@BasilPuglisi

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Customer Engagement for Small Business

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Telling business owners that they need to have some plans for customer engagement is easy. However, once they have absorbed that tidbit of helpful information, many may be lost as to what customer engagement can actually entail. Most likely, there is nothing that you in particular are selling, that can’t be found somewhere else. So what can the small business owner do to show that their product is the right choice for the consumer?

Be a Customer for a Day

Spend a day emulating the actions that your prospective consumers do.

  1. Call your customer service number.
  2. Go through the motions of purchasing your own product.
  3. Fill out your contact forms.

Make sure that your customer experience matches your outlook and ideas.

Build Communication Options

Not everyone uses Facebook and Twitter believe it or not. Make sure you have traditional methods of communication as well as digital ones. List phone numbers and a physical address for your business, even if it is online based.

Exercise and Act on Your Listening Skills

c/o www.retailshakennotstirred.com

It isn’t enough to reply to customers questions or request with generic terms. When prospective consumers ask for discounts or other beneficial options, show them you are listening by enacting them. You will get no better word of mouth advertising then having a consumer who can say “I asked for a discount, and they gave me one!” This doesn’t mean you have to offer that discount to everyone who asks, but you should never outright ignore those request.

Show Your Integrity

Since bad news can travel with light speed on the internet, you may need to go out of your way to show your customers that not only are you expert at what you do, but that you back that professionalism with personal integrity. Show your customers that the people behind the brand care.

Let Your Customers Advertise for You

Anything that you can do to get your consumers to share their product or service experiences with the public will provide you with two benefits. Obviously it will give you the valuable advertising you are seeking, but it will also provide you with media that you can post to help build top-notch links for your site. Don’t expect your customers to do this for no reward though. Their time is valuable too. Try to run contest for the best written or video reviews of your project. Reward the winners appropriately for their time spent talking about your products and services.

Above all it is important that any consumers approaching you for your products or services walk away with the sense that you are a brand they can trust and rely on.

Author:

@BasilPuglisi is the Executive Director and Publisher for Digital Brand Marketing Education (dbmei.com). Basil C. Puglisi is also the President of Puglisi Consulting Group, Inc. A Digital Brand Marketing Consultancy that manages professional and personal branding for Fortune 500 CEOs, Hedge Fund Managers and Small Business Owners.

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StumbleUpon’s New Front End Approach

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StumbleUpon is a very popular social media sharing and aggregation site with over 20 million users. They recently launched an immense user-end overhaul that changed pretty much everything about their site.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=F8DtI9e4xZ8]

Though they have just recently removed themes, groups, and blogs from their site, the new changes seem focused on directing users away from the site and back to using their toolbar, whether they have the iFrame or installed versions.

Direct Link Removal

One move that seems to have surprised many in the industry is the removal of all the direct links that point to content sources from within Stumbleupon. Now there is a single button for ‘Stumble This’ that when clicked transfers the user to an iframed version of the chosen content.

This reason behind the controversy is that now that all content from the site is iframed, once logged into the StumbleUpon system, there is no way to remove the toolbar, always leaving you in the iframed version of their site.

The Reaction

Although a bit before the change was launched, StumbleUpon employees discussed how happy they were that their pages had high SEO value for content owners, it seems they may not feel that way anymore.

Rebranding?

Although this may be a part of their larger re-branding plan, forcing users to browse in iframes may not be the best move yet. Before, users could simply X out of the StumbleUpon frame if they wanted to visit a site directly. Now viewers are forced to browse within the frame. Once logged out of the site, the toolbar is easily X’d out, which leaves many users wondering how useful the new change really is.

Author:

@BasilPuglisi is the Executive Director and Publisher for Digital Brand Marketing Education (dbmei.com). Basil C. Puglisi is also the President of Puglisi Consulting Group, Inc. A Digital Brand Marketing Consultancy that manages professional and personal branding for Fortune 500 CEOs, Hedge Fund Managers and Small Business Owners.

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Bottlenose Surfs the Stream for You

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For many with large social networks, reading through social feeds can begin to require the same time and energy as any other full-time job. This social media overload can be frustrating to those who are dependent upon their social networks for industry news, communication with friends and colleagues, or research purposes. How do you separate the videos from the web links? How do you filter through the spam, jokes, and memes to find the information you need.

Bottlenose may be a serious competitor in an industry that is filled with similar tools. Bottlenose allows you to filter your Facebook and Twitter streams by a specific set of criteria.

Bottlenose Custom Stream Filtering

c/o http://www.vexite.com/

Bottlenose allows users to create their own custom streams by:

  • Media Types – Videos, Web links, Images
  • Mentions – Messages and their relevance to you and your industry
  • Popularity – Topics that have been made popular by user aggregation, retweets, and shares

Users can also select actions to add such as apps that will play sounds when the stream updates. Although actions are a bit limited at the moment, Bottlenose relays that they have many more action options coming soon.

Sonar Term Clouds

This may be one element that sets Bottlenose above and beyond its competition. When you use the single column view tab, you can click on or observe any stream topic and the Bottlenose sonar will display a term cloud. You can control your term cloud in a variety of ways.

  • Changing Time Periods
  • Changing Term Density
  • Toggling People, Messages, Hashtags, and Topics

Users can zoom on their term clouds to open it in a feed. Clicking on the users relative to your account can also show you terms that are associated with that person, or even just let you view their feed.

Although Bottlenose is clearly in its relatively early stages, it seems to be growing up to be a very functional and useful stream aggregation tool.

Author:

@BasilPuglisi is the Executive Director and Publisher for Digital Brand Marketing Education (dbmei.com). Basil C. Puglisi is also the President of Puglisi Consulting Group, Inc. A Digital Brand Marketing Consultancy that manages professional and personal branding for Fortune 500 CEOs, Hedge Fund Managers and Small Business Owners.

Sources:

Reference.me – A Unique Business Social Site

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Since almost every social site claims to be unique, yet there are several floating around that seem to mirror each other, we have come to understand that often ‘unique social site’ in reality means, social site with a unique name. So when I came across Reference.me, I gave it a shot, but without any genuine expectations for uncommon features.

c/o www.domain.me

Trusted Networks

We have other social sites that rely on trusted networks. LinkedIn immediately comes to mind. Currently the largest business social network online, LinkedIn has over 120 million users. Many people use it to connect to business partners and other colleagues, or even employees and customers.

While most of us likely have a LinkedIn account and profile, accept or decline contacts on a daily basis, and even update our profiles when business opportunities change, we usually stop just short of using our LinkedIn profiles outside of a social bookmark on our website or link on our email signatures unless we are in the process of actively building on that network.

How Does Reference.Me Work?

Your trusted network on Reference.me actually comes with a very impressive visual reference of who your trusted network represents. It differs immediately from other social networks in one specific way. Log in is only integrated with Google + currently. However, once signed up, and logged in, you can still easily integrate your Facebook and LinkedIn accounts. Integration with LinkedIn will also fill out many of the details, work references, education, and skills on the Reference.me details tab.

There is no messaging on Reference.me, no activity streams, groups, or anything else you may be called to join in, or at least not yet. That doesn’t mean that Reference.me doesn’t have a shining quality or two at this stage in its development game.

Reference.me Pros

The site already has a great setup when it comes to a quick list and profile viewing opportunity with a few different filter options. Arranging your network by skills, location, companies, strongest connection, or even alphabetically supplies users with the ability to quickly locate members in their network that may not be so readily available on the top of your network. This layering feature is absolutely unique from any other social business network available on the net currently. It provides a more in-depth look at how the rest of your network functions with their own, giving potentially more elaborate insight if browsing the networks of perspective new hires, new colleagues, or even consumers.

The references system on Reference.me is impressive, as well it should be on a social site with such a URL. Grabbing a reference from their system is as easy as clicking on a name and choosing the big tab that pops up. Under the tab you may also see that the source is already a trusted one for you, or that you may need to request them to join your network so that they too receive trusted status on your Reference.me account.

c/o www.growyourbusinessnetwork.com

Reference.me Cons

Reference.me cons are as mostly as listed above. There is no messaging on Reference.me, no activity streams, groups, or anything else you may be called to join in, and for this reason Reference.me may not be seen as a full-bodied network that promotes major interactivity.

Fortunately, this doesn’t seem to be what the team at Reference.me is going for. Reference.me seems like a great place to send a prospective client, employee, or consumer when they ask for references, whole references, and nothing but your references.

Author:

@BasilPuglisi is the Executive Director and Publisher for Digital Brand Marketing Education (dbmei.com). Basil C. Puglisi is also the President of Puglisi Consulting Group, Inc. A Digital Brand Marketing Consultancy that manages professional and personal branding for Fortune 500 CEOs, Hedge Fund Managers and Small Business Owners.

Sources:

How to Make Your Event Successful

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Those who organize events know that the success of the event depends on many things, least of them the weather. The amount of options and the connections the attendees create in an event will dictate if they will join you next time or not. In other words “What would I get out of it?”

Even in our connected and social media rich world, business is still done face to face. The biggest hurdles business people have to overcome are psychological; how to introduce themselves to strangers, how to portray themselves without seeming cocky and how to make the most of the time in the event.

Pathable.com is a new program that aims to create a virtual gathering place before the start of the event. It is a private online community which aims to facilitate introductions and highlight common interests. They provide an interactive space for the attendees to gather and share information.

When one registers an event, all the attendees are asked to fill a profile. Those profiles are personalized with photos and links to other sites and all other web representations in social media; Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and more.

This has the potential of introducing the attendees to each other before the event starts. People can see who they would like to meet personally at the event and start a conversation beforehand. The program even makes it easier to spot them; people with common interests are highlighted.

Starting a discussion in forums is encouraged, and because people can converse, they can also set meeting to take place during the event. The software enables mailing schedules that will appear on all the chosen attendees’ schedules at the same time.

A personalized conference calendar is available for each attendee, so they can easily build their own schedules as well. The program enables attendees to save space for private meetings and has a diagram of the conference, including all the booths and private rooms to make navigating the event very easy.

Event sponsors can create their own pages and sponsorship tools that target specific channels. They can participate in the conversation and communicate with the attendees in a non-intrusive way. It provides another place for targeted advertisement.

All those features are available in a mobile app for iPhone, iPad, Blackberry, Windows and Android as well. Easy to use and quick to respond.

Author:

@BasilPuglisi is the Executive Director and Publisher for Digital Brand Marketing Education (dbmei.com). Basil C. Puglisi is also the President of Puglisi Consulting Group, Inc. A Digital Brand Marketing Consultancy that manages professional and personal branding for Fortune 500 CEOs, Hedge Fund Managers and Small Business Owners.

Sources:

http://www.pathable.com/tour/

http://www.crunchbase.com/company/pathable

http://www.geekwire.com/2011/profitable-growing-pathable-raises-cash-events-social

Monitoring Your Social Reputation with Kred

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Social influence is gaining notice as more advertisers, marketers, consumers, and affiliates use it as a method of gauging the knowledge, credibility, and reliability of prospective new clients or business contacts. There are other systems of influence measurement, such TwentyFeet, Klout, and Peer Index. Between them all there is a whopping level of social influence analysis to be found. So which should you be using? From someone who has experimented and experienced a little of what each has to offer, I’d have to say, use each of them for the best option they offer for social influence measurement.

[slideshare id=9465635&doc=kredslidedeckv15-110928212859-phpapp02]

What Does Kred Offer?

Kred offers many of the same options as the others. A collaborative algorithm will allow you to enter your social network accounts to gather an overall score listing the highlights of your personal topics, and circles of influence. However, Kred does offer a few things that the others do not, or lack a particular focus on.

Analytics

Kred seems to have an analytics platform that is a bit more detailed than the others. Using a system known as PeopleBrowser, Kred has based their analytics system around the notion that they believe social analytics can depict accurately, how human behavior and influence can provide data to help businesses increase productivity, community, and growth.

Community

An important element to any brand is the ability to find the right community that cares about your services or product offerings. When you include the chance to pinpoint top influencers in your industry or topics, a brand marketer’s job gets a lot easier.

Transparency

Kred is unusually upfront about how scores are handed down, down to every mention, retweet, follow, like, and so on.

See what Scott Milener of PeopleBrowser has to say about their platform.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AKTEXlGuxgM]

Influencer Reality

True influencer reality is not going to come from Lady Gaga, or a Kardashian. Although any company would be delighted to have one of those famous influencers tweet or share their brand, the true consumer is unlikely to run out and purchase relentlessly just because Gaga or Kim said they should. However, the true consumers, those that may buy your product or services, and then relate their wonderful experience with you to all of their friends, is the epitome of influencer reality. Klout and Kred both seem to have a good realization of what it means to base an algorithm and platform on the real consumers companies are clamoring for attention from.

Kred vs Klout – Fun Fact

If you think that the competition between Kred and Klout when it comes to providing the best tool for social influence, it may also be important to note that these two companies also share the same city and office space, not just the same views on social influence. However, as much as each company seeks to shed light on the same platform of social influence, they also appear to have different viewpoints on the true sources of online influence.

If you want to learn more about the basics of Kred, check out this helpful PDF.

Author:

@BasilPuglisi is the Executive Director and Publisher for Digital Brand Marketing Education (dbmei.com). Basil C. Puglisi is also the President of Puglisi Consulting Group, Inc. A Digital Brand Marketing Consultancy that manages professional and personal branding for Fortune 500 CEOs, Hedge Fund Managers and Small Business Owners.

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