Keeping It Real
By establishing Google authorship, writers link their articles from other sources (such as their blogs) to their Google Plus profile page. This shows Google and online readers that your material comes from a reliable source, an actual author, as opposed to junk articles generated by spammers.

The last thing you want is to be confused with some kind of spambot or other cheesey cookie-cutter content creator (try saying that three times fast!). When people see your name attached to an article, they need to be assured that what they read is genuine, awesome, genuinely awesome, and speaking of which…

Increased Visibility, The Incentive To Do Better
It is said that “character is what you are when no one’s looking”. Well, that’s true. But on the other hand, it can be argued that when everyone’s looking, you get fired up to give your best performance. Really now. Which makes you more eager to hit one out of the park, content-wise? The idea that no one knows (or cares) who you are, and thus no one sees your stuff, or the knowledge that people are following your posts and visiting your site, eagerly awaiting the next installment of deathless prose to emanate from your brain?

Google Plus lets you establish a stronger web presence, and a better showing on search results. By doing that, you’re less inclined to just cough up something and instead really put some time and effort into what you’re posting. The result? Less garbage, more readable content. Because let’s face it; at one time or another we all get lazy.

So, What To Do?
If you don’t have a Google Plus account and home page yet, get one. Fill out the profile, and link your sites to the page, and vice versa.  You can even link your profiles from other social media (e.g. Facebook) to your Google Plus profile. Add other members to your circles, and start getting known! Link your articles and blogs to your page. Here’s a flowchart to walk you through the process.

Everybody Wins
By using the Google Plus model, writers’ content stands out and their reputations are solidified as exposure grows.  This is a crucial part of online reputation management. Readers find their choices of online content narrowed a little more and made more manageable. The articles written by authors with solid reputations will rise to the top of searches while the crap sinks down into the dark depths where it belongs. And, of course, the sites that host your awesome stuff will benefit, since traffic will be driven there thanks to your solid reputation and search engine optimization. So yes, everybody wins.

Get moving, and in time, when people see your name, they’ll think “popular writer of entertaining articles”, and not “sketchy lapdog of spammer overlords”.

Bio
John Terra has been freelancing since 1985, and his work has appeared in diverse places like Inc Magazine, Computer Shopper, The Nashua Telegraph, and numerous online sites. An uber-geek and old school gamer, he’s also done extensive freelancing for role-playing games systems like Dungeons and Dragons , Star Wars, and others. John lives with his wife and three cats in Nashua NH.

GooglePlus1: “Here’s another batch of quality Internet articles!”

http://www.photos.com/royalty-free-images/the-bulldozer-on-a-garbage-dump/

Photo Credit: Photos.com

Gmail:

Multiple Inboxes – Keeping Your Inbox Organized:

If you are using Gmail on a regular basis, there is a very high chance that you might find yourself spending a lot of time prioritizing your emails. Have you ever imagined what it could be like to have your emails arrange themselves automatically across multiple inboxes of your choice? In our Top Gmail Labs series we’ve provided a detailed video tutorial as to how to do exactly that.

One of the more powerful Gmail Labs is the ability to create multiple inboxes. In order to enable multiple inboxes (Mail Settings > Labs > Multiple Inboxes) please make sure your inbox type is set to classic. Go ahead and enable it.

Now you can use the mail settings interface to easily specify what type of email you want to appear in each inbox; such as drafts, sent mail  or a certain label.

Labels & Filters – Be More Efficient With Your Emails

One of the best ways to save time in Gmail is through the use of filters. By automatically applying actions to incoming messages, filters can help become more efficient in your workspace. According to the rules that you set – you can label, archive, star, forward, and delete messages automatically. Moreover, the process is rather easy: Gmail filters work just like search: just click the drop-down arrow in the search bar and set your own parameters.

Gmail also offers more organizational features such as labels. Unlike Outlook, Gmail allows you to apply multiple labels to a single e-mail. Using this method, you can organize, file, and later retrieve your emails more efficiently.

Canned Responses – Save Yourself Some Time

As one of the most popular Gmail Labs, Canned Responses allows you to create templates of emails that you send often, and quickly insert the entire template into an email.  That way, messages that are composed on a regular basis can be prepared in advance and later extracted rapidly, saving precious time.

Drive

Keyboard Shortcuts for Google Docs

If you are using Google Drive, you must be using Google Docs on a regular basis. In order to save some time while working with Google Docs, you might want to consider learning some keyboard shortcuts. While most of you must be already familiar with the basic  shortcuts such as cut, copy, paste, undo etc, our tutorials expose you to more advanced shortcuts such as copy and paste of formatting as well as keyboard shortcuts for headers. Check out the video on GoogleGooru to see a few of our favorites.

Advanced Search Operators

If you are a daily Google Drive user, your Google Docs must be rapidly accumulating within your Drive Library. While you can store and organize documents in different folders, it can sometimes be hard to find specific documents you’re looking for. Using Drive’s Advanced Search Operators you can find your Docs using not only their titles as the search word, but also through searching for keywords, frequent words and key phrases used within the Doc you are looking for. In addition, you can narrow down your search using sharing policies.

How to Copy a Collection of Google Docs

Another popular way to save time is through the editing of existing docs. In order to do so, most of us simply copy the docs we are interested in editing. However, Google Drive does not allow for the copying of multiple documents at a time. Fortunately, there is a way to do this using the offline version of Google Drive.

Open the desktop version of your Google Drive > Right click a folder of documents that you wish to copy, and click copy. Now right click again within your Google Drive, and click paste. You should see an identical version of your folder with ‘Copy’ in front of it. Next time you sync your desktop Drive with your browser version, you should see this copy in your Drive.

Matan Levin @thegoogleguru: The Google Gooru is your #1 resource for Google Apps how-to videos and for keeping up to date on the latest updates and new features in Google Apps.

But this isn’t always a happy marriage of goals, and nowadays commercial websites have become enormous, complicated structures that require FAQ pages just to answer site navigation questions. Meanwhile, competing websites will continue to offer audiences similar features and prices, but one will ultimately win out because it provided the better user experience.

The study of user experience involves many different aspects of web design and content writing. These are details that your users will always notice on their end, but will often get overlooked by management. Here we will focus on the idea of minimalism, highlighting the potential benefits of offering customers a more simplified experience on your website and in your other content platforms. We will also discuss why this strategy works, and what outcomes to expect. But first, let’s take a look inside the mind of a user and get an idea of where they’re coming from.

What Do Users Want?

People’s habits on a web page aren’t much different than their physical behavior in a retail store. They’ll quickly glance over your landing page, scan some of the text and then click on the first thing that really catches their attention. This could be some sort flashy new content or anything that would lead them towards that thing they came looking for in the first place.

If the new landing page doesn’t fulfill their expectations or wants, they immediately turn back and start the process all over again. As a result, there will be many different parts of your website that users will never actually look at or read through at all. This boils down to two distinct behaviors all users share:

Scanning – Users scan content. A study by the Nielsen Norman Group found that on the average web page, users will read through only 20% of the content. This isn’t a habit that reflects ignorance or disinterest on the user’s part, it merely shows us that people are busy and will quickly scan content to determine whether or not it is any good.

Intuitive Search – Users follow their gut. Most of the time, they would rather find their own way through a site than read through and introduction page explaining the process. Think of it as the equivalent of a guy refusing to ask for directions. As you might imagine, users won’t always make the best decisions as a result. They’ll either end up somewhere completely irrelevant to their goal, or get completely lost and assume that their solution isn’t offered on your site.

Users want instant gratification

This involves the shortest, quickest route possible towards fulfilling their needs and wants. Maybe that’s the quality of your content. If users know that you’re going to deliver really good content on your end, they’ll usually put up with advertisements, call-to-action pop ups, and other intrusive materials on their end.

But the real question is whether or not that’s a necessary risk. If a website falls short on experience even for a second, then the user will bounce and you lose the sale. So instead of focusing on improving experience by adding, try to think about what you can omit.

Users Know Where Things Should Go

According to the many eye tracking studies conducted in the past, users tend to start scanning through the content of a web page on the top left corner of a site. They then proceed through the rest of the content in an F-like pattern, occasionally stopping whenever they find something particularly interesting or useful to them. As a result, users have become accustomed to looking for certain key elements of a web page on certain parts of a website. Let’s take a look at an example:

Category pages enable users to search through product catalogs quickly and efficiently. So where do you typically find category menus on a home page?



Users typically begin their search on the top left corner, so it’s easy to see that category menus are one of the most important aspects of an ecommerce website. Each of these websites is unique and has developed incredibly strong brands, and yet their site designs aren’t all that different when you take a closer look at it.

That’s because part of developing the minimalistic user experience involves understanding where audiences will expect to see certain elements of a website. Avoiding this altogether and doing your own take on it will cause users to waste time. Remember, users rely on intuitive search, so unnecessary site reorganization could ultimately lead to user disinterest and a loss of sale.

Users Want It Quick and Obvious

Content should be clean and out in the open. If a website provides a minimalist, simplified design, users will spend less time learning how to find what they want and more time actually finding what they want. The problem though is that we often have so many great ideas and content that we end up throwing it all up at once. It’s almost ironic when you think about it. We spend so much time thinking about cool new things we could add that we end up overwhelming our users with header art, signup sheets, FAQs, drop down menus and other excess materials.

There’s nothing wrong with constantly researching new ways to make the user experience better and more engaging, but it’s important to keep in mind that users want things quick and obvious. They want a clear road that will lead them to their goal, and they want to discover it for themselves. So why make it harder for them? Let’s take a look at this example:

OpenMile.com is a truckload freight broker that brings users with shipping needs to the companies who want to provide them these services.

Here’s their original landing page: 

It’s a very clean and straightforward design. But the problem was that the cover art (original as it may be) proved to be too distracting to users looking to find where they could get a quote. As a result, many of them never noticed the solid “Get a Truckload Quote” button even though it was near the top left corner of the page.

Here’s there updated landing page: 

Notice how the distracting cover art is gone leaving a plain “Get a Quote” button dead center of the page instead. The surrounding color complements the button by bringing it out in the open instead of masking it in the page. It’s literally the first thing you saw when you looked at it right? This is what I mean about providing a clear and obvious road. Users will discover it themselves and commit because of it. What were the results? Well a study by Visual Website Optimizer found that the change was responsible for a 232% increase in lead generation.

There’s nothing wrong with trying to make a website a new and fresh experience, but you have to remember to keep the ideal user experience in mind first. Don’t force them to relearn browsing concepts they are already familiar with and understand that sometimes less will really mean more.

Vincent H. Clarke is a Marketing Analyst for USB Memory Direct, a wholesaler of promotional USB drives. While he mostly writes about marketing and branding, he also enjoys writing about productivity, content strategy, and user experience. Connect with him on Twitter @_vhclarke.

It’s also important to realize that your message may experience some shifts throughout the course of your company’s life. Every company needs technology to help keep everyone up to speed on your company’s branding message. In this post, we’ll discuss some of the resources and tools companies of all sizes should consider and implement.

Tools for Unifying Your Message

—     Collaboration Tools: Collaboration is the lifeblood of the modern business structure. With tools like hosted SharePoint services, companies of all types can stay connected in real time with employees. This is one of the most effective ways to keep everyone up to speed on branding. In most cases, if your employees are engaged with your collaboration platform, it’s easy to disseminate information in a way that is both non-intrusive and easy to access.

—     Cloud Data Access: Another similar way to deliver this information is through an integrated cloud storage service. Not unlike your collaboration tool, a cloud storage platform is a seamless way to deliver complex branding information in an easy-to-access package. While some companies are still wary of the cloud, studies indicate that more businesses are experiencing both the financial and logistical benefits of implementing cloud resources.

—     Virtualization Infrastructure: Regardless of what platform you use to deliver sensitive branding data to your staff, every company needs a powerful infrastructure to make branding data easily accessible for everyone. The problem many SMBs are facing relates to infrastructure itself. Smaller businesses often don’t have the financial resources to integrate and manage a dedicated server to deploy and manage complex branding and messaging information. This is why many SMBs are migrating to virtualized infrastructure solutions like virtual private server technology, which gives you the control and computing power of the cloud without costing what an entire cloud platform would.

Branding Communication is Serious Business

Keeping your team up to speed on your overall social message is no easy task. Not only is it difficult logistically, but you’ll come up against employees that disagree with how you approach your branding. It’s crucial to maintain dialogue about branding processes with your employees. If your employees weren’t on staff, they would be potential customers, so their feedback is valuable. The fact that not everyone is in the same geographic location can muffle this communication. Again, having powerful collaboration and cloud storage tools can serve as the proper remedy.

Remember you’re reaching individuals: Even if the person you’re marketing to is representing a company, you’re still interacting with an individual. Therefore, your marketing needs to have that personal appeal that will engage people. After all, your content is going to be lumped in with everything people are seeing from their friends, too. A casual voice, lighthearted tone and a little bit of personality will go a long way in connecting with your audience. Before posting anything, ask yourself whether it’s something you would be interested in looking at during your leisure time. If it’s not, rethink your content and adjust it to make it more interesting and relevant for the people you’re trying to reach.

Be trendy, but don’t break copyright: Sharing viral content on social media is all the rage, but you have to do so in a way that doesn’t infringe on the rights of others. For example, many companies ran into trouble when they tried to post Harlem Shake videos because of copyright issues with the song. The safe method is to reference trends, while still keeping all of your actual content original. That way you’ll attract the attention of your customers without running into legal issues.

Keep the conversation going: Social media marketing isn’t your traditional outbound marketing. Rather, it’s a continual conversation with the people who interact with your company or brand. People are going to be posting questions or comments directed at you, or replying to questions or comments you make. Therefore, you need to be checking these and engaging with the people who have made the effort to engage with you. This often comes easily when people have positive reactions or honest questions about your products, but it can be more difficult with customer complaints. Remain polite and address everything, even the negative items.

Consider what people are interested in: People who are connected with you on social media don’t just want to hear about your brand and products all the time. Instead, they’re interested in information, fun facts, and news related to your type of product and services. Therefore, do lots of linking to interesting blog posts, news stories, and other content that will add value to those you reach. Go light on the promotional links, and tread carefully if you’re linking to anything that could be considered misleading.

Your business marketing strategy needs to include social media involvement, but it’s not going to be effective in converting customers unless you’re using the right tactics. Take a look at how companies similar to yours run their social media accounts and the results they’re getting in terms of customer engagement. Engagement often translates into sales, so if people are interacting with them, they’re doing something right. Of course, you don’t want to just copy your competitors, but to put your company’s unique voice and style into your social media marketing messages.

Don’t get us wrong; we are not saying businesses should ditch technology. What they do need to do, however, is ensure that they are cutting out complacency, and maintaining a focus on the products they do use at all times.

We explored some examples of business technology, and looked at how they can damage efficiency, and what they can do to deal with and prevent problems.

Poor IT Procedures

The biggest cause of data breaches in businesses is negligence. Even if you are a local company with no more than five or six employees, you need to have an IT policy and clear procedures in place. Not only does this protect your business, it means you can deal with people who decide to put your business at risk directly or indirectly, and it will improve the use of IT and the whole culture in your company.

Dealing with this problem can cost time, money, and your business’ reputation, and the best cure here is always to be preventative.

IT Maintenance

This is where the line about “the more they embrace technology” comes into focus.

When first buying hardware or servers, you naturally go for the best product available, or at least the best you can afford. As you move forward, however, it is easy to neglect upgrading these services or products, either inadvertently or because you don’t want to invest any more money.

The efficiency you lose because of slow systems or out of date hardware will cost you more than an upgrade, so don’t shoot yourself in the foot!

Not Going Mobile

If a business hasn’t gone mobile, then there are huge opportunities being missed. Why have people in an office sat in front of a computer making appointments, when they could be doing that on the phone while physically traveling to appointments and looking up information and potential leads on a mobile device at the same time?

When you do go mobile, it is important that devices are subject to the same security levels and maintenance as office hardware would be, even if you use mobile as part of a BYOD setup. Many businesses have lost data or been breached because they have accessed data via a tablet or phone, for example, that is otherwise secured in other locations.

Ensure your business is not caught out!

It’s a Must

If you don’t put this advice into practice, then you had better be ready to learn the hard way the importance of maintaining your technology platforms and security. It might seem time intensive and costly, but rest assured, it is more efficient than what you are currently doing, and definitely more so than having to deal with any problems.

Jaguar PC is the original leader in VPS hosting, providing the best web hosting with 100% network uptime and free-domain transfer

By creating content designed for social sharing, you can essentially turn a normal blog post into productive inroads with prospective customers, using a shared link to bring new traffic to your website. From there, you have the opportunity to produce a conversion — but only if you have a well-developed website waiting on the other end of the link. I repeat, if there’s no ill web design waiting for users who click through, they’ll bounce faster than the king of the four square courts. Whether you do it yourself or hire some professional Web designers, make sure it looks good!

Ultimately, social media can become another conversion and revenue stream if you use smart development strategy at every point. Read on for tips to make sure your online strategy is aligned to maximize social opportunities.

Creating content worth sharing

Developing a social brand should be the first focus of any company. In the early stages, you don’t need to worry about creating phenomenal, mind-blowing content as long as you keep the quality high and consistent. Instead, start cultivating followings on major social networks, such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram and Pinterest, to create a broad base of followers.

Once that base is established, work on increasing the uniqueness and quality of your content. Whether you offer whitepapers, blogs or static Web pages, the things you produce need to be relevant and useful to your consumers in ways that point to the value of your business. These aren’t explicit marketing materials, but they all need to relate to your company’s mission and your value to prospective customers.

As you develop your following and people consume your content, you’ll see more people sharing your content with others. Not only is social sharing a high-exposure, low-cost form of marketing, but it’s a great way to gauge what content is most valuable to your followers.

From content consumer to product consumer

By sharing your website’s content online, you’ll draw followers to your website. When that happens, they become social referrals and potential sales or lead conversions. That’s where your website comes in. As your content is making a case for your company’s value to the consumer, your website should make it easy for them to identify and enter the conversion process.

To do this, you need a simplified Web design that makes your marketing mission clear. Your site’s various links and images need to be simplified so they aren’t distracting — you want consumers to immediately recognize where and how to begin the conversion process. If you can get online referrals this far down the funnel, you’ve got a good chance at securing a conversion.

Efficiency in the conversion process

Once in the conversion process, the trick is in seeing consumers through to the conversion’s completion. This is an efficiency game you have to play well to maximize your opportunities. Online consumers are deterred by seemingly insignificant obstacles. Every line of data you request — address, phone number or email — decreases the odds of potential customers completing the process.

Similarly, every step in the process — every time they have to click “next” or wait for processing to take place — gives them a chance to reconsider their purchase. The more you condense steps and minimize workload, the better. The proof is in the numbers: the easier you make the process, the more conversions you’ll accrue.

By optimizing every point in the consumer process, you can increase the efficiency of your website. From there, focus on creating worthwhile content that engages your consumers. The more useful and worthwhile your content, the more social shares — and, ultimately, referred traffic — you’ll generate from this rich resource.

I finished the book this morning and found myself with mixed reviews.

The Fred

We all need inspiration. We all need reminders to be the best versions of ourselves. That is what Fred it all about. To paraphrase Hedwig, “[Fred] is an idiom working in America and Canada.”

Fred has become a philosophy to live better and to be better. Fred guides us to be the best versions of ourselves. 2.0 reminds us not to live life to the fullest but live it to the best. So many philosophical life guides direct our focus to the big picture, to not get lost in the minutia. Fred says to focus on the minutia. Make each moment count because it it the little moments that add up to make the big picture good.

This is not particularly different than most self help philosophies. However, differentiating from the mantra of every other life coach, Fred is a symptom of happiness not the cause of it. Living the life in the Fred philosophy will not make you happy, being happy will make you Fred.

When people are happy they are more likely to go out of their way to help other people, to be polite, to go the extra mile. They are more likely to whistle while they work. 2.0 tells us not to fake it until we make it but to do our best until we are our best. Then you don’t have to fake it.

What makes a Fred is more than just doing a good job and being nice to people. It is about extending a sense of pride in being more into everything you do, and then helping others to do the same.

Is Fred 2.0 revolutionary? No. The Fred Factor was revolutionary in the sense that it brought people to an ethos of personal betterment for the sake of being better. It said that the end result is not the goal, it is the process. It is not the thank you of opening a door for someone, or the praise for giving everyone on your mail route a turkey at the holidays. It is the act of opening the door, regardless of the appreciation, or giving the turkey whether or not the person even knows it was from you. The act is what elevates the soul, not the result. If you are looking to have the action make you happy you are looking exterior to yourself to find happiness. Fred 2.0 reminds us to look to ourselves. If we are happy then we don’t need the external praise to validate us. Ironically, the book is filled with stories of Fred, but that is more spreading the Fred than spreading the praise.

Critically, the book was not revolutionary. It was a good reminder of a philosophy of which I was already aware. Was it inspirational? Not for me. Realistically it was more motivational. It reminded me to live the passion I have for my own work.

By the middle of the book I was pretty tired of reading the word Fred. By the 3rd paragraph of this review, I was tired of writing the word Fred. That aside, the book was a nice read and a reminder to:

• Live your passion
• Bring the extraordinary to the mundane
• Be process driven and results oriented
• and to be happy because we are better people when we are happy.

If Fred is a symptom of happiness then I welcome it.

Go to www.fredfactor.com to read more about the Fred philosophy and to buy Fred 2.0.

I’d like to thank Mark Sanborn for sending me a copy of Fred 2.0 to review.

Why email titles are important

How many email marketing messages have you opened recently? If you’re like most of us, you’re very selective about which email messages you choose to spend your time reading. Nine out of 10 messages get deleted without ever being opened. There’s a reason for that. Nearly 90 trillion emails were sent in 2009. There’s likely more today. You simply can’t read everything that hits your inbox.

What that means is that the majority of your hard work composing, researching and editing your email marketing message ends up in the recipient’s computer trash can. Just think of the results — i.e., sales — you could reap if you could get an extra 10 percent of your recipients to open your message. That’s where email titles come in. Make the title enticing and the recipient turns into a reader.

How to write effective email titles

How do you write email titles that will grab a recipient’s attention? It’s a slightly different skill than is necessary for the body of your email message, so it may take you a few tries to come up with a winner. Don’t feel bad if it does. Here are some suggestions for success:

• Keep it short: Although each email service is slightly different, you have approximately 60 characters (including spaces) to grab your reader. Anything longer than that will get cut off and not show in the recipient’s email log. Be concise and be seen.
• Be intriguing: Nearly 90 percent of online consumers check their email inbox at least once a day. In this age of information overload, you can be assured most readers have seen, heard and read all of the obvious marketing lead-ins. Be original to grab the recipient’s interest.
• Pick clarity over creativity: The average email reader wants to know what’s in the body of the email before he or she opens it. If your title, intriguing as it may be, doesn’t impart that information, the recipient isn’t likely to become a reader. Subject lines like “Hey” or “Check this out” can come off spammy and result in your perfectly legitimate email being moved to the trash folder post haste.
• Use numbers: Numbered lists attract readers. Titles like “5 Reasons to Buy More Car Insurance” or “7 Kitchen Accessories You Can’t Live Without” will get read more often than the same titles without the numbers. Readers like detailed information that’s also packaged in an easy-to-read format.
• Use your name: Email titles that include the name of your company or the name of the sender get opened at a dramatically higher rate than those without a name. Yes, your name is probably in the sender information, but add it again. You’ll be surprised.

Don’t settle for just any title atop your email marketing messages. The title is the key to whether any of the rest of your work will get read. Content is king and that includes email subject lines.

One key factor that makes social media work for customers is the connection between the companies’ agent and the consumer. Without that connection, big name companies are using the networking opportunity to leverage their marketing position, which is only a fragment of what social media can do for a company’s growth. Here are a few ways that you can use social media and various networking tactics to broaden your scope of connection with your customer base.

Think Bigger

Think of the social media networks, like Twitter and Facebook, as platforms that allow you to make special announcements regarding new products, deals for your fans and followers, cancelations and service interruptions. Posting pics is great too, but customers really want to relate and interact with their company through these networks. After all, it is a “social” network, which implies that the customer is communicating a message to the company and the company lets the customer know that he or she is heard.

The Power of Twitter Connections

One great example of a social media/customer service connection happened when I bought a 2010 Ford Fusion. I was so excited, because it was my first hybrid car, that I immediately posted the pic on my Twitter page. About an hour later, I noticed that the Chapman Ford AZ dealership, that had sold me the car, had replied to my tweet saying that they were so glad that I was enjoying my new car. This connection made me smile and definitely made a difference.

In a recent study, conducted by Software Advice, four of their employees took part in an experiment where they mentioned in their tweets several large corporations, in various industries. For four weeks these participants tweeted complaints, compliments and requests for help, using Twitter handles (@nameofcompany) and the name of the company, so that the company could know who was mentioning them and respond. The results to the study were pretty alarming and showed how little customer service agents are using this extremely useful tool. Brands like Starbucks, Walmart and Apple were surprisingly non-responders, and their competitors took their sweet time and hadn’t even responded to half of the participants. If a customer is complaining about their awful experience at Starbucks and telling all of her friends to boycott the cafe on Twitter and Facebook and Starbucks doesn’t respond, they didn’t just lose one unhappy customer, it’s possible that they lost hundreds thousands if the customer was a celebrity with fans.

Be Efficient

Brown’s article in SocialMediaToday.com was singing the praises of a company that knows how to do customer service on social media networks the right way: Zappos.com. They have a customer service Twitter account that responds to questions in a timely and efficient manner. When a customer tweets about their Zappos shoes, they know that they will get feedback, even if it is just a smile emoticon and a quick “thanks!” Forbes’ Jenna Goudreau says that Southwest Airlines has been known to update flight delays on their Twitter page.

Most importantly, don’t let your Twitter, Pinterest, Facebook or even blog lay dormant. Content is king, even if it’s a gallery of images that is regularly updated or brief updates on products and services, staying current and present lets your fans know that you are present and available to field requests, questions, or praise at any time day or night.

Yasmin Rose
A real go-getter, Yasmin encourages others around her to shoot for the stars and be the best in the world of business. She loves sharing tips on how to build your own start up and make it into a success.