Chances are, you’re used to measuring your success or progress both personally and professionally. Personally, you might measure success by how well you’re doing toward paying down a credit card or mortgage or putting money in savings. Professionally, you may measure success by meeting a sales quota, hitting a deadline or delivering a projected number of leads on an email campaign. Regardless of where and what you measure, success typically comes down to meeting a goal or progressing toward it.

Social media success is the same; it’s about having a goal and meeting that goal or, at least, seeing regular improvement toward that goal.

You can break down measuring your success with social media into a few simple steps:

• Determining what social goals will contribute to improving your ...

We’ve all read books or stumbled on to what seemed to be a great web site only to close the cover or our browser and find another topic. Why? Because the content, the story, what we were reading, just didn’t grab us or deliver on our expectations.

It’s not terribly different with social media. If the tweet or the post doesn’t resonate, readers/fans won’t like it or retweet it and eventually, they may stop reading that author altogether. This is one of the major things that makes our roles as social media managers—whether as part of a bigger job or as a dedicated gig—the most challenging, finding what our audience—our customer—will respond to, today, tomorrow and next week.

Ultimately though, it doesn’t have to be that hard, and we can always benefit from experimentation and refinement. Few companies enjoy the luxury of enough budget to do deep customer research, but customer research doesn’t have to be...

Securing access to networks and applications.

Sophisticated network attacks have rendered simple password authentication insufficient to protect an organization against unauthorized access to its network and applications. The ramifications of unauthorized access to confidential information are dire: non-compliance, financial penalties, and theft of intellectual property.

Symantec™ Validation and ID Protection Service (VIP) is a leading cloud-based strong authentication service that can enable your customer’s enterprises to secure access to networks and applications while preventing access by malicious unauthorized attackers.

Features:

• Cloud-based infrastructure—Secure, reliable, and scalable service delivers authentication without requiring dedicated on-premise server hardware.
• Transparent risk-based token-less authentication— Leverage device and behavior profiling to block risky...

I know, I thought the same thing you’re probably thinking. Why should I create an account on yet another social channel? And why should I use more of my precious time figuring it out? Aren’t Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube and [insert the name of any other of the innumerable social sites here] enough?  Well, maybe not.

Google+ is another social channel, but has features that others don’t that can help you connect with customers, peers and industry leaders. For example, you can create a circle of contacts and communicate directly with those circles, unless you make your posts ‘public’. Contact segmentation at its finest. If you’re wondering about the ‘circle’ equivalent on other social channels, think ‘follower/following’.

Your sister (who you’ve put in your ‘Family’ circle) may not care about the latest virtualization certification you’ve earned, but those in...