If you have only made the purchase for your own email, many companies still leave their advertising there. With email being popular to brand organisations, it is common for a person to read your email address and take the part after the @, then go to see what your web site is about.

What can you do to promote yourself or your future web site?

By adding an html file to your server with your own advertising material will increase your investment. Some ideas include:

• Contact details such as Twitter, FaceBook, Phone
• A brief bio of who you are.
• Email sign up form to your newsletter
• Integrate your WordPress or Google blog
• A message stating when your web site will be accessible.

I am not a web designer

A simple landing page does not require that you be a web developer. If you use a word processor such as Microsoft Word or Open Office, you can design a document to your requirements, save it as an html file and upload that.

If you are not sure how to upload a file speak to the company where you purchased your domain name from or shop around other domain name resellers. The Domain Name Commissioner has a list of all authorised New Zealand companies.

I just came across this great initiative from the experts at www.iwantmyname.co.nz which would be perfect for those of you who do not have the technical skills to add a page.

WordPress site

There are a number of free plugins that will create a custom landing page. Simply search New plugins from the admin panel. One example is the “Coming Soon Page” http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/custom-coming-soon-page/ which is certainly a lot nicer than a plain boring text page.

Many organisations today advertise their FaceBook page and not their own web site losing their organisation branding and online identity. A .nz domain name costs between $28 and $50 per annum with hosting ranging from $50 to $500 per annum for branded web sites and email. .com addresses are much cheaper and can be purchased sometimes for less than $12 per annum.

Whatever the size of your organisation and required web-site, you need to brand it in part with your own domain name. A domain name is the equivalent of a phone number or name, and is used is used for all of your internet communication such as web site or email. The part of the domain name you register should be used for all of your social media usernames and Instant Messaging.

Everyone, especially your current and potential customers will recognise you by the name you choose for your domain name.

If you use a FaceBook address or your ISP’s address or email address such as:

• Facebook.com/yourBusinessName
• yourBusinessName@facebook.com
• yourlogin@ispName.co.nz
• www.ispname.co.nz/~yourLogin
• www.ispname.co.nz/homepages/~yourLogin
• http://yourname.ispname.co.nz
• Name.wordpress.com
• Name.blogspot.com
• Name.twitter.com
• Etc., etc., etc., etc.

You are putting your business or organisation at a number of financial and marketing risks including:

1. Not presenting a professional image to prospects who may wonder if you really are an established business.
2. Spending your advertising money promoting your ISP’s brand or social network by using their email address and web site.
3. If you change ISPs then you will need to change stationery, signwriting, business cards and any other media that has your email and web address on, then advertise to your clients the change and lose any potential customers who know only your ISP addresses.
4. It is not permanent and you are held hostage to the ISP or social network for your email and web address.
5. The risk that your ISP ceases business due to financial difficulty, mergers etc., you will lose your email address and future emails.
6. Lower search engine rankings as your default email address is not promoting your web site address.

Social Media pages

1. Lower search engine rankings as it increases the social media search rankings.
2. Lack of branding to your customers as the social network is the most prominent part of a social media page.
3. Making your organisation look cheap and maybe not legit as you can’t afford a legit web site.
4. As we have seen in the past with popular social media and even popular web browsers is that more often than not they are replaced with the next big and better service or product. Who remembers MySpace ?
5. Social Media such as FaceBook constantly change their Terms and Conditions which you must agree to prior to signing up for a FaceBook Page etc.
6. Often when using social media the Terms and Conditions make you sign away all of your legal rights to any information you place on the service.
7. You have no control of who accesses your information when using Social Media.
8. Your information and your customers will be used by the social media organisation for their own advertising and marketing.

If you choose to use a FaceBook page, you should first have a web site with your own domain name.
Secondly, create a sub domain of your web address that goes directly to your FaceBook Page or other social media page. An example is http://facebook.YourCompany.co.nz . This advertises your web site and FaceBook page without the need to advertise www.facebook.com/YourCompany .

On the face of it, this signature can be harmless and most people leave it there as it alerts the recipient as to why there are typos, bad grammar and short sentences with possibly with more abbreviations than normal.

There are also a large group of users who have no idea the signature is there or how to change it in the email settings.

The default signature can give people the perception that you are pro iPhone, pro Blackberry etc., and then all of the other connotations that exist can be quickly drummed up about what the persona of such devices. Others will see it as a form of brand loyalty.

Putting it in perspective, how often do you see an email signature stating “sent from my HP Laptop using Windows XP” etc.?

The simplest way to neutralise the default signatures is to change the wording to something like “Sent from my mobile device” or something more humorous “typed with my thumbs”.

The default signature is a short term issue with digital natives who can type perfectly well on smart devices. The recent technology of Auto-Correct and spell checking in smart phones will also make the signatures redundant.

As most Kiwis’ do these days, I do a lot of online shopping for the convenience and often the discounts. Not to mention the fact that New Zealand has some terrible lag time with products being released overseas and them becoming available in New Zealand.

Recently I heard of a natural product that could help a family member with their health problem. The product is made from New Zealand fruits and sold in New Zealand by an Auckland based company. The company has an obvious budget as they have spent advertising on at least one national radio station.

At this stage I am feeling confident about a purchase, so I proceeded to make the small purchase on my debit card.

After ten working days and no correspondence except an automated receipt about the same time of purchase: I wanted to ask the company if there was an issue with the order. I hit reply in the email that I received the receipt. It was a generic email with “info@).

To my surprise the email bounced back as the address did not exist. A Google search later, I found the web site and emailed the email address provided on the site. Yet again, shock horror!, the email bounced back – another email that didn’t exist. At this stage I was almost convinced that for the first time in my life I had been scammed with an online purchase. Why did this New Zealand company advertise an email address that did not exist ?.

After reading the web site “Contact us” page and “About Us”, I learnt that the web site that promoted the product and offered the online purchase, was in fact a product web site and not the company web site. The company web site had a different address with a different deign and branding.

After visiting the company web site I find an advertised email address and emailed it to enquire about my order. To some relief I received an email back the same day. In that email  I was told that the company did not realise I had a PO Box as the delivery address (it was in the order and receipt) and that the order had been sent through a courier that does not deliver to PO Box address. That the order would be resent straight away with extra product as compensation for my troubles.  At this stage, I thought that was good customer experience and I was willing to move on. But i was still annoyed that the company had stated that if I want to make ordering easier, I should use a physical address and not a PO Box.

Three weeks from the original order from Auckland to Christchurch, my order arrived but without the promised compensation.

As a customer, I will not shop with the company again and believe that I did more than was reasonable to try to rectify and gain information about the order. I am also now concerned that the product may have been made with the same lack of care and attention to detail as I experienced with the order.

Tips to avoid online purchasing disasters

1. Ensure that all email addresses you advertise are active and monitored by a staff member.
2. Provide clear contact details including: phone, email, and physical address on your invoice, email signatures and web sites.
3. Accept that some people will find it more convenient to have all parcels and correspondence delivered to a PO Box, much the same way most people prefer to be contacted via mobile phone. Cities such as Christchurch have many residents out of their own homes and some people do not have letter boxes. Apartments, and the fact that couriers deliver during business hours make a physical address an insecure option or a hassle when one has to drive into the courier depot with a card and retrieve the parcel.
4. Don’t tell your customers what delivery method is best. The customer will know the best form of delivery based on their own circumstances.
5. Choose a reliable courier company that can deliver anywhere in New Zealand cities and towns.
6. Provide clear contact details of how a customer can contact you.
7. Once you have shipped a product, a simple email to the customer should be sent stating the order has been shipped.
8. Give your customers an online tracking number.
9. Use Twitter and other online services that allow your customers to praise or complain about you. Good customer service will quickly make an online complaint into useful marketing and brand loyalty exercise.
10. When you make a mistake, an apology to your customer can go a long way.
11. Company and product web sites should be branded and easily identifiable to who your organisation is and how to make a complaint. This can be as simple as using the same contact details on both company and product web site.
12. Conduct a user experience test, or involve an experienced ecommerce consultant to evaluate your order and checkout process.

An hijacked FaceBook account can be either a copy of your account or someone that has taken over your account. Either way, there are a number of steps that you will need to perform to get control back.

In the first instance you should Report the account to FaceBook as a fraudulent account and make a complaint of fraud to the Police.

A.    Report the fraud to FaceBook

1. Clicking the “Report/Block this Person” link in the bottom left column of the profile
   
2. Select “Fake profile” as the reason
3. Select one of the fraudulent options
4. If reporting that someone has created a fraudulent account claiming to be you, you will need to fill in the following form http://www.facebook.com/help/contact.php?show_form=impostor_data_requests and supply: Photo Identification, Police report and a notarised letter.
5. Contact all of your FaceBook friends and tell them the account is a fake account and to Block and Report it.

B.    Review your FaceBook Account settings

1. If you’re FaceBook friends are only people that you personally know and interact with, then ensure that there are no strangers on your friends list. If there is, simply delete them.
2. Ensure that only your friends can see your photos and other information from Account, Privacy Settings.

If you are a gamer or a networker, then you must firstly have groups set up for various FaceBook friends and check your group settings and the access each group has to your information.

C.    Review your computer security

As it may not be immediately obvious how the fraudster obtained your photos and details, especially if your account is set to private on all the options in Facebook, you should then:

1. Clear all Internet history and cookies from your browser.
2. Update your Anti-Virus
3. Run a complete Anti-Virus scan on your computer or device you connect with FaceBook.
4. Change your passwords for all Internet accounts.

D.    Avoiding being a future victim of FaceBook Fraud.

1. Regularly use updated Anti-Virus checkers with real time scanning
2.  Avoid using FaceBook on public computers and public wireless internet if possible and convenient.
3. Be cautious of any suspicious activity on the Internet. If you are not sure that you are talking with a friend on the web, ring their phone.
4. Log-off from your account when you are not using FaceBook.
5. Regularly change your online passwords

To have an effective e-commerce store you must make changes to the default settings and install or add various bits of code that will allow you to see how your store is being used and to adapt to your customers ever changing requirements. Often additional add-ons are required and are available for free download from the Content Management Systems web site.

A common response from business owners is “well our tech guy said this was free and it looks good, so we installed it”. Your tech guy is just that – a techy. They fix your computers and network. They are usually not web and business minded though they probably are web savvy for using the Web for personal use.
Such attitudes regarding the tech guy or cutting costs can cause more damage to your customer relations than not having an e-commerce site to begin with. Imagine your customers giving up on an online purchase because it was simply too hard to complete a transaction and you had no idea about it.

Google Analytics or other tracking software when installed correctly will allow you to track how your site is being used and what pages your visitors are exiting the site from. If there is a record of visitors abandoning their sign ups or leaving shopping carts then this alerts you to a major issue with your e commerce strategy and the data will allow you to rectify the issues.

Based on local e-commerce sites here are some basic tips to increase sales and customer loyalty.

Payment – Only one method is available usually PayPal. Offering a method to send a cheque or a physical address to make a cash order is not always possible but offering your bank account number for Internet banking and other deposits will increase sales.

Sign Up Address – Often we are seeing sign up forms that require the user to add a “State” to their address and will not progress further till this is stated. Turn this off unless you want to exclude all New Zealand sales.

Verification – Some sites require a verification of account before you can purchase a product. Often the verification is marked as SPAM and never reaches the recipient. There is no logical need for the majority of e-commerce sites to require authentication and it only adds one more step in the process for you customers. If you still require further verification then we suggest a CAPTCHA.

To access the custom profiles:

1. Login in to your LinkedIn account
2. Edit Profile
3. Scroll down past the first box to the orange button and text “Add sections to reflect achievements and experiences on your profile.”

Briefly the 5 new custom profiles are described below.

Certifications

Here you can list all of your certifications that may assist your profile gain more attention. Though some people may have attended a University or a course, it does not necessarily mean they have achieved a certificate or degree. Likewise, there are many other certifications that can be obtained without completing a course.

Skills

An easy and convenient place to summarise your skill set in a bullet point style.

Languages

Add which human languages you speak and the level of proficiency you have.

Publications

List all publications you have either solely authored or jointly authored. There is space for an overview of the publication and publishing details.

Patents

Patents and their details can be recorded here.

If the migration is not done correctly you could loose all of your followers and the important investment you made in the group.

Below are the moist effective ways to migrate with minimal loss and a way to increase your followers.

1. Create a private Page while in development.
2. Make your Page public when it is completed.
3. On your Group wall announce the new Page.
4. Individually email, recommend and ask via wall posts the people in your group to change to your Page. Explain that they will benefit from more interaction and possibly offer incentives such a random prize.
5. Remove people from the Group that have joined your Page.
6. After a period of time contact the remaining Group members asking for them to migrate, as you will close the group page.
7. Delete the Group Page when you are ready.

Enjoy the new benefits of a Like Page and consider FaceBook advertising.

As a Social Media/Web company we are still waiting for Foursquare and Buzz to make a serious impact on the market. But with TweetDeck and other applications now integrating Buzz and Foursquare we believe this is the first hurdle for these two new services to an impact.

As with all new social media services it is often not the service’s original intention that makes the service popular. It is integration into other social media services and usually depends on how the users will use the service.

Two days ago I had a meeting with the Social Media Champion of a large organisation who did not want to listen about potential benefits of FourSquare and Buzz. I made it clear that these technologies are still new and the fact that  I remember in recent times when I had similar discussion about FaceBook and Twittter.

Our advise to organisations considering or even against Buzz and FourSquare is to at least sign up to the services and see if your online followers are interested. Don’t make an un scientific and decision based on personal thoughts.

Organisations need to think how they can offer value to their stakeholders and online followers with these new services.

There is a great deal of new technologies occurring at the moment that effect all Indigenous Peoples, in fact any non English speaking culture will soon see tremendous amounts of beneficial change occurring on the net this year.

The biggest event for Māori will be the ability to use macrons in web domain names next month.
. . .