Twitter: public relations and customer service

Twitter, for those of you unfamiliar with it, is a microblogging site. Users post messages (“tweets”) of 140 characters or less that the whole world can see (at least, if the whole world knows your username). There is an emerging industry devoted to Twitter and similar technologies for use in marketing; I even went to the MarketingProfs conference in October where an entire track was dedicated to “Social Media” — which essentially meant everyone was talking about Twitter.

In my (admittedly limited) experience, Twitter has been great for customer service. Comcast has several of their most active customer service reps on Twitter, and the anecdotal evidence has been that Twitter has been essential to Comcast’s improved customer service.

I think Twitter can help visionapp’s customer service in North America: as the most recent addition to the visionapp international family, visionapp NA depends on the customer support in Germany as well as a limited number of USA-based engineers to fill out its customer service profile. This is one place where Twitter can come in handy; by tweeting @visionapp, customers can reach us more quickly, allowing us to hopefully solve their problems faster.

Also, I just became aware of @micropr, a Twitter-based public relations tool where journalists, bloggers, and analysts can ask for contact in different areas. As soon as I signed up, I saw three requests for cloud computing and software-as-a-service, which are areas visionapp plays in pretty heavily–especially going forward.

I’ve done a bit of research that the majority of our customers can’t access Twitter at work because their Web filters block it. However, I’ve got a contact at Websense who says that business-related Twitter traffic is on the rise, and they’re trying to figure out how to filter the wheat from the chaff in the tweets. Users can likely use third-party apps like TweetDeck to get around this problem for the moment, but for an enterprise software audience, that’s a pretty big hill to climb. However, if the IT department knows they can get instant customer service from @visionapp (and other companies), perhaps they’ll turn off their Twitter filter for certain user populations.

Building an infrastructure factory

visionapp, CentriServ, and DevonIT want to help you turn IT into a competitive advantage for your business. To learn how your business can increase productivity and save your IT budget, we’re hosting a webinar on improving user productivity and reducing administrative costs with a Citrix environment.

Title: Building an Infrastructure Factory
Date: Tuesday, December 2, 2008
Time: 1:00 PM – 2:00 PM EST

Speakers include:
Chief Technologist of visionapp: Rick Dehlinger
Director of Professional Services at CentriServ: Jared G. Hoover

Space is limited. Reserve your Webinar seat now.

Webinar: XenApp 5 and visionapp Server Management

If you are looking to see the stuff in the “Migrating to XenApp 5″ white paper in real live action, visionapp is hosting an hourlong Webinar on December 2, 2008.

The everyday operation of Citrix XenApp farms and maintenance of machines, software and settings can be tiresome. Keeping servers up-to-date and consistent can be a challenge. Best practices for migrating to XenApp 5 from older versions of Citrix include having properly maintained machines as well as careful planning and testing. The webinar will show how vSM 2008 performs migration to XenApp 5 and day-to-day maintenance of Citrix farms – in a standardized, reliable, reproducible and documented way.

This webinar is mainly intended for technical audiences; basic knowledge of Citrix products is recommended.

Sign up here.

Migrating to XenApp 5

If you and/or your customers have questions about migrating to Citrix XenApp 5, visionapp has just published a paper detailing best practices and how to enforce an effective migration methodology. The paper is available on a few sites, including eMediaUSA, KnowledgeStorm, and BitPipe.

Here’s one of the links:
Citrix XenApp 5: Preparing for a Successful Migration (registration may be required)

Write a comment to let us know what you think!

Geek Speak Live in Des Moines, Iowa

The Citrix Geek Speak Road Trip is coming back to Iowa, and visionapp Chief Technologist Rick Dehlinger is one of the featured presenters!

Event Details:
Thursday, December 4th
Sessions: 1:00PM – 4:00PM
Drinks and Hors D’oeuvres, 4:00PM – 5:00PM
Location: The Des Moines Golf and Country Club
1600 Jordan Creek Parkway
West Des Moines, IA 50266

visionapp is also sponsoring the food and drink at happy hour. If you attended the Citrix Synergy 2008 event and the June Geek Speek event, then you are aware of the craze over Geek Speak Live.

visionapp business partner Alliance Technologies is bringing Geek Speak back to Des Moines this December, giving you facilitated learning from thought leaders and tech experts, including visionapp Chief Technologist Rick Dehlinger, as well as industry experts Doug Brown, Rich Crusco, and Michael Keen.

This open forum event gives the audience the chance to run the show and will include discussions and input from experts in the infrastructure delivery community.

You can find more info on the Geek Speak event here.

Connecting with the Citrix communities

It recently came to my attention that my attempts to reach (and promote) a visionapp community via Twitter and Facebook might be falling on deaf ears. The reason? Web filtering software, such as Websense and Webwasher, are being used by our B2B customers’ IT groups to block the very social media sites where visionapp is attempting to talk about best practices to migrate to XenApp 5 or different options for remote desktop tools.

I’m hoping that WordPress isn’t one of those websites that are also blocked by those web filters — and that you can tell me what websites and blogs you get your Citrix information from. I know Doug Brown (DABCC.com) and Brian Madden (brianmadden.com) both have very usercentric sites for Citrix admins and thought leaders. Anyone have other favorite blogs or sites? And — does your organization also block Twitter and Facebook at work?