editor, Author at Mediastreet

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A Complete Guide to Using Social Media for Your Small Business

June 19, 2020 No Comments

Social media has revolutionized human relations and transformed the way we communicate. It has created a new type of celebrity thanks to the power of personal branding.

And businesses are increasingly realizing how direct person-to-person relations via digital channels can be beneficial to their sales and marketing.

To master this new type of business communication, most companies could use a bit of social media advice and some digital marketing tips. So, we’ve gathered a collection of social media tips for business in this article.

They’re easy to understand, easy to execute, and should prove valuable for any small business social media marketing operation.

8 effective social media tips for your small business:

Learn about your audience
Choose your primary and secondary social networks
Use a mix of hero, hub and help content
Repurpose your content
Leverage inbound marketing and partnerships
Set up social commerce
Evolve your content from articles to video to live
Plan and automate

8 social media marketing tips for small businesses to try

Whereas social media marketing has become an advanced marketing discipline where experts compete for excellence and for outstanding results, it’s also a playground where any business — big or small — can make a difference for itself.

The following social media marketing tips can be implemented by practically any business. (Take special note of Nos. 4 and 8, which are our favorite social media tips on this list.)

1. Learn about your audience

One of the great benefits of social media is the access to market data it provides. Social media platforms are data-driven platforms designed to tailor advertising to their users. In the process, they provide access to some of that data to businesses.

As a business owner, you’ll get access to the social media metrics you need to steer your business, but you’ll also get insights into your audience that you can use for a social media audit or for defining your target market.

How to put your audience insights into action:

While running your social media activity, you’re constantly learning more about your audience. However, you can gather audience insights for a marketing plan in a more structured way.

Define your target: First, define what characterizes your target market. Perhaps you have several segments with different characteristics you can outline.
Estimate segment sizes: Go to Facebook audience insights and enter the characteristics for each segment to gather an estimate of the audience size.
Learn about their media consumption: Identify which publications your audience reads, what they watch, and who they listen to and follow on the internet by looking up their media preferences with SparkToro.

2. Choose your primary and secondary social networks

There are so many communication opportunities via social media marketing that you can easily spread your efforts too thin. By choosing one primary social network where you concentrate your efforts, you’ll get the biggest return on investment.

Other networks can be part of your small business social media strategy as secondary networks that you utilize in a more opportunistic way.

How to select your primary social network:

Sometimes the hardest thing to do is to pick one social media network and stick with it. Here’s one approach.

Analyze the options: Analyze the user characteristics of the various social networks via information they share with you. Make a list of candidates for your primary social network.
Compare with your target audience: Compare and contrast the characteristics of the users on each platform with the characteristics of your target audience to find the best fit.
Evaluate your strengths: You probably have more affinities and more reach with one or more of the social networks on your list. Objectively evaluate your strengths on each platform.
Apply weights: Set up a simple spreadsheet where you can score each social network on attractivity, audience fit, and strengths. You can weight each score to account for the most important elements. Then pick your primary network, and mark the others as secondary. Build your social media strategy around this primary social network.

3. Use a mix of hero, hub, and help content

Google has a challenge. Its advertisers were brought up with search marketing but were not necessarily educated on how to use Google’s other great advertising channel: YouTube.

Google therefore created a conceptual framework for working with YouTube. This framework helps define the role of video content, which by nature is more expensive to produce and distribute.

Whether you plan to use video or not, the YouTube strategy playbook — which uses the three Hs of “hero,” “hub,” and “help” — can be of great use when planning social media activity for your business.

How to establish your content mix:

Creating a mix of content with the three Hs is very focused on the hero content, or the driving elements of your business’s storyline that you want your broadest audience to see. Let’s look at what you need to do to establish your content mix with this in mind.

Content audit: The first thing you need is an overview of your existing content and events that can be used in your content strategy.
Brainstorm: The fun part of the process is the brainstorming and idea-testing for your hero content. Aim to find a unique and remarkable content idea that resonates strongly with your audience and emphasizes your brand’s differentiation.
Plan around the hero content: Some of the other content you use in your social media strategy can be built around the hero content. Other content pieces act as “hubs” and will simply help your brand stay top of mind. And “help” content is more traditional company information that you place around and between the more story-driven hero content.
Build a content calendar: The three types of content come together in a social media content calendar, which helps you stay organized and share your content in a consistent and effective way.

4. Repurpose your content

If you’ve followed our second tip, you may be wondering how to best utilize your secondary social networks. You may also be overwhelmed by the thought of needing to publish content to your social networks multiple times a week.

This is why content repurposing is an important strategy. A publication has a limited life span on social media, and in order to generate a return on your investment in a piece of content, you need to maximize its usage.

How to thoughtfully and effectively repurpose your content:

The initial version of your content should be optimized for your primary social network. Subsequent versions can be formatted to suit other networks, perhaps using a more visual angle, a different perspective, or simply different text.

Optimize for your primary network: The first time you publish a piece of content, it should be optimized for your primary social network. Each social network has its own ideal mix of image, video, text, emojis, and hashtags.
Adapt to secondary networks: You will likely need to make changes to the format of your content when publishing it on your secondary social networks. Perhaps you’ll only use parts of the content you prepared for your primary network.
Republication: One piece of content can typically be presented several times to your primary audience. This is useful as you never reach 100% of your followers with one post since everyone is online at different times. Using different text and images for subsequent publications is a good way to make sure your content doesn’t appear stale or repetitive.
Repurposing: Content in which you have invested significant time or money can be repurposed at a later stage. Perhaps you can update a survey you ran, provide a new editorial angle, or redo the graphics. A good way to organize the use and reuse of content is to build a social media content calendar.

5. Leverage inbound marketing and partnerships

Inbound marketing is an approach by which you create and publish content that will drive interested users closer to your offering.

It’s a structured process using planning, scoring, and automation to manage long customer interaction processes. It’s a great approach to marketing for small business, especially in the B2B space.

How to put inbound marketing into action:

Inbound marketing is about using content to drive users to your offering without reaching out to them with advertising.

Analyze the user journey: Users travel through various stages before they become prospects for your offering. You first need to identify what questions the user is asking before they’re ready to move to the next step in the user journey.
Create and publish content: With the stages of the user journey in mind, create content that corresponds to each stage, and think of mechanisms that will bring the user to the next stage: Newsletter subscription, whitepaper download, webinar registration, etc. This is the stage where you’ll actually use social media platforms to publish your content and engage with your audience.
Automate the funnel: One of the aims of inbound marketing is to create an automated lead generation process. It uses content and publications on social media to generate interest and subsequently works like a content relationship management tool. You’ll need a technical solution such as HubSpot or Salesforce Pardot to pursue this approach seriously.

6. Set up social commerce

Users can be strongly influenced by social media but may not be used to buying products there. There is, however, a rising trend of social commerce on social networks like Instagram and Pinterest.

Facebook also recently launched its Page shops, adding e-commerce functionality to business pages on its platform.

How to use social commerce in your social media strategy:

Social commerce is a shortcut from social media to e-commerce. It can be an interesting opportunity for companies with strong social media activity and the possibility to sell online.

Prepare product information: In order to sell online via social media, you need the same information as for any other e-commerce activity: product titles and descriptions, images, prices, and an order fulfillment solution.
Choose your platform: If your primary social network has e-commerce functionality, go with that platform. If it doesn’t, consider trying one of the leading social commerce platforms: Instagram, Pinterest, or Facebook.
Build the e-commerce functionality: It’s fairly easy to set up social commerce. Products and prices can be entered individually or as a product feed so your shop is up to date.

7. Evolve your content from articles to video to live

When you first consider content for your social media marketing plan, you might think about articles and images.

But video content has become accessible to small businesses now that platforms like the Facebook Live Producer empower you to create professional-looking live video content. You might even want to make video your hero content, as we saw in tip No. 3.

How to make smart use of video:

All you need is a smartphone with a good camera to start producing live video. We also recommend adding a good-quality microphone or headset.

Plan your video content: For video content, you need to create a title, write a script, and find the right filming location with good lighting and an appropriate background.
Test-run your video: To overcome the fear of looking silly and get used to speaking to the camera, do at least one test run. A teleprompter software tool can be helpful as well.
Set it up as an event: You can create video content for later publication or create a live event. Whichever you choose, make sure to build awareness before publication to drive more views and more engagement.

8. Plan and automate

Running social media activities is about efficiently using resources. The best way to organize any social media activity is to plan ahead and automate as much as possible.

There are a number of simple social tools to help with automation that each perform specific tasks, or it can be done using a more complete social media software suite that covers all of your automation needs.

How to plan and automate your social media activity:

If you’ve built your content mix using tip No. 4, you may have started using a content calendar as the nervous system of your social media strategy. Now, all you need to do is connect your primary and secondary social networks to your content via automation.

Define your primary social network: As described in the first tip, you should first define your social network set-up and decide where primary content goes.
Build your content calendar: A content calendar is a key component of a social media strategy. Build your calendar by placing the hero content first and scheduling supporting content around it. You will likely have a regular flow of hub content, and the amount of help content you produce will depend on your business activity and commercial calendar.
Automate publication: Bring it all together with automation software that allows you to connect your content to your social media accounts. Schedule posts to each of your social networks in advance, keeping your content calendar moving like a well-oiled machine.

The best social media tools for small business

Social media automation tools will help your business automate the implementation of your content strategy. In the tips above, we’ve mentioned various tasks for which these tools are useful: in implementing a content calendar, automating publications, and planning ahead.

Let’s look at a few tools that work in different ways.

1. Later

The core functionality of Later is to build a visual content calendar and schedule image posts to Instagram, Facebook, Pinterest, and Twitter. Later’s visual overview of the calendar is one of the best we’ve seen.

The content calendar view of Later is visual and well adapted to planning Instagram posts.

2. MeetEdgar

MeetEdgar is great for getting the most out of your content. It’s the content repurposing, recycling, and automation champion.

A unique feature of MeetEdgar is the automatic creation of post variations submitted for approval.

3. Sprout Social

Sprout Social is one the best and most complete social media management tools covering the entire spectrum of automation, management, research, and reporting functionalities for your social media activity.

Sprout Social provides a wide variety of reporting options, including content performance across the social media channels you are using.

Learn from what you do and focus on where you win

Most social media activity only pays off in the medium to long run, which can be frustrating to businesses looking for quick wins or a rapid return on their investment.

But some of the above tips are sure to generate value for your business even in the short run as they can help you focus on what’s essential and what tasks are the best use of your time.

Focus your efforts, optimize your content output, plan ahead, and automate where you can in order to get the most out of your small business’s social media strategy.

By Anders Hjorth

Sourced from the blueprint

In News

How to stop Instagram from tracking everything you do

June 19, 2020 No Comments

By Matt Burgess

There are some things you can do to limit Facebook’s web of surveillance, but not much

Instagram is a massive money-maker. Parent company Facebook doesn’t release figures on how much money the division makes but reports claim it generated $20 billion in advertising revenue in 2019 alone – that’s a quarter of Facebook’s entire yearly revenue. Or, to put it another way, more money than YouTube makes for parent company Alphabet.

At the heart of Instagram’s financial success is two things: advertising, the Stories feature it nabbed from Snapchat is now filled with it, and the data that powers all that advertising. There’s a lot of it.

Instagram, through its integrations with Facebook, uses your personal information to show you adverts that it believes you’ll be mostly likely to click on. This information comes from what you do within the app and Facebook, your phone and your behaviour as you move around parts of the web that Facebook doesn’t own.

First off – everything you do on Instagram is tracked. Almost every online service you use collects information about your actions. Every thumb scroll made through your feed provides it with information about your behaviour. Instagram knows that you spent 20 minutes scrolling to the depths of your high-school crush’s profile at 2am.

The data that Instagram collects isn’t just for advertising. The company uses your information – for instance, what device you use to login – to detect suspicious login attempts. Crash reports from your phone can help it identify bugs in its code and identify parts of the app that nobody uses. In 2019 it ditched the Following tab, which showed everyone the public posts you had liked.

Other than deleting the app completely there’s very little you can do to stop Instagram tracking your behaviour on its platform, but there are things you can do to limit some of the data that’s collected and the types of adverts you see online.

Delete (some) of your data

Want to see the information you’ve given Instagram? Head to the app’s settings page and tap the security option. Here there’s the choice to see the information Instagram has collected about you and download it. If you tap on ‘Access Data’ you’ll be able to see all your password changes, email addresses and phone numbers associated with the account, plus more about how you use the app.

In total there are 25 different categories of information that are collected – these range from interactions with polls that you’ve completed in people’s stories to hashtags you follow and changes to the information in your bio. Instagram’s access tool can be found here.

While it’s possible to see all of this data, there isn’t a lot you can do with it. Your search history can be deleted through the Security menu options, although when you do so you only delete it locally. Instagram and Facebook still know what – or who – you have searched for. “Keep in mind that clearing your search history is temporary, and that searches you clear may reappear in your history after you search for them again,” Instagram says.

It is also possible to delete the contacts that you may have uploaded to Instagram from your phone – this includes names and phone numbers. Uploading your contacts allows Instagram and Facebook to provide friend suggestions but also builds out its knowledge of your social activity.

This Instagram page shows whether you’ve uploaded any contacts and allows you to delete them. Deleting them will not stop new contacts being added to your phone from being uploaded. The setting can be turned on or off through the settings menu on iOS or Android.

The option to download your data includes photos, comments, profile information and more. This has to be requested through the Security menu.

Location

You probably use Instagram on your phone. By default, Instagram’s location gathering abilities are turned-off by default but you’ve probably inadvertently turned the feature on while adding your location to a post or story.

To change this – or at the very least check if you’ve given it permission – you need to visit the settings on your phone. It can’t be done through the Instagram app.

On Android, navigate to settings then tap on apps and find Instagram. Here you can see whether you’ve given it permission to access your location, microphone, device storage, contacts and more. You can turn these settings on and off, allowing Instagram access to your location all the time, only while you’re using the app or to completely deny it.

If you own an iPhone, the process is similar. Tap your way to the phone’s settings, go to privacy and then location services and find Instagram. Here you can choose whether location tracking is on all the time, when you’re using the app or off completely.

Control ads in stories

As Facebook has tried (successfully) to make more money from Instagram, it has filled it with adverts. What you see is all powered, technically, by the parent company. Facebook is the ads server for Instagram and the two are inseparable.

Instagram shows you ads based on what it and Facebook think you like. This is based on what you do while on Instagram (e.g. liking posts from particular brands) but also what you do on websites and services not owned by Facebook. Facebook’s Pixel is a tiny piece of code that’s on almost every website you visit and collects information saying you have visited it. The Pixel gathers data about your activity online and links it to an identifier and that helps decide what ads you’ll be shown.

It’s just one way data is collected that feeds into the company’s bigger advertising machine. “Advertisers, app developers and publishers can send us information through Facebook Business Tools that they use, including our social plugins (such as the Like button), Facebook Login, our APIs and SDKs, or the Facebook pixel,” Facebook’s data policy says. This includes what you buy and the websites you visit.

So what can you do about it on Instagram? The controls are limited. Within the app, though the settings tab, you can see your ad activity. This shows you the ads you have engaged with – such as commenting on posts, liking or watching the majority of. There’s also links out of the Instagram app that explain adverts on the platform within the settings tab.

If you don’t like an individual ad it is possible to hide it by tapping the three dots that appear next to the ad and tapping hide. It’s also possible to report an ad if it could break Instagram’s policies.

To really attempt to control ads on Instagram, you need to go to Facebook. Here it’s possible to change preference settings, which will apply to Instagram as well as Facebook. There are no ad preference settings for people who only have an Instagram account and not a Facebook account. The company says it is working on building controls within the Instagram app.

Facebook’s ad preferences page is a mine of information. It shows what Facebook thinks your interests are, companies that have uploaded information about you, how ads are targeted, ad settings, and ads you’ve hidden. To change the adverts you see you need to spend a short amount of time on this page working through the settings.

Some key choices that can be made are in ‘Your Information’. Here you chose not to see ads that are based on your employer, job title, relationship status and education. The businesses section allows you to stop businesses who have uploaded information about you from showing you ads. And ‘Ad Settings’ stops Facebook products showing you adverts based on information that’s collected from other websites and services you visit.

For any of this to apply to Instagram, the company says your accounts need to be connected. “To make sure your ad preferences are applied, connect your Instagram account to your Facebook account,” it says.

Delete Instagram

If you’re just fed up with Instagram in general you can delete the app. You can’t delete your Instagram account from within the app – we’re not sure why – but instead you have to visit this page. From here it’s possible to delete your account. “When you delete your account, your profile, photos, videos, comments, likes and followers will be permanently removed,” the company says. Or you can temporarily disable your account. This can be done here.

Featured Image Credit: Getty Images / WIRED

By Matt Burgess

Matt Burgess is WIRED’s deputy digital editor. He tweets from @mattburgess1

Sourced from WIRED

In News

Why Teams Don’t Cooperate

June 19, 2020 No Comments

By Lisa Earle McLeod

I recently spoke with a CEO who expressed frustration with the lack of cooperation in his organization. One incident in particular stood out. A smaller product group within his firm landed a new client. After the deal closed, it was revealed that another (larger) product group was calling on the same client.

Instead of collaborating, both teams pursued the business on their own. While the niche product group did close business, the larger team did not. The result was a relatively small sale, a lot of internal he-said-she-said, and a less than united company in the eyes of the customer.

Had the teams collaborated, they could have provided a more robust solution, behaved as joined forces, and potentially won a much larger deal. The client even commented, “Don’t your people talk to each other?”

Improving cooperation is an increasingly urgent challenge for leaders. When location-based teams left the office to work remotely, social interactions that may have once fostered collaboration evaporated.

Why didn’t the CEO’s two teams communicate? After all, they work for the same company, collaborating could have increased their scope and reputation. Failure to collaborate cost the firm revenue and potentially damaged their rapport with a major client.

Most companies have their own stories about silos; be it between two product divisions, HR and Finance, or Operations and IT. The larger the organization, the worse it gets. Lack of collaboration and cooperation stymies innovation and has a chilling effect on morale. Longer-term it can plummet customer engagement and brand reputation.

In my experience, silos are rarely rooted in malice or even turf defending. Emotionally and psychologically, humans are hardwired for collaboration and connection; we simply cannot survive (in any sense of the word) alone. Being a human is a team sport.

More often, a lack of collaboration is the (unintended) result of misaligned systems. Leaders who want to break through silos to create cooperative, united, purpose-driven organizations, must address the root causes. Unfortunately, in most large organizations:

Systems point people inwards, to concerns about themselves and their department, instead of outwards, towards teammates and customers.
Systems reward individual achievement instead of collective impact.
Systems push the immediacy of financial results instead of steadfastness of strategy and purpose.

Below are three common barriers to collaboration. We’ll start with the most obvious and move to the more insidious.

Compensation drives self-orientation

A team that gets compensated only on their own product line is hardly set up to collaborate. The same is true for any team that is commissioned or bonused solely on department-based metrics. For example, in the situation described above, if the team was compensated for overall company performance (in addition to individual performance) they may have been more incentivized.

Yet there’s also another, less obvious sign of self-oriented compensation in the earlier story: the sales team was exclusively paid when the deals closed. There was no incentive for client retention, referrals, client satisfaction, or even the effective use of the solution. This drives the team’s mindset to think self-first.

What to do instead:

In addition to individual performance compensation, add group performance and customer retention into the compensation mix. Discuss these shared objectives as often as you do individual targets.

Metrics are internally focused

When success or failure is defined by internal-only metrics, customer-impact is absent from the conversation. When a team or individual thinks: How can we hit our targets? they look inward. When leaders ask, How can we make a difference to customers? people think more holistically.

Inserting the impact on customers a lens for decision-making broadens the horizon, instead of each group focusing on their own metrics, the entire group is working towards helping customers.

How to change the frame:

Include customer success metrics as part of the overall organizational narrative. Here’s the difference: Internal metrics are: revenue, profitability, conversation rates, pipelines, etc. Outward looking metrics are things like customer satisfaction, net promoter scores (NPS) and customer retention. Make these outward looking measures as present and important as internal sales, financial and production targets.

Short-term success is prioritized over longer-term impact

One reason people don’t cooperate is because they don’t feel like they have time. An organization who defines itself by the team’s ability to hit quarterly targets is always going to feel the urgency of the short term. Organizations who define success by the ability to make a sizable, lasting impact on their customer-base think more long-term.

Where to point your team:

Tether the team to a belief in something bigger than themselves. Belief that customers are out there, and they need your company to help them seize opportunity, grow their businesses, or reduce risk (or whatever else your solution helps them do) prompts more innovative and noble thinking than the drumbeat of simply hitting today’s targets.

Lack of collaboration doesn’t happen by design. It happens by default. The traditional framework and language of business points us inward, towards short term self preservation which stymies collaboration.

Here’s what we know: Organizations that point themselves outward, who declare a bold customer-driven purpose as their North Star and foster a customer-driven culture to make it happen, get better results. They’re more innovative, they have better customer advocacy, they’re better places to work, and ultimately, better financial results follow.

Feature Image Credit: Traditional collaboration assumes physical proximity, virtual teams need new mindsets. GETTY

By Lisa Earle McLeod

Sourced from Forbes

In News

The Real Disruption Of Working From Home: It’s Not At All What You Think

June 18, 2020 No Comments

By J. Tyler Rohrer

The 9-to-5 workdays, the coffee breaks, the water cooler discussions — these are artifacts of a bygone time. Yes, remnants of them still permeate our corporate landscapes, operational workflows, social rituals and even our technology choices.

Recent events have launched a disruption of our daily work lives — but maybe that is just what we needed.

Right now, we face a choice of drastically slowing the global economy or compelling hundreds of millions of end users to be productive members of their organizations from home, right now. But the truth is this shift is possible.

And if it’s possible, what else is possible? What truly happens when you fundamentally change to a remote workforce versus preferring a primary campus attendance model? Secondly, what do you need to unleash this potential?

One of the first changes we have seen occurring for thousands of customers is that with remote working models, the best tend to rise to the top. Perhaps it is the lack of office politics or other constraints. But it’s more likely the result of added productivity of working when work needs to be done (not between eight arbitrary hours defined in a 1940s industrial model/production line economy). I want to use a phrase called “intrapreneurship.”

Unbridled in many ways, these remote office workers become not just stellar individual contributors — they become innovators. Having no formal training in psychology, I can only surmise what the possible effects of the comfort and agility, lack of bumper-to-bumper traffic and abbreviated eating and sleeping habits can have on productivity. But perhaps a better way of looking at this is to say we get back those minutes and hours we used to spend preparing for and navigating to and from work. This is not to say we are going to work more hours from home; we are going to work better hours.

As I think about this, it’s safe to say we have become an intellectual economy versus a manufacturing economy. So many of us no longer screw widgets on thingamajigs made by the low-cost bidder. Our service-based economy is based on intellectual property. Better said: ideas. And ideas flourish when people are liberated to pursue them unfettered by conventions or outmoded practices.

The internet is the greatest platform ever created by man for the proliferation of ideas. It is not for this reason only we should find models that use it to work. However, it is a compelling one. Virtualization, while it was and continues to be one of the greatest data-center recapitalizations of all time, also taught us the power of abstraction. Abstraction in the virtual technology vocabulary means the willingness to disassemble computer systems and re-assemble them in new ways using hypervisors and micro-services to replace prior system architectures. Abstraction becomes a key way to bypass our dependencies on any one device located in a single place. When the full capabilities of your computer can go anywhere at any time, then you can also work productively anywhere and at any time.

Moore’s law is something I refer to, as it is center stage in this new evolution of the modern workspace. The speed of processing power per dollar increases forever. There is no reason our new distributed, remote, work-from-home architectures cannot fully embrace this computing reality. A model with rich and robust edge devices and operating systems coupled with intelligent, pervasive, learning, secure, centralized and managed cloud services looks to be the ideal model.

The real disruption of this new work-from-home scenario is this: We are already emerging better, smarter and more agile. This is not a bumper sticker. This trend has been accelerating over the past decade, and adoption must move even faster if we are to equip ourselves to live in a world where “disasters” can now bypass borders swiftly.

The early adopters are tirelessly innovating and topping barriers, and a wave of “fast followers” are right behind them reading the pages of the newly inked “Work From Home” books being written across our agencies, organizations and enterprises worldwide.

Web collaboration platforms, tele and PC-presence, chat, teams, data sharing, VDI, DaaS, RDS, application publishing, server-based computing, clouds, hyperconverged infrastructure and more are all available right now to enable a completely new re-imagining of what your workforce could and perhaps should be.

For those organizations willing to re-imagine, there are a few logical steps you can take that are near fool-proof. I call it “cloud staging.”

Get a topological overview of what your current configuration looks like. Said another way, do an instant assessment to find out what your users have at their fingertips and, secondly, how they are using it. Like Google maps, know your starting position.
Look at the results of your assessment and realize that storage, applications, compute and networking do not need to be landlocked inside a PC from a big box store.
With your current work-from-home constraints, what applications are your users already using? There is a good chance they should be woven into your strategies. What new cloud services for data (Google Drive, Microsoft OneDrive, DropBox, AWS S3, etc.) and applications could you begin to use companywide?
The benefit of step-by-step cloud staging is that an organization can start small. Begin by backing up your data. Next, move on to replacing legacy applications with SaaS or cloud services. Most options are now just clicks away versus weeks of physical hardware delivery, configuration and deployment.
Fail fast. If designs fail, replace them. Do not stick to bad ideas just because we take a great deal of time making them.
Stay informed. The stream of consumable data on new ideas, new deployments and new architectures has never been more visible. There is no monopoly on good ideas in the modern workplace.

This is your opportunity to truly re-power your end user computing strategies. This is the real disruption of working from home.

Feature Image Credit: Getty

By J. Tyler Rohrer

J. Tyler Rohrer co-founded Liquidware and leads Strategic Alliances, managing relationships with major platform and storage partners.

Sourced from Forbes

In News

Is Social Media Analytics Redundant Today?

June 18, 2020 No Comments

By Vishal Chawla.

Over the last decade, there has been an explosion in social media data, and at the same time, AI/ML models are also getting better at predicting people’s interests and purchasing habits. For example, social media data can be processed and analysed using AI models to find meaningful correlations to precisely target products and services to specific users.

Businesses can also leverage analytics models on data collected from social networks and use computational frameworks like Apache Hadoop for analysing large volumes of data. A lot of companies have been using social media data from Twitter, Facebook, Instagram LinkedIn, Snapchat to improve their marketing ROI and target consumers by analysing users’ platform behaviour in relation to demographics.

But, there’s a caveat! While social media data provides great insights into the behaviour of users, they may also face user privacy-related issues.

Social Media Analytics Vs Privacy Violations

Ever since the Cambridge Analytical scandal and the introduction of regulations such as GDPR, it has become more stringent for companies to leverage social media analytics for targeted advertising. The impact of the Cambridge Analytica scandal was a catalyst in this regard when it was found that third-party applications on Facebook were mining users’ data for political campaign profiling.

In the past, third-party data aggregators scraped social media sites and collected personal sensitive data, which was then resold to companies. Now, with the introduction of regulations that prohibit that practice, will social media analytics become redundant or less effective for companies?

Events such as the Cambridge Analytica/Facebook scandal, massive security incidents like Equifax breach, and later on GDPR paved the way to tighten the norms on how personal data is collected, stored, and processed. In the past few years, the lawsuits against these tech companies on privacy norms have only strengthened the trend.

Companies around are therefore preparing to become more compliant with the regulations and what data they collect of users. Facebook, for example, has now become more transparent to users specifying what data they collect and what information they provide third-parties for their advertising campaigns.

Social media profiles have personally identifiable information and other sensitive data that can be used by data scientists to create models for specific products, which can generate more sales. The challenges with collecting social media data can depend on the kind of data collected (non-personal social data or personal data) and how the data is utilised. It also depends on the applicable laws and regulations in geography. For instance, in Europe, It will be more difficult for social media analytics companies to execute to their full potential using the data, versus Asian countries where privacy laws are less stringent.

Privacy Compliant Social Data Analytics

Without having to profile users using digital identifiers like IP or Mac addresses and cookies, there is still a lot which can be done. Companies are looking at GDPR compliant data processing on social media data, with proper consent and transparency for how personal data is collected and utilised for analytics. Here non-sensitive social media data is used for increasing sales or generating marketing insights with CRM integration, which is an appropriate use of social media ‘likes’ to achieve specific business goals. On the other hand, if sensitive personal data is mined to track users or survey their purchase habits, then that could be a violation at least in some global geographies.

For companies, it is important to be careful about the nature of data collected for analytics and ensure it’s not personal in nature, as it can attract penalties. To counter this, proper data governance programs have been put in place for analysing social media trends and making sure that there is no violation.

Even if there are fewer datasets available for social media analytics on personally identifiable data, social media analytics companies are expected to keep utilising non-personal data for sentiment analysis, sales trends, visualisation, and acquiring sales leads, all within the boundaries of regulations. For example, by monitoring social media, one can determine customer sentiment analysis on non-personal data, which can be converted into actionable insights.

The Roadmap For Social Media Analytics

The bottom line is that the collection and utilisation of social media data are complex, involving multiple sources and data management challenges. This is confusing for analytics professionals and social data analytics companies to identify the legality of collecting such kind of social media data.

This means that companies will continue to use popular products such as Google Analytics to track social media campaign performance, conversions, and ultimately understand the return on investment from social media marketing efforts. Other large companies like Salesforce, IBM, SAS have products for social media data analytics.

While social media analytics will continue to play a role in sales and marketing, other areas like risk management and fraud detection are also becoming more prominent. Here, law enforcement companies are leveraging social media analytics to extract and analyse the data generated from various data sources.

By Vishal Chawla

Sourced from AIM

In News

Why Amazon’s E-Commerce Sales Are About to Surge Even Higher

June 18, 2020 No Comments

By Andrew Tseng

What’s going to happen when Amazon can fulfil all the demand it’s seeing?

Overwhelming demand

Starting in early March, Amazon began to see a surge in demand in its e-commerce business as a result of consumers staying home and shifting more of their spending online. This surge in demand was so large and unexpected it overwhelmed Amazon’s fulfillment and delivery capabilities.

The company prioritized stocking and shipping “essential” items including household staples, medical supplies, and other critical products. It even actively discouraged customers from ordering nonessential items by “blocking” them or making them harder to find and significantly reducing its spending on marketing for certain product categories.

Massive hiring spree

On March 16, Amazon announced in a blog post that it would be hiring 100,000 people across the U.S. in full- and part-time fulfillment and delivery roles to help meet this demand. It also increased compensation by $350 million globally, which included temporary pay raises and a doubling of the hourly rate for overtime hours, up from the usual 1.5-times rate.

On April 13, Amazon announced it had hired the 100,000 people and would be hiring another 75,000. It also revised the $350 million compensation increase to over $500 million. Then on April 24, the company said it was extending the higher hourly pay and doubling overtime pay through May 16. And on May 13, the company once again extended the enhanced pay practices through May 30 and revised the compensation increase estimate to over $800 million.

Much of this hiring has related to fulfillment centers, but also to Prime Now, Amazon Fresh, and the Whole Foods delivery business. Amazon had announced a broad rollout of free same-day Whole Foods delivery to Prime members in January in the company’s fourth-quarter earnings release. In January and February it was easy to find and book available Whole Foods delivery times, but it began to get more difficult in March and into April as items sold out and demand outpaced delivery capacity.

Fulfilling demand

In Amazon’s first quarter, its online store sales — the global e-commerce business — grew net sales by 24% year over year. That was a sharp acceleration from last year’s 15% growth rate.

But the coronavirus-related demand only began to meaningfully surge in March. Presumably, January and February saw more normal growth rates. Amazon doesn’t disclose monthly sales, but let’s say those two months grew 17%. That would have been a slight acceleration from last year’s pace due to the positive effect of the rollout of free one-day shipping for Prime members and the broad launch of free same-day Whole Foods delivery. If that’s the case, that suggests March would have grown at a rate of around 39%.

But remember, March was a month when Amazon couldn’t even remotely fulfill all the demand it was seeing. To grow around 39% while not even fulfilling demand suggests that Amazon’s online store sales should surge much higher when it’s able to completely fulfill demand.

On the first-quarter earnings call, management said it wasn’t sure exactly when it would be able to fulfill all the demand and couldn’t “really project when that day will be or at what point in [the second quarter] or [third quarter] or beyond.” Considering Amazon’s conservative approach to financial guidance, suggesting it may meet all the demand during the second or third quarter is very bullish.

Later in the call, in response to a question about the second quarter, management made the following comment:

Well, we are heavily constrained — again, it’s an odd quarter because generally, the biggest uncertainty we have is customer demand and what they’ll order and how much of it they’ll order. Demand has been strong. And the biggest questions we have in [the second quarter] are more about ability to service that demand and that — the products that people are ordering in a full way, not blocking or making it hard to find nonessential items, increasing marketing and everything else.

It’s noteworthy that management said it was allowing people to order “in a full way” and “not blocking or making it hard to find nonessential items” and “increasing marketing and everything else.” It stands to reason Amazon would only open the flood gates like this if it felt it would be able to fulfill all that demand.

So what’s that mean? It’s a reasonable conclusion that Amazon’s online store sales growth should accelerate to well beyond 40% and possibly much higher in short order. There’s certainly precedent for this as so much more of consumer spending shifts online. For example, on Wayfair‘s (NYSE:W) first-quarter conference call, it said its second-quarter to-date sales growth has been about 90%. And on Etsy‘s (NASDAQ:ETSY) first-quarter call, it said it was seeing over 100% year-over-year growth in gross merchandise volume, the total value of products ordered on its platform.

Could Amazon grow that quickly if it’s fulfilling all the demand it’s seeing? Only time will tell, but at the very least its growth rate should go sharply higher. Investors should consider buying Amazon shares because of this underappreciated acceleration in e-commerce sales growth, but should also think about holding them for the long term considering where Amazon will be in 10 years.

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Why this CEO says ‘staying nimble’ is key to the success of direct-to-consumer businesses

June 17, 2020 No Comments

The last decade generated a new category of digital-first, direct-to-consumer businesses that upended how consumer goods were created, priced, marketed, and sold. My company, Mack Weldon, is one of them. Brands like ours have touched nearly every consumer category from cooking pans to mattresses (and yes, even men’s underwear).

This generation of disruptive brands has been propelled by emergent social media, access to capital, and generational shifts in shopping habits and brand perception. It has been the decade of direct-to-consumer.

Then the coronavirus crisis arrived.

While digitally-born and e-commerce-driven businesses are among the best equipped to survive this crisis, the catalysts that drove the DTC boom have changed. The assumptions made about the market, as little as five months ago, are no longer true.

What does the business landscape look like in the era after the pandemic? Here are four things you should hesitate to assume about DTC businesses.

A new outlook toward brick-and-mortar

DTC brands left their digital perches and started opening stores in the last few years. It was a boon both to brands looking to expand their reach and to landlords who were keen to place relevant tenants in their projects. This will all change.

Brands—whether legacy or digital—will be more cautious about when and where they open up doors. We at Mack Weldon opened our first shop last year at the Hudson Yards mall in New York City and had plans to expand through directly-operated stores and third-party partnerships.

Now, we’re looking harder at those plans. How will consumers respond to physical retail when the pandemic recedes and how permanent will those changes be? We’re being careful, but we also realize there will be timely opportunities for leases and new, more flexible formats in desirable locations.

Easy money to launch and expand

The DTC boom was largely driven by access to capital. Venture capital and private equity money fueled the formation and expansion of scores of new brands. According to data from CB Insights, consumer brands have raised more than $3 billion since 2012, and about half of that money was raised in 2018 alone.

But recent market trends and the pandemic have pulled the plug on easy money. High-profile flameouts, including WeWork and Brandless, coupled with an increasingly more expensive digital advertising landscape, changed the calculus for investors. Can new brands make enough noise in a competitive market? Can existing brands find both scale and profitability in this new environment?

Going forward, investors will be more circumspect about opportunities, valuations will come down to earth, and marketing and distribution strategies will be scrutinized. Financing will still find its way to high-quality brands and business models where the unit economics support profitability, but the volume of deals and subsequent valuations will be rightsized.

A return to the original marketing playbook

The digital-first, performance-driven marketing playbook that fueled so much success—ours included—needs an overhaul. Before COVID-19, ad rates on the major networks were climbing and price arbitrage all but nonexistent to support major growth. Once the pandemic took hold, some scale opportunities returned, but it’s clear that as demand comes back into the system, we all need new ways to drive cost-effective, new customer acquisition. For us, we are contemplating our first major video ad test including OTT and linear TV—as well as continuing to invest in channels such as podcasts and radio.

Further, the COVID-19 situation forced all of us to take a hard look at our marketing plans and make some major pivots. We heavily revised our marketing calendar and product launches in order to offer products relevant to our consumers facing drawn-out quarantines. Specifically, we revised the tone of our emails, ads, and social media to be authentic, empathetic, and human, and we prioritized imagery highlighting how our products work well in a WFH environment. What purpose can a brand such as ours serve at a time like this? The customer relationship must go beyond email campaigns and sales promotions. If you meet customers where they are today—they will reward you over the medium and in the long term with loyalty.

Lastly, the pandemic is shifting e-commerce demographics. According to First Insight, online shopping among baby boomers jumped 120% in March of this year as the pandemic finally forced these consumers online. Is there a new population for digital-first brands to access, and if so, how will we reach them?

Business leaders can use this time to adapt the cadence, tone, tactics, and audience focus of their marketing efforts.

There’s enough room for everyone

The first decade of the DTC period has come to an end, and the pandemic is accelerating the rules of its next chapter. We’ve already begun to see some high-profile bankruptcies in J.Crew and Neiman Marcus, and there will inevitably be more. Consolidation is on the horizon—anticipate smaller companies joining forces and larger incumbents making acquisitions motivated by more rational valuations and opportunities.

Furthermore, incumbents will likely emerge with entirely new strategies around their retail footprint and need to build a more robust, digital-first DNA. Likewise, there will be successes in this space, as brands with sound businesses can capitalize on new market realities and new customer preferences.

At my company, we’re cautiously optimistic about the next phase of DTC, bullishly looking ahead. We’re executing on our strategic plan but also keeping an eye on the future as we prepare for limited retail expansion and investment in our digital footprint and product offering.

Direct-to-consumer brands were born of ingenuity and tenacity; the pandemic is once again demanding that of the marketplace as we determine new ways to meet the needs of our customers. The most nimble of us will author the new rules together as we enter this next phase of direct-to-consumer businesses

Feature Image Credit: [Photo: Warren Wong/Unsplash]

By Brian Berger

Brian Berger is the CEO and founder of menswear basics brand Mack Weldon, which he launched in 2012. Since 2012, Mack Weldon has become a leader within the men’s apparel industry, expanding its product offerings to cover other essentials of a modern man’s wardrobe. Before founding Mack Weldon, Brian served in several leadership positions in internet and media companies, including Comcast and WebMD.

Sourced from Fast Company

In News

Why Facebook Has a Better Shot at E-Commerce This Time

June 17, 2020 No Comments

By Donna Fuscaldo

Online shopping is seeing a surge amid the pandemic, presenting Facebook with a big opportunity if it can succeed in a market that has long been out of its reach.

“Been there, done that unsuccessfully.” That’s what some investors may be thinking about Facebook’s (NASDAQ:FB) new e-commerce push. The tech stock has made online shopping missteps in the past, and it still has trust issues even if its user base continues to grow. But with online shopping increasing amid the COVID-19 pandemic, and with a potential shopping base of more than 2.5 billion monthly active users, Facebook has a real shot at succeeding this time around.

The pandemic is changing the way we shop, potentially forever

Shopping online was already a big story prior to the pandemic, but with stores shuttered and stay-at-home orders still in place in some cities, consumers have been turning to e-commerce to get their goods. At the same time, small businesses, many of which remain closed, have to find alternative ways to get products in front of customers — thus the increase in online shopping.

Those trends alone don’t ensure that Facebook will be a winner. It has to offer an easy and hassle-free way to shop in order for it to take off with the masses. If we’ve learned anything from the pandemic, it’s that loyalty can only go so far — consumers want service. With delivery delays hurting Amazon‘s ability to get products to customers in under two days during the pandemic, shoppers turned to alternatives. That’s helped drive sales at retailers that offered same day pickup and delivery.

So how does the tech stock plan to make its offering superior to one-click shopping pioneered by Amazon? By not requiring small businesses and consumers to jump through hoops to buy and sell across its rather sticky platforms.

Facebook Shops, which are free for small businesses to create, live on their existing Facebook and Instagram accounts. That means small businesses won’t have to learn a new application or create a new page to get up and running.

On the consumer side, users will either be able to purchase directly from Facebook and Instagram, or they’ll be taken to the business’s website to complete the transaction. Thanks to artificial intelligence and machine learning, Facebook will soon be able to automatically tag items users may like and place them in their feeds. That could encourage impulse shopping, particularly if it only takes a couple of clicks.

coming soon will be the ability to tag and purchase items from users’ feeds. To make the process easy for small businesses, Facebook is partnering with Shopify, Bigcommerce, and other third-party providers to power Facebook Shops.

Facebook has the base

In addition to making shopping easy, Facebook needs a large base of merchants for its efforts to take off in a meaningful way. The more e-commerce sales it does, the more advertisers will flock to Facebook and Instagram.

Facebook makes money off of ads as well as transaction fees when users purchase on its platform. It plans on adding Facebook Shops to Messenger and WhatsApp in the near future.

The social media giant is no Amazon when it comes to online shopping, but it does have more than 2.5 billion monthly active users that could turn into potential shoppers. It also plans to promote merchants’ products with dedicated shopping tabs and eventually enable real-time shopping events. That provides small businesses with a new opportunity to reach existing and potential customers without much effort.

It’s not a slam dunk

In order for Facebook to be successful and realize even a fraction of the tens of billions of dollars Wall Street thinks may await the company , it will have to win consumers’ trust, especially if it’s storing payment information. That could be a hard sell given its history with data leaks and privacy breaches.

It also has regulators and now the White House breathing down its neck. Any negative publicity could erode trust even further. Facebook has been trying to win back trust by blocking misinformation during the pandemic and supporting struggling small businesses. It’s also proven it can still grow even with a battered and bruised reputation.

This isn’t Facebook’s first rodeo. It tried several times before with shopping on its platforms but it failed to take off. The company tried launching Facebook stores with big brands back in 2009; it fizzled. An online gift shop dubbed Facebook Gifts was unsuccessful. And it has also tested a Buy button directly in ads that show up in Newsfeeds. None of the shopping features resonated with users, in part because consumers haven’t been too willing to store sensitive data on its platforms.

The timing is different now, thanks to the pandemic. If Facebook can deliver an easy-to-use experience and protect customers’ sensitive information, the social media giant has a good chance of becoming a real player in the post-COVID-19 e-commerce marketplace.

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John Mackey, CEO of Whole Foods Market, an Amazon subsidiary, is a member of The Motley Fool’s board of directors. Randi Zuckerberg, a former director of market development and spokeswoman for Facebook and sister to its CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, is a member of The Motley Fool’s board of directors. Donna Fuscaldo has no position in any of the stocks mentioned. The Motley Fool owns shares of and recommends Amazon, Facebook, and Shopify and recommends the following options: short January 2022 $1940 calls on Amazon and long January 2022 $1920 calls on Amazon. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.

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By Donna Fuscaldo

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It’s time for the ad industry to bust out of its bubble and heal: Living on the Edge

June 17, 2020 No Comments

By Jamie Barrett.

‘People are dying, the world is going up in flames, and we’re urging a voice talent to slow down his read,’ says BarrettSF founder

I grew up in Greenwich, Connecticut.

I attended a private day school for 11 years.

I went to an elite boarding school, and graduated from an Ivy League college.

I’m gainfully employed, and live in an attractive house that’s almost all paid off.

I have three healthy and well-adjusted kids, and my wife and I just had a really nice dinner in celebration of our 22nd wedding anniversary.

I don’t know a single person who has died of COVID-19.

And I am a middle-aged white man.

I tell you these things to make a point. On paper, I am highly unqualified to speak on the stress and suffering going on in our world right now. We are all living in “bubbles,” but some bubbles are more insulated than others. Some have a nicer view. Some have more money for groceries. It is borderline obnoxious for me to write a column in Ad Age about “Living on the Edge.”

Or is it?

The truth, or my sense of the truth, is that all our bubbles, insulated or not, have now burst. If the coronavirus was the pin prick, the televised murder of George Floyd was the Molotov cocktail. My bubble, your bubble, their bubble. No matter how well-constructed, they stood no chance.

Now, we are all living on the edge. We are all in this, irreversibly. No industry, no company, no individual is immune. There is a virus, there is venom, there is violence, there is a void in leadership. But for the foreseeable future, there is no vaccine. For any of it.

And yet.

And yet we all have our professional lives to lead. Clients to serve. Pitches to prepare. Zoom pleasantries to exchange. Ads to create. The beat goes on.

In many ways, on many days, it all starts to feel a bit small, even a bit wrong. People are dying, the world is going up in flames, and we’re urging a voice talent to slow down his read and really emphasize the phrase “paid up to two days early.”

This morning I asked my daughter Lucy what she thought I should do for this article.

“Talk about what a tough time it is, and how it’s going to take a while, but we can all help make things better,” she said.

I think Lucy is right. I think Lucy has to be right.

What we do has to be important. How we treat our people, the way we respond to adversity, the work we put out in the world, it matters. It adds up. We’re part of the dialogue. We’re part of the culture. As removed as we may sometimes feel, we’re part of this increasingly fragile, powder keg world.

And some good things are starting to happen. Nike, Heineken, VW, Dove, all these brands are responding in ways that begin to heal and help. Through their words and far, far more importantly, through their actions. More brands can do the same. No, all brands can. If I didn’t believe that, I wouldn’t set my alarm for tomorrow morning.

Tomorrow’s Monday, right?

So how has it been for me, and for our agency, “living on the edge?” How are we dealing with this year of reckoning, of riots in the streets and masks on our faces?

It’s been a tough time, and it’s going to take a while, but Lucy said it best.

We can all help make things better.

Feature Image Credit: iStock

By Jamie Barrett.

Jamie Barrett is partner and executive creative director at BarrettSF.

View all articles by this author

Sourced from AdAge

In News

48% of employees are less likely to follow safe data practices when working from home

June 16, 2020 No Comments

By Jonathan Greig

According to a Tessian survey, data protection concerns go out the window for remote employees.

A new report from cybersecurity firm Tessian found that the move to working from home has had drastic effects on how people approach data loss prevention.

In a survey of 1,000 people from the US and 1,000 from the UK, Tessian researchers found that 48% are less likely to follow safe data practices when working from home and 84% of IT leaders surveyed said data loss prevention is more challenging when employees are working from home.

More than 90% of IT leaders trust their staff to follow best security practices when working from home yet 52% of employees (52%) believe they can get away with riskier behaviour when telecommuting, creating a dangerous situation for companies in sensitive industries.

“Businesses have adapted quickly to the abrupt shift to remote working. The challenge they now face is protecting data from risky employee behaviors as working from home becomes the norm,” said Tim Sadler, CEO and co-founder of Tessian. “Human error is the biggest threat to companies’ data security, and IT teams lack true visibility of the threat.”

The report goes into detail about why employees take more chances when working from home and the differences between employees based on age or location.

US employees are more than twice as likely as UK workers to send emails to the wrong person and are twice as likely to send company data to their personal email accounts than their UK counterparts. One-third of all employees surveyed take company documents with them when they leave a job, with US workers twice as likely as UK workers to do so.

When asked why they put their company and its data at risk, employees gave a variety of answers, with half saying “not being watched by IT” was their main reason for not following safe data practices. Another 47% said distractions at home caused them to take more chances and 51% say security policies impeded their productivity while 40% cited the pressure to get work done quickly as a reason. Of those surveyed, 54% said they would find workarounds if security policies stop them from doing their jobs.

A recent report on data breaches from Verizon found that 30% of breaches involve internal actors exposing company information as a result of negligent or malicious acts and the Tessian study confirms many of Verizon’s findings.

When broken down by organization size, more than half of those at organizations with at least 50 employees, 250 employees and 999 employees all say they are less likely to follow safe data practices.

Younger employees are also more likely to think they can get away with riskier data behaviour, according to the survey.

More than half of all employees have training every six months, but this statistic varied greatly based on the industry. The average for all industries was training every eight months, but companies involved in public services, energy, utilities, engineering, manufacturing, education, environment and agriculture all have training 10 months at a time or longer.

“As with most things related to cybersecurity, user awareness is a big deal and training programs are key, but a lot of organizations don’t have a follow up to training,” said former chief information security officer Allen Look in the survey.

“They don’t have a system in place to measure user compliance, performance, and success around protecting sensitive information. So what happens if they repeatedly fail? So we retrain them? There often aren’t clear consequences or avenues for remediation, which means nobody is actually held accountable when an incidence occurs.”

The priorities also varied between IT leaders and employees when it comes to the consequences of data loss. Employees were more focused on damaged reputation and losing their jobs while IT leaders were more concerned about losing customers, damaging consumer trust, breached information, and a hurt reputation.

The report includes a number of suggestions that included more training, more stringent company policies, and the adoption of automation or machine learning to help protect data.

“Business leaders need to address security cultures and adopt advanced solutions to prevent employees from making the costly mistakes that result in data breaches and non-compliance. It’s critical these solutions do not impede employees’ productivity though,” Sadler said. “We’ve shown that people will find workarounds if security gets in the way of them doing their jobs, so data loss prevention needs to be flexible if it’s going to be effective.”

By Jonathan Greig

Sourced from TechRepublic