The business world today is much more empowered; empowered to act and react to dynamic changes often the moment they occur. For your organization to reap the benefits of the social media phenomenon, you must adapt and become more flexible in how you engage your customers, partners and community. To do so involves cultivating social connections that focus on solving business and customer challenges rather than the traditional PR techniques of selling your prospects on just how great you are.

Now that you’ve established the need for a social strategy there are a few things that should be done before you actually devise the strategy.

A) Help the CEO formulate a social media strategy team that will include internal leaders and managers spanning the entire organization.

The social team’s job will be to help create the strategy and oversee its implementation. As internal buy-in is critical to overall strategy success, the choices made in team selection are extremely crucial. Remember, you can’t build success on a rocky foundation.

Once the team is assembled, it wouldn’t hurt to…

B) Conduct a session with your company’s executive team where you explore social tech’s ability to and success in transforming organizations.

Be sure to fully explore how the same and more can be realized by your organization. Once the seeds have been planted and the bosses are on board, you can start building out your strategy. And because you’re building on a solid foundation, you should really be able to maximize your competitive advantage by following sound principles catered to your unique value position. Does this guarantee you’ll be the next Facebook or Twitter? No, but it will guarantee a much better fate than just blindly approaching the socialsphere, hoping for the best.

Based on a recently published Forrester Research report, Social Business Strategy, there are four key ingredients to a successful social business strategy:

#1 Know Thy Neighbor
There’s no way that you can create value through social engagement if you don’t truly understand who your employees and customers are, as well as, how they use social technology. According to Forrester, 62 million US adults visited a social networking site at least monthly between 2007 – 2010 representing a 50% increase in social networking usage.

#2 Define Your Goals
What do you expect to achieve by becoming more social? Do you want to improve customer perception? Increase customer sat? Increase sales? Whatever the case may be, get specific, associate each goal with a strategy and detail the steps to achieve the goal. Once that’s established, review what emerging social technology trends make the most sense in support of accomplishing your goals.

#3 Weigh the Pros and Cons
Determine which of your goals has the greatest output (return) for the least input (investment). Don’t get caught up in ego. Realistically assess the risk, effort and complexity of each goal/strategy so you can formulate the clearest picture of which ones should be pursued and which ones to abandon. If a project requires a high investment with very little return, it should be tossed. On the other hand, if you discover a gem of a project that essentially costs nothing to implement but yields untold riches, be smart and fast-track that one.

#4 Pick the Right Tool for the Job
You’ll likely need a myriad of services to support your golden social strategy so choose wisely. Explore all your options whether it be SaaS, PaaS or even IaaS. Determine which ones integrate with your existing infrastructure the best. You ultimately want your technology selection to be the icing on your well baked plan.

I’ve personally found success with this approach and feel that it can effectively be applied to a variety of operational/strategical models. How about you?

RELATED RESOURCES
http://www.forrester.com/rb/Research/social_business_strategy/q/id/57541/t/2

• Cost savings (e.g. lower taxes, cheaper labor, etc)
• Quality improvement
• Reduced time to market
• Capacity management
• Risk management/mitigation
• Scalability

During the late 90s and early 00s, there was a definite boom in offshore outsourcing a/k/a offshoring where mega-corporations were able to take advantage of large resource pools in lower cost economies due to an extremely disparate gap in wages that existed between the industrialized nations seeking to outsource and the developing nations providing the services. It was not uncommon to see companies like HP outsource their entire customer support operations to call centers in Hong Kong, Shanghai or Bangladesh. When planned effectively, those kinds of strategic business decisions have shown the potential to reap generous dividends on a relatively low-cost investment.

In the US, there has always been mixed emotions/views on outsourcing. Opponents claim it leads to job displacement, especially as it relates to offshoring. Supporters argue that offshoring actually lowers prices thereby yielding a greater overall economic benefit. Regardless of the position taken, the decision to offshore often carries its own set of consequences and repercussions that must be accounted for and dealt with such as:

• Physical distance (ie, geographic proximity, time zones, etc)
• Quality of service
• Language/cultural barriers
• Security issues
• Governmental policies/restrictions

Considerations like these coupled with the recent global economic downturn and the proliferation of cloudsourcing have cooled the heels of the once agressive business strategists to take a slower, more stable approach to offshoring in particular and outsourcing in general. This change in landscape, attitude and strategy has given rise to alternatives like nearshoring and as a result, has seeded socio-economic growth in neighboring countries like Brazil, Chile, Canada and Mexico.

What makes nearshoring appealing is that it allows an organization to mitigate several of the concerns/risks associated with offshoring while still reaping the benefits that an outsourcing strategy provides. By providing increased flexibility for organizational alignment, nearshoring can be an effective means to increase ROI.

Eventually, business strategists may shift back towards insourcing as some analysts suggest. This will especially become true as the once developing nations become more industrialized and the labor cost savings increasingly diminish. Would that signal the death of outsourcing? Hardly. I believe outsourcing is here to stay and will see increased/decreased implementation as market and economic conditions dictate. What do you think?

The Internet that we’ve become accustomed to will soon cease to exist. It’s fast-approaching that point where it can no longer exist as it does today. This is due to the fact that we’re running out of addresses under the current Internet Layer protocol, Internet Protocol version 4 (IPv4). IPv4 is responsible for relaying data across the Internet from source host to destination host based solely on their addresses. IPv4 uses 32-bit (2 to the 32nd power) addresses and can support 4.3 billion devices connected directly to the Internet.

Normally, 4.3 billion would seem like a massive number but with the proliferation of Internet-hungry devices, that number has become almost entirely consumed. As it stands now, less than 5% of IPv4 addresses are left unallocated to the regional Internet registries, who in turn issue them out to network operators. These network operators are then responsible for issuing them to their service subscribers. Think about that for a second, 5% of 4.3 billion. That leaves only 215 million addresses left to issue before IPv4 reaches its end. Experts expect the free pool of IPv4 addresses to be depleted in a matter of weeks. So, it seems that we’ve pushed IPv4 as far as it can possibly go and we did so in only 30 years. Without diminishing the incredible nature of that thought, what will happen once that eventual day finally comes? Will we no longer be able to surf the Net, check email, buy movie or plane tickets? Hopefully not. That’s what IPv6 was created to prevent.

IPv6 defines a new addressing method that’s infinitely more robust than its predecessor. It uses 128-bit addresses which supports a virtually unlimited number of devices (2 to 128th power). In other words, it will take a LOT longer than 30 years to exhaust those many addresses. We’ll have enough addresses to issue our future extraterrestrial networks on the Moon and Mars.

To get planet Earth ready for the mandatory switch to IPv6, the Internet Society is sponsoring World IPv6 Day on June 8, 2011. This global trial requires participants to support native IPv6 traffic on their main Web sites on that day. Google, Yahoo and Facebook, along with leading content delivery networks like Akamai and Limelight have all committed to the IPv6 trial. In order to participate in the trial, these companies must commit to running a dual-stack deployment which will allow IPv6 traffic to run alongside IPv4 traffic without utilizing shortcuts like DNS whitelisting. Until now, content providers like Facebook and Google have been supporting IPv6 via dedicated addresses separate from their main traffic-heavy sites.

These companies aren’t the only ones that believe change is eminent. Recently, the US Military started nudging its IT vendors to begin supporting IPv6 on their public facing sites. And, in September of 2010, the Office of Management and Budget mandated federal agencies to support IPv6 in dual-stack mode on their public facing sites by the fall of 2012.

The ball is definitely in motion to transition the world to the next version of the IP protocol. Hopefully this trial will prompt content providers, ISPs and manufacturers to start their transitions to IPv6 as soon as possible. As someone that’s ultimately responsible for technology and IT at my company, I am definitely excited to smoothly transition our internal and external operations over to IPv6.

Prior to Querious, I would have to use both of those other apps plus some CLI to manage all the data systems I’m responsible for. Now, with Querious I can use one GUI and resort to the CLI only when absolutely necessary. It has a lightweight feel like Sequel Pro plus you get the full administrative capabilities of MySQL Administrator + phpMyAdmin. If you have to import a massive SQL dump, either split it up or prepare for the app to crash (unless you modify max_allowed_packet).

All in all, Querious is a must-have for MySQL DBAs that work exclusively on a Mac and is definitely worth the $25 price tag…

Pre-Installation

So, after receiving purchase approval, I made my way to the nearest Apple Store to snag one of those precious jewels. I knew things would work out too when I made it to Santa Monica and lucked up on a parking space about 40 feet from the Apple Store entrance.

Once in the store, I didn’t waste anytime. I needed to get my server and split. Of course I ended up browsing and didn’t leave until about 20 minutes later. But, I had our new server in hand ready to be welcomed into the fold.

Once I made it back to the office around 9pm, I had to prepare the rack for a new family member. Finally, we could have all of our servers consolidated in 1 area instead of scattered around thanks to the form factor of the Mac Mini. It really takes up very minimal real estate and makes me wonder if I’ll ever deploy Xserve now that the Mini is a viable option. The cost-to-value ratio here is excellent. I mean you get a terabyte server with 4GB of RAM and an unlimited client license to Snow Leopard Server for around $1200 (including Apple Care). To do the same with a new Xserve could easily set you back $3000+. It might not work for a video shop but at these prices it’s a no brainer for powering an expanding network.

Anyways, it’s now time to put this puppy into action. So I roll up my sleeves and get to crackin’.

The Arrival

The box that it comes in adds an additional 1/3 to the dimensions. So you know the footprint on this bad boy is going to be small.

Installation Preparation

After inspecting the package contents, it was time to get to work. About 9 hours later, the new machine was installed into its new home ready to provide core and directory services to the team with overall workflow only slightly bruised…:D

Home, Sweet Home!