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.