Salesforce.com's Marc Benioff is a great visionary with a big appetite for change. From packaged software to the cloud, from CRM to platform-as-a-service, he's painted a color by number picture for businesses to emulate. But does his latest work, “the social enterprise" come with an easy enough guide for small businesses to paint it? The Paint-by-Numbers Social Enterprise Be...
Tag: SMB
6 Tips to Maximize Twitter Event Hashtags
Originally published in Small Business Computing, 8-29-11. Recently, a client asked me for some tips about how to get the maximum mileage out of Twitter event hashtags. Creating Twitter hashtags for your business events is a great way to mul...
The Impact of HP’s New Direction—An SMB Market Perspective
--by Sanjeev Aggarwal and Laurie McCabe, SMB Group After HP’s announcement that it would ditch it’s new Touchpad and put WebOS in mothballs, rumors leaked about it's intentions to spin-off or sell it’s Personal Systems Group (PSG) PC business and acquire information management software vendor Autonomy for $10.2B. Combined, these moves confirm HP’s CEO, Leo Apotheker’s strategy to get ...
Recap of Joint Social Business Webinar with Radian6 and CRM Essentials
Today I had the pleasure of joining David Alston from Radian6 and the legendary Brent Leary of CRM Essentials for a webinar live from CRM Evolution. We had a lively conversation about some of the key social business findings that the SMB Group and CRM Essentials uncovered in the 2011 SMB Social Business Study, which Radian6 helped to sponsor. If you missed it, you can replay the
Is Your Business Suffering from Social Media Denial?
Kevin Casey, intrepid journalist for InformationWeek, rang me up this week for input on his article, "Do Nonsocial SMBs Know Something We Don’t?" In the article, Kevin’s ponders whether SMBs that haven’t bought into...
SAP Business One: Big Business Capabilities on a Small Business Budget
SAP has forged its corporate identity in the large enterprise space, serving the likes of Coca Cola and Dow Chemical. But, while attending SAP's Sapphire user event last week, I had the opportunity to meet with Andreas Wolfinger, Global Head of Solution Management and Product Management for SAP Business One, and Jennifer Schulze, Director SME Solutions Marketing (who I interviewed in this
Social Media: How Does Your Small Business Stack Up?
Social media offers small businesses an inexpensive, relatively friction-free way to accomplish different business functions, from generating new leads to getting input for new product development. Consequently, it's not surprising that small businesses are rapidly moving to take advantage of it. How far along the social media curve is your business compared to your peers? We’ve picked some ke...
The New Dell and What it Means for SMBs: Takeaways from Dell’s 2011 Solutions for a Virtual Era Event
Twenty-seven years ago, Michael Dell launched Dell with $1,000 and a streamlined sales and manufacturing model that revolutionized the PC industry. Sticking with this playbook, Dell achieved similar success in the server market, once again disrupting the status quo. However, times changed, and Dell started to look like a one-trick pony. As Michael Dell himself acknowledged at last week’s Dell’...
Dell and Boomi: Doubling Down on Integration
Originally published 4-26-11 as an SMB Group research brief in .pdf format, available here. When big companies gobble up smaller ones, you always wonder whether the acquired company will get swallowed up into the belly of the beast, der...
Is There a Method to Social Media Madness?
By Sanjeev Aggarwal and Laurie McCabe, SMB Group, and Brent Leary, CRM Essentials SMB adoption of social media for sales, marketing, product development and customer service is on the rise – but how are SMBs tracking, analyzing and measuring the success of their social media endeavors? In our joint SMB Group/CRM Essentials “2011 Small and Medium Business Social Business Study,” we su...