Social media and social networking websites haven’t just found a whirlwind of popularity with web users around the world; they’ve become serious business. The role of these social networking utilities for communicating with customers and connecting with the public has quickly changed from a novelty to a necessity for many companies. As enterprises have adopted these tools more and more, the need for guidelines and regulations concerning their use has become apparent, and one of the first developments in this area is the recent release of a regulatory notice by the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA) about the use of social media.

FINRA’s notice is targeted specifically at securities agents and brokers, but at Amatra, we believe the guidance and advice outlined in the notice is applicable and useful for enterprises in all industries. In a nutshell, the notice states that all firms must keep records of all communications made by broker-agents through social media sites and blogs. Any investment recommendations made through these sites are bound by the same rules and regulations as recommendations made in person or through other mediums. While firms are not held responsible for content posted on their sites by outside parties, they can still be held liable for any information they had a hand in creating. To see the full-text of regulatory notice 10-06, click here.

So where does Amatra come in? The answer is simple. FINRA’s new regulations are a sign of things to come concerning the use of social media within business, and without an organized foundation from which to launch your company’s online communications, keeping up with these regulations will be difficult, time-consuming, and expensive. The Amatra SmartSource™ platform provides a single source to coordinate, launch, and record your social media presence. Basically, SmartSource™ stores and tracks every communication you send out so you don’t have to. In a year, are you going to be able to find that Facebook status update you just posted? SmartSource™ will.

FINRA advises every firm to adopt supervisory practices to make sure that outgoing messages and posts are reviewed and approved before finding their way to the web. This review process is streamlined with Amatra’s help, as all content passes through the SmartSource™ system before being sent out. This means you’ll be reading and reviewing all content in one location, ensuring that your company’s message is uniform, consistent, and compliant. To learn more about Amatra’s Enterprise solutions, click here.

If you’re trying to break into the world of social media, start smart. Don’t fall behind the rapidly changing rules and regulations concerning social networking sites and online communications. Amatra SmartSource™ provides you with a single, organized platform to build a successful and innovative social media campaign and realize the power of one source, infinite communications.

Amatra Team

When you think about a community, the most symbolic image that keeps coming to mind is a web. Dozens of unique strands—each anchored at different points and pulling in different directions—combine to form a solid web that is infinitely stronger than any single strand.

At Amatra, we recognize the diversity of every community and utilize that diversity to make our Amatra SmartSource™ Multi Channel Communication Platform technology as powerful and effective as possible. When a community adopts SmartSource™ for its mass notification and emergency management needs, it isn’t just City Hall or the local hospital that gain access to SmartSource™’s revolutionary technology. The numerous individuals and organizations invested in the public safety of a community each have their own niche to communicate with and serve. Each of these stakeholders is empowered and enabled with Amatra SmartSource™ technology.

Within the SmartSource™ database, governmental agencies, schools, hospitals, community organizations, and more can each manage independent contact lists. Not only does this result in organized and effective communication management for each entity, but allows for instant exchange of these contact lists in situations where every second counts. For example, in the event of a medical threat throughout the community, a hospital is able to quickly collaborate with city government to exchange communication information and inform every member of the community about the threat.

Without the centralized communication portal provided by Amatra SmartSource™, a community’s stakeholders have to work independently to encourage and promote public safety. At best, the organizations function like a slow-moving chain, where each entity receives information and informs their sector of community members individually. At worst, they act like dozens of strands pointing in dozens of different directions, each doing their best but losing all benefits of cohesive and unified communication.

Yes, a web represents strength and power. Amatra SmartSource™ is unlocking this power in communities and enabling them to communicate, inform, and protect like never before. To learn more about SmartSource™ and the benefits it can bring to your community, visit click here http://www.amatra.com/industries/government-industry/mass-notification.

Amatra Team

Wasted Data. It’s true. There is an enormous amount of wasted information every second of our worldly existence. Valuable data spews from billions of sources, but it is lost in the inefficiencies and inabilities of our communication systems, our society, and even our government. (Gasp!) How can that be? Hasn’t modern technology such as the Internet streamlined our communication? I mean, look at me! I can work from my laptop while sipping a mai tai in Maui. In fact, I now even have the ability to see my doctor through a television screen. Thank you Cisco.

Our communication technology is remarkable. There is no doubt about that. But it seems to me that we are only at the beginning of our technologically advanced world. Our innovations generate even more data each and every day. How do we capture all that data, sift through it and relay it quickly in order to create a better world?

There are visionaries, answers to that question. Innovators from around the world pulled together in what IBM has named “Smart City”. This collection of ideas would be brought together in a technological utopia. According to their website, they focus on areas such as public transportation, energy and utilities, education, economic development, and public safety.

But what does this mean? Am I the only one that gets confused when they say “Smart City”? For some reason I get images of a technological takeover. If this worries you as well then I would recommend Graham Brown’s article “What to Do When Technology Takes Over the Earth”.

The interesting thing is that the concept itself is very simple. The right data is communicated to the right place at the right time and in the right way. Bored yet? Let me give you some examples.

We’ll start with transportation.
A train arrives at the station five minutes late, but the bus has arrived on time. The bus driver is notified and knows he needs to wait 5 minutes in order to pick up the rush of people coming off of the late train. Or maybe the smart city recognizes that it needs additional buses to keep the schedule on time and so a second driver arrives ready to pick up the late passengers.

What about public safety?
An emergency situation arises. A truck crashes and dumps harmful chemicals. The smart city can simultaneously provide the police, Hazmat, the fire department, EMT Services and the hospitals with the relevant data they need to get their jobs done. Hazmat now knows what chemical from which plant. The police now know where their perimeter needs to be set up to keep a safe distance. EMT services now know what precautions to take when treating victims. You get the idea.

What about utilities and energy?
A smart grid enables electric utilities to minimize waste. Solar panels on residential buildings provide power for the building itself, but can also be sold back to the utility to be used somewhere else. A windmill on a skyscraper, solar panels on a house, or generators can be used to produce power. Suddenly the whole city produces and utilizes its own power. Talk about sustainable.

The concept is as simple as this, an interconnected world with a focus on efficiency and effectiveness. That massive amount of data generated every day is going help not hinder the communication networks of the future. And who will be the developers and implementers of this new network? Entrepreneurs.

Amatra Team

A recent CEO Study by IBM shows that Creativity is the most desired trait that CEO’s look for in new hires. This is understandable as businesses become increasingly complex and global. Management and Employees need to think ‘outside the box’ to help customers and solve complex business problems.

The next important trait was Integrity followed by Global Thinking.

Link to the full study

Did you know

53% of customers expect to increase spending for Social Software according to Gartner.

IDC expect 41% Annual Growth Rate in Online Community Software until 2013.

As the capabilities of digital devices soar and prices plummet, sensors and gadgets are digitizing vast amounts of information that was previously unavailable.

According to recent analyst reports, enterprise data growth over the next 5 years is estimated at 650 percent. Estimates are that 80 percent of this data will be unstructured, generated from a variety of sources such as blogs, videos, email, etc. In fact, 70% of this unstructured data is stale after 90 days.

With this ongoing shift in the market, companies and governments need to be able to analyze and extract intelligence from information, irrespective of where data resides, in real time — without being bound by a particular system or platform.

Source – IBM

Imagine a situation where the provider of your communication service has an outage which causes disruption in services for customers. For emergency notification this would have been unacceptable as critical information needs to be sent immediately.

That is why using multiple communication methods is highly recommended. Moreover sophisticated notification systems will have multiple providers for a particular communication medium. In case a service is down, the system can switch to secondary provider with minimum impact to customers.