Archive for the ‘Social Media’ Category

Posted on January 17, 2012 - by Wayne Sutton

Social Media By Demographics #infographic

Posted on January 13, 2012 - by Wayne Sutton

Guest Post – 5 Reasons Your Company Needs Live Chat

About Guest Author: Amanda DiSilvestro is a writer on topics such as voip phone systems and telemarketing to small businesses and entrepreneurs for Resource Nation.

From smartphones and tablets to social media and comment forums, people have learned to chat in every way possible. People love to stay connected and stay busy, so chatting during downtime seems to be the perfect solution. For this reason, chatting is becoming more and more high tech. So what does this mean for your business?

This means that your business should be utilizing live chat on its website. Consider some of the benefits live chat can have for your company:

Why Customers and Companies Love Live Chat

1. Save Money – The actual live chat software is very inexpensive, and your company can save by allowing employees to do more things at once. In other words, employees can chat to several different customers all at once as opposed to one at a time on the phone. And trust, having ten chat windows open for most future generations is a cinch. Employees will also likely prefer this method because they will feel extra busy.

2. Customer Convenience – Many customers want to buy online, but they often have questions that are better answered in the store. Live chat brings together the best of both world, and I think you will find that customers will embrace live chat for this exact reason. They will be able to get the answers they want when they want them without having to wait on a traditional business phone system for someone to help.

3. Competition – Although chatting online is second nature to many consumers, offering live chat is a fairly new idea in the business world. In other words, you will have a lot of customers interested to use your new service without the competition.

4. Increase Revenue and Customer Satisfaction – There is often a lot of back and forth that happens when someone is making a purchase. If they are making the purchase online, they very well might consider a few questions that lead them to turn away from the product or service. Had someone been there answering their questions right away, they may have made a different decision. According to a study reported in Forbes magazine, Wells Fargo used online chat and found that their customer satisfaction scores significantly increased.

5. Efficiency – One of the reasons live chat is so convenient and can help save a company money is because everything gets done faster. Employees will be able to talk with concerned customers faster and customers will be able to get their questions answered faster; thus increasing the overall time spent on a sale. This will allow your company to be more efficient with its time.

If you think that live chat is right for your company, consider trying a few different software first before making a decision. Most software does offer a free trial, so have your employees try it out and see what they think. It’s important that any employee utilizing free chat is trained in the program as well as how to talk with customers via live chat. For more information on software, visit Top Ten Reviews.

 

Photo Credit: vietave.com

Posted on December 30, 2011 - by Wayne Sutton

Guest Post: Microsoft Socl: The Upcoming Social Network Project

About the author: Alia Haley is a blogger by profession. She loves writing on technology and luxury.
Beside this she is fond of games. She recently bought a Gaming Mouse for herself. These days she is
busy in writing an article on Suzuki Motorcycles.

There was a murmur heard in the Microsoft camp a couple of weeks before about the social networking project being carried out by the company. Later these things embarked at a place called Socl.com with a name Tulalip. The fact of the matter is that Tulalip happens to be a website which allows you everything right from getting any information to sharing it unlike you see in any social networking site. With passing time, more information has emerged out now in public making things clear. Microsoft has embarked with a project called Socl and dropping the Tulalip. This place will allow you to search for information and clubbing things with a complicated blend. Microsoft has tested the applications with limited users in a group along with a number of features as discussed under:
The UI or User Interface: On the face of it, people can call it somewhere a Facebook; however, it is still too early to trust this notion completely. This can only be said when Microsoft will eventually launch the social networking website. However, at the moment you can consider having the same design of three columns as seen on Facebook. These include the updates coming in the middle section, information at the right side and the navigations links on the left side. However, the difference comes with the input area which is placed at the top side area where you can you can update about your statuses just beside the question asking to do so. However, you can choose for a standard format rather treading this path.

The Tags: The Socl is taking a different route to this path and not just replicating things from FB. At Socl you get the choice of using tags with some specific subject trying from anybody’s status or search the query; thereby you can get result of anything having this searched tag. It is still unclear how it will work while you can use your RSS feeds or just try Google as well for you. This feature is still under the phase of testing, we can have a clear idea after it comes out.

The Videos: Having the presence of high end HTML5, Socl works out without any hassle or issue even when you will see the video being used at the right side. In this way the users can therefore do two things together, watching the videos from YouTube and put comments through the chat box window.

The Social Element: As you see how Google is using the social element in its search results since they think that it can pull out information which is unique from the users using their friends. With Socl you can expect similar thing in this direction, though we need to wait and watch this thing.

Knowing the fact that the Microsoft social networking site –Socl is under test, it’s a tough task to understand it completely at this juncture. People though feel that the company will bring something different rather than mere replicating things from Facebook or any other social media site. To survive indeed you need to be different, by just being a copy cat it will make things tough for the Socl to combat the giants of Social media.

Posted on December 24, 2011 - by Wayne Sutton

How Social Media is Ruining Our Minds – infographic

Posted on December 22, 2011 - by Wayne Sutton

Guest Post: Budgeting for social media: Who pays for it and why?

About Guest Author:

Alia Haley is a blogger by profession. She loves writing on technology, health and parenting. Beside this she is fond of eating. Recently an article on Nokia Lumia 800 attracted her attention. These days she is busy in writing an article on Racing Games For Kids.

Have you ever come across deals like discount on purchase for a copy of a tweet or for liking a Facebook profile of a company? What could happen if you like Dell’s Facebook profile to Dell in reality? What is there for Coke to encourage Facebook profile? These are at the end of the day only intangible and binary signals confined within servers and networks. And answer is web 2.0 or interactive capabilities of today’s World Wide Web. User generated content is becoming tools for marketing in both B2C and B2B segments.

But who and why should spend?
All most anybody willing to draw public attention can spend – Barrack Obama did it in presidential election and Ford do it for their cars. Social media allows companies, organizations to spread brand awareness and increase customer engagement.
Companies spend millions of dollars on market research activities every year. But social network sites and forums provide endless opportunity to interact with customers and to understand their psyche at fractional cost. Besides, you can earn commitment if engage the customer around the branding activity. Reviews and remarks generated by customers work as marketing content for other left out prospects and customers.

Budgeting
But even a deep pocket corporate also needs to budget its spending. And despite so many cost efficient benefits it’s not easy to budget social media optimization. Part reason is lack of effective parameters that link money spent to money earned directly and the other part is slow action of optimization initiatives.
Other than budgeting, another common problem with SMO is how to distribute the allocated fund. Too much stress on campaign eats up fund for customer engagement process. This results in less than expected return on investments.
For these reasons, often companies drag their feet when budgeting for social media marketing. Even most willing marketing officers often suffer from over-budgeting or under-budgeting. To avoid such problem you can try few useful tips to streamline your social media initiative.

Separate budgeting
Make separate budget for different activities like, campaign, customer engagement, customer care etc. And don’t let one activity to eat up fund allocated for other activities.

Activity planning
We all know social media is a very fast changing medium. But for proper budgeting and fund use you must have a plan for future optimization strategy for near future. This would help you to allocate fund properly.

Introspection first
What worked for Ford may not yield for you. Try to understand your customers, prospects and brand reach. Every brand has its niche and it is important to understand that before you plan your strategy.

No magic
Social networking sites don’t give you any magic wand. It is absolutely legitimate if you find social media not much promising for you. You can restrict yourself within digital marketing only.

Wise parameters
Be wise when deciding on what test parameters to use to check effectiveness of your media effort. Try to rely less on paid media and stress more on earned media. Millions of followers won’t earn you dollar if they don’t shell out money to buy your product. Try to build and nurture even a small base of engaged followers.

CMOs must understand time is the most valuable input to skim optimum benefit from the social media marketing. And how much time you can afford would be major determinant of your budget. How much to spend is not important in SMO; what is most important is how long you can afford to spend. So, be careful to spend evenly across a long time horizon for better brand engagement and sales conversions.