Rarely has there been more hype about a technology trend than there has been about social networking and within this much hyped trend, Twitter seems to out hype all others. Celebrities Twitter and then mention their Tweets at every opportunity. Politicians Twitter with varying degrees of success (contrast Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton’s Twitter accounts) and now more and more businesses are turning to this phenomenon.

With such a high profile surrounding Twitter I decided to try this brave new world myself.

My first problem was to understand exactly what Twitter is. Twitter describes itself as ‘A global community of friends and strangers answering one simple question: What are you doing?’ but this seems to underplay what Twitter is and certainly doesn’t explain its popularity.

For me I have treated it is simply a series of very short blogs that pass information between a community. This enables people to keep in touch with lots of varying topics very quickly and as frequently as they desire. So in my personal Twitter I write brief notes about things as they happen, that allow friends and family (whom I would normal call once or twice a week) to know what I am doing each day. If left to the weekly phone call much of the sentiment that has been captured on the tweets would have gone. Therefore my friends and family build a closer relationship with me and understand my drivers, habits and likes and dislikes, better.

In our business Twitter Account – ‘AT8Group’ we share key industry happenings that will help people stay informed about Ecommerce in Financial Services. The information is current and therefore of value to the community but also shows our own domain knowledge and encourages people to contact us if they need more information in these areas.

The beauty of this is how easy it is to share information with so many people and build these deeper relationships. An individual Tweet is only 140 characters so takes less than a minute. But that piece of information is then shared around your entire network which would have taken hours of telephone calls to achieve.

So will the Finance industry wake up to Twitter as a marketing opportunity? Well its beginning to happen. IFALife – runs a twitter league for IFAs – currently lead by people such as Martin Bamford of Informed Choice and MBLs Steve Burdett. But the entrants are still few in numbers and largely limited more entrepreneurial types. Large financial services companies seem to be keeping their distance, perhaps scared by the lack of control and potential for mistakes to become famous in the online world.

As mentioned above AT8 are however braving this new world of online networking and have our own Twitter account ‘AT8Group’. In addition, the last 10 Tweets will be shown here on our Blog page. So for the latest ecommerce news in a bite-size format click here to follow us.

This question increasingly seems to be at the start of many meetings and conversations these days. All too often, it elicits a rather gloomy response as more and more industries and people within them seem to be adversely affected by the current downturn in the economy.

So, is it all bad? Well, it is if you were to accept the view of many journalists – especially Robert Peston of the BBC!! However, without being dismissive, the reality is that in such situations, there are some winners and some losers. As people re-balance their spending priorities and manage budgets more carefully, we are seeing ‘discount’ supermarkets and some of the budget food outlets such as the burger and pizza restaurant chains increasing their business and recruiting accordingly.

Less than 9 months ago, with the pendulum at one extreme, we were ‘suffering’ huge increases in oil [petrol] prices and other commodities. This position was presented as a ‘damaging negative’… yet now we are seeing such prices falling as the pendulum swings the other way and this converse effect is now being presented as a ‘damaging negative’! The point is that we are dealing with two sides of the same coin and as I said earlier, whatever happens, there are winners and losers.

If we look at some of the business failures such as Woolworths and other high street retailers, we could choose to see the negative loss, but one of the consequences for the businesses that survive is that they have by default acquired an increase in the proportion of their market share. How they capitalise on this is a matter for them, but it is important for all businesses to raise their heads above the necessary ‘tactics’ of survival and look to the strategic opportunities that will emerge – something that they should be preparing for now.

In our own industry of Financial Services, the answer to the question of ‘how is business’… will again depend upon whether you are a winner or a loser. The sub-prime market has suffered a major bloodbath over the last 12 – 18 months and there are many other parts of the lending/packaging community that have suffered too. One area of business that seems to be on the winning side of the coin at the present time is that of e-commerce. Having talked to the various POS/middle-office/back-office suppliers, they are telling us that their order books and pipeline are buoyant. Even if you discount some of the potential desire to paint a ‘rosy picture’, the conversations we have had with the Providers and Distributors certainly appears to verify that there is robust demand for these solutions. Indeed, a number of the providers have told us that following general instructions to cut operating budgets by the ubiquitous 10%, the resulting justification for being able to save this money has often been to increase reliance on e-commerce and or IT processing improvements. Indeed, several have told us that this has benefited their budgets, in one case this resulted in the Finance department initiating a threefold increase in the e-commerce budget!

We believe those who invest now will gain a positive market position when the recovery arrives. Indeed, a failure to act now and perpetuate current inefficiencies will be exposed as RDR takes effect. There will be a need to justify the ‘factory gate’ pricing of products and requirement to deliver first rate service. Distributors will face similar pressure, as they will have to justify more robustly, what their costs of advice and service are.

There is a lot of ‘fear, uncertainty and doubt’ about at the moment and there is a real danger that we succumb to the negative mood. In truth, there is much that we cannot fix, but for that which we can we should do so… As a colleague once said – somewhat unsubtly – to those who kept telling him what they ‘couldn’t do’… ‘stop whinging and get on with it!

AT8 has launched today a series of informative factsheets, AT8 InfoBlogs, on the core propositions of the leading solutions’ vendors operating in the core UK Life, Pensions & Investment market sectors.

They are designed to describe the key attributes of each vendor, provide an outline of their proposition and their key target market and customers.

It is our aim to keep the information up-to-date and so check back regularly to refresh your knowledge.

The documents can be found here: http://www.at8-group.com/library/library.html