Author: blogger

Social Security in Cameroon Toward Greater Solidarity between Cameroonians

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Although several discussions and efforts to debate on social security in Cameroon had been made, this issue remains a major problem in president Biya’s social policy making.

Nevertheless, the sector of National Social Insurance Fund (CNPS) has seen some improvement in terms of services offered. The renewal of the CNPS has seen more stations being opened up to ensure that retirement pension’s payment can be paid almost anywhere and that people do not have to queue for long hours waiting to be served. Similarly, pension payments can now be done monthly unlike the previous system of quarterly payments with the pension holders getting money directly to their bank accounts if any.

On a different note however, these new arrangements have not been as helpful as not all the retirees have access to this money owing to the fact that they have insufficient documents to ascertain that they are indeed the beneficiaries or the money deducted from their salaries earmarked for submission to CNPS offices never got there.

In terms of social security policy, retirement has become a puzzle. Without a shred of doubt, the social security in Cameroon is yet to help many despite it being a collective aid for Cameroonians against social risks like illnesses, old age and disability, family and maternity. According to a recent survey, the Prime Minister announced that very few people benefit from this system.

During the unveiling of the government’s social and cultural, economic and financial plans in parliament two years ago, the Prime Minister, Yang Philemon declared that the government was working towards ensuring that all members of Cameroon would be able to have access to CNPS. A month later, the head of state confirmed this issue by informing the public that the social security system was being studied.

The task force responsible for upgrading the social security has conducted various studies and have submitted their reports. This unit has mainly focused on the exploitation, response and validation of the steps taken by the piloting committee which is in charge of upgrading the CNPS. Also responsible for making recommendations, this unit has come up with ways which will expedite a harmonious development of social security in Cameroon.

The report forwarded to the government precisely covers organizational improvement as well as the current management systems in the social security sector. It also works towards putting up measures to cover the people who were not covered before and also upgrade the current benefits for better service.

Under the new management, both public and private sectors will work together towards social security in Cameroon simply because this issue deals with the social protection of all Cameroonians and therefore this should be met by both sectors.

The public organizations include the National Social Security Fund (CNSS), the National Fund for State Employees (CNPE) and National Health Insurance Fund (CNAM). The private organizations comprise of social mutual like the insurance companies, fraternal benefit societies and health mutuals.

This works with CNPS coverage for voluntary insurance, being taken over by the CNSS while the CNPE is responsible for taking care of civil servant’s benefits as well as people who belong to decentralized territorial communities. These three organizations offer four types of cover: family, maternity, old age and disability and work related accidents.

All these reforms work towards modernizing social security in Cameroon while we ensure that all is in accord with the other member countries.

read more articles and news from Cameroon on our websites cameroon-report.com and cameroonblog.info.

Cameroon-report.com is dedicated to news in Cameroon. You will find articles about politics, economics, society, sports, culture in Cameroon. As living in Cameroon, or part of the cameroonian diaspora anywhere in the world, cameroon-report.com keeps you informed on a daily basis. Cameroonblog.info presents different opinions openly or editorials about Cameroon and cameroonian diaspora.

The importance of social networking sites in social media marketing

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Social networking is the newest and most popular trend on the internet today. Many individuals who join a social networking site are able to keep in touch with old friend and relatives, meet new people and make new friends. With just a few clicks of a button, you are able to access and share so much information, and many businesses have taken advantage of social media to market their products as well as to promote their websites.

Social media marketing is now one of the fastest growing trends among online entrepreneurs today and small business owners can benefit as well. What makes social media marketing via these social networks so attractive is the fact that anyone can join. Whether you are a college student, a housewife or an entrepreneur, anyone and everyone with internet access has the ability to join a social network. With millions of active users constantly on these social networking sites, a small business owner has surely a lot of potential customers to do business with. Most of the social networking sites are free, so you do not have to pay anything to sign up. By simply creating an account and updating social networking pages, businesses can advertise their wares.

Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn are some of the popular social networking sites available. Facebook is a great way to advertise products and services. With a like feature, users can recommend a web page or link, which increases the chances of people investigating your site further. Be sure to utilise all possible Facebook tools such as posting a fan page for your business and include pictures, questions, information, and resources that your target audience would find useful. Twitter has a limited amount of text to use, so make sure that you customise your page to be unique with a catchy background and title. Also, hyperlink words back to your company website, which will create traffic and increase the possibility of being picked up by search engines such as Google. By using LinkedIn, you can link your company’s website to the network and it will be shared with the professional community. You will have the ability to answer questions posted by your target audience which will give you expertise in the field.

If you are a business owner who is considering online marketing to increase your sales, then use social networking. This way you can increase your advertising potential by reaching more people and at the same time develop a niche market for your products and services.

Poker Training Network Review – Poker Goes Mlm

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Poker and Network Marketing?

Is this really happening?

Well, it is.

Considering the explosion of poker and the amazing staying power of the industry that just continues getting more popular, it’s easy to see why this company makes sense.

First off, Let me acknowledge that I am a founding affiliate for the Poker Training Network. What that means that this review is biased, even so if you decide to research on your own, you will see that everything in this review is true. I’ve been a part of the MLM industry for nearly 20 years and I carefully studied nearly 50 companies before choosing to go with PTN.

What that means is that the Poker Training Network beat out everyone else.

In early September 2009, the Poker Training Network (PTN) went into a soft launch and since then has made a bit some noise in the network marketing industry as well as the poker industry. It’s not gambling, it’s poker training and here’s the pleasant surprisetheir products work, very well.

The Poker Training Network makes a suit of training products available that anyone can use, regardless of skill level. The system includes a video lesson library, podcasts, a play simulator, a proprietary game room, a results tracker and an incredible database driven analytic tool that actually records your play then provides feedback on your play based on core poker fundamentals.

It’s like having your own personal poker coach.

It’s estimated that there are 300 million people that play poker and combine that with non-playing network marketing followers; most agree PTN has a rather large place to market.

New MLM’s launch frequently and every good business person knows that the place to start and end your evaluation is with management.

So, who is behind PTN?

Dennis Nadeau is the Founder and CEO. Nadeau has had success in both MLM and traditional business, making it big years ago with Quorum before changing his focus to internet marketing for fortune 100 companies.

Dennis Windsor serves as the President and Chief Marketing Officer. Those who’ve been familiar with the network marketing business for some time will recognize Mr. Windsor’s name. He’s been on both the distributor and management side of the industry most notably with The People’s Network and he ran the network marketing division of Video Plus.

The following information will be quite interesting, especially for the long-time network marketers. Do you want to know of the chief investors? None other than Jeff Olson (NSA, Quorum, The People’s Network, Slight Edge). Jeff is likely the biggest name in MLM for the last two decades and has raised three different network marketing businesses to over $250 million yearly and has been #1 distributor or the owner of each. He must see something he likes with PTN since he’s never done anything small in the industry.

Okay, so it’s an awesome product with stable managementwhat about their compensation plan?

The Poker Training Network has gone with a binary with a check match. So, you’ll earn 10% of the volume of your pay leg (lesser volume) and are eligible for a check match for everyone in your enrollment tree down 10 levels. You enrollment tree is your personally sponsored people plus their team.

Even at the beginning levels, you earn a 50% match of someone’s check. So, if you help someone make $2,000/mo, you will earn a $1,000 bonusand that’s just for that one affiliate.

This is the real power of these binary check matches. You won’t get rich on your team bonus (it caps at $25,000/mo), but the check match can represent some huge income over time.

PTN is a firm organization with a star-studded management and ownership team; there is no question about that. They have a firm compensation plan; that is easy to see. If you look up some info, you will also find their poker training products are by far the best in the industry.

So now what?

How are you going to market your business/product?

Trade shows? MLM events? Family? Friends?

All of these methods could potentially work, but what if you really learned how to market like a pro?

What if you learned how to position yourself and your company so that you only talk to people who wanted to talk with you?

Every business should have an effective marketing plan. It’s what makes an organization work. Making a list of the top 200 people may work for some, but definitely not everyone.

If you really want to build a long term, effective, profitable business with PTN, you definitely must learn a few core marketing skills that will separate you from everyone els.

Social Media Monitoring How To Select A Service

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The focus is on social media monitoring in this final article in the series on Selecting a Media Monitoring Service.

In earlier articles, Determining Your Media Monitoring Needs, Print News Monitoring vs. Online News Monitoring, and Broadcast Monitoring for TV and Radio News, I describe the various approaches to news monitoring.

Definition: Social Media Monitoring

The social web is a fast-growing and fast-changing “platform” for consumers to discuss companies and products.

Social media monitoring is the process of listening to online consumer reviews and conversations about your company, its brands and services.

The overarching goal of social media monitoring is to learn from listening – learn the consumer’s concerns about your company and its industry, and then use that knowledge to improve your products and services.

Social Media Monitoring Services

Your social media listening strategy should encompass all forms of word of mouth media and consumer discussion including but not limited to blogs, “complaint” sites, message boards, forums, Usenet news groups, and video sharing sites such as YouTube. You should also monitor social community sites like Facebook, MySpace and Linked-In, along with Twitter, the microblog.

Social media monitoring services monitor all forms of social media – but not all services monitor all media. The services use specialized software to aggregate social media postings from multiple sources, index all the content on a near-continuous basis, query the index using the client’s key words and identify consumer posts of interest, and then deliver the relevant posts to the client.

Since it’s impossible to predict where or when important market intelligence will “pop up” on the Web or where it will be republished, it’s important to monitor as much social media as possible.

Market Intelligence vs. Worthless Chatter

Social media overflows with inane chatter. If the Chipotle restaurant chain monitors social media, the overwhelming majority of mentions will be about “going to” the restaurant or “meeting (name)” at the restaurant – not very useful for market intelligence purposes.

Well-constructed search queries help minimize extraneous chatter. As an example, McDonald’s could focus social media monitoring on specific product names (brands) instead of the corporate name. Or it could use an “and not” operator in the Boolean query on common phrases like “going to” or “meet”. That type of clip avoidance strategy will likely delete a bit of worthwhile conversation, but will certainly minimize useless chatter to be reviewed.

If your company is using social media monitoring as a customer service tool, it’s important to see all mentions to sort out and act on complaints and compliments.

What should you be listening for?

As a starting point, monitor for your corporate name, your brands, the services you offer, and the names of key executives.

Initially, focus on identifying and anlyzing complaints, compliments and questions about your organization. Look for any serious issues that need to be corrected. Look for patterns or trends that are emerging – positive or negative. Initially, measurement of social media is not necessary, especially for small and mid-size companies. Later, you may want to expand your listening to encompass competitors and industry-specific issues – and also do some formal measurement of social media conversation.

Who in the organization should coordinate the listening?

The answer to “who should listen?” will emerge from the central reason or the combination of reasons your organization wants to monitor social media. Is it to find service complaints and rectify them? Then “customer service” should listen and react – often called “engagement” in social media circles.

Is the reason to identify issues with product performance? Then marketing or product development should be listening.

Is it to monitor corporate reputation? Then the public relations department should be listening.

In large corporations, multiple departments should be involved in the listening process.

How to listen?

Using free social media search engines can provide quite a good cross-section of word-of-mouth commentary by consumers on the Web. For blogs, try Technorati, Google Blogs and Ice Rocket. Searching multiple services causes a problem of duplicate content that you’ll need to filter out – something that commercial media monitoring services do automatically.

For message boards and forums (which may be even more important to monitor than blogs), try BoardReader which covers about 50,000 different online consumer discussion sites. The best way to start monitoring Facebook and Linked-In is to simply sign up as a member and enter search queries into each service’s search engine.

The downside of free search services is the time required to conduct the searches. It may not be the most productive use of in-house staff. Staff time is better used for analyzing, not searching. If there are a limited number of new posts each day, it may be acceptable to monitor less frequently. But at least occasional monitoring of social media is crucial to gain a better understanding of consumer issues and to protect your corporate reputation.

Bottom Line: free social media search engines may well meet your needs if you have just a few search terms, typically receive only a few new postings each day, are willing to invest the time to conduct searches on a regular schedule using multiple free services, and have no need for advanced services to measure the quantity, reach, and tone of the social media postings. Using free media monitoring tools, though not perfect, may be “good enough”. “Free”, however, is not truly free. The staff time investment must have an adequate return.

Commercial Social Media Monitoring Services

The paid subscription services for social media monitoring provide more comprehensive coverage, save staff time, and provide many bells & whistles including online clip archives to manage the social media posts, and automated quantitative and qualitative measurement of the posts.

Prominent social media monitoring services include Radian6, Alterian M2, Trackur, and Scout Labs. Presently, more than 50 companies compete in the social media monitoring and measurement space. There is a “wiki” of social media monitoring solutions at http://wiki.kenburbary.com/ that continually updates the growing number of social media monitoring services. The Yahoo! Directory also contains a comprehensive list of social media monitoring services.

Many of the well-established news monitoring services provide integrated social media monitoring. CyberAlert, for instance, in addition to its online news monitoring service, provides comprehensive daily coverage of 50+ million blogs; 100,000+ message boards, forums, complaint sites, and Usenet news groups; 200+ video sharing sites like YouTube; and all Twitter postings for the previous 24 hours.

Social media monitoring services vary considerably in their mission and in their deliverables. In screening the companies, it’s vital to match their market niche with your need. Doing your homework in advance to narrow down your vendor list is absolutely essential.

Assessing Social Media Monitoring Services

Questions to ask in assessing social media monitoring services:

What is the core goal of your service?

Who are your key customers? What internal department is the primary client contact point for your service?

What’s your service best at doing? Exactly what social media do you cover? How do you aggregate content? May I add social media of special interest to our company to those your company already monitors?

Do you cover “complaint” sites? Which ones? Do you monitor Twitter?

Do you cover and exactly what content do you harvest from Facebook, MySpace, and Linked-In? Is your search engine capable of performing Boolean queries? What Boolean operands does it use? Is it capable of using regular expressions? How many keywords may I use in my queries?

Does your service include a searchable archive of social media posts? What are its features? Ask for a demo of the archive.

How do you differ from (another service you are evaluating)?

Who is your best competitor? Why are you better than they are?

What enhancements do you plan to your service in the next 60 days? Six months? One year?

Many of the services offer a comprehensive demo or, even better, a “test drive” of the service. That’s unquestionably the best way to sort through the features and benefits of the various vendors.

Summary: Social Media Monitoring

As a new and rapidly evolving media, online consumer discussion and social communities form the “wild west” of monitoring. No solution is perfect. But for most every company, some social media monitoring solution is necessary. The temptation is to leap into social media at full speed. But, the “full service” solution of listening, measuring and engagement may not be the best solution to meet your needs. Determining your needs before contacting or meeting with vendors is the most effective way to start the process. Even with general specifications in hand, you’re far more apt to contract with an appropriate service – and not buy more than you need.

Social Networks Pluses And Minuses

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The number of users of social networks nowadays is really astonishing. Both developers and users have noticed it. Up-to-date masses often even dont imagine themselves without social networks and online communicating. But is this good or bad tendency? In this article we will try to help you answer this question.
Firtly, advantages:
1. Social networks give us communication, connections with many people. It is not a secret already, that virtual communication has become far more attractive for many people. And in modern society a lot of people are just lonely and for them virtual communication is essential.
2.A search for classmates, old friends. Social network allow us to discover old friends that have moved years ago, classmates and sometimes relatives we have lost contact with. We have a possibility ot communicate with them online and meet in in reality. Not long ago we could just dream of such possibilities.
3. Find new friends and meet new people. Social networks give everyone unbelievable dating possibilities. The big number of members in social network also allows everybody to discover friends according to their interests and hobbies.
4. Big possibilities for ad and job finding. Social networks can be easily used as bulletin boards and looking at the number of users, really good ones.
5.Interests. For many visitors social networks are the interesting spending of time. Such hobby is not a bad one and it gives users many possibilities for self-realization. In social networks people can be whoever they want and communicate without worries.
But of course, as nearly all popular phenomena social networks have their disadvantages too:
1. The information spread in social network can be connected by who ever, without users even being informed about it.
2. Contact information may be used for spam.
3. Sometimes social networks can even hurt families and close relatives. The explanation for this is simple: users, who are too interested in social networks spend there all free time and dont pay attention to their families. In such case, such hobby can spoil real life relationships.
4. The absence of control can damage the psychics of children. Parents should care with whom their children spend time in social networks.
5. Medics frequently say that social networks are dangerous because they cause the addiction, and it is really so. Many people can not spend a day without visiting the social network. The absence of internet becomes great problem and people got addicted to virtual communication. Especially if people have problems in their life, they spend a lot of time in social networks in this way replacing life with social networks.
On the whole, the attitude to social networks can differ depending on the people and concrete situation, but they have conquered a big section of internet and are still developing. Today many people just cant live without social networks and the quantity of their members is still growing nowadays. But the most important thing here is to find a golden mean: use all advantages that social networks offer people but dont forget about the real life also.