You have probably heard more than you care to about social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter, their popularity and the viral nature of people’s posts that claim to “crash the Internet.” Dramatics aside, social media serves many valuable functions in the company business plan, particularly how it relates to your customers.
Crowdsourcing, a term coined by writer Jeff Howe, is the act of designating tasks usually performed by a specific person, such as a contractor or employee, to a large pool of workers who handle these individual chores on a freelance basis. Since these workers are independent contractors, the usual expenses of hiring, training and even keeping track of payroll taxes are unnecessary, and since the people in the “crowd” could be anywhere in the world, it’s possible to get the simpler and more repetitive tasks done at a very low price.
You are opening up your own business, or your small business has decided to start accepting credit cards to make purchases more convenient for customers. What steps will you take to garner your customers’ trust that their credit card data are secure and remain confidential?
PCI Data Security Standards
First, as a new business accepting credit cards, it is imperative to understand that you are subject to the scope of the PCI Security Standards Council (PCI).
The PCI offers assessments to your business, as well as compliance information.
So which is right for your business: virtualization or cloud computing? Do you know the difference? No? That’s okay; a lot of people who don’t work in IT don’t know the difference either. The word “cloud” is thrown around so often that sometimes people aren’t sure how “virtualization” fits in, and the two get confused pretty fast.
GoogleNow’s service has now been listening to, learning from and directing people for nearly three years, and the newest round of improvements reflects all of that time spent collecting information. As GoogleNow continues to develop, the goal is that it will become more and more like interacting with a human.
You might not want to keep up with technological advances, and that’s understandable. Everything changes so quickly that sometimes it can be quite overwhelming, especially when you have a business to run and employees to manage. However, sometimes a technology will make running your business so much easier that passing it up would be a tragedy.
The biggest social media platform in the world is, yet again, changing things with its services. While sometimes these changes are things that hardly even go noticed, this time that might not be the case.
Mark Zuckerberg and team recently had a keynote where they discussed upcoming changes with Messenger and video on Facebook, and the changes are significant.
Some people believe that autoresponders are just a little too impersonal and that they don’t convert or result in any good except for a click or two. Sometimes they don’t even result in that and you get stuck in the spam folder. All of the hard work you put into your autoresponder was for nothing, and you don’t like wasting your time and money on things that don’t work.
Anyone who’s even loosely associated with the tech industry knows that there’s no such thing as privacy on the web. Most government agencies have, at this point, been hacked. Private companies from banks to insurance firms, with state-of-the art protection have been breached, data stolen, customer trust destroyed.
Apple has not classically been known for being a company that considers the environmental factor of their production, and in fact, the company has gotten some flak for it in recent years. However, it did not take these accusations lightly and the phone and computer company has started to move towards greener pastures, so to say.