Expert Advice

Think you need a SAS 70 report -- or its replacement, the SSAE No. 16 -- to demonstrate your credentials? You may... but maybe not. Service Organization Controls reports are designed to help service organizations build trust and confidence in their processes and controls through a report issued by ...

Consumers today don't want to interact just with other consumers. Increasingly, they expect to interact and communicate directly with brands and companies themselves. Over the past few years, companies have come to see these communities as a valuable asset, nurturing them as part of a brand's offeri...

A major source of Facebook's success is its "social graph," a term coined in 2007 by company founder Mark Zuckerberg to describe the network of relationships between Facebook users. Facebook's social graph is a valuable component of the Facebook platform. The robust mapping of relationships and pref...

Though there are many benefits to bringing your company public, there are also disadvantages to be considered. Therefore, the process of deciding whether to launch an initial public offering should be a deliberate, well-thought-out process made by a team of professionals, including management, your ...

Not since Amazon started selling books more than 15 years ago has the world of e-commerce undergone such a wholesale transformation. The current online overhaul will likely be even more profound than the original dot-com boom, as it's unfolding across the entire retail sector as opposed to just a fe...

Self-service is a concept that has been evolving. In decades past, self-service meant providing a detailed manual. The downside, of course, was that a printed manual could not be updated dynamically and was costly to distribute. In the late 1990s, with the advent of the Web and content management, s...

Monitoring online conversation can provide insights that are relevant to a range of functions and activities, and that drive different types of value to a company. Companies need to understand what these sources of value are and then design their social media monitoring program so that the findings ...

What does the future of Java look like? Many say Java is reaching the end of its life, while others go so far as to say Java is dead. Will Java become Cobol, an antique enterprise platform too entrenched to get rid of, but no longer relevant? Will Oracle's takeover of Java prove to be the final n...

'Tis the Season. And it's better to give than to receive. And you'd better watch out. Besides being Christmas gibberish, those statements apply neatly to CRM. It's always the season to think about improving how your employees use CRM. It's better to give them tools that reward them for using them ...

In the rush to Facebook, marketers are discovering that different kinds of content drive different kinds of results -- and different social networks respond in different ways. It was not that long ago that the experts warned that brands could not "sell" in social media, that the audience would rebel...