Monthly Archives: September 2013Blog

Content Strategy

Search, social, penguin, panda. Websites today require a content strategy and someone to oversee it.

People have been using the web to find information since day one. It’s amazing that content hasn’t gotten the premier position it deserves until now. But that’s what social media has done. Sharing content through social networks increases that content’s value exponentially through the power of recommendation. If a user says something is good, it carries much more weight than if a brand, media outlet, agency, or salesperson says the same thing. And content can be anything, whether it’s hot off the presses or exhumed from the archives. A creative touch can put value on anything, and it becomes content.

“A head of Content Strategy, Creation and Distribution … should be at least VP level and report to the CMO. It makes sense that this person lives in marketing, but they are going to have to build relationships and bridges to every part of the organization and teach companies to think about all published materials as content. Very importantly, they must evangelize the importance of content in driving business results and help the entire company think about whether or not a piece of content is worth sharing.”

Soon all the social networks will want to use your likeness and words to place implied recommendations on anything for sale. The more your content is shared, and the more shareable it is, the more social power will come into your selling. Today’s marketing requires every website to have a content strategy and someone to drive it. Think “content.”

Read full story: http://bit.ly/1a0tCBM

Controlling a PC from an iPad Turns Tablets Into Genuine Work Devices

I have a problem with the whole “Post-PC Era” thing. The problem is that trying to do any real work on a tablet is a miserable experience. Typing and keyboard issues aside, there is so much that you can’t do on a tablet that we take for granted on PCs. Much of that has to do with the limited tablet interface and the fact that desktop applications are so much more full-featured than apps. Also, file management doesn’t exist at all on tablets, which can be absolutely maddening. In my opinion, the only serious “work” that users can do on a tablet is email, web browsing, note-taking, and perhaps writing (if you can live with the touch interface or a flimsy add-on keyboard). I call my iPad my “couch computer.” It’s a handy little device to have around, but it’s good for little else.

What would be nice is a way to access and control a desktop computer and all its applications and files from a tablet. The only remaining obstacle to doing real work would be the tablet interface. But full functionality and access to files could be re-established if the tablet simply served as a portal to a full computing experience.

Such solutions have existed for a while, such as GoToMyPC and LogMeIn. But these run into interface problems as well since PCs rely on precise control of a mouse, which is difficult to emulate with finger-controlled tablets. However, a new product, called Parallels Access, may have solved these problems. Reviewed by Walt Mossberg, Parallels Access claims to turn the desktop experience of a computer into a full-screen tablet experience that makes controlling a PC remotely quite easy.

Unlike many others, [Access] doesn’t force you to constantly try and emulate the precise mouse pointer for which most of these computer programs were designed. It runs them like iPad apps, in full screen and at the iPad’s resolution, yet preserving full functionality and the ability to switch among open apps and windows on the computer. It works over both Wi-Fi and cellular connections.

File sharing is still a bear, but Parallels is said to be working on a solution. Also, the program is quite pricey — $80 PER YEAR, PER COMPUTER accessed. Ouch! But it may be worth it for the ability to do real work on the road. Read the article, check out the accompanying video, and be sure to read the comments, where a less expensive program with similar capabilities called Splashtop is discussed (with Splashtop’s CEO providing some interesting notes).

The “Post-PC Era” may be a clever marketing take, but at this point it requires better “Post-PC” apps and a remote PC, too.

Read full article: http://on.wsj.com/17kK3Xf