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12 Enterprise IT Resolutions For 2012

From taking mobile to the next level to preparing for a hybrid cloud world, we offer a dozen suggestions for moving toward progressive IT.

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Make Social A Holistic Experience

Once you've ventured into the social realm and are building and measuring your community, the next step will be to measure the return on these initiatives. That means you'll have to make a better connection between social profiles, likes, dislikes, and interests, and your existing customer database. This deeper understanding will improve measurement of marketing campaigns and brand and product promotions, and you can start to apply social network insight beyond the marketing realm. For example, electronics retailer Best Buy learned just how unpopular restocking fees were through the social sphere, so it eliminated them through changes in product-return policies.

The idea is to make well-informed, holistic decisions about what products to develop, how to optimize the supply chain, and how to appeal to key customer groups with revenue and profitability in mind. In other words, once you embrace social, don't treat it as a stand-alone silo of insight.

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