Articles by Ned Madden

The familiar social media paradigm of "Listen ... Learn ... Engage ... Earn" has a correlative imperative: "Publish or Perish," and enterprises probably need to find someone else to do the job for them. But be really careful about whom you select I've covered the specifics of B2B digital media relations and social media marketing in previous articl...

Personalization -- the purported long-sought Holy Grail of Web content management -- just might have finally arrived via Web applications that make Web sites responsive in real-time to the unique needs of individual visitors At the heart of recommendation and personalization technologies are active, content-based collaborative filtering formulation...

Good news for the economy: Small business outsourcing has gone mainstream thanks to the increased use of automation technology -- computers, software and the Internet powering cost-efficient outside service provider teams Bad news for outsourcing service providers: Small and mid-sized businesses (SMBs) are proving to be slow on the uptake....

"Monetize." This dry semantic substitute for figuring out ways to make money stood out as the Word of the Day (or possibly Demand of the Day) for the companies displaying their social media Web sites and Software as a Service (SaaS) offerings at the VentureNet 2008 Conference, produced by the Torrance-based Technology Council of Southern California...

Part 1 of this two-part series focuses on on-demand outsourcing relationship management (ORM) and service level agreement management The global business process outsourcing (BPO) market continues to strengthen relative to the more mature IT outsourcing market and is forecast to reach US$450 billion by 2012, according to a June report entitled "Glob...

Because outsourcing both creates (money-saving and money-making opportunities) and destroys (existing internal IT infrastructures), the multi-billion dollar global outsourcing industry has given rise to the field of outsourcing relationship management (ORM) and a US$500 million market for ORM software tools from niche players like Janeeva, Kelsar, Digital Fuel, Oblicore and RealTime Bookkeeping...

Part 1 of this series explores the technologies behind analyzing customer behaviors. Part 2 looks into the tools of business intelligence and Web analytics. Part 3 focuses on analytics tools for niche markets. The growing reliance on business analytics at the enterprise level to improve strategic operational decision making and increase corporate...

Part 1 of this series explores the technologies behind analyzing customer behaviors. Part 2 looks into the tools of business intelligence and Web analytics Business "intuition," popular in the days of pen, ink and paper, was the first "BI" -- keen and quick insight rooted in trading experience and utilizing heightened observation with direct percep...

Broadcast, cablecast, simulcast, webcast, podcast, vodcast, mobilecast -- the melding of the realms of "lean back" (TV) and "lean in" (Web) technology can mean coming attractions for business-to-business (B2B) marketing communications and video news generation -- if done straight-up, i.e., correctly and transparently. Part 1 of this three-part ser...

Oh customer, so mysterious ... what have you done ... what will you do ... and what decisions should a business make to keep you or get rid of you? Seeking answers to these key questions, the commercial world has turned in a big way to analytics -- the science of logical analysis. Analytics involves the extensive use of data, statistical and qua...

Corporate social networking ... channel communities ... enterprise social software applications -- the business of business has entered the Web 2.0 world, and there's no going back Part 1 of this three-part series looks at how B2B (business-to-business) enterprises can sharpen their public relations chops by engaging Web 2.0 communities. Part 2 exp...

Attention! We're listening! Seeking competitive advantage and profitability through good relations with the social media, the B2B (business-to-business) world has energetically embraced the grand online colloquy known as the two-way talk-back "conversation." ...

Data management rules and regulations have become a major concern for businesses, due in large part to increasing oversight that often requires organizations to invest in new technologies in order to address compliance issues However, the promise of enterprise technologies as a solution to the demands of data management compliance will go unmet abs...

Identity theft, a cyber-crime causing inestimable damage for scores of ordinary citizens, has prompted passage of the federal FACT Act Identity Theft Red Flags Rule, issued this year. Part of the 2003 Fair and Accurate Credit Transactions Act, the rule aims to combat the scourge of identity theft, which each year victimizes 8.3 million Americans for a total of US$15.6 billion in losses, according to the Federal Trade Commission...

When it comes to properly managing and protecting critical enterprise data and information resources, Corporate America is stuck between two strongly opposing forces The Rock: Cyber-Crime...

Candidates, political parties and money might seem to dominate the upcoming 2008 U.S. presidential election, but when it comes to voter relationship management (VRM), software rules campaigns and politicking When qualified U.S. citizens cast a legal ballot to express a preference for a candidate or for a proposed resolution of an issue, they do so ...

Big irony So old-school uncool, the mainframe computer -- the workhorse of the IT world running the majority of today's global business transactions, the mission-critical platform of choice for virtually every member of the Global 2000 as well as local, state and federal governments -- is said to be going the way of other '60s artifacts like the vi...

Little Iron IBM has found one way to sidestep the mainframe vs. distributed computing dilemma by simply calling its mainframes something else....

Little Iron IBM has found one way to sidestep the mainframe vs. distributed computing dilemma by simply calling its mainframes something else....

The front office meets the back office at the Web 2.0 enterprise portal Part 1 of this series discusses the changing role of portals in a Web 2.0 world; Part 2 relates portals to the shifting landscape of e-commerce....