Enterprise social software tools have multiplied manifold in the past year, but which one will work for your organisation? GigaOm Pro weighs in with several considerations in its recent report on “Social Media in the Enterprise”:

• Know what you want to achieve with your initiative. Social media tools can achieve a huge range of different tasks, from better internal collaboration to lead generation. What does your firm need to do?
• Understand your organization’s culture and leadership. Social media won’t change an organization’s culture. Understanding the culture and leadership of your organization will have a huge impact on your requirements, choice of tool and how to implement and configure it.
• Listen, watch, understand and interview or survey the constituent base that will be asked to participate in your social initiative. It’s important to figure out how your new social initiative will be received and used by the people you hope will utilize it. Make sure you have involvement and buy-in at an early stage, and understand your users’ needs.
• Ensure that you have an effective resource and content plan in place to manage your community. Your new social software can enable an existing community or form new ones, but in order to be successful, communities need ongoing cultivation. Make sure that you have the resources and a plan in place to cultivate your community.
• Initiate conversations with your legal, HR and IT teams early on, in order to understand the limitations and risks that may be associated with your initiative. As with any new business initiative, you should make sure that you understand the risks involved with implementing social software.

(via WebWorkerDaily)

And while you are at it, it never hurts to abide by some of the golden rules of social media.

RWW has just released a report that will help guide businesses seeking to engage with online communities on their own websites or all around the social web. It includes deep-dives into areas like return on investment for online community management, job descriptions for community managers, the Marketing/Customer Service Balance, and dealing with challenging community members.  There are also comprehensive interviews with successful community managers, and a collection of valuable additional resources such as podcasts, Facebook groups for community managers to connect through, and must-attend events in the community management industry.

All said, with RWW’s extremely current, no-fat, incisive and though-provoking commentary, the $299 value is probably well-justified. A teaser is available for free. Get it here.

Michael Stelzner published a free downloadable report on Social Media Marketing Industry Report: How Marketers Are Using Social Media to Grow Their Businesses. [PDF]

We set out to uncover the “who, what, where, when and why” of social media marketing with this report. Nearly 900 of your peers provided the kind of insight that previously has not existed. In this report you’ll find:

1. The top social media marketing questions marketers want answered
2. How much time marketers are investing in social media
3. The benefits of social media
4. How time invested impacts results
5. The top social media tools
6. And much more!

The report says most marketers who use Facebook and Twitter create or link to content and gather followers exposed to their brand and businesses. It’s free, but time-consuming. 64% are using social media for five hours or more every week, and 39 percent use it for 10 or more hours.

But the question still remains as it is - how effective social media is? “They don’t know how to measure how successful they are,” says Stelzner. “But [they] are just realizing that they are getting response, often a lot more than before, using social media.” From what they can tell of their results, about 80% claimed they’d generated exposure for their business while 61% said they’d improved traffic and growing lists. But generating business is a different matter: only 35% said they’d managed do to that using social media.

On the same note, over at GetIT Comms, (my company) Kaashif Ahmed & Joshua Johari published a whitepaper on Social Media Primer.

Graphic designer Adrian Shaughnessy lives and works in London where for 15 years he was creative director of Intro then a consulting creative director of This is Real Art. He now splits his time between design and editorial direction, writing several books about design, including How to be a Graphic Designer Without Losing Your Soul which has become somewhat of a bible for young designers, and Cover Art By: about radical music graphics. He is also a contributor to Design Observer, where last week he wrote a (traffic record-breaking) post, “Ten Graphic Design Paradoxes” (which, in a true paradox, includes 11 things).

Here goes the paradoxes, in short:

1. There’s no such thing as bad clients: only bad designers.
2. The best way to learn how to become a better graphic designer is to become a client.
3. If we want to educate our clients about design, we must first educate ourselves about our clients.
4. If we want to make money as a graphic designer, we must concentrate on the work — not the money.
5. For designers, verbal skills are as important as visual skills.
6. Ideas usually fail not because they’re bad ideas, but because they’re badly presented.
7. “I’m a professional: I know best.” The only designers who use this argument are unprofessional designers.
8. “All the good jobs go to other designers.” Not true
9. The best way to run a studio is to be domineering and forceful. In fact, the opposite is true.
10. If we believe in nothing, we shouldn’t wonder why no one believes in us.
11. When a client says the words — “you have complete creative freedom,” they never mean complete creative freedom.

Image courtesy: karramarro

Stanford University is now offering an entire course (iTunes link) in iPhone development through Apple’s iTunes store, absolutely free. The only cost will be the $99 iPhone Development Program fee (if you aren’t already a registered developer).

Tools and API’s required to build applications for the iPhone platform using the iPhone SDK. User interface designs for mobile devices and unique user interactions using multi-touch technologies. Object oriented design and using model-view-controller pattern, memory management and more…
The course, the first installment of which is available now, is aimed at students who already have a basic familiarity with programming languages like C+ and C++, so if you were hoping to go in blind and come out with a game in the same league as something from ngmoco, you might want to consider heading back to school for that CS degree you always regretted not getting. That said, the course might prove very beneficial if you already have some development experience but haven’t felt brave enough to venture into the realm of Cocoa Touch.

Via: The Apple Blog