Archive for September, 2013
Avoid the Mistakes That Landed a Programmer in Hot Water
Sep 30
If you leave a company after being in the IT department as a programmer or just as someone who had intimate knowledge of computer systems, you better be careful when switching to new company. Learning the law is vital in order to avoid being prosecuted by your former employer.
You can’t take secrets with you from one company to another. This seems like it should just be common sense, but a programmer, who made a million dollars per year, has served time for doing just that, so maybe it needs to be said.
After leaving a company that he had earned him millions upon millions of dollars, a now famous programmer was handed down an eight-year prison sentence. The ruling was later overturned, but he still spent time in the slammer. This time could have been avoided with slightly different business tactics.
Leaving the company made sense since a start up was willing to pay him more for his services coding the same types of programs. The problem is that while fixing code for his new employer, the programmer violated some open-source laws by using a program called Subversion. It allowed him to take some code he had written for his previous employer along with him.
What he did was pretty common in the programming industry. To those outside of the field, they looked pretty shady. It led to his arrest just a month after changing companies. It didn’t help that he had erased his keystroke history, but the reason he did that, he claims, was to keep his password safe.
He also claims not to care about the money and seems innocent enough. Regardless of how he felt, however, his former employer obviously decided the money was everything and wanted payback for the perceived betrayal – IT is a competitive enough field without losing your best programmer.
| No comments | This entry was posted by EIC Social Media Team on September 30, 2013 at 6:06 pm, and is filed under Information Tech Law, Legal. Follow any responses to this post through RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback from your own site. |
Common Mistakes Involving Responsive Design
Sep 23
It won’t be long before the prolific smartphone outnumbers the amount of humans on the planet. It only makes sense then that companies are focused on developing mobile strategies. A standard website won’t bring all of the business that it used to, especially if someone can’t view it on their phone or tablet where they spend most of their time surfing the web. Responsive design is about making sure that your site can adapt to the device that a person surfs in on. Thus, instead of having a separate mobile site, and possibly even a different site for smartphones as opposed to tablets, you can have just one website that adjusts accordingly. While this initially seems like the obvious way to go, the technology is limited in some ways, and there are definitely some marks against responsive design. Let’s examine a few shortcomings.
Let’s start with your advertisers. You may need the revenue from these ads to keep your business afloat. Newspapers, for example, used to rely on ads in the printed paper to fund printing and staff costs. Now many of those companies prefer to have their ads run in more popular online versions of the newspaper. Now let’s think about responsive design. The site is automatically resized for the mobile device. That isn’t very good news for someone who is paying to have a readable ad on your page. The size of the ad may be altered. Its location on the page might be adjusted. All of these things are considerations in the pricing of ads. You don’t want to lose an advertiser because they don’t like what your responsive design site does to their spot.
Also, you need to have top notch designers to make responsive design work, and even then they will have to put forth a tremendous amount of effort to create the site. It takes a lot more initial planning to design the website properly. Then every little adjustment made from there on out needs to have many more parameters taken into consideration.
Sometimes having a mobile site or creating an app are just better choices than responsive design. Figure out what aspects of your site the majority of customers are going to use on the go. Make that what is accessible on the app or mobile site. Someone who wants to check if their flight is on time doesn’t need an entire page to load up that includes input fields for purchasing a flight. Someone will sit down at their computer for that. Take that example and apply it your business.
| No comments | This entry was posted by EIC Social Media Team on September 23, 2013 at 2:23 pm, and is filed under Usability. Follow any responses to this post through RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback from your own site. |
Don’t Fall for Marketing Tech Schemes
Sep 16
Marketers know all about building up a product to make it sell. It makes you think that marketers would be beyond falling for their own tactics, but human nature is human nature. There’s a reason why we promote things using the methods that we do. So the big build-up behind a lot of the marketing tech available today has gotten the better of many marketers. The fact is, however, that there is such a thing as overdoing it and making things even more complicated by having too many tools at your disposal. Before long you’re staring at a maze of data.
Just like Apple always convinces us that we need their latest product, marketing tech companies create so much hype over their latest tools that marketing companies are afraid they will fall behind the competition without it. How can your team properly utilize marketing automation software? Here are a few tips.
The two things you are looking for in your tech are CRM (customer relationships management) and MA (marketing automation). These are the tech tools that businesses actually do need. If you feel that you are falling behind your competitors, these are the two areas to sure up.
Tools to keep track of your social media are abundant. A lot of them started to spring up all at once, and it quickly became clear that not a lot had gone into them. The game has changed, though, and many current social media tools are very effective. If you have your MA and CRM in place and are looking to expand a little further, this is the next tool to invest in.
What tools should you avoid? In my opinion, some of the least worthwhile tools are ones that quickly get you more fans, followers or friends on various social media platforms. Most of the individuals aren’t real in the truest sense, and the ability to gain anything – from an increase in brand awareness, to a new customer, to a sale – from a tool like this is slim.
Of course, having the right person operating it can make just about any tool look good, so your team is more important than the software. They need the right skills, and they need to not be so overloaded that they can’t hone in on the strengths. When you have the right people using the right tools, you have a strong advantage over your competition.
| No comments | This entry was posted by EIC Social Media Team on September 16, 2013 at 2:20 pm, and is filed under Marketing Strategies. Follow any responses to this post through RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback from your own site. |
Privacy Concerns That Consumers Have, and How to Address Them
Sep 9
Consumers are concerned about their privacy, and policies need to address those concerns while also creating the benefits that the organization expects to receive in return. Let’s look at some circumstances that need to be given consideration when it comes to privacy.
First of all, every culture has their own unique views on privacy. While there is no distinct evidence as to a reason why, it seems that “melting pot” cultures like in the United States, Canada, Australia and Britain, where immigrants abound, seem to have fewer concerns over privacy. Countries with a greater degree of uniformity – Germany and Japan, for example – seem to place a much greater degree of importance on online privacy. These cultural differences must be addressed when your organization is developing a policy on privacy.
Population density is another factor. While everyone in a small town will strive to know every other person’s business and think it’s odd if you aren’t willing to share, those in overcrowded cities value their privacy dearly and will fight against anyone who is trying to infringe on it. While people who live spread out in countries like Australia or the US frequently visit one another, people may be friends for years in crowded nations like Germany or the UK before they ever consider inviting one another to their home.
Another factor to consider is the type of government that the person is used to living under. Someone living under a communist leadership such as in China will never give a second thought to online privacy. Having someone looking over their shoulder seems natural. In the US and Europe, governments are looked to for privacy protection, and corporations are viewed as the bad guys for trying to take it away. In particular, Germany and France have many laws to protect online privacy. The regulations reflect the attitude of many of their citizens.
| No comments | This entry was posted by EIC Social Media Team on September 9, 2013 at 5:09 pm, and is filed under Marketing Strategies. Follow any responses to this post through RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback from your own site. |
Suggestions on How to Develop a Privacy Policy
Sep 2
If your business is international, it adds another privacy concern into the mix. Every country handles privacy differently. Since most people are used to how their government handles online privacy, your company won’t get a lot of complaints if you handle matters the same way. But it involves trust that information for each nation will be kept on local servers. When data gets sent around the globe, concerns arise over how another government will handle the privacy of those who are not a citizen of their nation. It can be a particular concern for those who are used to being well protected.
Research shows that even though people regularly make online purchases, they are still wary about privacy and view online purchases as less secure than ones they make in person. Few will be able to give you a straight answer over what those concerns are. It’s just a sense of dread that exists in the back of the mind when it comes to privacy and the Internet.
How can you convince consumers to trust your site in particular? After all, if that is a major concern of online consumers, it will play a big role in whether they use your website or decide to go somewhere else. Step one is to be transparent. If they trust that your privacy policies are legitimate and not just a bunch of legal double talk, you’ll have a better shot at convincing them to trust you. They also are concerned that what you do with the data you collect will not endanger them in any way. It may not be a fear of something specific happening, just a general dread that your company mishandling their data will result in loss for them. Finally, they need to believe that you have the ability to back up what you say you will do.
This is the emotional side of privacy. It’s not enough to understand. You have to build consumer trust in your brand. The more open you are, the more consumers will trust you, so rather than hiding a bunch of legal mumbo-jumbo behind a tiny link at the bottom of the page, it’s time to start reassuring people.
| No comments | This entry was posted by EIC Social Media Team on September 2, 2013 at 5:07 pm, and is filed under Marketing Strategies, Online Personalization. Follow any responses to this post through RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback from your own site. |
