Farshid Ketabchi

I’ve been thinking about my presence on the internet from the early days, from my time at Argonne National Labs near Chicago in 1988-1989 and from my graduate school days at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis in 1989-1992. That was even before the web browser days, which didn’t come out till 1993-94. Mosaic browser was first released in 1993. And I remember the excitement we had at work when we installed an early version of Netscape browser in 1994.Partial map of internet 2005,via Wikipedia There was internet of course even before the browser. In addition to the worldwide email which primarily linked major universities and research labs, there were numerous user groups — virtual discussion groups — that I used to take part in and contribute to. I suppose that was the equivalent of today’s social networking. Amazingly enough, after all these years most of tha... (more)

Leveraging Social Media in Your Business

In my last post I explained that before you embark on using social media for your business, you need to first determine your objectives and define your strategy. And this strategic planning does not and probably should not involve any specific social media channel at the outset. A good article that outlines the steps for the planning and strategic upfront work is "10 steps to a practical social media business strategy" by Allen Bonde, where he describes the fundamental and basic steps that must be done upfront, such as creating a mission statement and a marketing plan, assigning ... (more)

Leveraging Your Host Systems with SOA Web Services

The promise of service-oriented architecture (SOA), increasing benefits of Web services, and continued business use of legacy systems have all coalesced to usher in a new era of flexible IT alignment for business needs. With only a fraction of legacy applications being Web-enabled and increasing enterprise investment in SOA, organizations need to know how they can use Web services to leverage their legacy systems. Web services can be used to leverage host systems and enable the transformation of legacy applications into Web-enabled composite applications. Such applications can b... (more)

Using Social Media in Your Business: Strategic or Tactical?

A while ago I read a blog post from a marketing executive who wrote that he had prohibited the use of certain words in his strategy and planning meetings. Among those words there where many popular social networking and media words such as Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn. Though that might seem odd at first, it makes a lot of sense. The point is that while social media may serve as an effective method of promoting your business, it is only a set of tools and channels that you may use to execute against your business plan and strategy. It is part of the tactical stuff that you do ... (more)

How do I tweet? Let me count the ways...

New Media on Ulitzer One of the great and unique things about Twitter is that it is a fairly simple and easy service to use. From an end-user perspective, setting up an account at twitter.com and starting to tweet is a couple of minutes of work. I can describe the concept of Twitter and its features to any internet-savvy person in 5 minutes. The basic functions on twitter.com can be summarized as follows: Create an account/profile Search or look up users Follow/un-follow a user Tweet — post an update Send a direct message to a follower Reply to a user or mention users I suppose ... (more)