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Category: Cloud Article

De Montfort University launches UK’s first digital marketing and social media degree.

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First schools and now Universities continue to innovate their offering to reflect the needs of the corporate environment.

This is a unique degree course that combines two critical areas in marketing and has the backing of a major blue-chip organisation and a leading social media agency is now recruiting its first students.

Launched by Leicester Business School at De Montfort University (DMU) in Leicester, the BA (Hons) Digital Marketing and Social Media – the first single honours degree to offer this combination – will equip graduates with the skills they need to get a head start in the fast-growing digital marketing sector.

With input from computing giant IBM, the course has been designed to incorporate key subjects such as interactive marketing, online customer engagement analysis, online media design and social media management.

The Single Honours course has been developed as a result of growing demand for graduates with digital marketing skills – and course leader Dr Anne Broderick believes that its innovative syllabus and emphasis on practical skills are just what employers have been waiting for.

“We recognise that digital marketing and social media management will be at the centre of what marketing managers will do in the future,” she said.

“The syllabus we’ve developed focuses on the digital marketing techniques and thinking that are essential to all organisations – not just to large organisations, but also smaller businesses, new start-ups, sports clubs and charities.

“Giving students the opportunity to study how those techniques and concepts fit into traditional marketing practices enables them to develop a more relevant range of theory and practice to underpin their career in digitally-driven firms and markets.”

Close links with IBM mean that students will have access to the latest social media activities and digital-marketing techniques – and for Peter Jakob, IBM UK and Ireland Brand Manager, the involvement of the company reflects the importance it places on the digital marketing skills of potential employees.

“We welcome this link with the Business School at De Montfort University,” he said.

“This innovative degree, with its joint focus on digital marketing and social media management, reflects what UK companies now urgently seek in future employees – the ability to contribute in a concrete way to contemporary digital marketing operations and to shape the dynamic social media activities that can influence key customer groups.

“The 2011 IBM Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) study revealed that 82 per cent of CMOs say they plan to increase their use of social media over the next three to five years, but only 26 per cent are tracking blogs today.

“Customers are sharing their experiences widely online, giving them more control and influence over brands. The study shows that this shift in the balance of power from organisations to their customers requires new marketing approaches, tools and skills in order to stay competitive. The skills that the Digital Marketing and Social Media degree will offer are exactly the type of new competitive skills that marketers need.”

Deputy Vice-Chancellor and Dean of Business and Law Professor David Wilson said: “Establishing such a valuable learning link with IBM will inspire graduates to seek leadership roles themselves in their future career and to take on significant responsibility in what is now a critical management area for many organisations.”

The programme also has the backing of the Rabbit Agency, an award-winning social media specialist.

Dirk Singer, founder of the Rabbit Agency, said: “Social media marketing has matured to an extent where there is a real need for a course like this that matches the theory with hands-on experience.

“The skills set that the course will provide is relevant throughout the marketing mix, both in agencies and in-house, and graduates will almost certainly be in demand, especially at a time when many marketing areas are seeing budgetary squeezes. We’re really thrilled to be supporting DMU in this industry ‘first’.”

The input of the Rabbit Agency, through knowledge sharing on creative social media developments, is valued by the course team for the rare exposure it offers students to highly-rated agency practice.

The three-year course can be extended to four years with a 12-month paid placement within a marketing agency or other business.

Practical experience in industry, combined with a strong focus on the contemporary nature of digital marketing, will ensure that students graduate with a strong online portfolio that they can show prospective employers.

Deadline for applications for DMU’s Digital Marketing and Social Media BA (Hons) – starting in September 2012 – is Sunday 15 January 2012.

Anyone interested in the course can sign up for a free digital marketing taster session during December and January. The first taster session is on 10 December. Email ambmar@dmu.ac.uk for details.

Further information about the course, and details of how to apply, are available at http://www.dmu.ac.uk/digitalmarketing

 


Social Success from salesforce.com

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Salesforce.com really are the company that keeps on giving. Just a few weeks into 2012 and they’re already announcing ‘The Social Success’ resource site ‘to help you social power your business.’

Well, we all know that social is both the present and the future, so here’s what to expect from The Social Success:

:: Ideas, advice and best practice on social media for sales, marketing, customer service and beyond

:: Expert interviews, Dreamforce Takeaways, and social round-ups from around the web

:: Lots of statistics, expert quotes and further resources…

If this sounds like something you would like, just click here and download your copy of ‘The Social-Powered Enterprise eBook’.

 


Pupils set for coding and app lessons

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The BBC reported this week that ‘School ICT’ lessons are to be replaced by Computer Science Programme.

If you read past the horribly antiquated term, which brings to mind men in white coats with punch cards surrounding a computer attached to a dot-matrix printer, the proposal is surprisingly hopeful, although belated.

Michael Gove is pushing this forward to enable young people to be able to ‘work at the forefront of technological change,’ an idea that ROD have been pushing for a while, as we’ve blogged about here and here.

So from this announcement think less ‘computer science’ and more teaching on coding, apps, programming, cloud, platforms and social integration.

The BBC reports that: Computer games entrepreneur Ian Livingstone, an adviser to Mr Gove, envisages a new curriculum that could have 16-year-olds creating their own apps for smartphones and 18-year-olds able to write their own simple programming language.

ROD knows that some 18-year olds are already able to code and indeed change the face of computing. Take for example the legendary Steve Wozniak of Apple fame, who dropped out of University to work on the first Apple computer in Steve Jobs’s garage; or his Silicon Valley colleague Mark Zuckerberg who developed ‘The Facebook’ whilst at University.

The hope from this great news is that the next generation of Wozniaks, Zucerkbergs and Benioffs will stem from the UK; that companies (start-ups and established firms) will be able to hire a crop of trained and able young talent fresh from school, college or university.

Teaching in IT shouldn’t be restricted to IT lessons, all lessons should be using apps, tablets and new technologies as part of a wider integrated IT approach.

We predict a new breed of start-up, that focuses on producing materials and apps for the education market; even down to publishing firms making interactive text books available for tablets – giving rapid and automated feedback to students as they learn and pushing notifications to them as they study.

Our wish for schools is that they draft-in existing skills from the corporate environment in order to best facilitate ‘computer lessons’ for students. Not all IT teachers will be able to code or build an app, but to explore creative potential in students the schools should look outside of their walls and even consider work placements with start-ups; extra-curricular classes in smart phone app development; weekend hackathons; partnerships with tech firms and training in new technologies such as HTML5 and the salesforce.com platform.

We await the implementation of this education drive and look forward to welcome the next breed of developers and programmers to the cloud eco-system.

 


Salesforce.com get friendly with Toyota

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Earlier this year the CRM vendor announced plans to build ‘Toyota Friend’, a private social network for Toyota customers and their cars.

This week Toyota unveiled the soon-to-be-launched Prius PHV plug-in hybrid in Japan, and with this, Toyota made ‘Toyota Friend’ available for the first time.

This vehicle will launch in Japan on 30 January 2012 and one of the features being offered free of charge is:

“Toyota Friend: A proprietary social networking service that provides charging and service reminders via “tweet”-like alerts. It also enables communication amongst Prius PHV users.”

Toyota Friend will be powered by Salesforce Chatter, Salesforce.com’s enterprise social messaging platform. Toyota Friend will connect Toyota customers with their cars, their dealership, and with Toyota.

Information that is expected to filter through the application include product and service data as well as maintenance tips. It is not a closed loop system, however, which could be key to marketers: customers can communicate to family, friends, and others through Twitter and Facebook. The service will also be accessible through smart phones, tablet PCs, and other advanced mobile devices.


Do.com – Chatter on Steriods

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Back in September we blogged on the new offering from salesforce.com: do.com.  At that time no one really knew much about what it would do, although with some educated guess work many people, us included, thought that it might be linked to Manymoon, which salesforce.com acquired.

Yesterday Marc Benioff tweeted “Check it out www.do.com! Now live.”

Cue a flurry of people trying to access the site.  Sadly it’s currently invite only and even those who have requested invite codes don’t all have them yet, but no doubt these will be forthcoming in the next few weeks.  Beta invites being trickled out slowly are immensely popular, with Spotify being one tech-firm who have made this model work for them in recent years; but early reports of those who do have access are very positive.

“Do.com is for anyone and everyone,” says Sean Whiteley, Salesforce’s Senior Vice President, in an interview with RWW. “We’re calling this a prosumer application. It’s the closest thing to a consumer app we’ve ever done.”

In December 2010 salesforce.com purchased the open cloud platform Heroku. Then yesterday, Salesforce.com unleashed do.com, which would seem to be a Heroku-based service, but integrated with Gmail (and presumably Google Apps) and indeed Outlook.

The concept is a social-cloud task management and collaboration platform, aimed at corporate and personal users. Think Chatter on Steriods.

Techcrunch report that do.com allows small teams and individuals to manage task lists, organize projects, and capture notes. The app allows you to assign tasks to other users (non-Do users can be sent an email to join), and in joint tasks, users can comment on tasks, accept and reject assignments and more.

Do also serves as an Evernote-like application and allows you to take notes from within the app, and assign yourself tasks from parts of your notes.

As Salesforce says, the app is meant to be used for both everyday consumer, list management use as well as for small group use within a business. So you can use the app to plan a dinner party or coordinate a marketing launch. Once you have a number of different tasks with shared users, you’ll see a Chatter-like Activity Feed, with real-time alerts and access to any comments on specific tasks.

The app is available via a web-based HTML5 app, as well as an iOS app. Do will also be available in the Google Apps Marketplace, Salesforce App Exchange, Chrome Web Store and LinkedIn App Marketplace. Any actions in one of these apps will be synced across your Do account. And Do is integrates with Dropbox so you can share files within the application from the file sharing service.

Do is free for now but Salesforce says eventually it will be adding paid features such as administrative controls and customization. For now, Do is still in private beta but will be opening up to larger audience over next few weeks, and will eventually open to the public in late November.

“A lot of people have referred to [Do.com] as a social productivity app,” Whiteley goes on, “but really it’s the set of things that you need to manage task lists – it can be your own task lists, or ones you share with a group of others. You can organize small or big projects, at home or with life or at work. Plus there’s some utilities such as easily taking notes and having them on all your devices – the basic sets of things you need to get work done with other people.”

Here’s some screenshots:

 


In the clouds or on the ground?

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Gartner’s latest Hype Cycle Report has been released and showed that the hype around has reached its highest levels to date this year.

The analyst firm claimed cloud computing is among the emerging technologies that have moved into the “Peak of Inflated Expectations” stage of the cycle of acceptance and adoption that it charts using a proprietary methodology.

The hype-cycle, tracks technologies’ trends from their conceptualisation, through the hype of them being the “next big thing”, through the valley of despair as they fail to live up to expectations, to a plateau of maturity whereby that technology is used for what it is designed within realistic expectations.

This diagram, shows the Hype Cycle for cloud computing and can help us predict how the technology will be perceived and acted upon in the future.

Jackie Fenn, vice president and Gartner fellow, said “computing remained among those technology areas attracting ongoing interest and activity, alongside social media and mobile.”

At Resource on Demand we follow these reports with great interest and believe that whilst there may be a ‘trough of disillusionment’, this will be short-lived, likely due a double-dip recession where firms will seek to gain value for money from their IT systems, leading to a likely take-up of cloud computing. Indeed it is quite likely that we are already on the ‘slope of enlightenment’, as cloud and web platforms become increasingly common place, especially in the light of iTunes launching iCloud.

What do you think? Is this report accurate? Are we heading into the trough or already on the slope of enlightenment?

Source: Gartner, Hype Cycle for Cloud Computing, 2011 David Mitchell Smith Publication Date: 27 July 2011 ID Number: G00214915 © 2011

 


Teamworking communications: a beginner’s guide

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The good people at BizGene recently approached ROD, asking for our thoughts on online collaboration.  Our Operations Director, Theresa Durrant happily penned a few thoughts for them.

Here’s a snippet from that article:

“There are two sides to communications within a working team. One is technological – there are huge amounts of productivity tricks and tips which work now because we have the technology available which simply wouldn’t have happened a few years back. The second is the ‘soft skills’ side, the people element. Both are vital.

Collaborating over the Internet has expanded dramatically since someone first had the idea. It is possible and very desirable to allow people to work on files and projects simultaneously.”

To read the full article, including Theresa talking about Google Docs and Chatter, just click here.

 


Will the shortage of cloud architects lead to bad clouds?

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David Linthicum writes a compelling piece in infoworld.com, suggesting that there seems to be more cloud construction projects than there is talent to support them.

He writes:

The demand has exploded for those who understand how to build clouds. However, you have pretty much the same number of cloud-experienced architects being chased by an increasing number of talent seekers. Something has to give, and that will be quality and innovation as organizations settle for what they can get versus what they need.

You can read his article in its entirety here.  What do you think?  Does demand outweigh the talent available?  Will something give?  Is David right?


Can we speak the new language of the cloud?

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ROD was recently approached by the good people at Cloud Pro, who wanted our thoughts on how quickly people are adapting to new technologies like Cloud Computing.  Here’s a snippet of the article and the link to the full piece on their website.

Can we speak the new language of the cloud?

Cloud computing has created the need for a new vocabulary – and new languages. How quickly are we adapting to this new way of working?

It is perhaps no surprise that the ‘utopian’ world of cloud computing should throw up new set of programming languages. A new lingua franca was inevitable as software developers came to collude inside the fresh pastures of the cloud computing cloudscape with its untapped possibilities.

While cloud vendors have sought to pacify us with suggestions that software development methodologies and core technology principles translate ‘seamlessly’ to the cloud; the reality is that a whole range of new languages and systems tools has come to be and, as yet, not everybody speaks fluently in these new tongues.

Comparatively new names including Cassandra, Voldemort, Puppet, Chef, Map Reduce and Hadoop are starting to define the skill sets that by which we measure cloud competency at the individual coder level. So has the IT recruitment industry found itself on a blind curve heading downhill faster than it can manage? Furthermore, have programmers themselves recognised the new skills topography they will need to navigate – and what are they doing about it?

Back to school?

At the individual level, software application developers are of course responsible for their own skill sets. As such, they can take it upon themselves to ‘train up’ for the cloud by using online training tools and resources if they wish. However in practice, not every developer will choose to augment his skills, so inequalities in the programmer job market have become more pronounced.

“One thing we have always noticed as cloud recruitment specialists is that there are truly excellent programmers who excel at everything they do; and then there are average programmers who ‘just about get by’ and are sometimes carried along by other members of the team. But, crucially, when it comes to the cloud, this disparity is magnified and there is an even greater wedge between the two tiers,” said Theresa Durrant, operations director of cloud-specialist recruitment consultancy Resource On Demand Limited.

“We typically work for large global IT consultancy brands and our clients are becoming very demanding when it comes to skill sets for the cloud. This issue needs to be highlighted right the way back to the student level, or we risk the uncertainties of a job market suffering from a dearth of core skills. Aberdeen University has apparently started to offer MSc/PgDip in ‘Cloud Computing’, but this is a mere drop in the ocean in terms of what is needed,” added Durrant.

To continue reading this article on the Channel Pro website, please click here.