Debate about social media in the enterprise is just so damn silly. It seems crazy to me to try to regulate technology in the workplace when the real harm (or benefit!) comes from the people using that technology. My recommendations to organizations are simple: Have guidelines about what you can and cannot do at work. Hold employees to a measurable standard for performance on the job. (Read cydcor articles about direct marketing) But don’t try to ban a specific set of social media technologies.Your guidelines should include advice about how to communicate in any medium, including face-to-face conversations, presentations at events, email, social media, online forums and chat rooms, and other forms of communication. Rather than putting restrictions on social media (that is, the technology), it’s better to focus on guiding the way people behave. Cydcor provides you enough informations about marketing.

The corporate guidelines should inform employees that they can’t reveal company secrets, they can’t use inside information to trade stock or influence prices, and they must be transparent and provide their real name and affiliation when communicating. As long as your employees get their work done in a satisfactory manner, there should be no need to regulate their minute-to-minute behavior. You don’t regulate how often people can use the restroom, when they can chat with a colleague in the hallway about their kids, or whether they use a mobile phone for company calls while taking a cigarette break, so why regulate how they interact via social media? If you have individual cases of people not getting their jobs done in a satisfactory manner, deal with that problem as the “people issue” it really is. If it persists after several warnings, fire the employee, but make sure your expectations were clear from the start..

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Ticket markets raise a large variety of pricing questions that are of substantial interest for theoretical economists. They also offer a unique laboratory experiment for empiricists because they exhibit rich sources of price variations. Prices vary because seats are different, because seats are located in different places, because performances take place on different dates, because venues offer different complementary goods, or because the promoter bundles several tickets together in a season ticket package such as New York Rangers Tickets, to name just a few examples.

Some of these pricing issues have received scant attention as applications of broader economic theories. In the last ten to twenty years, however, ticket pricing as such has started to receive more attention. This recent interest has produced a set of papers that cover both theoretical and empirical issues. What will surprise the reader who fancies these issues is that many of them have been studied in isolation. Surprisingly enough, these works rarely reference each other. In fact, there are many disjoint works on ticket pricing but no real literature per se on the topic.

In ticket markets, firms do not sell a homogeneous good since no two seats offer the same experience. One does not see or hear the same way from two different seats in the premises. These differences in visibility and hearing will depend mostly on the distance to the performance. In extreme situations, consumers are so far away that they can barely see the performance but rather experience it on nearby television screens. Firms will take these differences in product quality into account and will accordingly sell different seats at different prices. You can analyze some tickets such as Rogers Centre Tickets, Toyota Center Tickets, and Boston Opera House tickets as your own literature.

Creating the right team is imperative to your success. A team is comprised of people who can bring necessary skill sets to the venture. A team is different from partners. Partners are financially and legally tied to the venture while team members are brought in to create and continue the process. Team members can be employees or sub-contactors.

These are people you can control – you get to pick them. You can use their services for as long as you like. If they don’t work out as planned, you can find a different team member or you can find a place on the team where this person can be more effective.

Creating the right environment for the team is equally important. People will give their best when they feel that their services are being valued and that they are entrusted with producing a part of the success of the venture. Team members must have the same values as that of the venture and they must follow the same code of conduct consistent with your desired outcome. They must truly want the venture to be a success and feel that they are a part of that success. They must work well with the other team members.

Differences are encouraged only if they are presented in a positive fashion, recognizing the efforts of the others. Each team member must give more than they are asked for in their areas of expertise. This does not mean extra hours; it means working with heart and soul, working with the creative minds flowing, working with a positive mental attitude, and working together with the others so that all are winners.

What ideas do you have that will create a positive, successful team? How can you create this team and have each person feel that they are as important a part of the success of the venture as you are? Study successful entities to find out how they treat their team members. Find out what motivates team members in successful entities to keep them successful – is it money, power, trust, fear, etc.? Thinking these things out before you create the team will help you in putting together the right team for your venture.

You should write out all the positions of your team and keep updating it as you grow as when you grow you will need to change out some positions on your team. This is a big mistake that people make as they grow. They keep the same team members that were effective when they were small and they do not re-evaluate the need for replacing members who have not grown to levels where they are now needed. Therefore the overall team growth is limited by the lack of ability of one or more members. Just like upgrading your peer group, always be open to and active in upgrading your team members.

You must strive to place the right people on your team. This goes for all positions you pay for, including lawyers, accountants, advisors, sub contractors etc. Be clear on what is a must upfront and make the positions open as specific as possible.

If you are just starting out then make your team as simple and complete as possible. Just be sure that your team members are able to excel and have knowledge in the industry and direction you are going in. The last thing you want to do is to have to micromanage your team members. If you find you are doing so you have made a mistake and replace them right away.

Your team members must be proactive to your needs and outcome. If not replace them or place them in a position where they can be more effective. Please always keep in mind that in most cases you are paying for their services in one manner or another. Never pay a team member 100% upfront for their services as this always gives them something to aspire to. Placing the right team members in the right place will make your endeavor soar.

In 1998, Shawn Fanning, an 18-year old student at Northeastern University in Boston, couldn’t access all the music files he wanted to download. So Fanning looked for an easier and better way to access MP3, or music files. By 1999, the file sharing technology that became better known as Napster was driving recording industry executives crazy. Rather than embrace the technology and make it their own, industry executives started to prosecute Napster users who downloaded and shared music without paying royalties. According to Maryam Alavi, vice dean and chaired professor of information strategy at Emory University’s Goizueta Business School, “Suing 14 and 15 year olds wasn’t really going to work,” she says.

As a result, technology completely changed the recording industry and nearly a decade later, the industry is still grappling with ways to profit and remain competitive. If the industry had embraced what was happening with music on the Internet, it might have harnessed the technology to its benefit rather than allow college students and others to dictate its course, notes Alavi who spoke on leveraging technology during the Executive Women of Goizueta Conference held recently in Atlanta.

Although the recording industry’s troubles are well documented, Alavi reminded the packed audience that technology is a constantly evolving medium and though technological resources are available to most businesses, recognizing how best to use them can make a significant impact on a company.

According to Alavi, executives can utilize technology to achieve competitive and organizational advantages by consistently auditing whether their business model and processes are in alignment with technological capabilities. “Technology can really change, diminish or render your business model obsolete,” explains Alavi. “If your business model and technology are misaligned, it’s going to have negative consequences.”

Even established brands are not protected from technology-induced changes, warns Alavi. Take Encyclopædia Britannica, which published its first encyclopedia in 1768, and had been in business for well over 200 years, when Microsoft put its Encarta product on a CD for use in PCs in the early 1990s. Executives at Encyclopædia Britannica ignored the move and as a result nearly went out of business.

And it’s not just big businesses that need to pay attention. Alavi tells the tale of “Mr. Harmel,” a freelance photographer who specializes in images related to the healthcare industry. A museum wants to use images of people sneezing for an informational kiosk. Harmel directs them to some of his stock photos and sells the museum six shots at $150 each. Then the museum discovered istockphotos.com. At that site, the museum could purchase very similar shots for about $1 each. So they cancelled the order with the photographer. “Mr. Harmel now has to rethink his strategy,” notes Alavi.

The value of IT alignment
Although all firms have access to technological resources, the differences in what organizations gain from using information technology depend on the management of technology. Performing IT alignment audits on a regular basis is essential, contends Alavi, and provides the key to achieving competitive and organizational advantage. Regular audits give executives a better understanding of their business’ technological capabilities and enables them to better identify technology-driven business innovation. According to Alavi, executives and business owners will be more apt to make smart investments in technology if they ask themselves the following key questions:

• Can IT help me reach new markets?
• Can IT reduce barriers to entry in my business?
• Can IT make my business processes faster or smarter or both?
• How might IT impact who performs a process and where it’s done?

“There are all kinds of ways technology can enhance a business model and create opportunities,” stresses Alavi. Technological advancements can allow existing businesses to reach existing customers in new ways, reach new customers, increase customer loyalty via value-added services, and use data to create new sales opportunities through cross-selling and the like.

For example, technology allows airlines to send customers a message—via email, text or voice mail—to notify them if a flight has been delayed or cancelled. These value-added services help create customer loyalty, notes Alavi.

When an existing customer logs onto Amazon.com, the retailer uses data collected from the user’s past purchases to greet the customer with items “recommended” for him or her. Amazon also uses technology to exploit cross-selling opportunities. If a customer researches a certain book, Amazon provides details and reviews as well as links to similar books.

Entire business ecosystems are spawned by new technologies, adds Alavi. Online auctioneer eBay was founded in 1995 and the infrastructure of eBay made all kinds of new businesses possible (eBay hosts over 300,000 online stores worldwide and claims more than 220 million registered users).

Let Technology Propel your Business
Technology can also refine business processes and make business models more efficient. For instance, Cisco Systems, Inc. is a top provider of IP-related networking equipment, but Cisco doesn’t operate a single manufacturing plant, explains Alavi. Cisco relies on a handful of contract manufacturers for the bulk of its production. A single enterprise extranet connects manufacturers and distributors. By creating electronic links instead of physical ones, Cisco is able to reduce the number of steps necessary to obtain and fulfill customer orders.

Technology can also improve the ability of companies to manage process knowledge. Cisco provides the data collected by its customer service department to equipment designers and manufacturers. Through this process, Cisco’s been able to trouble shoot, identify design and marketing flaws and correct them. “Companies can slice and dice data to create insight,” notes Alavi.

Although it’s a huge multi-year undertaking, many hospitals either plan to or have already revamped their electronic patient record systems so that patient information can be quickly accessed when needed to enhance quality and/or efficiency of patient care. For example, when a doctor prescribes a medicine, he or she will be alerted if that particular drug could have negative consequences when taken along with another medication the patient is already taking. The technology even suggests a similar drug that won’t cause complications.

Technology can also affect what processes a business decides to keep in house. According to Alavi, technology is the impetus behind outsourcing and the emerging phenomenon of “crowd/expert sourcing.”

Crowd/expert sourcing refers to a situation in which information technology allows a large number of individuals to participate in design and development of a product or service in an ad hoc fashion. InnoCentive is an example of expert sourcing. InnoCentive is a web-based system that matches R&D projects of about 35 Fortune 500 companies with about 90,000 registered scientists and engineers from around the world. InnoCentive was set up by Eli Lilly in 2001. Other companies that use the system pay a fee to Lilly to list their project on the system. The registered expert who solves a listed problem gets paid $10,000 to $100,000 based on the scope and complexity of the problem. For example, when Colgate-Palmolive faced a challenge in injecting fluoride power into its toothpaste tube without it dispersing it into surrounding air, the company posted its problem on InnoCentive. A physicist in Canada solved the problem and was paid $25,000. “Could Colgate/Palmolive have solved that problem on its own? Sure, but quickly and for $25,000? Probably not,” notes Alavi. “Technology allows us to change the boundaries of an organization when it makes sense and adds value.”

Alavi advises business executives to monitor regularly what processes are best kept inside the organization, which ones are best outsourced and which ones should be kept somewhere in between.

Remaining competitive is an ongoing process and maintaining that momentum should include regular technology assessments. According to Alavi, business owners and executives “should be constantly thinking about the alignment of technology with their organization’s business model and business processes.”

The Executive Women of Goizueta’s (EWG) mission is to provide a forum for executive level businesswomen to interact and support each other. EWG provides its members the environment in which to share experiences and business strategies, to learn about recent business trends and research, and to motivate one another to be successful women leaders in business. EWG’s Vision is to provide an atmosphere of “Women empowering Women.” To this end, EWG holds regular events including informal discussion forums, an annual conference, and breakfast meetings with business leaders. Use payday advance for saving loans.