Steering Your Business to Great Heights with an Effective Social Intelligence Strategy

Social intelligence plays a critical role in developing an effective social marketing strategy. Although many companies may not actually have a social intelligence strategy, there are many companies that are social online in media campaigns. Companies invest heavily in the creation of their social sites, but they usually have inadequate visibility into all the activity that mentions, promotes or criticizes them. With social intelligence there is a certain amount of logic made out of the numerous tweets, comments, posts, and other social data. This is done by monitoring, collecting, and analyzing social data, which primarily involves monitoring social media, collecting and analyzing the content, and using the information to formulate a strategy.

The success of particular strategies and techniques depends entirely on the specifics of an individual business as well as many other undefined variables. Instead of implementing a social intelligence plan exclusively based on the success of another company, it is crucial to take the time to develop a suitable plan that directly aligns with the goals and values of your organization and your customer. This can be a vital success factor. To develop an effective and successful strategy, it is necessary to have a thorough understanding of the business. It is also important to have an understanding of the objectives, and the specific processes that will be carried out to reach them. You can obtain a wealth of information to get insight into what a business is doing well and what needs improvement in daily activities and long-term strategy, just by looking at a media account. It therefore beneficial to have a team of professionals that handles the areas of social media in which they are specialized.

Companies can also coordinate with existing customer support teams to define a strategy to deliver consistent cross-channel customer support. It is easy to track data across many social platforms and tap into the customer behavior insights trapped in the ever-expanding social media analytics by adopting the right social intelligence apps. An effective social intelligencestrategy can have great benefits and play a large role in steering your business to great heights. With the right metrics in place, a company can be aware of when and where to start planning and who to target.

Social business interactions will continue to soar. Companies need to develop a plan to immediately meet this growing wave with a strategy that concentrates on a broader marker for social commerce.

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Using Automotive process in Office Products Industry

The progress made by science and technology from time immemorial has always been for converting the manual systems and creating better facilities for the human race. Automation is the use of technology oriented control systems to reduce the need for human work in the production of goods and services. The industrial era brought with it, mechanization, which was later, followed by automation. Mechanization resulted in the use of machinery to assist manual work.


Automations which goes a step further to reduce both physical and cerebral workload plays a vital role in changing the world economic condition. This has brought a paradigm shift in the job market from being industry oriented to a more service oriented ones. The office supplies industry, which is generally picturized as the local stores with its stock of staples, pens, papers, and office depot items have evolved into a market, which is technology dependent.  The notable impact of automation process can be seen in the office products industry, automated telephone switchboards, medical processes, laboratory analysis, cash withdrawal systems, etc.


The automative process in the office products industry with its significant reduction in time taken for any operation and work handling tends to easily replace human operators in tasks that involve physical or monotonous work. This helps to free the workers for jobs that require interaction that is more intellectual. Further, this provides the workers with a higher-level job options in development, deployment, maintenance of the automated processes.


Integration of technology into the 175-200 billion dollar office products industry has seen a drastic difference in the sales margin. Having established networks of distribution centers to serve targeted regions, the industry leaders have also made use of technology to bring in automative process to ordering, billing and warehouse operations. Like with use of the sophisticated software systems to track inventory, the industry leaders have also been successful in automating the labor –intensive process of maintaining master files and product specific electrical pricing information in flexible formats which can well be integrated into the other business system software.


With the shrinking market of the retail stores, the expanse of the automation., the industrial supply distributor explored the benefits of the deploying automation systems with the help of softwares and have also ventured to make use of the world wide web to improve the business revenues.  The automation softwares being compatible with other business softwares, a large number of office supply dealers are updated quarterly of the any changes and new editions.


Click here to read more on - Electrical estimating software, Automotive parts catalog

Revolutionary in Electrical Contractor Products

With the latest innovation in technology and computing devices, there have been significant changes that have taken place in electrical contractor products. These products play an important role in bidding for projects and other construction assignments.

Previously you must have come across various ads offering products at a lesser price. Sometimes these ads look tempting but results in heavy expenses later on. Times have changed. Today we have eminent companies dealing in trade services providing revolutionary solutions in electrical contractor products. Some of them are discussed below:-

  • Submittal Manager

This acts as a submittal tool for electrical contractor and comprises software along with beyond 250,000 catalog pages. It represents more than one million electrical items. The product helps users to save time, minimize the expenses and paper work. Furthermore, it is easy to use and has simple search methods that help users to locate quickly results for what they are looking. You can save up to 75 percent of time to produce the submittals. This means, you can allot the time to enhance other assignment details.

  • Supplier Exchange

This is yet another innovative offering from electrical contractor products that accelerates the speed of the overall bidding process by linking the electrical contractor bidding to their preferred supplier’s pricing information in real time. The contractor can submit electronically a group of items to their supplier from their estimating program. This is list is immediately matched to the supplier’s pricing file. With a short span of time the list is returned having contractor-specific pricing details. This is now ready to be applied within an estimating program or bid.

  • Electrical Price Guide

When you are on a job site, you can search for this handy tool to get details about the pricing required for making appropriate invoices and estimates. This guide offers users with comprehensive illustrations, a labor unit section and provides prices beyond 15,000 of the most commonly used electrical contractor materials and tools.

Another important electrical contractor product is the electrical estimating software that is a material pricing database consisting 2 million electrical items from more than 650 manufacturers. This software comes with a powerful search engine along with drill-down look up methods. Furthermore, it helps in minimizing the time taken for researching items. The database is up-to-date and offers detailed product data leading to improved search features.

Also read on - electrical distributor, automotive parts catalog

Social Media Analytics: Expanding Footprints On The Web

The presence of Internet on our daily lives can be seen from the growth of various social networking sites. Social commerce being the buzzword, the techno savvy business world today uses these social technologies to connect to the customers, understand their social behavior and build strong and lasting relationships. The customer on the other hand being connected through blogs, reviews and ratings, forums and social networking communities, gains a lot of experience and knowledge about any product.


Most of the leading brands that have recognized social commerce as a win-win situation for both the brand and the customer, provide a customer centric platform to activate participation, improve customer experience and understand customer behavior. Social media analytics have today become a critical tool in understanding trends, and gauging the market response. The business environment being very volatile, the word of mouth is an important factor. Further, with a vast number of social media sites growing every day, these have become vital drivers of business growth.


Even though most of the major brands have their footprints on the web, companies need to extend their brand experience beyond the walls of the website. Since the official websites get traffic directed to them from brand conscious customers, making the presence on any social media sites through remote widgets, wish lists or gift registries, will provide customer a visit to the website and review about the brand.  Based on the response gathered by monitoring online activities of various sites, the social media analytics tool provides precise information about the customer behavior pattern paving way for a more accurate taste than a speculated one.


The social analytics tools that are used must be able to gather the large volumes of data from the social media sites and produce valuable and related insights. Further, these should be able to seamlessly analyze data, apply real-time business rules, and increase the organization effectiveness in social domain. Nevertheless social analytics today opens up a entirely new concept of revenue driven e-commerce through global reach, increased customer retention technique and interactive marketing for a the technologically sound business world. All the social intelligence  tools will work to let the organizations stay in the right track.

Why Enterprises Are Keen On Social Business Software

Social business is the biggest innovation that has happened to enterprises. It’s not whether businesses should use it or not; it is how best businesses can leverage it to drive business and reduce cost. With internet changing the face of communication, the new ‘Web2.0’ includes access to inexpensive tools (blogs, wikis etc) and people are interested in using these.

Tom Coates, a Yahoo employee and blogger has come up with one of the most concise definitions, i.e. “Social software can be loosely defined as software which supports, extends, or derives added value from human social behavior—message boards, music taste-sharing, photo-sharing, instant messaging, mailing lists, social networking.” It is a combination of interactive and communication tools.

 Organizations are taking keen interest in social business software for multiple reasons. Enterprises have today become more global and distributed. Working teams always do not sit together for meetings or see each other frequently. Yet enterprises use traditional software built on an old model. . To make things better, service providers of social software have designed social applications for a dynamic enterprise platform. Its unique people profiles make it easy to connect and discover people. Simultaneously, the group based format helps people to get connected with their interest groups, and expert communities.

In a competitive business environment, an employee’s success is highly driven by the strength of his/her network within a company. Therefore advanced tools are required to monitor and measure an employee’s network. With jobs becoming more diverse, an employee’s performance in knowledge–intensive work environment is directly proportional to their network strength. Importance is given to the variety and quality of these contacts, than the quantity.

Companies offering social software allow enterprises to understand the activity hubs, local leaders and natural coalitions in their organizations. Managers learn more about their team members, i.e. where they spend their time, the people they connect with and areas they are likely to influence. With this insight they have a better idea about team competencies as well as an employee’s career aspirations. Furthermore, they are able to recognize individuals for specialized job profiles. This process can be termed as an enterprise social network that uses standard external social networking services to generate employee visibility.

Our new age workforce is expert in obtaining value from social software tools in their personal world. For them, business social software is a natural extension to their business needs. Service providers of social business software tools help the enterprises to interact with the workforce in a way that would interest them. With the help of microblogs, news, and discussions an enterprise sets up bilateral communication with their workforce.

Know more on: online team collaboration,   group collaboration software

 

Secure Customer Data with Vulnerability Management Solution

With increasingly sophisticated attacks on the rise, no matter how secure you make your website, there is always a chance of a breach. The degree andthe way to deal with a breach can be controlled with an efficient vulnerability management solution.

Vulnerability management solution is a continuous process that secures customers valuable data, intellectual property and crucial network assets. Almost every digital data that is the basis of any GRC (Government Risk and Compliance) management process of enterprises, resides on assets. Therefore, it is essential to manage these assets well. The asset management process involves identifying, discovering and classifying assets such as desktops, laptops, servers and many others. Managing vulnerabilities proactively will minimize the scope of misuse.

Service providers of vulnerability management offer solutions that manage performance, tasks and data associated with assets and other vulnerabilities. Their IT compliance management features automates, conducts and continuously scans to spot potentially harmful vulnerabilities within the network infrastructure. Furthermore, an innovative compliance scanning function integrates and scans compliance related data from multiple sources, for instance Vulnerability Scanning, File Systems, and Databases. Other important features are as follows:-

  • Centralized and single repository for all vulnerabilities and assets Automated compliance related information assembled from technology and non-technology sources

  • Schedule vulnerability audits - A comprehensive audit to meet industry and regulatory compliance requirements.

  • Remote vulnerability scan Scans and incorporates compliance related data from multiple sources

  • Remediation trackingPrioritize, detect and remediate critical IT threats.Classifiesyour critical assets by their importance to your business defining them from Low to Critical.

  • Map vulnerabilities and assets to regulations Identify, organize and map your network assets to reduce vulnerabilities- document management, access control and asset repository through a secure web based interface

  • Analyze Threats with powerful reports and dashboards Offers management dashboards for compliance status with the capacity to drill down across geographies and departments.

  • Deployment capability and scalability Requires no software to be installed, updated or maintained

Vulnerability management solution delivers protection against security threats without significant cost and resource to organization. By proactively monitoring all network access points, organizations can eliminate network vulnerabilities before they can affect them. Whether it is SOX, HIPAA PCI or a sound sense of security that is driving organizations to vulnerability management, it is the most important essential component in running a successful business organiztion.

Know more on - ISO 27002, PCI Compliance

Types of Special Economic Zones

A geographic region within a nation where the financial and economic laws are relaxed is known as a special economic zone (SEZ). Economic laws that are applicable nationwide are relaxed within an area chosen as the special economic zone. The purpose of SEZ is to encourage foreign direct investment by foreign investors. Foreign investors would be ready to invest in an area if and only if the conditions are favorable for their businesses. By creating certain areas as special economic zones where taxes are reduced, financial and environmental regulations are relaxed, governments are able to encourage rapid economic growth.

Special economic zones have been developed in many countries including India. Approximately, there are 3000 special economic zones in 120 countries. In India, the special economic zone act was passed in the year 2005. SEZs were set up in the private, public, or in the joint sector by the state governments with permission from the central government. The onus is on the state government to provide an internationally competitive and comfortable environment for the investors to set up units for manufacturing goods and rendering of services. There are 114 special economic zones in India and they are in Tamil Nadu (20), Karnataka (18), Maharashtra (14), Gujarat (8), Kerala (6), Uttar Pradesh (4), Haryana (3), West Bengal (2), Chandigarh, Rajasthan and Orissa (1).

Special Economic zones are broadly divided into more specific zone types and they are. 

  • Export Processing Zones (EPZ)

    It refers to an area that allows aggressive economic activity in the form of tax cuts, fiscal incentives, and other benefits to revive weakening export business.

  • Free Zones (FZ)

    It is an area where immigration, visa, customs and taxation are relaxed. 

  • Free Trade Zones (FTZ)

    It refers to a particular area within a country where normal trade requirements such as taxes, tariffs, and quotas are either reduced or relaxed to attract investment. 

  • Industrial Parks or Industrial Estates (IE)

    Also known as trading estate, it is an area planned for industrial development. A lighter version of industrial park is the business park or the office park, where there are lighter industries such as offices. These areas are located away from the city’s main residential area but close to transport facilities such as highways, airports, railroads and ports. 

  • Free Ports

    It refers to a special customs area with relaxed customs regulations or no customs duties or controls for transshipment. 

  • Urban Enterprise Zones

    It refers to an area free of certain local, state and federal taxes and restrictions. Located in the industrial or commercial areas of a city, the sales tax rate within this zone would be half compared to other parts and the incentives would be much higher. This is done to revive the business climate of a city that has been shattered by economic problems. 

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Development of Special Economic Zones in India

Special Economic Zones or SEZ’s as they are more popularly known have been set up in numerous countries more as an experimenting ground for the execution of the principles of liberal market economy. They are taken as the instruments to improve the credibility and acceptability of the transformation policies, to attract foreign as well as domestic investments and for improving the economy.

 

SEZ’s in India aims to promote the value addition constituent in exports, to set up employment as well as mobilize the foreign exchange. Numerous companies in India, dealing in engineering services outsourcing have come forward to develop these areas. These companies deals in engineering and manufacturing needs in various domains that includes aerospace, automotive, engineering, as well as oil and gas engineering. 


The first Aerospace Precision Engineering and Manufacturing SEZ is situated in Karnataka and the developments occupy a total area of 300 acres in Belgaum. It is well equipped and is prepared expand the Aerospace Precision Engineering and Manufacturing supply ecosystem. Some of the features and benefits are as follows:-


* Sustainable Support at the Special Economic Zone

* An Eco-friendly, Organic and Sustainable Industrial Environment

* Consulting facility

* Incubation facility

Companies specializing in engineering services outsourcing makes it easy for multiple investors to leverage from the benefits of the SEZ policy that the Indian Government has approved. The fiscal advantages are as follows:-


Income Tax advantages for units at the SEZ

* 100% SEZ tax exemption - in a block of 10 years out of 15 years


Investments in SEZ have the following Income Tax Benefits:-


* 100% Exemption – for first five years

* 50% Exemption – for next five years

In India, the government has been proactive in developing the SEZ’s. They have formulated specified policies, have occasionally reviewed then and also assured that sufficient facilities are offered to the developers as well as to the enterprises who are planning to set up their units in SEZ’s. This gradually has resulted in the huge corporate rush for SEZ development. Reports highlight that more than 234 enterprises have attained a formal approval, 162 companies received in-principle sanction, and approximately 100 enterprises have attained notifications for the same.


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Secure Your Vital Data with effective Threat Management Solutions

With the prevailing conditions in data management and loss, threat management is a challenge for most companies. Threat assessment and management of the work place violence provides you with a strategy that takes a step ahead from the prediction of threat to the recognition and management of risk. A risk can be in the following forms:-

  1. Direct

  2. Indirect

  3. Written

  4. Spoken

  5. Gestured

According to Gavin de Becker the ultimate goal of threat management solution providers is to offer the required tools in order to help enterprises assess and identify the risk. The risk levels can vary between high, low or medium.

Today there are eminent companies that provide innovative threat management applications. With their services and experiences, they have been offering IT and other enterprises the security from unforeseen data breach hazards. The solutions provide advanced firewalls that keep aside unapproved intrusions into private networks and virus scanners. The protection systems that manage the quarantine, filter and safeguard you from virus attacks at times are not capable of securing essential information. Hence, companies today require appropriate security systems that would lessen information threats.

When you assess the various threat management solutions that are available, you will notice that these solutions address security and various IT – GRC (Integrated Security and Government Risk and Compliance) concerns individually. Somehow, there is a need for solutions that result in continuous incorporation of advanced network monitoring and IT – GRC. This will help the users to get a unified understanding of the IT compliance management software as well as operational security posture. Such solutions are offered as listed below:-

  1. By resolving various data-centric information security challenges that comprise advanced persistent threat detection, insider threats, data leakage, malware analysis, continuous controls verification, and network e-discovery

  2. By helping in delivering a holistic solution for security and IT-GRC with simple monitoring through an integrated dashboard

  3. By providing continuous automation of every enterprise security, compliance, audit, and risk management requirements

Renowned service providers of threat management assist their clients with advanced vendor management solutions as external vendors have access to critical business information of an organization. It is essential to assess continuously the partners or vendors vulnerability to data losses.


Also read on - PCI Compliance, HIPPA compliance

 

Business Tax Return: Entity Linked Tax Returns

Owning a business in a competitive world needs more things than just courage to go ahead. First and foremost, the entrepreneur needs to understand the various formats of business, its investments requirements, implications, the taxation factors as well as returns expected. Business can be in the form of a sole proprietorship, a Limited liability company, an S Corporation or a C Corporation (which includes publicly-held companies).

One of the major advantage of organizing ones business as a Limited Liability Company (LLC) or an S corp. is that ones personal assets are protected from the creditors. Secondly, both LLCs and S corps help to avoid paying both personal and corporate taxes. However, the type of business determines the taxes and the payment methods. Business taxes in general are of four types- Income Tax, Self-Employment Tax, Employment Taxes and Excise Tax. Sole proprietorships do not file a separate business tax return. The expenses and income (profit or loss) from the business are shown in the individual’s income tax return.

However, the LLC tax implications differ from those of corporations in that they do not file an income tax return. Since the income from the business is passed down to the members in LLCs, profits or losses are claimed on their personal tax forms. Single-owner LLC taxes are on Form1040 with the Internal Revenue Service whereas partnership LLCs, are required to file their business tax returns using Form 1065 with information on the payments made to their individual partners and members. Using these business tax returns waives away double taxation, paid by most corporations.

The filing of business tax return in case of Corporations is on separate forms depending on the type of corporation. The C Corporation is subject to taxation both at the corporate level and the individual level. Besides the pre-tax income deduction at the corporate level, the shareholders are taxed on the dividends received. For income tax purposes in case of S corp, the individual shareholders of the corporation and taxed at the individual level.  However, an S corporation is has to file tax returns separately. However, maximizing business tax deductions will help to save small business taxes.

Know more on - Itemized tax 2106 & US India tax