Analytics

With budgets getting tighter than ever, small-business owners have to make the best use of every penny they can to stay ahead of the game. While you might think you have a first-class Web site that seems to be attracting lots of visitors, how do you really know if it's working? Is it delivering the ...

Occasionally when some new and disruptive technology comes on the market, my friends and colleagues phone me up to ask, "How is this new technology going to change your world?" They know I will feign indifference and my comeback will be that CIO means "career is over!" The secret answer is, innova...

A computer company's research team puts their latest video up on Facebook rather than presenting it during a technical conference. A video game developer turns to Twitter to first break the news of a new release to the masses. A salesperson stays in touch with all professional relationships -- colle...

Society's expectations for more personalized products and services have risen. As a result, vendors need to better understand their customers and prospects in order to remain competitive in the marketplace. One of the best ways for a company to do this is to spend time examining the interactions bet...

For a long time, small businesses were reluctant to embrace the latest in search engine marketing and other online advertising tactics. The SEM industry was unable to deliver to this group of typically local-interest, cost-conscious companies what they wanted the most: a means to assess how their in...

It may be as sexy as grandma's underpants, but data is the foundation upon which everything else is layered. Without the right support underneath, the fat will roll over your margins, creating an unsightly, unseemly, unprofitable business bulge. "While it sounds a little boring, managing data as the...

When it comes to Web 2.0 tools and your business Web site, there's a time and a place for everything. Web master wannabes with businesses to run often go overboard with the plethora of social networking tools at their disposal and end up wasting a lot of time and effort on frivolous undertakings. "I...

Last week Salesforce.com introduced its new support concept dubbed "The Service Cloud." I have to say it makes a lot of sense both as a product direction and as a business decision. The announcement is in line with many of the business initiatives that the company has made over the last decade in t...

When Microsoft kicked off its second annual business intelligence summit in Seattle, it did so with the announcement of enhancing end-user BI capabilities with Gemini, an Excel-based interface that will enable on-the-fly pivot table functionality with point-and-click ease of use. Organizations conti...

As e-commerce gets more sophisticated and consumer expectations continue to rise, many retailers are considering prettying up their existing Web sites with improved graphics or new features in order to make them more attractive to consumers. While such enhancements can make your site more appealing ...