Outsourcing Software Development has become an integral part of any forward thinking company that understands the importance in being part of a globalized and correlated economy and will seek to expand its global capabilities. Outsourcing software development adds value in terms of time, cost and quality and gives considerable structure to project execution and benefits to all the stakeholders. Good mapping of all organizational processes will be the starting point. Your response to this review should be: “I need to outsource to remain competitive“.
Nevertheless, companies that are thinking about outsourcing their department only for reducing labor costs are blinding themselves to the vast advantages and opportunities that this road can lead their business into. It’s important to keep in mind that off shoring projects these days is no longer just a mean to reduce costs, but has become a tool for adding value to their business by enabling them to concentrate on their core competence.
In an outsourcing engagement, the onsite-offshore hybrid model is the most popular software development model offered by service vendors to their clients. In this model, the outsourcing work is distributed between the onsite centre (usually the client location) and service provider’s offshore development centre. Usually, 20-30% of the work is done at the onsite centre that includes requirement gathering, planning and initial designing, co-ordination, issue resolution, deployment and support. The actual development and testing of the software is done at the offshore centre, based on the requirements provided to them.
This model offers an array of benefits. The outsourcing company is able to release resources for high value-added and priority work and can concentrate on their core business knowledge while delegating technical tasks, maintenance, research or routine tasks to the offshore software development company. Above all, off shoring is about sourcing the talent needed to sustain the innovation engine of a company by adding significant technical knowledge.
What to do when people are talking about your brand on the web
Friday, October 23rd, 2009A brand’s online persona is the first impression for potential leads or clients, which counts for a lot in cyber space. Study after study demonstrates that web surfers have notoriously short attention spans. Failure to capture someone’s attention, or worse, if pegged with a negative association off the bat, odds are you won’t get a second chance to make your case. For this reason it is vital that you keep a positive online reputation intact.
The first step is to monitor your brand all over the internet. Make sure you find out about everything that is being said about your brand. First things first, you need to monitor all the keywords that are associated with your brand. This can be your brands, products, brand abbreviations, company director, public relations officer, also common misspelling of all of these variables.
Second step is to monitor your online reputation on a wide range of two-way internet mediums. This will be social networks, blogs, groups, forums, social media sites, consumer websites, and maybe most importantly on SERP’s. Use to RSS feeds to track these comment mediums with ease.
The most important step and technique is how to react to the negative comments. This can be described as damage control. The truth is that there will many different circumstances and not all negative comments will be the same.
There are the “trolls” and the “rager”, usually focused on degrading others, ranting, making jokes etc. These types of comments do not deserve a response, but mediums that host them should be monitored for information. Responding to specific comments could potentially exposure the comments more. Consumers hate being overly marketed to and a very aware of the marketing and PR practices that companies try to implement. Stay away from exposing your brand as being overly concerned with laughable comments it can only make your brand look worse in the eyes of consumers.
(more…)
Tags: brand comments, Brand Management, brands, Customer Relationship Management, online brand management, online reputation management, online strategies
Posted in Brand Management, Brand reputation management, Internet Marketing, Social Media Optimization | 3 Comments »