What A Twit! (Twitterer)
Today Twitter hit the headlines when the British Airways talks were scuppered over the weekend. Derek Simpson, the union negotiator, had posted tweets directly from the talks as they were happening. This infuriated BA.
What luck that I had chosen BA for examples of how they themselves are using social networking tools for business! Shortcuts to the recent articles are here and here.
Derek’s usage highlights some important aspects of Twitter:
- Tweets allow people to see in real-time what’s happening. This can optionally include links to websites, photos or videos.
- However, unless the reader happens to be reading your tweets at that precise time, the chances are that readers will miss what you are saying. (This is because subsequent tweets from other people being followed by that reader soon knock older tweets out of sight.)
- In any case, Twitter does leave a full history of tweets made by each user. As I write, Derek’s tweets history is there, plain to see. Judge for yourself.
For marketing purposes, Twitter may not provide the immediate flood of interest from tweets that you might hope. But it does leave a trail of comments that readers can find useful. For example, the Camwells tweets effectively provide a history of articles in this blog, as well as providing links to external sites that readers may find interesting.
The key is to use Twitter constructively and not be a “twit” about it!
By the way, it is possible to delete a tweet at any time. This can be useful if you spot an error, want to add a hashtag (as in #topic), or realise the tweet was a mistake. Either Derek doesn't realise or he's choosing to leave his tweets in place. (But beware: Deleting a tweet from Twitter won't delete it in any system to which it is fed, such as LinkedIn, nor will anyone's re-tweets be deleted. Note to self - triple-check all tweets before submitting!)
Mid-range ERP systems
This last week SAP announced the re-launch of “Business ByDesign” (BYD), originally launched in 2007. This is SAP’s SaaS cloud offering aimed at the mid-market, for organisations of around 100-500 employees, and 10 system users upwards (formerly 25). BYD provides a range of functionality across financial management, CRM and business operations. Further background on BYD will be in an article tomorrow.
For accountancy practices, IRIS has launched OpenApps that provides SaaS cloud services for online bookkeeping, document management and other options. As IRIS have found that security is users’ number one concern in using the cloud, interesting that they talk about encrypted data and “bank level security”.
Sage reminds me that Sage Line 500 and Sage 1000 (both spawned from the acquisition of Tetra Business Systems) will be morphed together into Sage ERP1000 v3.0 in July. This will have a completely re-written and improved front-end user interface. Like Sage’s other mid-market systems ERP X3 (formerly the French Adonix) and Accpac ERP (USA-sourced)), ERP 1000 is not available yet as SaaS cloud services.
In the mid-market, is on-premise or SaaS cloud more appropriate? The launch of BYD brings this question to the forefront.
Stop Press!
Just received a piece of spam email that has a link to GoogleReader. Turns out it’s an advert for “enhancement” products.
Link starts http://www.google.com/reader
More about GoogleReader in a future article.
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