Social Media is obviously growing into a marketing necessity, and organizations of all sizes should take notice. In fact, a few nights ago I was watching the Denver Nuggets play the New Orleans Hornets in the first round of the playoffs and during a commercial break I got up to grab a drink and heard an NBA commercial advertising to follow the NBA on twitter. This new form of advertising social media is obviously on the rise and there are many reasons that Linkedin, Facebook and Twitter can be effective in companies of all sizes. I recently heard an analogy that I thought was a clear way to explain these forms of social media. Linkedin is the business meeting, Facebook is the water cooler conversation, and Twitter is the trade show. So with that in mind, how can you implement social media in your organization?

Many companies are under extreme pressure to make budget cuts and trim expenses in an effort to stay afloat during the current economic storm that has been looming over our heads for the last 18 months. Often times, there are two major budgets that can be effected by such turmoil.

The first place many businesses look to trim on costs is the IT budget. This is a tricky area to cut, as most companies have a substantial amount of the IT budget tied to fixed costs. However, many organizations are rapidly turning toward outsourcing IT services to experienced vendors in an effort to give employees time to focus their efforts on new and existing projects. This doesn't mean sending jobs across seas to India in search of cheap labor.  This simply means adding an experienced company specializing in application managed services in order to drive profit margin and increase revenue.  This is smart business as it is a safe and cost effective way to ensure the health of the entire IT stack while freeing up internal resources.  

The second budget many companies look to trim in a time of economic uncertainty is the marketing budget.  Now depending on the size of an organization, there are obvious cuts that can be made without putting to much thought into it. Usually the first to go are the high cost media outlets such as TV commercials, video, radio, and print ads. There is a reason that newspapers are going out of business and the most recent Superbowl had to sell discounted commercial spots. Companies marketing to both B2B and B2C are strictly cutting budgets in these areas mostly due to the price tag associated with such mass media.  However there are still many cheap ways to get your message out into the public eye without spending a lot of coin.

There has been a lot of writing concerning the SaaS Maturity Model devised by a handful of Microsoft engineers and evangelists.  This model essentially covers 4 types of SaaS deployment ranging from the ASP model to a dynamically configurable multi-instance multi-tennant model referred to as Level 4 SaaS Maturity.  This is a useful discussion, however it does not address how a company can go about getting a SaaS application to market.  In this series of posts and associated presentation which I will be giving at the OpSource SaaS Summit 2009, I will discuss this topic with a particular focus on Production Management and enhancing customer adoption through intelligent data mining.

Pain and Prototype

• Identify your customer's most important pain
• Prototype to meet requirements of a few key customers
• Validate USP and expand coverage

Beta Launch

• Production Operations Become Important
• Stress Testing Essential
• Deep application instrumentation necessary

Production Launch / Market Validation

• Scalability and Visibility
• 24x7 Production Operations
• Go to market evolves rapidly

Continuous Business Optimization

• Leverage BI to improve customer conversion
• Deep usage pattern instrumentation
• Use customer behavior proactively

The CSIA has  put on a great event tonight.  They managed to pull together top level executives from a broad range of Colorado's most influential companies ranging from Sun Microsystems to AIMCO to eBags to Vail Resorts.  The entire crowd was extremely open and willing to discuss their problems and the solutions they need or could bring to the table.

As expected,  the common theme of the night was the impacts of the economy on business and technology operations and the need to do more with less.  The top ten topics I heard tonight in no particular order were:

I just read an interesting post on the Tech Republic site advising CIOs on a number of areas where they can optimize their IT spend (here).   In the post, it talks about the basics but doesn't really offer an upside.  The truth is that most organizations spend more on IT than they get out. 

My advice to CIOs is simple -- only do what adds the most value to your business and outsource the rest. 

• Network Management -- specialized vendors bring depth of support expertise you probably can't afford and 7x24 service.  Some I've met with who do a good job at all or part of the network and security equation are GTRI, Symplify (Cirro NetworX)
• Application Management -- There are specialized vendors like Longview Systems, OpSource, HostMySite and Absolute Performance who can take an objective view of your business requirements and provide you with outsourced Application Management Solutions that deliver to meet your business requirements at lower cost and higher value to your end customers.
• Desktop Management --  For mid to large sized companies there are opportunities for significant economies of scale here
• Application Development and Integration --Depending on what your needs are, there are a large number of world class development shops in the United States and Europe that will take the time to understand what you need to get done and help you execute on it like Relevance and TechEmpower.

I strongly believe the the key to successful outsourcing is to pick specialized vendors who can solve business problems for you and then communicate directly and completely about what success looks like.  Then work together to develop measurable SLAs/KPIs which hold both sides accountable to the business requirements.  Your chosen vendor should be able to provide you with real-time visibility into the KPIs that matter to your business.   Relationships with outsourcing vendors are not a one way street, but they can enable you to focus your staff on the adding NEW value to your business.

 Jerry Champlin, CEO Absolute Performance