Author: Robin

*SOCIAL MEDIA IS NOT A TREND*- it’s a fundamental change in the way companies reach their audiences.
Overview of social media landscape – what tools are out there.
Blogs – lots out there, becoming mainstream news (Huffington Post); case study about the Direct2Dell site that came directly from a blog post that coined the term “dell hell” and was picked up within 2 days by NY Times and Business Week.
Microblog – Twitter has 4.5 Million users; uses of Twitter: live discussion, reinforce your brand, promote content, speed linking, content syndication (hi everyone who is reading this because I tweeted my new blog post!!). Case study: @comcastcares – search for Comcast in Twitter, respond to complaints, become one of the most effective customer service campaigns in social media.
Social Network Facebook – 120+ Million users, Facebook groups, applications and photo sharing. Case study – Barack Obama – 6.8 Million supporters (John McCain, 518,000 supporters) in Facebook, 2.5 M in Twitter with 392 updates, 179,000 subscribers in YouTube and a social site of his own at barackobama.com
YouTube 1 billion video clips shared every day; useful for marketing. Case study: Cadbury’s Gorilla Ads
Flickr (photo sharing), Delicious (bookmarking), Digg (social relevancy), Amazon.com (collaborative filtering & recommendations)
Social Listening
Where? Technorati, Google Blog Search, Twitter, Google Alerts – very important to hear what folks are saying about you.
Crowdsourcing – Case study: Project Dogfood – built a targeted, effective event through direct collaboration with the audience. Case study: Netflix prize – 1M to anyone who can improve their recommendations by 10% – crowdsourced programming…
LISTEN. ENGAGE. MEASURE.
Why social media campaigns fail – no strategy, poor listening, unreliable content, lack of metrics for success.
Social Media Stragegy – define target audience & get in-depth understanding of their problems & questions, become a trusted source of info, build an online presence with relevant content, make it easy to transition the client from learning from you to buying from you.
“you don’t need a million customers, you need the right 10,000” – Chris Brogan

Now I’m in (in Theater 1, which has wireless…) an IT disaster planning session. He’s starting off discussing BCDR (BC? – DR = Disaster Response) and his company’s (Starfire Technologies) experience in creating them.
To begin, he discussed the different types of disasters that could befall us (small, medium and large “never-happen” disasters). Medium disasters are the ones we should be planning and testing for. Smaller ones happen often enough (accidental email deletions, etc.) that we should be in practice. Medium disasters (server failures, etc) should be planned for. Large disasters include facility failures (fire engulfing the building) and have their own special needs.
BCP – Business Continuity Plans, not for DR but for daily business operations, requires process documentation, timelines for recovery events, ineffective training, etc. BC vs. DR – frequency & scope differences, can be complimenting solutions.
BCDR Plan – important characteristics

• Skill assumptions and expectations
• Automation of processes
• Application landscape review
• Sufficient infrastructure at recovery site
• Recovery data currency
• Identify external vendor dependencies
• Long-run planning
• Production-return planning

Next he talked about tiers of multi-site service. When I get the internal MRRL cloud up and running, we’ll be on Tier 4 – Dual Active Sites with all the data being shared among all locations.
The data – get rid of classic, aged backup methodologies for unified solutions (backup/restore, archive/retrieve, space management)
The Infrastructure – Storage; centralized arrays, internal fault tolerance, remote mirroring. He recommends offloading backup processing from systems (again, something I’ll be doing more of when we go to our cloud backups)
Infrastructure – Technologies; remote sites, vendor cloud offerings, virtualization and deduplication (no mention of internal cloud offerings… other than maybe a mention of storage virtualization)
That’s as far as he got before his time was up and up next is lunch – some sort of buffet… I’ll post more after!

TJ O’Connor led this session on using Web 2.0 tools inside the enterprise. He mentioned a couple of tools I was unfamiliar with – Clearspace (which has apparently become SBS since he created his slides) and Present.ly -and then talked about using blogs, microblogs (that’s where Present.ly came in), IM (we use Gmail’s chat for just about anything Present.ly could do, but I appreciated the pointer anyway!), RSS Feeds and Wikis. He finished by talking about how to get 2.0 tools adopted in the Enterprise. (*foster grass-roots adoption, encourage emergent behaviors, combine with top-down support and remember your goals)