Hello Entrepreneurs
I have an exceptional accounting software for you. Where you can Do all your accounting and bookkeeping, quickly and easily, and never pay a cent (or a Baiza). Real double-entry accounting that actually makes sense to non-accountants.
Check it out for yourself, and then say a little prayer for me :-)
www.waveapps.com
Stay tuned for more app and software solutions to help you build your business.
Counting followers on Twitter is like counting pennies – sure, they’ll add up, but how much are they really worth? Follower count doesn’t mean much unless it’s attached to other stats about how influential you are on Twitter, like how often you’re retweeted or replied to. As any Twitter veteran will tell you, influence is a much better measurement of your Twitter effectiveness than follower count – and we’ve got 5 of the best tools to measure your Twitter influence for you.
Most of these influence measures take into consideration factors that include follow count, but also go far beyond it. While follower count can give you a brief at-a-glance view of how popular you are on Twitter, it does nothing to tell you how influential you are with those followers. If everyone is ignoring your tweets, 10 followers doesn’t mean any less than 1,000. Likewise, if you are being retweeted, @mentioned and otherwise interacted with every day, your 100 followers might be more valuable than someone else’s 10,000.
If you only use one influence measure, use Klout. Klout is the gold standard of Twitter influence measurement, and it is a great benchmark for anchoring the other influence measures in this list.
After entering your Twitter username into the box on Klout’s main page, you’ll see a page full of nicely presented stats. The big one, Klout Score, is a number out of 100 that takes over 30 factors into consideration – including your retweet frequency, the influence levels of your followers, and how far your retweets go. Klout will also give you badges for reaching certain milestones, like being listed 10, 100 or 1,000 times. And finally, you can use Klout’s influence matrix to see what type of tweeter you are and adjust your strategy if you so choose.
Klout is also great to take a look at your competition. You can view anyone’s Klout score and analysis simply by typing in their username. So if you want to see just how popular a competitor is, or you are curious about the influence levels of celebs like Lady Gaga and Justin Bieber, you can check that out too.
PeerIndex is another popular Twitter influence measurement tool. Like Klout, it gives you a PeerIndex score out of 100 that is “a single measure of status” on Twitter. A number above 40 means you’re in the top 10% of Twitter users, and a number above 90 means you’re in the coveted 0.1% of Twitter influencers.
PeerIndex uses activity, authority and audience to measure your total Twitter influence. It also provides you with a topic fingerprint which shows just how influential you are in certain “benchmark” topic, such as sports, politics, science and media.
Retweet rank is perhaps the simplest influence measurement tool on our list, but it’s powerful nonetheless. The amount of times a Twitter account has been retweeted is calculated, and a number displayed based on the rank of that account. So, if you get a retweet rank of 30,000 for instance, that means you are the 30,000th most-retweeted person on Twitter.
Retweet rank also has a leaderboard of the most retweeted people on Twitter, and it will tell you just how you stack up in terms of what percentile you land in.
Just enter your Twitter username and Twitalizer will give you an influence number out of 10. If you’re curious about why you only got a 2.1 but you’ve got 13,000 followers, Twitalizer uses the following to measure your Twitter influence: number of followers; number of unique mentions; frequency of unique retweets; frequency that the user retweets; and frequency of tweets.
Twitalizer will also let you know what type of Twitter influencer you are, which can give you a snapshot of what you need to do to get to the next level.
If you’re used to getting graded like in elementary school, you’ll love Twitter Grader. It gives you a number out of 100 that measures the impact of how you tweet. Like many of the above, it takes follower count into consideration but adds in dozens of other variables to complete its algorithm, including the power of your followers, how frequently you are retweeted and follower to following ratio.
Twitter Grader will also rank you out of all of the Twitter accounts it currently analyzes – and at over 8,000,000, you’ll get a pretty good glimpse into just how you stack up compared to the rest of the Twitterverse.
by ALAN S. COHEN Feb 4, 2012 1:00PM
Editor’s note: Alan S. Cohen is Vice President of Marketing at Nicira. A 20-year IT veteran, Alan has held executive positions at Cisco, Airespace, Tahoe Networks, IBM, US WEST, Coopers & Lybrand, and the Department of Energy.
Change in the air. It’s palpable.
Those of us in the technology world are witnessing a transformation: A buyer-led revolution in how information technology is both produced and consumed.
Smartphones and tablets are upsetting the PC order; social applications are impinging on traditional “workforce productivity” and communications applications.
And the infrastructure, the underlying electronic “institutions” that make all of this happen, are also undergoing a transformation that promises to reshape the boundary conditions of all the participants. The wave of disruption powered by virtualization, and now, cloud, is rapidly and dramatically reshaping how companies and organizations of all sizes purchase IT and who sells it to us.
Said simply, for the first time in a generation, information technology’s supply chain is in the state of serious disruption. It truly is an “Arab Spring” for the IT world and when it’s over, there will be a host of new companies driving enterprise technology. Don’t believe me?
Let’s establish some historical context.
Most revolutions take time. There are always early revolutionaries who pave the way for the change in the system.
Although we chart the Arab Spring to events in Tunisia just over a year ago, the underlying currents driving change in the Middle East are decades in the making. In our industry, the antecedents are also more than a decade old. VMware, the early power player in compute virtualization, was founded in 1998. Salesforce, the first big SaaS player, was founded in 1999. The iPod, the progenitor of the contemporary smartphone, was revealed publicly in 2001.
For those tuned in to IT’s golden oldies channel, there was a transformative revolution in the 1970s. It was called the PC.
At the center of these revolutions and disruptions, you will find end users who have a simple mantra: “We want what we want, when we want it, to get our jobs done.” Employers have to meet these goals. Yet their job can be doubly difficult: Companies and organizations are frequently locked into existing IT approaches and are now told to do more with less. Business leaders around the world are demanding that the current model of IT, one that has led to a multi-trillion dollar per year industry, become more responsive to their twin goals of business velocity and efficiency.
But today, at the beginning of what historians will someday call the “as-a-service” era of technology, there is a new mantra for Enterprise IT: Faster, cheaper, and pay only for what you use.
If IT providers do not supply what the end users want, the latter, like the brave individuals who took the streets of Cairo, Tunis, and Tripoli, will take matters into their own hands. Most often, the initial transformation happens as “shadow” IT. Bring your own device is shadow IT. Most SaaS applications start by bypassing IT and going directly to functional groups (managing sales through Salesforce or sharing through Box.net).
Think about it: Less than five years ago, people were questioning whether the iPhone was ready for the enterprise. In 2012, Apple is expected to sell $19 billion worth of iPhones and iPads to the enterprise, making iot the 25th largest IT vendor in the world. How’s that for a shadow IT movement?
Now it’s time for infrastructure. If IT does not provide the end user with the infrastructure they need, the latter can rent it, by the hour or month from companies like Rackspace or Amazon. All you need is a credit card and no approval from IT. What is powering this change? Software. Software will be the new hardware.
Like the Arab Spring, traditional powers in IT clearly know about the change that is underway. However, as with so many Middle Eastern heads of state, half-measures toward meeting end user requirements will not be enough. Adding a cool interface to onerous applications or a software stub to a piece of stubborn “iron” will not appease the end users.
In our world, it’s change or lose your franchise. Maybe that’s why Andy Grove knew only the paranoid survive.
Embracing rapid change is not the usual modus operandi for many IT superpowers. The need for top and bottom line growth, and the scrutiny of public markets, does not make changing your business model on-the-fly the easiest task. If you are a multi-billion dollar IT player, how do you explain to your installed base, “Guess what, everything is going to change?”
But if you are in IT, you have to ask yourself: What side of history will you wind up on?
One of the Best Articles I Have Read for a While..This is truly the shift to take into account whether you are a small, medium or large enterprise owner. Welcome to the Service-Value, Customer-Centric Times!!
However, do keep in mind that ERP can never die so long as there is manufacturing. So a more accurate way of putting it is to say that ERP is simply moving to the cloud as a Software As A Solution (SaaP) service, which can be delivered as a subscription service or installed on the client’s premise.
Here's the Article:-
Tien Tzuo is founder and CEO of Zuora. He was previously chief strategy officer and chief marketing officer at Salesforce.com.
Tien Tzuo: A moment of silence for ERP.Much has been discussed about SAP’s pending $3.4B acquisition of SuccessFactors, and now Oracle’s $1.9 billion deal to buy Taleo. Rightly, SAP and Oracle have been praised for trying to bolster their cloud offerings with these moves. But, in a few years, I wonder if it will really matter. Because, while SAP and Oracle are obviously trying to get with the times by offering their services via the cloud, it may be too late. Why? Because, in short, ERP – enterprise resource planning software – is on its deathbed.
That’s right. ERP’s days are numbered. And it is because of a fundamental shift that is taking place regarding how people consume products and services driven by the massive growth of the cloud itself.
I’m referring to the shift we are experiencing away from a 20th century product-based, “buy once” economy to a 21st century services-based “Subscription Economy” centred around recurring customer relationships.
Think about it: there is a very good chance you are one of the exploding number of consumers who now access their music via a subscription such as Pandora or Spotify. Perhaps you are one of the many people who have stopped renting DVDs in favor of streaming your movies over Netflix. Or, you could be one of the growing number of consumers who have eschewed owning a car to accessing one via a subscription with Zipcar. Or, maybe you are one of the growing list of companies who are voting “no” to buying hardware and software and instead are using apps and computing power served up from the cloud. As an economy and a culture, we are rapidly moving away from owning tangible goods and, instead, gravitating towards becoming members of services that provide us with experiences – such as listening to a song, using a car, watching a movie or collaborating with our colleagues.
Of course, this cultural transformation has profound implications for business models. Why? Success is no longer gauged by counting how many units of your product you have sold. Rather, success is measuring how many customers are using your service on a recurring basis and how successful you are monetizing those recurring relationships.
Today, the Subscription Economy is fuelling massive changes across communications, media, technology, consumer services and other billion dollar industries that are embracing subscription revenue models. In addition to the names above, innovative companies that adopted the subscription business models to fundamentally transform their industries include Salesforce.com, Box, Tata, VNU Media and Zendesk.
But, it is not just the upstarts that are leveraging the subscription model. A greater indicator of this shift is that traditional product companies such as Dell are racing to re-invent themselves around services. Dell recognized that selling low-margin hardware was simply much less lucrative than offering services. Consequently, Dell has acquired service companies and refocused its efforts around, “pricing our products based on value rather than based on cost,” according to Michael Dell. And it is working. In a recent Q3 earnings call, Michael Dell stated, “This is a new Dell…in Q3, our enterprise solutions and service business grew 8% to a record high $4.7 billion.”
And Dell is just one of the many titans of industry that have shifted to a service-based model. According to a recent Gartner Group report, “by 2015, 35% of Global 2000 companies with non-media digital products will generate incremental revenue of 5% to 10% through subscription-based services and revenue models.”
Why does all of this signal the death of ERP? It’s because the rigid ERP systems from SAP, Oracle and others were designed specifically for the 20th century manufacturing era rather than the 21st century services-based world. Because ERP was built to track products that can be put on a pallet, versus offering services that are consumed over time, subscription businesses using this legacy technology struggle over and over again with the fundamental questions:
It’s for all of these reasons that ERP’s days are numbered. The Subscription Economy demands new ways of both measuring and monetizing customer relationships. Companies must break out of the shackles of ERP if they are to succeed in this new world. Or, risk being buried alongside it.
Recent Comments