BCA

By John Riley

You have to hand it to Verizon… their marketing has been very successful promoting their network coverage at the expense of
AT&T. You have probably heard stories as I have, that with AT&T you can expect more dropped calls. Even the most recent Consumer Reports says Verizon offers the best service.

Well, things are often not what they seem. Today’s Sunday New York Times article (Dec13,2009), proves the point. Two third party services that run extensive network tests for major cell phone carriers have shared some of their findings that show AT&T clearly superior in performance to Verizon. According to the Times, neither AT&T nor Verizon would comment on the story.

“The results place AT&T data network not just on top, but well ahead of everyone else” says Randall Stross who wrote the article. He goes on to point out Global Wireless, a network test company, found AT&T’s data throughput is 40 to 50 percent higher than the competition including Verizon. AT&T is one of their clients.

Root Wirless is another network test firm that places AT&T performance head and shoulders above Verizon. Root Wireless ran 4.7 million tests on smartphones for each of four major carriers spread across seven metropolitan areas: Dallas, LA/Orange County, New York, Seattle/Tacoma, San Francisco bay area and Washington. Stross said “In every market, AT&T had faster average download speeds and had signal strength of 75 percent or better more frequently than did Verizon.”

The Times story went on to say, “AT&T’s achievement is all the more remarkable considering the sudden jump in the volume of mobile phone data the network has had to handle with the introduction of the iPhone 3G in 2008: approximately 4,000 percent. AT&T has the most number next-generation smartphones, with full browsers and built-in video players.”

Curiously, AT&T has still not released all this performance data, although they are starting to advertise their market coverage in advertising. Sometimes things are just not what they seem.

In the interest of full disclosure, I am an AT&T subscriber.

Birmingham, AL & Greensboro, NC – The ROI Institute and the not-for-profit Center for Creative Leadership (CCL) have just completed the first ever ROI certification for individuals involved in leadership development. This comprehensive one-week workshop, designed to prepare leadership development professionals to conduct impact and ROI studies on major leadership programs, was conducted on CCL’s headquarters campus in Greensboro, NC. Each workshop participant must complete an impact or ROI study to achieve the designation of Certified ROI Professional. A total of 18 professionals representing four countries and several major organizations such as Cisco Systems and Boeing attended the comprehensive workshop on September 14-18, 2009. The week of training focused on measuring the impact of leadership development, coaching, executive development, management development, and executive education.

“To date, more than 4,000 individuals have been involved in the ROI certification process,” said Jack Phillips, chairman of ROI Institute. “While participants usually come from many different functional areas, leadership development is emerging as the hottest area for this level of measurement. It’s an important topic and this certification provided an opportunity to focus just on this discipline. This certification is the beginning of a partnership with CCL to focus on the business contribution of leadership development,”

Based on this success, the ROI Institute will plan another special ROI certification sometime in 2010.

The Center for Creative Leadership (CCL®) ranked among the world’s top providers of executive education in a biennial BusinessWeek survey released today.

BusinessWeek rated CCL No. 3 worldwide for Custom programs, up five spots from 2007. In the Open-Enrollment category, CCL ranked No. 5 after not being ranked in 2007.

CCL, which provides leadership training worldwide from its offices in Asia, Europe and North America, is the only institution in the survey that focuses exclusively on leadership education and research. The BusinessWeek rankings were based on surveys of organizations from around the world that rated leading executive education providers, such as Harvard, Duke and Wharton, for quality and impact.

BusinessWeek is the second major news outlet this year to give CCL high marks. In May, the Financial Times ranked CCL No. 6 worldwide in executive education.

According to Nielsen Research:

Total identified blogs– 125,635,057 as of today.

New blogs in the last 24 hours– 93,874

By John Riley

To help understand the progression possible in blogging, I classify blogs into four categories: basic, intermediate, advanced and professional. The basic blog is usually a free hosted blog on a site (call it non self-hosted) and with some restrictions on its use. After three months of trial and error, I decided to upgrade my blog to intermediate status so I would have control over my blog and could add features unavailable to me on my basic WordPress.com site. How to make that transition is the subject of this article.

There are a variety of blog resources on the Internet so the process of moving from one host to another can vary with the parties involved. In my case, I moved from the free WordPress site to a paid Blue Host site, (from $5 to $7/mo). Rileybiz.com then became a self-hosted blog. Because it offers so many excellent features, I continue to use the WordPress software.

Moving a blog database from one hosting organization to another is easy to contemplate, but can be difficult to execute. Initially, I signed up with Go Daddy to host my blog since they were listed on the WordPress website. An important consideration when you sign up: WordPress needs the PHP language to run so you want a Linux hosting account rather than a Windows account. Next you need to link your hosting account to your domain name.

Moving Your Blog to Another Host

At this stage, I asked Tom Oviatt,(oviatt@cox.net) a computer systems guru, to handle the technical aspects of moving the database since the process was unknown to me. The first step was to back up all my .com blog database files before trying to move them. We found access to the blog files in the WordPress server to be quite restrictive. Moreover, some of the steps outlined in the Go Daddy import process did not seem to mesh with WordPress.com. Repeated checks with Go Daddy confirmed no database files had been received.

After returning to the WordPress website, I searched for the name of another hosting firm and signed up with Blue Host. We contacted WordPress again and essentially followed the same procedures as before, but this time they meshed with Blue Host and in fifteen minutes the .com database was in Blue Host. The next day I cancelled the Go Daddy hosting plan. Inexplicably, some 24 hours later, Go Daddy e-mailed me that our .com database files had been received. Now I had two .com blogs. So I moved my Go Daddy blog to Blue Host and renamed it .org. before making it temporarily inactive.

Installing the Plugins
Selecting and installing the plugins that would give my blog new capabilities came next. There are more than 7,000 plugins for WordPress blogs. An example of a plugin is WordPress Mobile. This plugin provides a custom display of my blog for mobile devices which access my blog. I now have six plugins and expect to install more. There may be a nominal charge for some plugins, but thus far I have not encountered any.

At present, I am in the process of selecting a new theme to provide a new look for my upgraded blog. There are hundreds of free themes available on the Internet and even more that can be purchased for anywhere from $29 up to $2,500.

What next?
My blogging experience thus far has been much more rewarding than frustrating. It’s a good idea to get a little help when you upgrade for the first time. Now that I have my upgrade behind me, I’m going to take an online college course on blogs to see what I’ve missed. I should have done it before I started this whole adventure. Hope I see you there.

The Center for Marketing Research at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth has followed up on its 2007 and 2008 studies of social media usage by the Inc. 500. Adoption and awareness continue to trend upward, with 91% of firms using at least one social media tool in 2009 and three-quarters describing themselves as “very familiar” with social networking.

Social networking and blogging have seen the most growth in adoption, while other technologies have flattened or even declined in use, including wikis and online video. Twitter usage, of course, has caught on quickly—more than one-half of businesses reported tweeting in 2009. This was the first year respondents were polled about Twitter.

One impressive change over time was in the percentage of Inc. 500 companies that did not use any form of social media. It dropped precipitously from 43% in 2007 to just 9% in 2009.

The Center for Marketing Research also noted that the Inc. 500, a list of the fastest-growing private companies in the US, is outpacing the larger, more traditional companies in the Fortune 500 in many social media activities.

Is the rush to adoption bringing marketing success? Respondents overwhelmingly believed it was. The companies polled were mostly measuring hits, comments, leads or sales as primary indicators.

Companies were also monitoring mentions of their brands in the social media space, at 68% this year. That figure was climbing steadily, up from 60% in 2008 and 50% in 2007.

Printed with permission of e-marketer. To see the complete data charts, go to e-marketere.com.