But first I'm going to do a little research. You know how much I love researching things!

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Hit the Bullseye at the Heart of Customer Service - the Customer Is Always Right , Even When They Aren't

We've all been there — the customer who creates great stress in their desire to have their perceived wrongs be righted by the company you work for. You may feel your company is in the right, but anyone who has done customer service for a while knows that being right and satisfying the customer aren't always the same thing.

That's why I like this article. It brings home the point that underlies the best customer service you can ever provide. The customer isn't always 100% right, but that doesn't matter even one bit. You will always win in the long run if you always treat the customer as if they were right.

You avoid name-calling, frustrated customers blasting negativity about you all over the web, and unhappy customers who inevitably make more unhappy customers. You lose business. You end up with demoralized customer service staff. It's just a real lose-lose setup.

There are lots of reasons to treat your customers with the utmost respect, no matter what the circumstances are.

Check out this article on customer service for a breath of fresh air to reinvigorate your customer service team.

The post Getting to the Heart of Customer Service appeared first on Spotlight on the Real World.

Remarkable Customer Service Can Win Customers and Improve Your Company, Too

He says that every customer service call is a chance for improvement on two levels — fixing the customers problem on the short-term and fixing the source of the problem on the long-term, so it never happens again. And his tips for achieving that are excellent.

If you've ever wanted a fresh look at how you can reduce customer service costs in the long-term and really create happy customers, you've got to read this article at the Joel on Software blog.

The post Remarkable Customer Service Does More Than Help a Customer appeared first on Spotlight on the Real World.

Building Your Brand With Brand Advocates

It's a phenomenon we run into all the time. People love your business, but they don't like to take the time to do a review, or write it down, or maybe they just get busy and forget. So they ask us how to get the word out.

One solution I recommend is to cultivate your "brand advocates." Brand advocates are people who love your company, and who have an outgoing personality. They love to connect with people with similar interests, and get a big kick out of sharing their personal knowledge with their circle of friends.

Don't try to change the leopard's spots and get someone to share who doesn't want to. Find people who like to share.

Brand advocates are predisposed towards sharing, enjoy helping people they know, and are motivated by the recognition they get from others by providing them with helpful information.

You Can Create a Win-Win-Win Situation by Connecting with Brand Advocates

You win because you've got fans out there talking about you in great ways, and with lots of people. Brand advocates usually have a lot of connections. Advocates are highly trusted individuals within their circles and according to research they are 1.5 times more likely to value being seen as a reliable source of information. They enjoy the recognition, and you can help them get that recognition.

If you actively recognize their advocacy and offer special ways to spread the word that help them feel good about both you and the knowledge they share with their circle, you'll both win. And by getting good information out to their friends, you build your brand audience wider.

Best of all, you can work together with your advocates, maybe even by offering them some special knowledge that isn't "out in the wild" yet, so you give them a chance to share their enthusiasm for your brand, help out their friends, and get the enjoyment of being in the know and sharing it.

Oddly enough, even though you might stress about promoting your business brand, over half of the advocates you find out sharing their experiences say they find it a form of relaxation.

So you can seek out people who already love your brand and are sharing their experiences and help them take the next step to being a brand advocate. All it takes is some of your time, and some positive recognition and personal care to build a solid relationship with them. Everybody wins.

The post Build Your Business Brand - Cultivate Brand Advocates appeared first on Spotlight on the Real World.

By Deb Nystrom on Flickr under CC License

With the increase in content marketing online, sites like SlideShare.net are offering a great opportunity for companies to publish their content across Internet and gain additional leads and traffic.

In fact, browsing around published items on their site is a great way to learn more about what works and doesn't work.

However, you should definitely also consider these Top 5 Tips for your Powerpoint presentation to make sure you are marketing effectively.

1. Contrast is good between slide backgrounds and text colors. But don't overdo it. Headache-creating contrasts like red on black, yellow on black, or other unattractive color combinations won't make your audience appreciate you. And they'll spend less time looking at the information on your slides.
2. You should be generous with your white space. It sets the tone of your presentation, and it affects usability and readability. White space has impact. And you should concentrate your best white space around the most important items on the slide to focus your listener's eye.
3. Other than a corporate logo or one design graphic to emphasize branding, you should use no more than one graphic or illustrative chart on a page.
4. Avoid any distracting transitions on your slide presentation. It takes away from your message by making you look like an amateur. Good old-fashioned basics is the way to go. The pretty presentation of your information is not the point. Making the sale is what you are after.
5. Don't overwhelm any slides with too much information. The safest rule to follow is the 666 Rule. No more than 6 bullets per slide, 6 words per bullet, and 6 word slides presented back-to-back. Anything more will overwhelm the audience and they'll miss part of your critical message.

So there's the big tips for marketing effectively using Powerpoint slide presentations. Follow these basic tips and you'll have a much better speaking experience next time out.

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If you don't know what is going on behind the scenes, you don't know what to scale up and what to scale back.

To properly manage your Internet marketing plan on an ongoing basis, you need regular input before, during, and after you implement some tactic or method.

They say that no battle plan survives first contact with the enemy. Well the same thing is true for Internet marketing plans. The watchword is adapt or die.

What is the Value of Marketing Statistics Analysis to Your Company?

Once the opening salvo in your marketing plan battle has been fired, you need regular input from the battlefield in order to keep your marketing plan up-to-date and on-track.

As a business, you don't want to dump good money after bad.

Keeping track of your marketing statistics isn't hard with the right software. You can use special online web services to track the effects of your marketing plan online. Then you roll that information back into managing your marketing plan so you can adapt for maximum value.

Statistics include information about numbers of visitors to the site and each page, how long the visitors stick around, what areas of content they spend the most time viewing, where they came from to visit your site, what search terms they used to find your content, and much more.

The more user marketing intelligence you have, the more refined you can make your Internet marketing.

How Do You Do Marketing Statistics Analysis?

You can set up tracking software to monitor the types of information I mentioned above. The key, however, isn't in having the statistics available, it's in knowing what they mean.

You should review this information regularly and use it to increase marketing on channels and with keywords that are succeeding, and determine whether to adjust or discontinue other elements of your marketing plan. Google Analytics is free, and it is also one of the most mature statistics programs online. There are tons of articles online for maximizing its use, and Google's own Help Section is actually pretty good in itself.

Your Potential Return on Investment (ROI) from Analysis of Your Marketing Stats

The key to high Internet marketing ROI is maximizing your gains from successful tactics, adjusting elements that need an additional push or change, and discontinuing methods that are showing negative results or which aren't successful enough compared to the implementation and maintenance cost.

Without measurable and detailed data, you can't tell the difference between winners and losers in the marketing plan management game. So, for maximum ROI, track and analyze your results.

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Plan and Manage Your Business Brand and Reputation

The problem with services like this is the difficulty in quantifying the return on investment for an ongoing fee. How do you put a value on the absence of a negative?

What is the Value of Social Media Monitoring and Reputation Management?

Although car maintenance isn't as obvious as a new paint job or detailing for your car, it's still a necessity for your car to deliver good service. At least if you want it to keep running.

Reputation management is like car maintenance. You need to regularly monitor where you stand in the social media networks — comments, mentions, negative reviews, and more — or a total disaster could sneak up on your brand and knock you for a hard fall before you're even aware of it headed your way.

Monitoring and reputation management are a social media one-two punch that you need in the modern "social Internet." There are so many channels for sharing information about your company and a regular process is the best way to keep tabs without things falling through the gap.

And if something comes up — bad reviews, a former employee or former customer who slams your customer service, out-and-out lying by competitors — you've got to be trained on how to respond to the negatives, and you've got to know that the issue came up in the first place.

And if you get some positive feedback, regular social media monitoring uncovers that, too, and allows you to interact socially with that information, sharing it out to fans and prospects to boost your brand.

53% of users of social networking sites use consumer reviews to help choose local businesses to use (Search Engine Watch, even back in October of 2009) Don't you think it would be a good idea to know about reviews and make sure you've positively dealt with any issues?

Your Potential Return on Investment (ROI) from Reputation Management

For the most part, the ROI on reputation management is avoiding problems that could arise. By carefully managing your company brand, you don't end up on the losing end of the reputation game. Nothing bad happens, and you don't have to waste your time, staff time, or your money having a professional company help you to rescue your brand. That's a solid savings. But sometimes it seems a little wishy-washy compared to real dollars in.

But even if you have a hard time calculating the savings of a non-disaster, there is a positive ROI for reputation management. In all that monitoring and watching, you have the opportunity to discover the "positive elements" of your brand as broadcast by friendly parties in social media, review sites, and more.

Once you've discovered these gems, you can spread the word about this fabulously useful information to your network. And that can translate to prospects, sales, revenue, goodwill, and enhanced trust.

And those elements of positive ROI are something you cannot purchase at any price.

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