Mediaboss Marketing

MILPITAS, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--

Social email provider harmon.ie today announced it is helping Microsoft Outlook users embrace social networking by making IBM Connections available through a social sidebar in the users email inbox. The resulting cross-platform product will aggregate IBM Connections social objects, Microsoft SharePoint documents, presence awareness and unified communications into a single email window to streamline user access to social business tools.

This project leverages harmon.ies social aggregation technology to enable users to access multiple social and collaborative activity streams without leaving the email interface where they spend a large portion of their workday. harmon.ies ability to enable typical business users to adopt new collaboration tools without changing their daily work habits has helped enterprises worldwide increase end user adoption of collaboration platforms from an average of 20 percent to as high as 80 percent in just a few months time.

Just because a company chooses to use another email platform does not mean they should miss out on becoming a social business, said Jeffrey Schick, Vice President of Social Software, IBM. Social-enabling email is the first step to connecting people with people, and people with information, in the context of a business users daily work habits.

A recent uSamp survey validates the choice of email as the hub for multiple computing activities. In the survey, 78% of respondents reported a greater willingness to use collaboration and social business tools if they are accessible in the familiar email work environment. Nearly nine out of 10 users indicated that they publish documents and/or emails on a collaboration platform when they can do so from within email, a 75% increase over those without an integrated email option.

Enterprises are eager to accelerate the adoption of social platforms. The most successful adoption strategy is an evolutionary one that exploits the ubiquitous use of email to incorporate collaboration and social tools into the business users current workflow rather than attempting to change the way people work , said Yaacov Cohen, co-founder and CEO at harmon.ie. This collaboration with IBM advances that strategy by providing a cross-platform solution that combines access to the Connections social experience and SharePoint document collaboration in the same email window.

The new cross-platform product will be available later this year.

About harmon.ie

harmon.ie (pronounced 'harmony') is a provider of software solutions that advance social business by aggregating document collaboration, enterprise social networking, unified communications and other social tools into the email client and other locations where users already spend their workday, saving time and eliminating point solutions that that complicate usability. Thousands of businesses already use harmon.ie to vastly increase user adoption of applications such as Microsoft SharePoint and Google Docs for social and collaboration functions. For more information, visit http://www.harmon.ie/.

All trademarks, trade names, service marks, and logos referenced herein belong to their respective companies.

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harmon.ie to Make Outlook Social with IBM Connections

SAN FRANCISCO--(BUSINESS WIRE)--

Connected consumers in the U.S. are reporting a growing wave of distrust across major communications channels including mobile, fixed and social networking due to fears of security threats such as viruses, spam and phishing attacks, according to new research released by Cloudmark, Inc., the global leader in carrier-grade messaging security.

The survey, conducted in conjunction with online research provider Toluna, analyzed the mobile, fixed-line and social networking habits, security threat exposure and sentiment of 1,000 U.S. consumers.

Trust in the Security of Mobile Communications Platforms Declining

The survey results show that 19 percent of U.S. respondents have less trust in the security of mobile short message service than they did 12 months ago. While previously considered a very trusted communications channel, overall, SMS ranked a distant third (15 percent) among the platforms survey respondents consider to be the most secure, behind voice (43 percent) and email (34 percent). The SMS platform holds a higher level of trust among younger users, with nearly one quarter (24 percent) of 18-24 year olds and 21 percent of 25-34 year olds naming it as the platform they consider the most secure. However, trust in the SMS channel appears to decline with age, with just eight percent of the 55-plus demographic citing it as the most secure platform.

This trend of declining trust was mirrored across fixed and social networking channels, where 41 percent of respondents reported less trust in the security of social networks and 18 percent said they have less trust in the security of instant messaging services. Meanwhile, 44 percent reported that they have less trust in the security of email than they did a year ago.

Threat Penetration across Devices and Messaging Platforms

Mobile social networking appears to be gaining significant traction, with 19 percent of 18-24 year olds and 13 percent of 25-34 year olds naming it as the communications platform they access most regularly. However, in spite of its popularity, trust in the social networking platform is low and seemingly continuing to decline: just three percent named it as the platform they trusted the most, the least of all platforms. In addition, social networking websites are second only to email as the platform on which consumers have experienced viruses most frequently (21 percent).

Messaging abuse remains the number one security threat across all major platforms 61 percent of fixed line and 13 percent of mobile users claim to have suffered spam-related problems. Despite the high profile of email and desktop threats in recent years, 75 percent of Americans have experienced a security threat on their desktop or PC. Nearly half (49 percent) of these reported incidents were due to a malicious virus while almost a third (31 percent) were attributed to phishing attacks over email or instant messaging while online. Meanwhile, 18 percent of mobile users reported that they had experienced some type of security threat on their mobile device.

Security Distrust Could Hinder Mobile Commerce

Excerpt from:
Research Reveals Decline in Trust Across Major Communications Channels – Mobile, Social Networks and Email

Ilana Rabinowitz is a "lion" in ecommerce and social networking. As Vice President of Marketing for the Lion Brand Yarn Company, she built a newsletter with over 1 million subscribers, launched an award winning podcast and blog, and created a presence on social media outlets that gives Lion Brand Yarn a circulation greater than all of the trade publications combined.

Ilana writes and blogs at Social Media Explorer and Marketing Without a Net, Google Plus and Twitter.

EcommerceBytes caught up with Ilana to find out some of the secrets of successful social networking for ecommerce players.

Do you see social networking as an important tool for online sellers who may not have a nationally known brand?

Ilana Rabinowitz: I think social networking is most important for companies that are not nationally known brands. This is because people do business with companies they know and trust.

If you are not a known brand, you have to help people to learn about you and develop trust by showing them that you know your product and you are there to be helpful, every day, when you're not selling, by providing useful and relevant content. This doesn't happen by broadcasting marketing messages. It happens by sharing information and telling your story on social media.

Online sellers also need to be on social media because people often make buying decisions based on the ideas and recommendations of friends.

What are three social networking sites where all online sellers would be participating and, if you chose just one, which one would it be and why?

Ilana Rabinowitz: Choosing the right social networks for your business is not a simple one-size-fits-all question. It depends on how much time you have to devote to social media, what your goals are, who your audience is and what your resources and talents are.

I would never recommend that anyone try to conquer three at once. It would overwhelm any small business. Anyone just starting out should realize that while there may not be an out of pocket cost, there is a time commitment, and to do it right means that one or more people will need to set aside time to seriously dedicate to it.

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Social Networking Most Important for Small Ecommerce Players

By Eve Tahmincioglu

Figuring out which social networking site is the best for your job search is like trying to decipher a riddle with a constantly changing answer.

When Google+ was introduced, many expected the site to rival Facebook and LinkedIn when it came to its job-hunting potential. But recent data show that the social networking site hasnt lived up to all the hype. Google+ users only spend mere minutes on the site each month, compared to almost eight hours a month on Facebook, comScore reported last week.

And now, an increasing number of people are using Pinterest, the latest social-networking darling; and some are even posting graphic-intensive resumes in an effort to impress employers. The number of unique visitors to the site jumped 56 percent since December, according to comScore, to nearly 12 million.

All this social media ballyhoo has many wondering which site will help them land the job of their dreams.

Once upon a time, career experts pointed to LinkedIn as the only site workers had to be on, but now thats changing. More playful sites such as Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Quora, and even Pinterest are turning out to be valuable tools for job-hunters, too, wrote George Anders, author of The Rare Find: Spotting Exceptional Talent Before Everyone Else," in a Harvard Business Review post last week.

If the alphabet soup of social media choices has you wanting to shun them all, think again. Employers are increasingly using social media to connect with applicants. The most recent data show 56 percent of the organizations currently use social networking websites when recruiting for potential jobs, according to the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM), which surveyed nearly 550 HR professionals via email last year. Thats up from 34 percent in 2008, the last time the survey was conducted.

Where recruiters are going to find you out in cyber space, however, is a moving target.

Among the employers SHRM polled there are three top choices:

But a survey put out last month by The Creative Group, an interactive advertising company, of advertising and marketing executives found that if they had to pick one social networking, 56 percent would choose Facebook, followed by LinkedIn and Google+.

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For job hunters, social networking options abound

I have a couple thousand "friends" on Facebook, and a few days ago I cyber-smacked one of them over the head like an ugly son-in-law. He had made what I thought was a very snarky, malicious comment about one of my awe-inspiring, earth-shattering posts. Such an offense I could not abide.

So, in defense of my opinions (more accurately, my ego), I took to the keyboard and let him have it in front of Mark Zuckerberg's 800 million Facebook users (That's right, if you haven't been paying attention, Facebook is now the third largest nation on the planet, exceeded only by the populations of India and China). But a day later I discovered it was a huge misunderstanding.

My friend had not aimed his comment at me; it was directed at someone else. Further, he was being more sarcastic than sinister, more playful than mean-spirited, but it just didn't communicate across the online superhighway. I apologized profusely and retreated to a corner of the World Wide Web with my foot, mouse, and keyboard in my mouth.

This whole incident, as minor as it turned out to be, is reflective of how we communicate and miscommunicate in the 21st century. For years I have noticed how people will say things in e-mails that they would never say to someone else's face (good and bad), and I often warn my children about this as their thumbs blaze across the QUERTY keypads of their cell phones.

"Social networking" sites greatly magnify the effect, an effect now known as "online dis-inhibition." We seem to lose our social restraint, our better judgment sometimes we lose our minds completely while hiding behind the pseudo-invisibility of the Internet and the digital airways.

A congressperson posts racy pictures to his account and scuttles his career; a middle-aged husband rattles all his marital skeletons online and ends up in divorce court; a high school football star loses his promised scholarship because of his Twitter rantings; a young woman can't land a job because prospective employers Google her and deem her a liability: These are the realities, virtual and otherwise, of today's world.

I don't want to sound like some crazed Luddite who hates technology and pines for the days of the rotary phone or the covered wagon. I love WI-FI, streaming video, GPS, downloadable audio, and satellites. These words you are reading were typed on a laptop computer I cannot live without, and I've received a dozen emails in the course of writing this column. No, I'm not ready to give up these things.

But neither am I ready to accept all of these technologies without some critique and discernment. While I now recognize the countless alternative ways we can connect with others, I also recognize that we are lonelier and more disconnected than ever. I can see that we are more aware of the world around us than any previous generation, and yet I see that we may be the most narcissistic generation to ever live in North America.

As "social networking" grows, it appears we must guard against real communication disintegrating, and the constant undermining of real, human connection. Technologies aside, we still need flesh-and-blood relationships, connections that are built upon mutual respect, actual time together, shared interests, and face-to-face conversation.

People of faith may have more at stake in this issue than most, because faith fails in a hyper-individualized, self-centered world. Faith only flourishes in the environs of an authentic, unselfish community, not a virtual imitation where people hide behind their avatars.

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Real Social Networking