It’s the summer holidays, kids are off for 6 whole weeks, and being 21st century children, mine are very computer literate even at 7 & 5 years old.

I’ve had an old PC kicking around for some time and thought that this would be a perfect toy for them to use over the summer. For the most part the kids use mine or my wife’s mac, and it must be said that even the kids can tell the difference between the Windoze/Mac experience, and would rather use a Mac. So, with nothing to lose I installed Linux (Fedora) on the machine to replace XP. And the result is a thing of beauty. The interface is professional and intuitive, kind of like a Mac (only better), without all those playschool colours of vista and XP, and the machine is lightning fast (booting-up in just 15 seconds!

So why would anyone pay £300 for Vista and MS Office, when one can get Linux and OpenOffice for free. It’s the same thing only free...and better. This is of course, the power of marketing.

But with the freedom, information, and honesty of the internet (which ironically Microsoft themselves have helped create) there’s nowhere to hide poor value and poor product, so there may be trouble ahead for Bill’s boys!

Well, my point is that this is a metaphor for all of our businesses. If we don’t offer value, quality and service then our days are numbered, because now it’s so easy for our customers to find a better/cheaper/more proactive supplier and when they do, we’re history.

I know that Microsoft is one of the biggest companies in the world... but the history of the IT industry is littered with stories of giants falling. IBM, Netscape, Yahoo to name a few. Microsoft are living on borrowed time, 10 years from now they’ll be a niche provider of ‘old’ technology, whilst everyone else has moved over to cloud computing and the Googlesque world of remote computing. The new world of web enabled business favours small nimble companies rather than leviathans.

Watch-out, enjoy some of the dinosaurs of today, they'll be extinct soon!

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I know that social media is starting to be seen as a legitimate channel for marketing spend for organisations both large and small, but how do you measure the return on investment?

Well, up until relatively recently social media has been viewed as a long-term brand building exercise in much the same way that mass media advertising has. It’s a vital spend, but very difficult to quantify what the benefit is.

Until now…

There are now a number of social media monitoring platforms which listen to all blogs/platforms and alike, and allow you to look for trends, and see what’s being said. This is very exciting as it means that you can start to monetise and measure your presence in social media, and begin to see some sales return.

The three main areas that this offers benefit in are:

1) research – the opportunity to listen to what people are saying about your products and services WITHOUT having to worry about the effect that asking the questions might have, or whether you’re asking the right questions.

2) competitor analysis – see what the market thinks of what your opposition is doing. Can you learn anything from it, and what’s selling well, what should you avoid doing.

3) sales – people don’t just use social media to tell everyone they’re having a cup of tea! Lots use it to ask for opinions of what they should buy. Simply pass these enquiries to your sales team to close – bingo.

We are about to begin working to BAA at Stansted, and have had an initial look at social media comments, currently running at 3000 per month. This can be an invaluable source of honest and most importantly, current feedback.

The exciting thing about all of this is that you can now place some metrics on your social media exposure.

Enter the dawning of a new age!

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