Management vendors with money on their minds - Network World

If you're involved with running a data center, a CIO, operations manager, etc. you should take a look at this - IT process automation will help you do more with less in this troubling economic time and it looks like NetIQ is leading the pack with an incredible offer.

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SC Magazine Policy Management Product Best Buy

2008 SC Magazine group review of Policy Management selects NetIQ Secure Configuration Manager 5.7 as Best Buy.

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Help Put the PCI-DSS Record Straight

Bloggers pulled apart a recent PCI DSS vendor survey (see link in Blog) - "Always satisfying, and no-one really has much sympathy for vendors". Help put the record straight...

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Merchants call credit card industry's bluff on compliance

The Register reports that '88% of European firms have failed to achieve compliance with a credit card industry standard for processing ecommerce transactions'

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Five tips for successful VoIP deployment

Determining the network's readiness is the first step to migrating to IP telephony. There are five areas to consider when planning a VoIP deployment:

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Tips for Making Most of Longhorn's Top 5 Security Features

Deploying Windows Server 2008 - To quote gtkwatkins "Brilliant article. I would like to see more stuff written by this guy. He really knows his stuff."

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Community Sites and the Buying Cycle

The latest Marketing Sherpa weekly chart tracks five different types of information buyers seek over the course of the buying cycle, from awareness through purchase.
They focused on one easy-to-digest point that I tend to agree with: Our ‘About Us’ pages are more important than you might think. I was also very interested in how a corporate community site with blog, forum, hints and tips etc. can help address the customer service and competitive comparison needs.

Company information is where Marketing Sherpa focused. It is of less importance than the other information but gains in significance at the negotiation phase. It is at this point that prospective buyers start looking at a company as a whole, after short listing. They move beyond the features and functions of the products and services and want to know if the company is stable, trustworthy, reputable, easy to do business with - it is the values that can not be put on a purchase order.

A good community site offers prospects who are looking at the company in more depth a gamut of useful references. Customers who post comments, questions and are featured in blogs, vlogs, tips and tricks, and the special interest groups by product, industry or geography help indicate to prospects who we are working with today and establishes the peer group or groups where they feel comfortable. A prospective purchaser can garner advice and even ask direct questions of existing customers - What is it like working with NetIQ?.

Which leads nicely into customer service. As you move product forums into the open environment of a community site your online customer service and interaction is on show for all to see. And yes, they can see your dirty laundry. If there is something wrong with a product or service it will be raised by customers within a community. Glitches happen and a prospect knows this, part of their evaluation is how those are addressed. Honesty and a positive resolution focus that is communicated clearly helps reassure that the primary focus is on the customers satisfaction and assert if the level of service is better than competitor 'X'.

A community site is not however in my opinion the best medium for providing direct comparisons to competitive products or services, but it can make it easier for a prospect to find the information they need. The question will be asked and as with all questions should be addressed with honesty: Yes, 'X' offers a valid solution for this area of functionality, this independent magazine ran an evaluation piece recently that I think you will find very interesting and Gartner, Forester or A.N.Other analyst company offers this review. We also have this independent lab evaluation which compares our product against 'X'.

Most importantly if you have customers who used to use that product and have posted comments, provide links to those pieces and let the prospect query the customer via the forum as to why they switched and how it compares.

Community blogs also help convey the company position of thought leadership and give insight into the way its people think and interact with their audience. All in all a company or products community, supported or independent, is a valuable tool in any organisations arsenal.

Automates Mundane IT Tasks

Quote: Marc Jones, IT infrastructure support manager of Principality Building Society - "...helps improve IT operations efficiencies...enables us to reallocate skills, time and resources toward more strategic areas where we can really add value"

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NetIQ and Facebook

According to the InsideCRM article The Facebook Marketing Toolbox... in the last couple of years, Facebook has gone from a college photo-sharing site to a burgeoning business-networking platform for self-promotion, advertising and multimedia interaction.

I tend to agree, to a degree. The user profile is still predominately in that college age bracket but it is certainly shifting in the right direction for organizations like NetIQ. Forrester presented some demographic research on Facebook late last year, they are already a little dated but do indicate a trend in the right direction.

In a quick review of the IT corporations or products with Facebook pages you will find Linux, Apache, Blackberry, Cisco, and Citrix to highlight just a couple from NetIQ's AppManager Modules product list. You will also now find a NetIQ page, which is already beginning to gather a fan or two from outside the NetIQ/Attachmate organization in the few hours it has been published.

Facebook offers a gamut of ways to promote solutions, but a couple of primary objectives should always be developing an active and recognized fan base; advocates for the brand and solutions and communicating beneficial information. You always have to remember that Facebook is about communication, two way communication, just like any Social Media Marketing effort should be.

Those fans will then help the outreach to the target audience as their fan-dom becomes known to their Facebook friends. You leverage other existing groups, where it is relevant, also helps boost the buzz about products and services. Plus, don't forget to ensure you can be easily found in relevant networks.

Take a look and why not become a fan yourself.

NetIQ and Wikipedia

Every time you Google something, anything, a result for Wikipedia it seems is guaranteed to be on that first page of results. This has not been the case for NetIQ, which has been absent from the pages of Wikipedia for almost two years (I will not go into what happened here). This changed today with a new NetIQ Wikipedia page that we reinstated and edited together.

Now bear in mind that this page is only a starting point, which you can plainly tell if you opened it. It needs a lot of improvement. You can help with this as Wikipedia is an open content encyclopedia. So go ahead, register and improve our listing.

So why is having a Wikipedia page important?

It was partly because Wikipedia held a high authority status with the search engines and all that "link juice" would help our Search Engine Optimization (SEO). That changed in January, a fact I got confirmed in Steve Raye's Social Media Marketing: Working with Wikipedia post on SocialMediaToday. All the links on wikipedia are now rel=”nofollow” which means they are not counted as a link by Google or other search engines which use links as part of their algorithm.

But with 52,000,000 unique visitor a month from the US alone, according to Quantcast, Wikipedia remains an important part of our SEO and Social Media Marketing (SMM) strategy. Just having a Wikipedia entry that shows up in the search results lends credibility to our organization.

Interop Poker Extravaganza

Shamus McGillicuddy of SearchNetworking Blog never imagined he'd be wearing one of the most coveted pieces of bling in the poker-playing world.

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IT Administrators Rejoice IT Process Automation Myths Busted

Travis Greene of NetIQ in Interview by Keith Shaw of Network World busts the myths of IT Process Automation. Remove the menial, repetitive tasks from your day; automate disk space management across distributed systems; address ITIL known errors and other processes seen in ITIL, CoBIT etc.

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Aiding SEO with Linked-In

A primary objective is to increase the traffic on NetIQ.com. There are many ways to do this and one key method Damian and I are focusing on is Search Engine Optimization (SEO). A major part of our SEO strategy is garnering as many links to NetIQ.com as possible. This is because Search Engines like Google, who kindly outlines how to create a Google-friendly site, take the number of links into account as part of your ranking.

There are many ways of doing this and we will review them here over time, but this is something every employee can help with by obtaining and leveraging their LinkedIn profiles to boost our optimization. LinkedIn is a professional social networking website and we are using it to host the NetIQ GMC group and you can link back to your own website in your profile page. So you are asking: Does that really work? Yes, because Linkedin does not tag the outgoing links to stop the search engines following it out to the site.

Here is how to do this:

1. Switch profile view to full
- Click on 'edit my profile' in the left side menu
- Scroll down a little until you see the box below
- Click 'edit' and change it to full view
- Check the box next to 'Websites'
- Remember to save changes

2. Update you page to display customized web names
- Just above the public profile box you should see the word website in bold, click on 'edit' next to it (If not scroll down to additional details and hit 'edit' there)
- Where it says choose, pick 'other'
- Type in your company name in the cell called Website Title, i.e. NetIQ
- Enter the URL in the next cell
- Scoll down, save changes

Now you have done the hard stuff remember to add your personal Linked-In URL to your personal blog (I just got mine in here), comments on other blogs, Facebook profile, etc. It all helps with search engine rankings.

NetIQ GMC

NetIQ GMC is a covert project for NetIQ staffers. It will allow everybody within the project to drive results. If you are an employee, you'll hear more very soon.

Monitoring the Blogosphere

I reread part of David Mermann Scott's book The New Rules of Marketing & PR a few days back and he sums up beautifully some of the key steps we have to take in building towards the launch of our corporate blog, and I paraphrase slightly:

• Monitor what millions of people are saying about...the market you sell into, your organization and its products.
• Participate in those conversations by commenting on other people's blogs.
• Begin and shape those conversations by creating and writing your own blog.

So what is the best way of monitoring all the blogs that might mention NetIQ, one of our products, an area we operate within or the points of pain we help address? How will we know when Bernardo Sanchez, .docstoc, or when Anna Rocha submits a SCM 5.7 piece to Digg.com?

Google News is already being used to feed content into our sales force information source, but I found that a little restrictive as it does not provide the depth of blog coverage I felt we needed. I also didn't want to establish feeds from each of the sites that should be monitored. That would put me at the receiving end of multiple fire hoses.

Turns out that Jackie Huba at Church of the Customer blog was at the receiving end of some great work Kingsley Joseph of Salesforce's was doing with Yahoo Pipes to get on top of their online buzz. Anyone familiar with UNIX pipes will understand how this works, but it allows the construction of a single feed from sites like Techmeme, Technorati, and Digg.

After cloning Kingsley's work, which worked great, I have started building my own basic pipe (first draft pictured here) in an effort to more effectively cleanse the results of blog spam. It is a work in progress, but we should be able to start reaching and commenting on relevant blogs very soon.

ISAPI Rewrite for File Protection

For as long as I have been building and marketing websites, I have been a Linux/Apache/mySQL/PHP (LAMP) guy. NetIQ web pages were created using ASP on IIS.

One refreshing IIS/Apache similarity I have found is Helicon's ISAPI Rewrite IIS module. It is an implementation of many of Apache's mod_rewrite features for IIS. It uses a config file with near-identical Apache syntax. NetIQ has been using this product for some time now and I was happy to see it.

One novel use for the ISAPI Rewrite filter is its ability to protect files, like trials, from being downloaded without first completing a registration. While creating new PPC landing pages, I realized I need to make a large .exe available for download, but only to people who complete a specific form. While there are probably better ways to do this using ASP, I was going for simplicity and minimal infrastructure modification. So here is my ISAPI/Apache code:

RewriteCond Referer: ^(?!http://example\.com/PPC/the_referrer\.asp)(.+)$
RewriteRule /PPC/downloads/the_download.asp /PPC/no\.asp [I,RP,L]

The first line states that the rule only applies if the visitor's referrer isn't http://example.com/PPC/the_referrer.asp. Then the rule itself redirects from the "protected" page (or .exe) to a page that explains the file cannot be accessed directly.

Obviously, this method of protection can be circumvented by simply faking the headers sent to the webserver, but the person would still need to know the url of the .exe. In this case, the .exe is a software trial that is otherwise available on our website, so nothing is lost if someone decides they want to get around my protection measures. What it does effectively do is prevent someone from linking to the .exe from their website or emailing the .exe url to someone. I want to capture as many leads from downloads as is practical.

Here we go

Following David's introductory post, I wanted to jump in and introduce myself, as well. David shares the credit for the idea for this blog with me, but the truth is that it was his idea - my only contribution so far has been my enthusiasm.

I'm Damian Smith and I'm the recently-hired Web Marketing Specialist for NetIQ. David is the Manager of Social Media Marketing.

NetIQ is changing the way they approach web marketing and dramatically increasing the resources allotted to the web. SEO and PPC had been outsourced to an agency that didn't understand NetIQ's goals, products, and marketing message. As a result, the agency underperformed. As part of their new approach, NetIQ recruited and hired me from the world of freelance SEO and PPC. NetIQ has also come to understand the value of Social Media Marketing, tapping David to manage this effort. I'm sure David's years of experience with NetIQ's Partner and Sales Channel programs made him an obvious choice. Two months ago, the web team consisted of two members - in just a couple weeks, there will be six of us.

There is plenty of work to be done - much of it is catch-up work or starting from scratch; this is where David's idea came from: Wouldn't it be interesting to document NetIQ's renewed push into web marketing?

So here we are, ready to share our sweetest victories and confess whatever failures come our way.

Where do we start

Welcome to The Net Intelligence Quotient.

A couple of weeks ago Damian and I had a great idea. What better way than a blog to communicate, to our colleagues and maybe some prospective NetIQ community users, what we are doing to help them and market NetIQ online. It is what we are all about after all: social media marketing and search engine optimization (SEO).

Then I had to sit down and write this first post, something the NetIQ corporate blog writing team will be facing in the near future. Two questions came to mind:

The first was what should I write as an introduction? I felt this should include some information about Damian and I, our focus and objectives and what we will be covering. Was I right? A quick Google bought me to Linda Bustios' Corporate Blogging: Tips for Writing Your First Blog Post on Get Elastic. This is a great round-up of some excellent opinion and review of elements to roll into and consider in writing that first post. Some I had down, others I had missed.

The second was what could I glean from this experience to help our writing team down the road? Each writer on the team has their own skill set and range from think tanks full of thought leadership opinion pieces to a technical expert who can make the nuances of distributed Blackberry environment management sound simple and make it so. It affirmed my opinion that a contributing / managing editor at large was required to develop the editorial calendar and to write pieces like the introduction.

This blog is your heads up, without disclosing too much to our competitors, to the latest online marketing wizardry and services we will be employing to help our customers and prospects find what they need to make the most from the NetIQ solutions. We will be following the development and launch of our community site, improvements in our SEO efforts and payout on our Pay-per-click investments, amongst other things.

So stay tuned for our next post, bookmark this site and let our colleagues know where to get the latest information. We would also love to hear your thoughts and suggestions, so use the comments box and lets get this show on the road.