Computer Weekly Editor's Blog

Microsoft and Google have both unveiled their plans for cloud computing.

Azure is Microsoft's attempt to bridge the gap between desktop and cloud-based computing. The idea behind it is that applications developed using a common Windows programming model can be run either in-house or as a cloud service.

Microsoft chief software architect Ray Ozzie describes this as "giving customers choice". Clearly, this is a well thought out strategy. Microsoft is late into the market, but Azure promises to offer software developers and enterprises a way to migrate some of their existing Windows applications into the cloud, while keeping others on site.

Google has taken the opposite approach with Chrome OS. Its starting point is that all applications are Javascript-based web applications, accessible via a web browser. It says Chrome OS will run these applications more efficiently than a browser because it has been designed to make the most of hardware such as graphics accelerators, multicore architectures and multimedia peripherals. In theory, this means web applications can provide as rich a user experience as Windows 7 or MacOS X without the need for a runtime environment such as Adobe Flash Player or Microsoft Silverlight.

Unlike Microsoft, which has blurred the distinction between the desktop, server and the cloud, all Chrome OS data and applications reside in the cloud. Local storage is only provided to support offline working. Once an internet connection is established, Chrome OS automatically synchronises data using cloud storage.

Both approaches are valid. Azure is compelling for users happy with Windows, but who want the option to use cloud-based services. Chrome OS is an operating system for cloud computing. If IT directors accept that cloud computing is the future of IT, then Google seems like a good bet.

Whatever approach you take, the landscape of corporate IT has changed. Businesses cannot afford to ignore the impact of cloud computing on how applications and services are delivered.

Today we have launched the first in a series of developments on ComputerWeekly.com:

• Our white paper library has gone live - this will give IT professionals the opportunity to find detailed information about products, services and IT best practice
  

• In the coming weeks you can look forward to us launching new commenting functionality on articles. This is a massive step forward for us in engaging with our readers and our audience.... yippee, can't wait for that!
  

There's still a few bugs and styling issues with some of the back end changes we have made today as we migrated our content to a new content management system. Over time our new CMS will allow us to improve our content and your user experience. So please bear with us. 

If you haven't already then this week is your last chance to cast your vote in ComputerWeekly.com's IT blog awards.

So far we have had nearly 8000 votes cast and there's one week to go until voting closes on the 20 November - so if you haven't voted yet then cast your vote now to make it count.

The details for the awards event to be held at Shoreditch House on 25 November next week are as follows: Those who have been shortlisted should have received their invite. Please note the event is strictly by invitation only. Sorry!
Details are below

Kick off - 6.30pm for 7pm

Awards presentation - 8pm 

Dress - casual/informal/whatever you like

RSVP - essential to get on the guest list. RSVP to ITblogs@computerweekly.com 

It is with a sad and heavy heart that I officially compose my last blog post as the true custodian of this blog...well I guess it is the case.

On Monday our new Editor in Chief Bryan Glick, formerly editor of age-old rival Computing, will be joining Computer Weekly as our new Editor in Chief...and as all good editor's need a blog, I suspect I will relinquish the reigns reins of this one to Bryan.

Good luck Bryan. With tender and generous love this blog has much potential to grow...the likelihood is that I will still post here occasionally, so don't think you've heard the last of me yet!

And if you want to hear form me, then I will be blogging frequently about the social networking space for the enterprise on our Social Enterprise blog, which I am resurrecting with Suw Charman-Anderson.

It's time to have your say and cast your vote in the 2009 ComputerWeekly.com IT blog awards, in association with IBM.

Now that our nominated blogs, and twitter users of the year, have been whittled down to manageable shortlists, it's time for IT professionals to decide who are the best blogs and twitterers.

So get stuck in and cast your vote, I am sure you will find some new blogs that will be valuable sources of information as you look through the shortlists.

This year we have received the highest ever number of nominations and the introduction of some increasingly competitive categories, such as IT professional male and the IT twitter user of the year awards, have introduced some controversy and excitement!

To view the shortlist and vote go to www.computerweekly.com/voteblogs.

I will confess its not been easy to set up the right categories for this year's blog awards, and we still haven't got it quite right yet, so we will keep tweaking each year. Click here to see the full list of categories and shortlisted blogs.  I think of it like good web development - its a process of iteration. Each year we learn and improve for the next year.

However, I am sure you will find that there are some cracking blogs in each category and we will have some worthy winners.... go on have your say and cast your vote now!

For sometime my colleague Faisal Alani has borne the brunt of producing content for our successful Inspectagadget blog.

Eventually, he persuaded me that he should have additional contributors. After a bit of arm twisting, I agreed, and we put a call out to our twitter community.

To say we were avalanched with queries would be an overstatement, but we did have quite a few. From that we have appointed Karl Hodge as part of the blogging team for Inspectagadget. Congratulations Karl, I know your posts will be informative, interesting and most importantly entertaining.

To see some of Karl's work see his latest two pieces:

1. Vodafone gets friendly with 360

2. Kindle coming to the Mac

Great stuff Karl - look forward to many more of your contributions.  

Two well-known brands - drinks company Innocent and online clothing retailer Asos.com - have totally different approaches to their employees' using social media under their brand name. These examples were taken from the media 140 event in London about brands.

Asos eCommerce director James Hart actually went round asking staff that he saw on twitter to add the brand name to their username, and use it to tell people what they're doing at work as well as just talking to their friends.

"We have 55 people on Twitter. I trust them and I see what they say because I follow them. We like to be where our customers are, and we adapt to the environment. I'm not really sure what to do with the official account. People search for Asos so we need something, but we don't really push products at them. I just want to talk to and learn from them."

By comparison, Ted Hunt, digital comms manager at Innocent, just has the one official account. Innocent isn't strict over internet communication - it doesn't monitor its blog comments, aside from comments with swearing in them. Negative comments stay up, and the company encourages interaction. But Ted says it's simply easier to control one Twitter account than 55.

"We keep it as a single Innocent drinks account. Otherwise it fragments too much and it's hard to control the message. It's easier to get a message out in one go. But we don't moderate strictly. In two years we've removed six comments. Negative comments stay up. We take down swearing as children come to the website."

It seems it's a horses for courses approach, some brands already have a strong voice and identity and so having lots of different voices twittering under the brand could harm it (Innocent would be a good example of this), while those trying to find a voice and personality may find several voices works best.

Controlling the message is a social media no no though and consumers can smell an over-corporatised twitter feed a mile off... enter and engage in conversations in an open and honest way. That's the message, ain't it? 

First session after lunch at Media140 is John Beasley, head of brand at Red Bull, who says social media plays a key role in the marketing of the company's products.

He says the important thing is to find something genuinely interesting to do with the medium. The company is prioritising its marketing to the extent that it says it wants it "to become the brand".

It uses everything from videos to iPhone apps to link its name to (and produce) unique content it thinks will excite people and get them interested in the brand. Beasley says the eventual aim is to monetise the content and get people to pay for it.

He says, "As a brand, we should only contribute when it works in the community. We need to be very targeted and responsible. You need to connect with and benefit with consumers. Communication is never just for it's own sake, and we hope to create something in the long term that will mean a consumer will have a better idea of us."

He says long-term commitment to social media is the only thing that will get it to work. The first thing the company did was create a presence online using MySpace, Facebook and Twitter.

He says, "But we had to develop that though and use content . We found consumers wanted short bits of content that needed to be refreshed constantly. We also created lots of different points for consumers to discover us through."

Red Bull sponsors an F1 team and uses this to create content and engagement - staff in the pitt at a Grand Prix will twitter about what's happening, answering questions and talking to people. And alongside commitment and decent content, Beasley says honesty is needed - it's important not to be fake.
 
Red Bull doesn't really innovate through its products - it doesn't launch new products all the time, instead it innovates through its marketing. Not all companies would want or need to do as much as Red Bull has, but it provides a good example of what a company that relies fairly heavily on marketing can do with social media.
 

One of the better presentations so far at Media140 was Ciaran Norris's keynote "Learning to Listen", during which highlighted some of the good examples of companies that have listened well on twitter or other social media platforms.

• Comcast, an ISP in the US, responds to every tweet complaining about their service. It got some great free publicity after responding to Techcrunch editor Michael Arrington's angry tweet - he later wrote a post saying how good they had been, which went out to his 3m readers.

• Dominos faced a PR nightmare after two employees filmed themselves putting pizzas up their noses while at work. It's a little unclear as to why this was fun, but it must have appealled to some people because it got 600,000 views on YouTube. The company took 48 hours to respond, but their video got 1m views in the end, so the positive appeared to outweigh the negative.

• First Direct feeds every comment about the company onto its site - both positive and negative. It has the potential to backfire, but it does show customers that it appears to be listening, and it creates one space where staff can see every comment made.

• But not everyone gets it right. I wasn't able to get down all the details but Ryanair staff attacked and argued with a blogger on a blog discussion board, for daring to suggest he found a bug on their site. He was relatively polite but they insulted and threatened him. When Ryanair did come up with a formal response, they stuck to their guns, callin him an "idiot blogger" and saying they wouldnt listen to anyone like him. Not the way to do it.

Ciaran is a former colleague of mine at Reed Business Information, we worked on CatererSearch together... Ciaran was our SEO point man, now he is head of social marketing for Mindshare.

So far the media140 event on Everything a brand needs to know about twitter and real-time social media has been heavy on hot air and light on substance.

In some respects that's not surprising, twitter and real-time social media are still babies in the human development analogy. Many companies are still grappling with what they mean for their brands, for their customer service, for their communication strategies....you could go on.

That's why when the evangelists are often asked to demonstrate some ROI, the concrete examples are hard to come by. What is true though is that there is increasing awareness of twitter and social media and companies are scrambling to play in the space.

The conference's keynote "Why pay attention to twitter and real-time social media?" by Tom Bedecarre, chief exec of agency AKQA, said: "Our clients are asking us to engage in social media - its the number one thing that clients are asking for now."

He admitted there's a lot more conversation than there is money spent at the moment, but that most campaigns at his agency now have a social element.

Its a growth area, look at the amount of social media jobs being advertised, its the only sector in the recruitment industry that is growing right now.

US cable TV company Comcast now employs 12 people to field customer service enquiries through twitter.

Gap asked AKQA to do its autumn campaign for denim, traditionally run through outdoor and TV media, through social media. It is essentially a Facebook campaign around the tag line borntofit. Its all also all about the customers sharing experiences and collaborating with the brand.

Tom said it was too early to say whether its been successful yet, just six weeks in, but its proof of how brands and companies now feel the need to play in the social media space to get their mesage across and communicate with their customers.

So for compnies that aren't using social media there is a school of thought that says its worth just getting out there and doing it... there's also a feeling that there needs to be a strategy to underpins what you do.

If you're not sure how to get started don't worry there are hundreds of self-defined social media experts out there, just search through twitter, you'll find a few, I can assure you.

One thing is for sure you can't ignore social media and twitter, there is no doubt it is increasingly becoming part of communication and brand strategies.... even if the ROI is hard to pinpoint at the moment.