The Savvy CIO

To balance out my previous post (perhaps rant is a bit more accurate) about Facebook and Twitter, here’s a fairly well-balanced overview of 30 Valuable Lessons Learned Using Social Media for Small Business.

My only beef? The author, while providing many good points, is in the hospitality industry. That’s business-to-consumer and somewhat of a lifestyle brand, exactly the two areas that have seen some social media success.

I still hold reservations for the near-term prospects of most social media for business-to-business industries. (Though we obviously blog and use some other targeted social media, so we’re in the pool, even if not wholeheartedly!)

Regardless, good tips for any type of business using or considering social media.

Working at a tech firm, I’m surrounded by a lot of very technically savvy people.

I find, in general, very technically savvy people tend to be paranoid about privacy and security on the Internet.

This worries me.

What do they know that I don’t know?

So in a toast to technically savvy Internet paranoia, here’s a trio of Firefox browser add-ons designed with the security paranoid in mind. read more »

Check out this great story about how open source crisis-mapping software has saved lives in Haiti, Chile and elsewhere. Two people wrote the program in a few days during the 2008 Kenyan post-election violence. The result?

The Ushahidi program provides a way for volunteers to collect information from sources like text messages, blog posts, videos, phone calls, and pictures, which are then mapped in near real time. It can be used to plot everything from disasters to wars. And unlike older forms of crisis-mapping software, Ushahidi is advanced enough to paint an accurate portrait of events while remaining incredibly user friendly and easy to build on.

This is open-source software at it’s best: fast, powerful, extensible, user-friendly and leveraging existing platforms instead of reinventing every wheel.

Kudos to the folks at Ushahidi. What great work.

The Ushahidi site and a photo of the software are after the jump. read more »

Five Four (why use more than you need?) Fine Links for Friday highlights the best, most interesting, most relevant or most funny content we’ve come across recently online.

Are you using Google Alerts to find out what is being said about your company, your competitors, your clients or your market?

Do you even know what Google Alerts is?

Google Alerts allows you to set keywords, such as your company name, your name, topics you want to stay current on, etc. Google Alerts then regularly scans the Internet for any mention of those keywords, and delivers the results to you. It’s an incredibly powerful tool for business, alerting you to any online mention of the key words and phrases you specify.

Interested? Check these links:

1. Google Alerts.
2. Google Reader. (Google Alerts generates what is know as a “feed”. Google Reader lets you scan, read and organize those feeds.)
3. How to Set Up Google Alerts and Why You Need Them.
4. 10 Ways To Use Google Alerts for Business.

Five Fine Links for Friday is a new feature at The Savvy CIO. We want to highlight the best, most interesting, most relevant or most funny content we’ve come across recently online.

This week’s Five Fine Links are all Internet “gateway” sites. A gateway site is a website that helps people find other websites. Ideally, your company’s website.

How do people find your company online? They may search Google or Yahoo! or Bing, but they also may use another gateway. Here are five of the most important gateways. You’ll want to enter or verify your business information at each of these sites. A few minutes could pay off big.

1. Google Places
2. Yahoo Local
3. Best of the Web Directory
4. Open Directory Project
5. Business.com