Archive for January, 2009

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A Multi-Media Database

January 14th, 2009

Those fortunate enough to have attended CES, MacWorld, and the Affiliate Summit have done a great job sharing their experience with those less fortunate (like myself) who were unable to attend. Luckily for me, many of the attendees were sharing their experience via tagged tweets, videos, podcasts and FlickR photos, so in my own way, I was still able to participate as a virtual attendee.

Technology has made it easy to share photos and videos instantaneously with services like FlickR (over 100,000 search results on CES alone) and YouTube (over 200,000 search results on CES). Now that you are coming down from your technology buzz is a good time to ask yourself, how do you track all of the content you created or received outside of the event? Of course we all have our accounts with iTunes, YouTube, FlickR as well as numerous independent sites which are great for capturing traffic that you wouldn’t have had otherwise. But how are you storing those files today? Probably not on your hard drive, we all know what happens when you stockpile video. What if you could organize all of your photos, podcasts and videos in one centralized place?

To make things easier, I’d recommend uploading all your photos, podcasts and videos in a centralized online database that has flexible field types to handle images and video not to mention a powerful search feature making it easier to find that that one photo or video.  Make sure the online database you select has ample storage for your media library.  And to go even a step further, your databases can be categorized based on event or activity.

How are you keeping track of your growing multi-media library, today and is it working? If not, give me a call at 1.800.673.3302, and I will help get you started.

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Posted in features, online database

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Detroit Bailout Funds for TrackVia?

January 13th, 2009

Yesterday’s Wall Street Journal article entitled “Inventory Traffic Jam Hits Chrysler” made me do a double-take. And not just because the photo accompanying the article was from my home town of Golden, Colorado. The article describes how car dealers are refusing new inventory from factories due to slow sales, causing an inventory pile-up for manufacturers.

I’m pretty sure TrackVia can’t solve that problem, but it sure can help manage the logistics. I know this because one of our customers is a major automobile manufacturer that uses TrackVia to track vehicles that have been shipped from factories to off-site storage lots. In fact they’re using a nifty date formula to see how long each vehicle has been in the lot, so they can prioritize shipments and meet targets for inventory turns.

Meanwhile, politicos in Washington are working out conditions that will be attached to any auto-maker bailout. I wonder if my Congressman could slip in a requirement that car makers have to use TrackVia to sort things out? Hmmm….

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Posted in general, industry trends

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Toys for Tots on the Fast Track with TrackVia

January 12th, 2009

With over 300 volunteers and thousands of attendees at the annual Atlanta Two Hundred’s Toys for Tots Drive, Steve Kilby needed a centralized database to help better track volunteers, attendees and sponsorships.

After discovering TrackVia over a year ago, Steve has saved over 300 hours of administrative headaches and has in turn increased the efficiency of this social charity.

In the following podcast, Steve highlights his experience with TrackVia and how the web-based database has helped his organization. Click here to read a more detailed case study.

Want to share your story?  Send an email to ed.dunigan@trackvia.com

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Posted in Podcasts, customer stories, general

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Apple’s Design Secrets

January 9th, 2009

The MacWorld Expo wraps up today in San Francisco, and though CEO Steve Jobs didn’t attend, he stole the show anyway by announcing he has a hormone imbalance. Meanwhile the success of Apple’s products hums right along: iTunes sales reached 6 billion songs, the MacBook became the top-selling laptop computer in the U.S., and the number of third-party software applications available in the iPhone’s App Store topped 10,000.

I was one of the 250,000 programmers who downloaded the iPhone software development kit (SDK) in the first three months after it was announced. I figured I’d try my hand at building a simple iPhone application just for kicks. I didn’t get very far, but I did discover a little gem that helps explain much of Apple’s success.

Tucked away in the technical documentation of the iPhone SDK was an article called, “iPhone Human Interface Guidelines.” (It’s here, but you have to register as an iPhone developer to access it.) It provides guidelines for building iPhone applications that users will understand and enjoy. Along the way, it explains how Apple thinks about software design, in terms that are applicable to any software or web-based product, not just the iPhone. For example, it explains the importance of providing feedback to users:

Users need immediate feedback when they operate controls. Your application should respond to every user action with some visible change. For example, make sure list items highlight briefly when users select them.

It continues in another section,

Users need to know whether their requests are being processed and when their actions might result in data loss or other problems. That said, it’s also important to avoid overdoing communication by, for example, alerting the user to conditions that aren’t really serious or asking for confirmation too often.

The document also uses dozens of screenshots to illustrate specific best practices in design, such as thinking top-down, minimizing input required from users, and expressing information succinctly. The advice goes on for dozens of pages.

If you design or build software or other high-tech products, or you’re just curious how Apple keeps cranking out so many successful products, I recommend taking a look!

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Posted in industry trends

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Should the USDA Certify Green Electronics?

January 8th, 2009

There is a lot of buzz about “green” products invading CES this week. Several have identified green products as a key theme of the conference. I must ask, what makes an electronic product “green”? Is it grown on a farm without pesticides?

I previously worked for a brand consulting firm and had an organic bread company as a client. I literally broke bread with consumers in their homes to explore what “natural, made with organic and certified organic” meant to bread lovers. It turns out USDA seals add credibility but consumers view all bread as natural and a little organic goes a long way.

If the USDA requires 95% of a product’s ingredients to be organic to proudly display the USDA badge, should electronics have to be made with 95% recycled materials to be classified as “green products”?

I’m all about taking the steps necessary to produce greener electronics; however I feel the tech community should set some standards to alleviate confusing or misleading consumers. I like to think TrackVia is a green online database but I don’t feel confident saying we are 100% green. The technology community has a chance to prevent the confusion confronted by consumers in the grocery aisle over organic and natural. We should not muddle the waters with various shades of green. Either a product is green or its not.

To learn more about “green” electronics, Greenpeace has done some of the work for us in its recently released report titled “Green Electronics: the search continues”.

What do you think the standards should be for an electronic product to call itself green? Bonus points – what should the seal look like?

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Posted in industry trends

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What did you do during the Salesforce blackout?

January 6th, 2009

Word traveled fast on Twitter when Salesforce.com had an outage today.

I am amazed at the number of tweets about Salesforce.com being down (it even made the twit scoop list). In the social media world, where was Salesforce in the conversation?  The bigger question, how should companies respond to an outage as it is happening? 

I admit I am 2 hours behind the outage, but the outage made me wonder what do you do when the tools you depend on go down? Silicon Alley Insider had an interesting suggestion that Starbucks should have had a midday coffee promotion. What would you do?

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Posted in general, industry trends

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Next Generation PR – Meet Your Database

January 5th, 2009

In PR it isn’t always about “who” you know… In today’s world where voices are a plenty, tracking “who” you should know is just as important. With a rise in social media and the growing influence of bloggers, the days of relying on a media subscription for your PR activities are long gone.

Most PR professionals subscribe to at least one media database but like me, you probably aren’t using the notes features. I, for one, use a number of media databases and would rather not store my information in a service that I may not continue using- not to mention that many of these services have limited sharing functionality.

I have used a number of databases throughout the past decade or so. Most were server-based and made it difficult to keep records updated in real time given out-of-office requirements. Today I run a virtual firm, Digital Idea Media, with two partners and a number of contractors. What we thought would just be a nice alternative to saving our contacts in Excel has quickly turned into a platform with unlimited ways in which we can track client programs and our business activities.

I decided that it would be best to share a list of the few surprises that we found in using TrackVia for our business:

1. Influencer Database – track all media, analysts, bloggers and record all PR activities (it isn’t just media relations anymore); run target lists and reports on activities per quarter; include images of contacts for tour briefing books

2. Media Database – track all audio, video and blog posts and upload stats for quarterly reporting; provide clients with a quick and accessible record of all media

3. CRM: Prospect/Client Database – track people who work for companies of interest; include background information; add notes for touch points; send holiday cards

4. Client Reporting Tool – keep an editorial or activities calendar and house documents that need approval; house final documents where all information can be assessed by the client or the firm at any time

5. Newsletter Database – track newsletter issues and calendar of ideas; use the mail merge feature to send the newsletter to the contact database

6. Blog Planning Database – create a list of blog ideas and final posts to keep on top of regular posting

7. Planning Database – track all PR activities for the year in one place; record how you did against your goals and keep your “PR Plan” in a living database

As you can see, there are many different ways in which you can use an online database solution like TrackVia. What we didn’t expect when we started using the database was the value in sharing the status of activities with clients, not just with our team as we had done in the past. The TrackVia database allows us to create the fields that are most relevant to our business and, we are able to customize a solid database that allows us to stay organized and our business well managed. We are just getting started and would love to hear how others are using it in our industry or others.

Melissa Hourigan
Partner, Digital Idea Media
Recurring TrackVia Guest Blogger

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Posted in general, use case

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The Email-Enabled Database

January 2nd, 2009

I read with interest the recent announcement that Yahoo! is opening up its email service to third-party software. That’s probably good news for programmers who want to build email-enabled applications, but what about ordinary business users? Since email is a staple of communications in the business world – now totaling 200 billion messages per day, according to Cisco – wouldn’t it be nice if you could integrate email with your business database without hiring a programmer? 

With TrackVia, you can. We’ve always had good outbound email integration – for example, email campaigns, and emailed reports, calendars, and statistics that are delivered on demand or via automated distribution schedules. But now, we’ve launched some neat improvements to our integration with inbound emails. By inbound email integration, I mean having your TrackVia database check an email address and pull copies of received messages into the database.

The best of these upgrades is that TrackVia can now be set either to create a new database record for each email received, or to intelligently find a match with an existing database record and update it.  When a match is found, TrackVia can automatically update a field in the matching record.  For example, if a previous job applicant emails an updated resume to your HR department at careers@acmeinc.com, TrackVia can automatically add the new resume to the applicant’s database record, and change a status field to “new update!” so that the new resume is easily noticed.

With this update-matching-records option, TrackVia is a great way to track and manage business processes that involve email. In addition, we added support for secure email connections, for leaving a copy of email messages on your email server, and other technical bells and whistles.

If you want to join the email integration revolution, please contact us! We’ll help you send your email traffic into your TrackVia database and start better managing your share of those 200 billion messages a day.

 

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Posted in email campaign, features, general