Monday, 23 April 2012
Google Doodle Zipper Photos & Videos - Gideon Sundback Google Doodle
Friday, 20 April 2012
People Actually Read Your Emails tips
Email is an efficient and effective form of communication. It’s also very easy to ignore. That’s because most email is spam, so people are primed to hit the delete button.
So how do you get people to actually read your missives? Try these 10 techniques.
4. Moderate Your Send-Out Rate
Nothing exceeds like excess, and the boundary between BFF and stalker is slim. Be moderate in your email outreach, so that recipients don’t categorize you as a junk mail sender.
6. Chunk it Up
If the email is longer than a paragraph or two, use techniques like subheads, bullets, or numbered lists, to make it easy for people to read.
If you’re not a strong writer, consider hiring someone to write for you. If stylish writing isn’t readily available, at least be clear. Briefly outline what you want to say. Be sure the topics flow in a logical manner. Clarity of communication has much appeal, if for no other reason than its scarcity.
10. Respond to Emails You Receive
People ignore those who ignore them. You will, of course, have response mechanisms in your emails. Be sure someone pays attention to them and takes the necessary actions.
You still won’t get everyone to read your messages, but you can increase the percentage, which is only good for your business.
So how do you get people to actually read your missives? Try these 10 techniques.
1. Set Importance to High
Email software lets you declare the importance of a message. Turn it to high and recipients will see the status and pay attention. However, use this sparingly, and only for what the recipient will consider important.2. Make the Subject Count
Subject lines show people an email deserves attention. Compare “October Newsletter” with “3 Sure Fire Ways to Close More Sales,” “35%-off Sale,” or the use of a mutual friend’s name.3. Know the Subject Length
Email software displays only so many characters in a subject line. Microsoft Outlook displays 66 characters, including spaces. Web-based services like Gmail depend on the width of the browser window. Smartphone email might show only a couple of dozen. Ensure the most compelling part of your message is visible to get your emails opened.4. Moderate Your Send-Out Rate
Nothing exceeds like excess, and the boundary between BFF and stalker is slim. Be moderate in your email outreach, so that recipients don’t categorize you as a junk mail sender.5. Get Out of the Way of the Message
Getting an email opened is only the first step. If you write the sequel to War and Peace, pack the message with visual clutter, or otherwise turn reading your email into work, guess who will go on to something else?6. Chunk it Up
If the email is longer than a paragraph or two, use techniques like subheads, bullets, or numbered lists, to make it easy for people to read.7. Make Sure Your Writing is Engaging
Great writing will stop people in their tracks and compel them to read. The J. Peterman Company is famous for catalog and advertisement copy that creates vibrant stories about the most everyday things.If you’re not a strong writer, consider hiring someone to write for you. If stylish writing isn’t readily available, at least be clear. Briefly outline what you want to say. Be sure the topics flow in a logical manner. Clarity of communication has much appeal, if for no other reason than its scarcity.
8. Spell Correctly
Penelope Trunk claims that judging people on spelling and grammar is passé. Some members of your audience may agree. Others will delete an error-ridden email. Messages without mistakes won’t offend either group. So why take the chance?9. Use Personal Reply-To Addresses
Make sure the return address is to a person, rather than to a “no-reply” email address. People like to deal with people, not automation.10. Respond to Emails You Receive
People ignore those who ignore them. You will, of course, have response mechanisms in your emails. Be sure someone pays attention to them and takes the necessary actions.You still won’t get everyone to read your messages, but you can increase the percentage, which is only good for your business.
Thursday, 19 April 2012
Better Customer Service on Facebook tips
Customers know that the squeaky wheel gets the grease, and web-savvy customers know that Facebook is the ultimate squeak amplifier. According to Forrester Research, 27% of U.S. online consumers sought customer service support on the web in 2011, and currently three out of four expect a reply to a negative comment posted on Facebook.
Unfortunately, many brands still don’t incorporate customer service into their social strategy, despite the fact that Facebook is one of the best venues in which to turn your customers’ negative comments into brand opportunities.
Here are eight tips to help you improve your Facebook customer support initiative and, in turn, raise your brand’s reputation, decrease your inbound service requests, acquire new customers and turn infrequent customers into brand loyalists. What are your tips? Let us know in the comments below.
1. Outsource
“Your Facebook wall is not an adequate customer service platform because it is not searchable, and it puts a negative twist on your main page,” says Jeff Nolan, VP of product at Get Satisfaction. Nolan suggests that brands build an online customer service channel and then funnel the data into their current CRM system. Companies such as Get Satisfaction, Lithium, Moxie Software and Parature enable brands to offer customers a way to connect in multiple online locations, including Facebook.
With these products, companies can streamline their customer service processes and track important customer data, no matter where the customer decides to engage. As these features become more commonplace, customers will begin to instinctively seek them out when they visit a brand’s page, so be prepared.
2. Crowdsource
“Identify and develop relationships with influencers who are knowledgeable about your products,” recommends Erin Korogodsky, social strategist at Lithium. “Those superfans are likely to lend a hand when a customer stops by with a question.” Products like Lithium’s LevelUp social suite allow for the peer-to-peer customer support Korogodsky suggests. Cultivation, encouragement and rewards for “superfans” who engage such solutions provide customer service request deflection, which Korogodsky says is one of the best ways you can save money for your business.
3. Who’s the Boss?
When it comes to social support, it is not always clear who’s in charge. Your customer service reps are not Facebook experts and vice-versa — that is why the two groups must team up to provide online customers with the best support experience. Have your social media team field Facebook comments and escalate issues to the appropriate customer service representative. Many social media marketing platforms, such as Buddy Media, Context Optional and Wildfire offer moderation features that allow for customer service reps to be pinged and prompted to respond upon assignment.
4. Transparent Humans
Users have faith in the transparency of social media and look to it as a place where they can directly contact their favorite companies — and be heard. Create a brand voice that is human and approachable. Do not delete posts, but instead take the opportunity to solve your customers’ issues or complaints on your public page. Each problem is most likely a problem for another customer and if the answer is easy to find, customers will be able to answer their own inquiries. At the very least, page visitors and friends of the disgruntled customer will see your brand as attentive and solution-oriented.
5. This is Your Time
Elisabeth Diana of Facebook’ communications team suggests brands take advantage of two new Timeline features: messages and pinned posts. First, users can now directly connect with a brand through brand page messages. This feature can serve as a free online customer service support system for your brand until your volume becomes unmanageable. Customers can also exchange private information with your brand, such as phone numbers and email addresses, which may help you solve their problem faster. The downside is that there will be no audience to watch you turn a negative situation into a positive one. Remember however, that this is an optional feature and can be turned off (which many large brands already have done).
In addition, “Pinned” posts allow brands to highlight certain hot topics by pinning them to the top of the wall. Diana uses TurboTax as an example of a brand that really takes advantage of this feature. As Tax Day approaches every year, TurboTax receives an influx of the same questions. So instead of posting the same answer multiple times, the company can now pin reply posts to the top of the wall, thus reducing the number of incoming inquiries.
6. Know Your Issues
As your brand continues to offer effective customer service on Facebook, you will see that the volume of requests will only increase. Take this opportunity to log some of your previously solved issues in order to be more efficient and consistent with future replies (without sounding automated, of course). You may also want to take these most common questions, requests and issues and build a FAQ Facebook tab. Again, if your customers are able to find answers easily, your workload will be lessened, as will negative sentiment on your wall.
7. Set Up Alerts
If you have very active Facebook fans and are able to use a social media marketing platform, it’s important to set up alerts for certain keywords to help filter out high priority initiatives. Single out certain terms such as “question,” “customer service” or “frustrated,” and you will receive notifications when related comments are posted. If you are a toy company currently experiencing an issue with a particular toy, set an alert for the product name. Whether the comments are positive or negative, you will be kept in the loop.
8. Accept Compliments Graciously
Your mother always taught you to say “thank you” — your brand should do the same. Don’t just respond to negative comments, reply to positive ones, too — you can encourage positivity with politeness and grace. Fans love to know that their favorite brands hear and appreciate their praise, and they will often come back to leave positive comments in the future. These positive comments help shift the overall sentiment of your wall, improve brand reputation and increase Facebook virality … so remember to say “thank you.”
Tuesday, 17 April 2012
Why You Need a Wedding Website
How do you feel about wedding websites? Some people find them a good outlet for narcissism, while others find them to be a helpful guide during modern digital times.
Sure, tossing 600 photos of yourself on your wedding website with an accompanying story about how you met is a little extreme (and totally unhelpful), while building a simple site to share important event details and anecdotes from your relationship is not.
Here are 7 reasons why you need a wedding website, and what your site should include to be of maximum benefit for your guests.
- 1. Save on printing costs. If you’re having invites printed, you know how quickly the price will rise by just adding another piece of paper to the mix. By directing everyone to your site in any engagement party, shower, or wedding correspondence, you’ll save time, money, and effort on printing costs.
- 2. Easy registry access. You’re probably already refreshing your gift registry to see which items have been purchased; why not give guests easy online access, too? In most cases, you can link directly to your registry info, which makes it easy for guests.
- 3. Your fridge can only hold so many magnets. If your friends are anything like mine, you already have a fridge full of Save-the-Date magnets from friends and family. The side of my refrigerator is busier than the wedding announcement section of my local newspaper. Skip the magnets, save some cash, and put together a website.
- 4. Change of plans? No problem. Last minute location change? In-case-of-rain info? Hotel updates? While major changes to the big event can make for one hectic bride, making the change on your site takes five minutes of your time. Plus, you can add updates as the date gets closer instead of feeling the pressure to nail everything down before your Save-the-Date notices are sent.
- 5. It’s easy to stay in contact with your guests. Many wedding site templates offer guest book and RSVP sections. Ask guests to sign the book or enter their email addresses to be notified of site updates or changes. Then happily send one email instead of making 150 calls.
- 6. You don’t have time to deal with 150 calls from 150 guests trying to figure out directions. The last thing you, your parents, or your Maid of Honor has time to deal with is an endlessly ringing cellphone from friends and relatives asking to clarify the location one more time.
- 7. It’s eco-friendly. No matter how you use it, your site will probably save you cash on paper and stamps, not to mention the trees you’ve saved by using less paper and carbon emissions you’ve spared by not loading the mail carrier down with a whole lot of envelopes. Whether you prefer to go completely paperless and use your site for everything or just plan to ask for eRSVPs for a portion of your wedding-related festivities, every little bit helps.
Go Here to Create
Monday, 16 April 2012
Tools for Building Your Online Portfolio
In today’s digital world, your job search has to be as much online as it is on paper. Social media platforms such as LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook can help you establish your personal employment brand and connect with potential employers — in fact, almost 90% of employers are using social media to recruit potential employees [PDF]. What better way to have all of your online and offline job search tools in one place than in a portfolio?
An online portfolio allows you to compile what makes you employable — it should include things like your resume, cover letter, references, certifications, transcripts and any examples of your work (including writing samples, press clips, artwork or lesson plans). Plus, you should include basic contact information, such as a phone number and email, and more modern information, like a Twitter handle, LinkedIn profile, or Facebook URL. Put all of this into one online package that’s easy to browse and voilà — you have an online portfolio!
Here are five great options that can host your online portfolio. There’s a breakdown of each one, so you can pick which one works best for you and your career goals.
1. WorkSimple
Summary: WorkSimple is the first work portfolio that helps you manage your career and performance inside your organization. Users have endorsements, followers, goals and accomplishments, which can help you build your professional and social reputations. Set your professional focus, add your goals, and get recognition for your work.
Additionally, WorkSimple allows users to brand themselves by sharing goals and contributions with co-workers in real-time. Essentially, it’s a Facebook Timeline for professionals.
Best Feature: WorkSimple encourages you to set career focus and add “Social Goals” that support your direction, which help you keep track of your accomplishments, efforts and successes as you build your reputation. Plus, you can get great feedback from co-workers.
What Needs Work: Those looking for a traditional portfolio to display resume, work samples and more may not find these features in WorkSimple.
Ideal User: A corporate worker who is tech-savvy and wants to establish goals and stay synced with co-workers. Like the other portfolio platforms, you can add images, but this portfolio is not solely image-based.
Cost: Free for an individual plan but pricing plans exist for team or company plans.
2. Behance
Summary: Behance is a platform for creative professionals to gain exposure and manage their careers. Users can create multimedia portfolios that showcase their work to millions of visitors.
Best Feature: Behance turns your work into an online gallery; It claims to get 15 times the traffic of all other leading portfolio sites combined (including Carbonmade, the next site on our list). Recruiters can find and track talent and post jobs for the creative professionals on the site.
What Needs Work: In order to have your own personal portfolio website, rather than just a profile on Behance, you need to join ProSite. This costs $11 a month, but it allows you to create a full website without coding, and it syncs with your Behance portfolio.
Ideal User: Any creative professional wishing to showcase multimedia projects — images, text, audio or video. The layout of the site is better for viewing visual projects, so anyone from graphic designers to photographers to industrial designers can benefit.
Cost: Free for a Behance profile, $11 a month for the ProSite.
3. Carbonmade
Summary: Carbonmade is an online portfolio platform that helps users show off their work — especially creative work like design, illustration and art.
Best Feature: Carbonmade makes portfolios easy. Users can create a profile in a snap, and the service offers tons of ways to personalize your portfolio. Plus, users can establish their own URL — for example, yourname.carbonmade.com.
What Needs Work: The site isn’t conducive to any text, audio or video work — a still image is best for this portfolio.
Ideal User: Again, this portfolio service is primarily for creative professionals. In comparison to Behance, Carbonmade seems even more geared toward visual art. Any professional who can share an image of their work — fashion designers, illustrators, architects and more — would find Carbonmade useful.
Cost: Free
4. Pinterest
Summary: Pinterest is basically an online pin-board. It’s primarily a social photo-sharing website where users can create separate boards for various things. For example, you could have a board for recipes, pictures of places you’d like to travel or, in this case, your professional creative work.
Best Feature: Pinterest is far more social than Behance or Carbonmade, so you can have eyes from all parts of the globe on your work. Plus, you can “pin” any image, and when users click on a pinned image, they’re redirected to the original website. For example, if you “pinned” a piece of your artwork from, say, your personal blog, you can attract more traffic to your blog.
What Needs Work: The platform was not made to be a professional portfolio site. Therefore, the site may have a different audience of viewers than an actual portfolio platform. Plus, like Carbonmade, text or audio works cannot be “pinned.”
Ideal User: Pinterest only allows photos or videos (which will be “pinned” as a still picture), so creative professionals with image-based work will find this site most useful. Any professional with visual work that can be put into image form can display their portfolio on Pinterest.
Cost: Free, but you do need to request an invite.
5. Dribbble
Summary: Dribbble is a “show and tell” for designers, where users can share small screenshots of their work.
Best Feature: The platform shows off your work with screenshots of your progress or completed project. Plus, it’s easy to browse other people’s work by tags or color.
What Needs Work: Dribbble isn’t useful for anyone with non-visual works; it’s really only conducive to visuals.
Ideal User: Anyone who creates visual work that can be shared via an image, especially graphic or web designers, illustrators and logo designers.
Cost: Free
Conclusion
All online portfolio platforms have their pros and cons, and different sites work better for varying types of professionals in myriad industries. There are many portfolio services to explore aside from the ones mentioned above, but what all of these sites have in common is that they allow professionals to display their work online and continue to build their personal brand.
Do you have an online portfolio? What service do you use? Let us know in the comments.
Friday, 13 April 2012
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Thursday, 12 April 2012
Mistakes to Avoid on Your Ecommerce Site by SagarGanatra
We’ve all been there. You’re all set to buy something, credit card in hand, but for one reason or another you never close the deal.
Maybe the third time you were asked to enter your credit card number you gave in. Perhaps it was the exorbitant shipping costs. Maybe the site crashed.
The truth is, there are at least seven things that send potential customers fleeing in horror from your website, some of which were chronicled in this perceptive comic from The Oatmeal. If you actually want people to stick around and buy stuff from your site, you may want to take note of and avoid these common pitfalls.
1. Your Site is Too Slow
Every 2 seconds of load time on your site equals an 8% abandonment rate, according to Gomez, the application monitor from Compuware. If you drop your load time from 8 seconds to 2 seconds, your conversion rate actually jumps up 74%.
It’s easy to see why: Do you want to waste your time waiting for a site to load?
Unfortunately, there are a lot of reasons why your site is loading so slowly. Steve Tack, Chief Technical Officer for Compuware, says many ecommerce sites are overloaded with third-party plug-ins for Facebook, Twitter and ad networks — all of which can slow a site down. Another cause is cloud issues: If you’re using a content-delivery network (CDN), your site can slow to a crawl if your service provider is having issues.
2. Your Site is Too Complicated
If you’re asking consumers to take more than five steps to buy something off your site, then you’re asking too much. Compuware recommends the following:
- Welcome/cart contents page
- Bill-to section
- Ship-to section
- Payment module
- Confirmation/thank you page
3. Your Credit Card Entry System is Punishing
Here you may also want to take The Oatmeal’s advice about credit card entry fields. Is there anything more frustrating than entering your name, address, 16-digit credit card number and three-digit security code, and then restarting from scratch because you forgot your ZIP code? And yes, if most of your business is in the U.S., why not put the country first on the scroll instead of way down at the end, as it would appear alphabetically?
Sucharita Mulpuru, an analyst with Forrester Research, says that there’s a standard sequence of information for credit card information. If you mess with that order (by putting the credit card number before the name and address, for instance), then users are apt to enter the wrong info because they’ve been trained to log such data in a certain sequence. Says Mulpuru: “Follow the industry standard.”
4. You’re Charging Too Much for Shipping
Mulpuru says that if you’re charging more than 10% of the total cost of the item for shipping, then you’re charging too much. “You’re probably depressing your sales significantly,” she says. “People are more likely to abandon your cart.”
5. You’re Overselling Your Tablet App
If a potential customer visits your website on her iPad, that doesn’t necessarily mean that she’s keen on downloading your iPad app. “Don’t over-invest in customizing your mobile apps,” says Mulpuru. “Unless there’s a clear value, most people figure, ‘Why bother?’”
An alternative is to optimize your site for the tablet experience, something that few are doing right now, Tack says.
6. Your Site Performs Horribly on Certain Browsers
You may be a Google Chrome fan, but there’s a world full of people who are using old versions of Internet Explorer. Have you tested your site on those other browsers? “Many sites don’t perform well across various browsers,” says Mulpuru, “so people abandon them.”
7. You’re Hitting Your Customers With Irrelevant Offers
OK, you’ve completed the sale. This person has indicated that they’re interested in what you’re selling, so it’s natural to conclude that they might want to buy something from you in the future. So why not hit them with offers for things that they’re actually likely to buy?
Mulpuru recalls, for instance, that after she bought a bed from Costco, the retailer besieged her with offers for … more beds. While deals on pillows or sheets might have made sense, a bed is something you generally purchase every five or 10 years. Says Mulpuru: “At this point, I’m not in the market for more beds.”
What peeves you about ecommerce sites? Let us know in the comments.
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