needed for sell-side contracts as well.  From several companies in the discrete manufacturing, high-tech, and process goods industries relying on contract management in their sell-side and multichannel management operations, the following maturity model has emerged from the companies spoken with:

Level 1: Stand-Alone and Siloed.  The majority of these companies use sell-side contract management only for managing pricing exceptions and as a database for re-evaluating selling contracts.  These databases often reside in Microsoft Access databases and also in Microsoft Excel.  As a result, there is often a lag in terms of the accuracy of the data that leads to lost profit opportunities as well.  From the research, approximately 70 – 80% of the companies researched are in this category.  There are major opportunities for increasing contract management performance in multichannel management strategies.

Level 2: Minimal Integration leads to Margin Loss.  This is the middle ground of the contract management maturity model, and is populated by companies who have integrated their sell-side contract management systems with sales operations, Accounts Payable (AP), Accounts Receivable (AR), and in the case of distribution-based businesses, their pricing and forecasting systems.  On average these systems have two to four system integrations, most often through internally developed adapters or connectors their IT departments have created.  Companies in this level of the maturity model have the ability to forecast and plan out the impact of taking discounts across their reseller base, create specific programs to help resellers get to their specific performance goals. 

Level 3: Contract Management Platform. In companies including Cisco, Ingram Micro, Intel, GE, Microsoft and others, channel contracts are managed more as part of the broader Master Data Management (MDM) strategy, which are what SAP customers commonly use for managing their Supplier Relationship Management (SRM) contracts. Forward-thinking companies spoken with during a series of sales calls on sell-side contract management want to move their dealer and distributor contracts into their SAP MDM warehouses as well.  Companies who have done this are capable of managing their multiple channels more profitably because the contracts can be accessed and used by anyone completing a marketing plan or evaluating a new marketing strategy.

Bottom Line: Instead of filling up filing cabinet with contracts, get them automated so they can be used for better managing your resellers and creating incentives for your channels to seller higher margin, more profitable products.

Courtesy – Louis Columbus at Perfect CEM

INDIA Calling….are the Marketing Writers listening?

India consists of 28 states and 7 union territories has the world's 12th largest economy at market exchange rates and the fourth largest in purchasing power. Economic reforms have transformed it into the second fastest growing large economy. As per last census conducted in 2001, the overall literacy rate of India is 65.38%. This is a big number when you consider the current population is 1,147,995,904.

So are we a good market for the marketing gurus, writers or publishers from the west. Unfortunately I am still force to say NO. Surprising to my knowledge there seems to be an underlying negligence by marketing writers and publisher from the west on the Indian Market. I wonder what could be the reasoning for marketing writers of not considering India as a market to distribute their work or get reviews and so on. However I would say that India portals like rediff, Indiatimes, etc and bookstores like oxford are doing a decent job in getting the international work to India. But it surprises me when I see that Amazon does not deliver to India. It forces me to wonder that are Indians considered to be somewhat of not “considerable importance” or thought of  as unable to spend on quality work? Through this post I would love to have feedback(s) to clear my misconception(s).

Books like “The New Rules of Marketing & PR”, “Tuned –In” are some wonderful work by David Scott, and are surly a recommended read for all marketers specially in India, who are exploring or transitioning towards the “new age marketing”. This is a wonderful piece of work by David that would enable young and old marketers to leverage the new age marketing including digital marketing, especially in the current situation of economic slowdown where we all marketers are or can expect squeezed marketing budgets. David brings his experience and expertise to his work in such a simplistic form that attracts or rather forces me to recommend his work in nearly in all forums that I attend. Another good work that comes to my mind is – “All Marketers Are Liars” by Seth Godin. Having mentioned these examples, by no means I plan to discount or neglect the work(s) of other authors that I am been privileged to read.

However I am still forced to wonder when I see its unavailability of similar work(s) at the local sites and/or book stores. Are the marketing writers or even I would say their publisher in west feels that India is not a big market for them. Similarly few days ago I noticed couple of people from India on Twitter requesting their “followers” in US to courier marketing books to India due to their unavailability. This is a similar case in local marketing forums that I attend. Hence this is one of the reason that I was carrying a pile of 10+ books from my US trip.

Surprisingly I even had a not so good experience once I tired connecting with one of the renowned marketing writers in US for his latest release. I wrote an email requesting him to guide me to an Indian publisher from where I can buy his newly released book, and got a reply - “well, the good news is that my site has literally thousands and thousands of free posts”. I kept on wondering that what made him think that I am trying to get some freebies out of him. Is it the way I wrote the email, was it where I was writing (country) or is it something else. Nevertheless the book is still not available in India. I would not like to name the author as I truly likes his work.

The aim of articulating this post is to encourage writers and publishers in west to see the importance of India as a market. I am marketer by profession and try to follow marketing & strategy writers all across. Hence would thought of making an attempt for writers in the west to ensure that their work should also reach the country known as INDIA.

Have a happy Sunday!

10 Articles on Social Media

With a pretty busy schedule I was not able to post anything for last two days and due to the work load would like to keep Sunday on ease. However would like to share some interesting articles from Social Media space for the weekend reading. I am sure people like to relax on this weekend as much I am doing, however just incase : -

1. Evolution of Social Media & Viral Marketing

2. The Social Life Of Shopping

3. The 5 Critical, Current Responsibilities of a Social Media Expert

4. How Mainstream is Social Media?

5. 6.5 Million Americans Watched a Mobile Video and Mobile Social Networking Up 8.8%

6. 10 Ways to Find Readers for Your Blog By Leveraging Other Online Presence

7. LinkedIn adds Apps….and relevance

8. Study: 59% of Top Retailers Now on Facebook

9. Social Media ROI

10. 7 Things to Check Before Starting a Business Blog

Have an informative and relaxing weekend !

How to Connect the Dots of Web 2.0 Communications

Four Crucial Questions to Help Tap the New Media Power for Business

Web 2.0's Need for Strategic Transition

There is an unfortunate yet growing disconnect developing between corporate America, and the potentially effective opportunities for enhanced online communications offered by the innovative Web 2.0 movement. In short, the dots are not getting connected to demonstrate how the new technology of Web 2.0 can benefit business and organizations.

Photo Courtesy of Brian Solis – www.briansolis.com

As a result, new developments, such as the phenomena of social networking, are being relegated to the world of techies – software developers, online designers, IT vendors and so on. Rather than being seen for its strategic potential to help organizations to better interface with stakeholders and enhance value, the tools of Web 2.0 – including popular social networking sites, such as Twitter and Yammer – are too often dismissed as trivial by executives.

Photo Courtesy of Rodrigo Vera

There are, right now, numerous expos and conferences around the world by and for people with a vested interest in Web 2.0 technology to discuss the nuts, bolts and minutia of what the latest hot social networking platform might be, largely without consideration for how to communicate that enthusiasm to businesses and organizations that can ultimately make it a success.

Preaching to the choir will not get Web 2.0 out of the box.

Here's a reality – with few exceptions, such as Cisco, neither business and organizations nor their support services, such as public relations and advertising agencies, are scrambling to invest in learning Web 2.0's potential. It's simply not happening. Most PR and ad agencies are already woefully behind the curve in learning the online world because if clients have not bought into Web 2.0 there is little chance for billable hours.

It is the responsibility of seasoned business consultants who comprehend the vision of Web 2.0, together with disciples of technology, to shift from talking about tactical online tools and geek jargon to practical strategic uses that will create tangible results and bottom-line value that will get the attention of corporate America.

Vision – Go Look

It starts by leaders stepping back and taking a more strategic view of the competitive landscape. Put aside for a moment all the tactical choices—things like interactive sites, streaming video, viral word-of-mouth tactics, social networks, branding in a virtual world, Web site newsrooms, blogs, and so on—to focus on understanding the strategic business elements that include objectives, perspective, understanding audiences, messages, and outcomes.

4 Crucial Questions You Need To Ask

1. What does your organization want to achieve by using online media to promote its vision and message, for example?
2. How can it best manage communications through online media and social networks to gain assurance that the meaning of its words are being conveyed accurately?
3. How can an organization manage interactions with journalists and bloggers to its advantage?
4. On a personal level, how can a CEO, leader and executive become media savvy and recognized as an influential and respected voice in a competitive field?

It's time for Web 2.0's strategic transition to the real, practical world to help mainstream businesses and organizations build competition leadership.

Courtesy - by David Henderson, Author of the Media Savvy Leader and Emmy Award-Winning Former CBS News Correspondent, at Expert Access

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What is Cincom Expert Access?

Expert Access is a business e-zine for senior-level corporate executives, IT and operations managers and technology buyer committees.

Each issue comprises about 16 articles, the most popular of which are the feature articles (on a variety of topics) and the 'Ask the Expert' section where readers' questions are answered by an expert in the particular subject area.

Because Expert Access spans a range of job titles and industries, it must deliver value by presenting the business benefits of the latest technology advances to corporate and operations managers while at the same time getting under the covers of the latest business and production applications for the IT managers and users.

Highly recommended subscription. To Subscriber visit – www.cincom.com/ea

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Searching for Social Networking’s Enterprise Groove

Despite how quickly integrated social networking is becoming in enterprises, it still isn’t scaling to meet the most complex problems faced today.  The well-known success stories of customer service being made more accountable and responsive are emanating out of how @ComCastCares, @JetBlue, @SouthWestAir and other companies are using Twitter as a means to better solve customer problems.  Before social networking, these customers would be relegated to workflows that treated customers more like cattle than people who made paychecks possible.  Twitter, like other social networking sites, has an instantaneous level of accountability to it, and is cutting through processes that got in the way of serving customers, creating a catalyst for process change. 

Making Social Networking Pay By Simplifying Quoting and Ordering Workflows

Getting ready to present at the SAP Configuration Work Group Conference last week on the topic of Web 2.0 and its impact on sell-side processes and development tools and applications, the point of how far social networking needs to go became clear. The SAP CWG Conference is attended by developers, system engineers, managers and enterprise-level geeks.

Instead of giving them a Social Networking 101 presentation, I decided to take the more challenging route and attempt to explain how social networking’s customer information could revolutionize sell-side processes, and how this also changing application development. Of the two points, the one of how social networking is changing app development resonated with this audience. 

With the audience being SAP-centric, the focus on how transaction pipelines, specifically how their Internet Pricing & Configurator (IPC) and Variant Configurator-based workflows could be made more relevant to customers by the infusion of customer insight from social networking apps was presented. Making online ordering capable of anticipating the preferences and needs of customers through the analysis of social networking data, defining service and support plans that are as unique as each customer, and tailoring product customization strategies based on insights gained are all potential areas that could benefit.  These workflows are beyond reliance on APIs and even XML.

Social Networking’s’ Impact on App Development

The more I worked through these process areas of transaction pipelines, online ordering, and stock-balancing service requests from resellers for example, the more it became clear that enterprise-based form development relying on AJAX had the potential to bring customer insights from social networking apps. Imagine being able to have an enterprise form that had all relevant transaction data complete with real-time updates from Twitter, Facebook or any other social networking app regarding conversations with the customer?  Or being able to see who cross-shopped and then purchased a customized product and what they had been promised in terms of delivery date?  This is beyond a CRM system or an order management system; it is the ability to see how an enterprise makes and keeps commitments to customers and the real-time results of being accountable and transparent.

Despite this appearing to be futuristic, I did find examples of enterprise working diligently to integrate social networking data into these process areas.  Toyota has done this on their hybrid new product development and introduction (NPDI) process workflows, in addition to another auto manufacturer working to resolve dealer complaints due to parts outages by using social networking feedback. 

Key Take-Aways

From the conversations with the audience after the presentation last week, the following take-aways emerged.  It’s interesting to note that many SAP customers had sent their development and programming engineers there to learn more about using IPC and Variant configurators to support new selling strategies.  Their insights are provided below:

·    The majority spoken with are relying on J2EE-based programming approaches with ABAP integration to support new selling strategies. A few had worked with AJAX for complex online forms.  AJAX, even in this enterprise-centric audience, had lots of interest.

·    SAP’s enterprise focus is to bring what they are calling harmonization to ERP data so that sales quotes can be produced directly from that system, previously CRM data had been used.  Harmonization sounded a lot like integration, and it was great to see SAP product managers speak about social networking as a part of their future direction and their use of Wikis and other socnets internally.

·    Customers’ perceptions of delivery performance and order accuracy as measured through social networking queries (Twitter) are getting attention by SAP developers.  On this topic I found a dichotomy in this developer community.  There are those developers who see social networking as necessary for bring greater accuracy, accountability and immediacy to customer feedback and those that see existing e-mail systems as sufficient. Between the two groups, one developer on his own had attempted to build out an app that would give real-time customer satisfaction ratings with delivered products over time.  This was a reverse-grading application that had the customer rate his company with every shipment that arrived.  It’s a great idea, using social networking to quantify every order delivered to every customer.

Summary
Personally, I like hanging out with developers and programmers at a conference like this.  I learned quite a bit and also found that social networking’s influence on application development, from tools and apps to code being written, is growing.  The bottom line is that social networking has the potential to greatly impact these complex, ugly and often chaotic processes companies rely on.  The lag time will be the development of app tools that give these developers the opportunity to architect entirely new approaches to solving these problems. 

Courtesy – Louis Columbus, Perfect CEM