Spotlight Features

When politicians are campaigning, voters get close attention as prospective buyers and customers. After they take office, however, and are charged with actually running a government, how often do the elected officials maintain a real customer orientation to the voters? In Georgia, Gov. Sonny Purdue ...

The first point of contact between a business and its customers is increasingly a website, not a phone call or an in-person store visit. For government agencies, where store-like "walk-in" access is either difficult or unavailable -- especially at the national level -- improving customer contact t...

Starting your own blog does not have to be an arduous endeavor. "You just do it! There is way too much anxiety over blogging," said Lorrie Thomas, chief executive officer of Web Marketing Therapy. "Bloggers need blog technology and authenticity," she said. "It's not so much about the tools but how y...

There's been much ado about social media as the latest, greatest customer service tool -- but all that ado does little to help a corporation steer the conversation around perils and toward profits. So, buzz aside, where is the leverage in a set of tools that is seemingly all talk and little substanc...

The constant drumbeat of bad economic news didn't stop Jennifer Cloud from pursuing a job in her chosen field of interactive marketing. Armed with a degree in communications and a desire to learn new technologies, she started using Twitter. "I was wondering if the resumes I was blindly submitting on...

As city administrators grapple with the notion of tying all their apps into one overarching network, should they be looking to open source as an alternative to apps from vendors? Enterprise-level open source apps exist, and are used both by the federal government and by large corporations. For examp...

While telecom operators provide a means for improved interpersonal communications, the operators themselves still have a long way to go to make communications with their customers more personal.

Cloud computing and SaaS are on the rise in a big way, but for some companies, there's an issue that is starting to come up in a lot of conversations with their service providers: the geographical location of their data. While it may not seem a big deal to some, conflicts with national privacy laws ...

Cities, like other large organizations, will move increasingly toward virtualization and the cloud in order to save money on infrastructure. In fact, many city governments have already implemented Google Enterprise. When problems occur in cities with automated programs, who's responsible? The city a...

A good CRM system can prove invaluable to a small business trying to achieve its business goals. Once that growth starts to occur, though, a small business needs to consider how the CRM tool will scale to meet the new demand. A small business is ready to think about scaling up if its processes are b...