Hensley Elam Blog

Today's blog entry - an idea about Social Media and Branding for IT companies. In a group of 300 of the countries leading IT firms that are in Vegas at a vendor confernence I came to realize that Hensley-Elam has been very gifted to have our creative group resources on hand. Because of the services that we deliver to our clients, we were able to leap into the Social Media space for our own purposes. I was really surprised when I see companies both larger and smaller than Hensley-Elam that are struggling with how to incorporate social media into their strategies. In a small group of 50 Hensley-Elam was the only firm that had a blog, Facebook business page, and a twitter personality. They didn't ask about Youtube or any of the other tools that we use. Outstanding!!

Hensley-Elam is often asked in our creative group about helping "go viral" on the web. There is an excellent article in this month's Harvard Business Review about viral marketing. Really, forget about viral marketing tools and issues being the first order of business. Make the PRODUCT viral. "Simply adding a "share" button to your product can increase peer-to-peer influence over product purchase by 400%." This is 10 times more effective than a rotating banner ad and twice as effective as email campaigns. Call us to talk about big ideas.

This week Microsoft timed the release of Internet Explorer 9 to occur during the South by Southwest tech gathering in Texas that starts this weekend. IE 9's main advantage is support for HTML 5 which is a new standard for programmers and designers to create more robust user experiences graphically without tools like Flash and other "plug-ins".

IE 9 will only be deployed for Window's Vista and Window's 7 computers. There is no planned support for Windows XP. Probably because XP itself has a final end of support date of August 2014.

Because of the Javascript engines in the 32 bit version being newer than released in the 64 bit version the 32 bit version appears to be faster even on 64 bit versions of Windows until the Chakra Javascript engine is updated. The 32 bit version is benchmarking faster than Chrome or Firefox current releases based on the anecdotal data in the market.

Get ready.. it's coming Monday.

In case you hadn't heard, Google misplaced 150,000 GMAIL accounts for 4 days and just restored them this afternoon. So much for "The Cloud" redundancy being infallible. Many of the hard questions that are needing to be answered are often falling upon deaf ears because of the marketing hype of "The Cloud" and the misunderstanding of it.