Measuring Customer Satisfaction

So the question is simple, “Are You Measuring Customer Satisfaction?” You must ask yourself this question now. Finding out what customers want to tell you may be as simple as asking them. There is a natural tendency to want to know as much as possible about what your customers think and feel about your product.

It is no secret that companies want to hold on to their customers. After all, repeat customers are a key part of success in the business world. The general belief is that it costs companies much more money to get new clients than it does to simple keep existing customers. This is why measuring customer satisfaction is so vitally important.

If customers shop at your online store or retail store and end up unhappy, then the odds are good that they won’t be returning. You have not only lost their business, but you have to suffer the potential fallout from others that they complain to about their experience at your store. These are some of the problems that result from the lack of measuring customer satisfaction.

The bottom line is that you want your customers to be happy, and the importance of measuring customer satisfaction cannot be discounted. There are a wide variety of ways in which you can assess how pleased or displeased your clients may be.

If you run a business in which your employees interact with customers one on one, of course you can simply ask them in person. For example, restaurants frequently ask customers, “How was everything tonight?”

However, with many other types of business, including online stores, it can be trickier to find a way of measuring customer satisfaction. The good news is that there are new methods available that perfectly suit ecommerce. For example, there are now customer feedback questionnaires and satisfaction survey software that is easily integrated onto your website.

If you are running a business and not measuring customer satisfaction, you may be losing valuable profits each year. It is time to reassess and start finding a way to gauge the happiness of your clients. As a result, you can often make much needed changes to your company that result in a better functioning business.

Post from: Social Media Vision

Are You Measuring Customer Satisfaction?

You can now see what’s being said inside your city.

Twitter has over 55 million status updates per day. That is a ton of data that is being published online what’s happening right now. With more and more users using mobile devices to post status updates, and with more users opting in to include their location with their Tweets – more and more of the 55 million updates are being tagged with a location. This is going to spawn interesting tools for internet users.

One of these tools was recently launched in the form of Sency for Cities (http://sency.com/cities.php). This tool, allows anyone to see what’s being said right now by people inside of Atlanta, Baltimore, Boston, Chicago, Dallas, Houston, Los Angeles, London, New York City, Philadelphia, San Antonio, San Francisco, Seattle, & Washington DC. So, when there is a topic that you want to get the publics thoughts on – you can now do that by performing a search at one of these city centric engines. Sency for Cities also shows you what’s hot right now in each city via 10 current trends listed under the search box. Lastly, this initiative will show you where people are at right now based on recent status updates in a city that provide an actual location.

All of this data can you help you learn more about what is going on right now inside of a city. It is also interesting to compare the current sentiment in your city with what the mood is in a rival city. Or, when a new movie comes out – you may be curious what all people are saying about it – but Sency for Cities can also show you what people in your city – are saying about it right now.

As time goes on – this data will get even more rich. You will eventually be able to see what’s being said at actual locations as opposed to just inside a specific city. And as the data becomes more targeted and helpful – more uses will come out of real time location search. But the great thing about it is that it’s different for everyone, so a way you utilize and learn from it may be extremely different from how the next person uses it.

The plan is for more cities to be added to Sency for Cities – so down the line – more people can see what’s going on inside of their respective city.

Post written by Evan Britton, founder of Sency

Post from: Social Media Vision

Sency for Cities

CRUSH – Your one and only source for juicy social media news in four minutes or less. Don’t forget to join us on Facebook and Twitter, and get your daily crush at www.commonsensenms.com

As promised, we’ve got the latest on the debate heating up over Facebook privacy. U.S. Senator Charles Schumer is adding fuel to the fire, asking the FCC to provide privacy guidelines for social networks. Schumer believes “The default policy should be one of privacy, and users should be in control of how they choose to share their information, not the other way around.” This “opt-out” to “opt-in” transition sounds smart to us, but check out the Senator’s Facebook page to find out what everyone else is saying and to put in your own two cents.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oFWAmMXmIiw

Taking a more active approach, a group in Germany expressed their concern over “privacy invasions” by sabotaging a Google “Street View” car. The Google employee returned to find the tires let down and the camera cables slashed. However, the protestors were kind enough to leave behind the informative note, “Please do not drive away, you have a puncture”.

And perhaps these privacy issues are the source of anxiety and worry bringing an influx of users to the site “Blah Therapy”. This new website pairs random strangers together as “venters” and “listeners”, however, when we tried to unload our feelings the site was down due to an overload of users.

But our epic privacy FAIL comes courtesy of Blippy, a social media site that lets users share with friends what they purchase. Several credit card transactions were visible via a simple Google search, exposing detailed information including amount spent, specific location, and full credit card number. While we hate to say it, we predicted this case of “TMI” from the beginning.

In Twitter news, a new report by Edison Research and Arbitron reveals that while the awareness of Twitter among Americans has increased from 5% to 87% in the past two years, the population is still struggling to find a reason to use it as only 7% of Americans are active users.

However, Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez has now joined the 140-character brigade in hopes of spreading Bolvarian Revolution. And if Chavez, who had recently declared Twitter “a tool for terror”, can be converted to the dark side, maybe Twitter still has a chance.

In an attempt to aggregate all the “Like’s” around the world, Facebook has created the new website likebutton.me. The site operates as a directory of “likes”, showing what your friends and the rest of the world have deemed most important from popular web sites, such as YouTube, New York Times and Pandora.

And that brings us to our CRUSH OF THE WEEK – we are taking on the serious epidemic sweeping the globe, “Internet Valleygirlification”. With Facebook only allowing a “like option” our freedom of expression is confined into a simplistic, 4-letter, click of affirmation. So that’s why we are hitting the pavement for the CRUSH Road Trip 2010. Don’t worry, we will find out what American’s really have to say and of course share all the juicy with you.

Post from: Social Media Vision

CRUSH: Road Trip 2010

You now have an opportunity to receive the Internet marketing education that can last a lifetime.

The Secret Classroom

It’s not an ebook that overpromises and underdelivers.

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On the contrary…

The Secret Classroom is the course that the Internet marketing community has been waiting for… even begging for..

I’m sure you’ve heard of Joel Comm’s internet marketing reality show, The Next Internet Millionaire, and perhaps even the Secret Classroom which was 12 DVD product released soon after.

Well, Joel has now put all DVD’s, workbooks and bonuses online in a private member’s area and he’s slashed the price to make it literally a no brainer for you to get instant access today.

You’ve undoubtedly heard of the legends who are a part of this 22-hour one of a kind event.

Check out this amazing roster…

- Mark Joyner (the Godfather of Internet marketing!)
- Armand Morin (made over $25,000,000 in his online business!)
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- Marlon Sanders (a living legend of online marketing!)
- Mike Koenings (no one knows online video like this guy!)
- Brad Fallon (can you say StomperNet?)
- Kristopher Jones (CEO of Pepperjam Search!)
- Mike Filsaime (the world’s viral marketing expert!)
- Ray Edwards (gets $10,000+ to write a sales letter!)
- Dave Taylor (prolific blogger, author and speaker!)
- Perry Marshall (the world’s leading AdWords expert!)
- Rich Schefren (the guru to the gurus!)

You could pay thousands of dollars to attend a conference where SOME of these people are speaking…

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Only twelve people were privileged to attend this exclusive seminar.

Now, for the first time…

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And check out the amazing intro video at SecretClassroom.com and then take advantage of the lowest price ever for this incredible product.

Post from: Social Media Vision

The Secrets of Twelve Internet Millionaires Revealed

CRUSH – Bringing you the latest in social media news in four minutes or less. And in our own exciting news – we’ve gone HD, making our crushing capabilities that much clearer. Enjoy! Don’t forget to join us on Facebook and Twitter, and get your daily crush at www.commonsensenms.com

Facebook took center stage this week with its annual developers conference, F8. What were the biggest announcements? Although Facebook founder Marc Zuckerberg displayed a dozen new tools and widgets, the most significant announcement to prepare for is the “open graph platform”. Open Graph plans to connect all corners in the web in order to “create a Web that’s smarter, more social, more personalized, and more semantically aware”. As one element of this platform, website owners will have a chance to place a “Like” button on their pages, allowing Facebook to then publish whatever a user likes directly to their Facebook profile.

Of course the privacy police have already stated concern over the new development, and with good reason. When does sharing data on what we read, view, listen to, and interact with on the web become invasive as opposed to interactive? Stay tuned to CRUSH for latest in what is sure to be an upcoming battle over personalization versus privacy.

In honor of the recent celebration of Earth Day, we encourage you to fly on over to the “We Love Birds” community on Ning. Hosted by NRDC and the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, “We Love Birds” is one of the best uses of Ning we’ve seen yet. View some of natures’ finest yourself with the over 7,000 stunning photos.

While social media sites continue to innovate at a crushing speed, the honorable justices of the US Supreme Court seem to be experiencing technical difficulties. The divide between “the hip justices and hip-replacement judges” was made painfully clear during this week’s court discussion over sexting and privacy rights. Embarrassing highlights from the case:

• Chief Justice Roberts asks what the difference was between email and a pager
• Justice Kennedy wondered what would happen if you were sent a text the same time you were sending one to someone else – “Does it say: ‘Your call is important to us, and we will get back to you?”
• Justice Scalia’s confusion on service providers and concern of whether they can be shared by printing them – “You mean (the text) doesn’t go right to me?”…”Could Quon print these spicy little conversations and send them to his buddies?”

In other online sex news, we would like to commend Apple’s decision to trash nearly 6,000 sexually suggestive iPhone apps. Refreshing to see some leadership within corporate America, and hats off to Steve Jobs for refusing to chose profits over the objectification of women.

And that brings us to our CRUSH OF THE WEEK – Our story this week truly reveals the power of social media, as Mayor of East Haven Connecticut donated a kidney to a Facebook Friend, Carlos Sanchez, after seeing the status update Sanchez posted saying his friends and relatives had all been tested but were not a match. Making the Mayor a hero in our books, and Facebook her loyal sidekick.

Post from: Social Media Vision

CRUSH: The End of Anonymity

Everyday more online retailers are adding customer surveys to their checkout process. Without consumer ratings, often merchants find that assessing whether or not customers are pleased is a somewhat of a guessing game. Consumer ratings have many benefits including the fact that merchants can gain valuable feedback about the shopping experience from the customer’s point of view.

Adding customer surveys to your online store can be one of the most effective ways of increasing the loyalty of your shoppers. As a result, this method can be extremely beneficial for growing sales. Not only will your customers be more likely to turn into repeat clients, they may be so pleased with their experience that they recommend your products or services to others.

On the other hand, often when your customers are unhappy with their experience, they won’t say anything. They will just disappear for good. Needless to say, you have lost their repeat business. Often you will find through customer surveys that the issues that your clients have are quite small and can be easily addressed. However, just these issues could have very easily equated to customers choosing another shopping destination for future purchases.

There are a variety of ways to easily add customer surveys into your transaction process. For example, one company called Shopper Approved adds customer surveys that come up right after a customer orders his or her product. This way a client’s initial thoughts can be expressed through the means of this customer survey form.

Through the Shopper Approved software, customers can also opt-in to participate in a longer survey after receiving their purchase. This sort of automation through the means of software allows customer surveys to be a smooth and easy process for your customers. Luckily, computers allow online customer surveys to be a thoroughly automated process. As a result, confusing paperwork and/or mailers are now a thing of the past.

What is Shopper Approved?

If you own an ecommerce website, then you know that ratings and reviews highly influence new customers to buy.

The problem is that most ecommerce sites don’t effectively gather customer reviews. And most of the sites that do, don’t know how to leverage those reviews to boost their online reputation and increase their sales.

Shopper Approved is the perfect solution.

By adding the Shopper Approved rating/review service to your website, your customers will be able to provide you with valuable feedback, ratings, and reviews automatically. You can then give your new customers easy access to this brand building information by displaying our exclusive ‘Shopper Approved’ trust seal in a prominant location on your website.

Shopper Approved is so effective at gathering feedback that on average, almost 1 out of every 2 of your paying customers will provide initial ratings and/or reviews, and nearly 1 out of every 3 will opt-in to complete a full customer survey once they receive their order!

To learn more about Shopper Approved online customer surveys software visit ShopperApproved.com

Post from: Social Media Vision

Online Customer Surveys

CRUSH – Bringing you the latest in social media news in four minutes or less. Become a fan on Facebook and get your daily crush at www.commonsensenms.com

Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you know that the massive lines outside the Apple store have been for the much anticipated, release of the iPad. With over 450,000 sold, it appears that having the iPad will be as commonplace as the iPod. But while there are already 3,000 iPad-specific apps available, there is one thing noticeably absent – Adobe Flash. Apple has banned flash from any of its iPhone and iPad apps, instead choosing only programs developed in HTML5.

Another media mogul Apple is taking a bite out of? Google. Apple is challenging Google’s online advertising dominance with the introduction of the iAd platform, which allows advertisers to develop interactive ads within another application. Although Apple CEO Steve Jobs has concluded it won’t be able to compete with Google’s search advertising, he is hoping Apple can become the leader in the mobile advertising sphere.

The war on climate change is heating up as the NRDC Action Fund rolled out its new media campaign to one-by-one get the 68 Senators who are not actively pushing for comprehensive clean energy and climate legislation to get in the game. And Senators, if you think they aren’t serious, just look at the recent activity towards target number one, Scott Brown of Massachusetts…

While the NRDC Action Fund works on the Senate, fifteen-year old Parker Liautaud is showing his commitment to the environment by skiing to the North Pole. His expedition, funded by none other than General Electric, is in hopes of becoming the first person to check in at the North Pole on Foursquare, which will earn him the coveted “Last Degree” badge.

Freedom of speech has been not only a liberty our country holds with pride, but also the source of controversy when it comes to media. Most recently, the forces for a free and open internet have been dealt a blow by the U.S. Court of Appeals for D.C., taking away the FCC’s power to move forward in it’s plans to get more Americans connected to a faster and cheaper internet, and potentially allowing Internet service providers to block internet content they don’t like. Luckily this future isn’t set in stone, and a majority vote of FCC commissioners could give the power needed to both protect consumers and close America’s digital divide. Go to savetheinternet.com to lend your support to this important cause.

The latest news from Twitter is bringing applause from the business community, as the site’s plans for a huge redesign shows a greater emphasis on data. Hopefully this will allow better insight into solving the riddle that has plagued many of us, Tweet R-O-I.

And the quest to solve new media riddles brings us to the CRUSH of the Week, where we highlight a number of individuals who are moving up in the world after making the leap from old to new media. Proving once again that the future where new media rules the day, well, is now.

Post from: Social Media Vision

CRUSH: The Great New Media Migration

So the Facebook f8 conference is a hot topic so I figured I should give some resources and some of the Facebook F8 Announcements.

If you don’t know what f8 here is their definition:

“8 is a Facebook conference where developers and entrepreneurs collaborate on the future of personalized and social technologies.

At f8, members of the Facebook team and the developer community will explore a variety of topics including new tools and techniques, business growth strategies and open technologies. We hope you’ll join us.”

Here are some of the new plugins and api updates and more:

• Like button plugin
• Activity stream plugin
• Recommendations plugin
• Facebook Login plugin (they plan on killing off Facebook Connect)
• Social Bar plugin
• Open Graph Protocol

You can watch the Keynote replay and other videos here – http://apps.facebook.com/feightlive/

Here is the code you can use to add the Like button to your website/blog:

<iframe src=”http://www.facebook.com/widgets/like.php?href=http://example.com”
scrolling=”no” frameborder=”0″
style=”border:none; width:450px; height:80px”></iframe>

Here is what it looks like:

Here are some news updates and blog posts on what is going on:

Why Doesn’t Facebook Look Like This?

As you may be aware, tomorrow, Facebook kicks off its big f8 developer conference in San Francisco. We’ll be there to cover what’s going on, but it looks like a lot of the information is already out there — Inside Facebook, All Facebook, … Obviously, I’m interested in any location announcements the company may make tomorrow — but it’s not clear if Facebook will actually announce anything yet as their plans have been fluid, and possibly still aren’t solidified. …

Hacking The Graph: Live From Facebook’s f8 Conference – Story …

Story analysis for facebook graph . Quickly understand and learn about facebook graph from your favorite sources.

Facebook F8: One graph to rule them all | Technology startup news …

Facebook F8: One graph to rule them all The social network’s big announcement at its F8 developer conference is what CEO Mark Zuckerberg calls the Open.

Post from: Social Media Vision

Facebook F8 Announcements

I had to share this funny video called “THE NEW DORK – Entrepreneur State of Mind (Jay-Z ft Alicia Keys Spoof) for grasshopper.com with all the readers of Social Media Vision. This is for all us Social Media Geeks out there!!!

Post from: Social Media Vision

THE NEW DORK – Entrepreneur State of Mind – Funny Video

CRUSH is a fast and fun weekly round-up of social media news – Join us on Facebook to keep up with all the latest.

What was this week’s theme among your favorite social networking sites? Change. Twitter, YouTube, and Facebook are all rolling out a handful of new features. Including Twitter’s addition of “most popular tweets” to its search capability, a new interactive layout for YouTube, and the introduction of language alterations and community pages from Facebook.

Facebook was especially busy, as it also acquired “Divvyshot”, a program that will allow users to tag photos by event. You can expect to see this application in the upcoming months. Music artist John Forte has already gotten a head start on how this might work, pausing mid-set during his latest tour stop in Boston to snap a photo for his morning Twitter feed.

More politicians are beginning to find audiences via social media. Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty is reaching out to his constituents on Facebook. He follows New Hampshire Governor John Lynch, who did a live stream chat courtesy of the Live Free of Die Alliance a few months ago.

But beware, the power of social media is a double-edged sword. Just ask the RNC, as the release of controversial financial records and activities have been blasted to the public by an army of bloggers, as well as a video mashup of RNC Chairman Michael Steele’s speeches to Fat Joe’s music video “Make It Rain”.

On a lighter note, April Fool’s Day did not go by unnoticed. Here’s a list of Mashable’s favorite pranks from this year.

And of course, we couldn’t resist pulling a prank of our own, which brings us to our CRUSH of the Week. Haven’t heard of a Rick Roll? Let us introduce you…

Post from: Social Media Vision

CRUSH: Rick and Roll