Zuberance Turns Employees Into Brand Advocates |  |
- Zuberance Turns Employees Into Brand Advocates
- Confidential Company Data: You Might Be Surprised Where It Ends Up
- Draw Visitors to Your Small Business with Local SEO Strategies
- Anil Dash of Dashes.com: Blogging & Business Then And Now
- Office Talk Over Coffee
- Facebook Fixes Its Ad Problems
| Zuberance Turns Employees Into Brand Advocates Posted: 17 Aug 2012 03:00 PM PDT Word of mouth marketing can be a powerful tool for small businesses, especially for those who use tools to make sure that message reaches as many people as possible.
For years, companies have been working on ways to turn their customers into brand advocates, but there's one more group of people who could be a strong advocate for brands in a completely different capacity. Marketing company Zuberance, which focuses on turning a brand's customers into brand advocates, is now working on a new push to begin turning a company's employees into advocates of a different sort. The new Workforce Advocacy Program can help companies enhance what is oftentimes already there. A company's employees could, for example, share positive testimonials about their employer for the recruiting purposes. Zuberance would use the same types of tools as it does for its traditional brand advocacy programs, such as Advocate Stories and Advocate Answers, and just repurpose them to be used in a new capacity. In addition to employee advocates helping with recruiting, they can also be there to help the company in times of PR crisis. For example, if the company's CEO posts something on social media that upsets some customers, the company's employee advocates could be there to put the statement into context or clear up any misunderstandings. Zuberance specializes in finding out which customers, and now employees, would make the most enthusiastic advocates, and then providing them with the tools to create testimonials, reviews, answers to specific questions, and more. Then companies can track how many clicks, leads, and sales were generated by those advocates. Some of the tools offered by Zuberance may be more relevant to larger companies or brands, but small businesses could benefit from some of the tools offered, both for the Employee Advocacy Solution and the Brand Advocacy program. Zuberance offers several different options for its advocacy programs, including Zuberance Self Service, a more hands-on approach to the advocacy system that is free to use during its current beta period. From Small Business Trends |
| Confidential Company Data: You Might Be Surprised Where It Ends Up Posted: 17 Aug 2012 12:30 PM PDT As a small business owner, you may think you've taken steps to keep your sensitive data private, but it may be more at risk than you realize. In fact, your customer data, payroll data, banking information, email communications and more may fall into the hands of those it shouldn’t — and all because of sharing files. When files are shared online in the cloud, there are a number of points of weakness that make those files vulnerable to falling into the hands of third parties, as this graphic shows:
Click to see full-size file-sharing graphic Online security company Symantec has created the above graphic to illustrate just how vulnerable your confidential company information and sensitive customer data may be. Symantec's Senior Manager of Emerging Cloud Products, Anthony Kennada, says:
Symantec's graphic illustrates a number of risk factors that may lead to your company's confidential data finding its way into the wrong hands. Let’s look at some:
With more and more businesses using the cloud, it’s more important than ever to consider your practices and make sure that your company's data is secure. Adds Kennada:
So, does this mean you should never share your files in the cloud and keep everything offline? No. In this day and age, that’s just not realistic. But what it does mean is that you shouldn’t take security for granted. Look at all the potential points of weakness outlined in the above graphic. Be sure you have taken steps to minimize loss at each point. From Small Business Trends |
| Draw Visitors to Your Small Business with Local SEO Strategies Posted: 17 Aug 2012 11:00 AM PDT Small businesses know just how difficult it can be to attract new business to their physical location. It's tough to run your business and manage your marketing efforts at the same time—just one more ball to juggle with the rest of your responsibilities.
Many businesses don't realize how much potential there is in the Internet, and even if they try a few online marketing campaigns, if they aren't successful, businesses abandon Internet marketing altogether. As someone that works in online marketing and sees the power of successful strategies first-hand every day, take this advice: don't give up on the Internet. According to marketing research, more consumers trust the Internet to help them find local businesses in their area and learn more about them. With these tips, you can cash in on consumer trends with a few free and easy online tools that will boost your search engine results and get you noticed on the web: Help Google Help You: Google+ LocalGoogle is one of the biggest, most widely-used search platforms on the Internet, and they provide a number of free, simple features you can use to promote your business directly to search engine users that are actively looking for your products and services. Google Search is a product first and foremost, and that product depends upon the quality of data Google has. To make sure that they have the highest-quality data, Google invites businesses to put themselves on the map with Google Places for Business—which recently became Google+ Local. In just a few minutes, you can boost your small business's visibility on the Internet by providing Google with some basic information about your business. The more you provide, the better your results will be. To get started, sign in with a Google account and go to Places for Business. From there, you can follow the prompts and either fill in your business info or claim your business from public listings and provide Google with more valuable information about your services and your brand. You can be as sparse or as thorough as you'd like with your business's information, but keep in mind that the more thorough you are, and the more you optimize your Google Places page with good keywords and search-sensitive information, the better your results will be. Once you've completed this, your business will soon be fully discoverable across Google Maps, Google Shopping, Google+ Local, and many other Google Search products. Use Customer Review Sites to Your BenefitMarketing research shares a lot of insights into the weight consumers give to business reviews online: 72% of consumers said that online reviews are as trustworthy as personal recommendations, and 52% of them said that positive online reviews about a local business make them more likely to pay it a visit. This points to one conclusion: online reviews are becoming more popular, and more consumers are referring directly to the Internet to seek out local businesses. The strategy is very clear here: make these customer reviews work for your business. That doesn't mean you should spam fake reviews of your own business all across the Internet, and it doesn't mean you should use these review sites to slam your competition—those are bad practices that can get you blacklisted on Google Places and can destroy your good name as a reputable business in no time. Instead, encourage your customers to leave positive reviews online. You can't force customers to really do anything, but if just a handful of them leave positive reviews on the Internet about your business, those will become valuable testimonials that will encourage more potential customers to pay your business a visit. Localize Your SEO and Content Marketing StrategiesThe last major tip is a little obvious, but it's surprisingly overlooked in practice: localizing your search engine optimization with region-specific keywords and place qualifiers. If you take a look at your website analytics and the data tells you that you have lots of customers searching for you from a particular city or region, you should include that area by name in your keywords. If you find that visitors are hitting your website with a search term paired with a city or state name, optimize your online content for that particular city/state name. Simply including city and state names with the keywords you're optimizing for on-site is a simple, easy way to increase your visibility in those areas. Search engines will associate your keywords with the regions you're optimizing for, so when someone within your area searches for your services, your business is more likely to rank higher due to that association with both service and regional relevance. These are just three of the many ways you can use search engines and other online services to boost your local business, attract more qualified visitors to your website, and turn them into customers more easily. Do you have any other good local SEO tips? Boutique Shopping Photo via Shutterstock From Small Business Trends |
| Anil Dash of Dashes.com: Blogging & Business Then And Now Posted: 17 Aug 2012 08:00 AM PDT We've come a long way baby – in the blogosphere that is. Tune in as Anil Dash, one of the pioneers of blogging, dating back to 1999, Founder of ThinkUp and Activate and columnist for Wired magazine, joins Brent Leary to discuss the world of blogging – then and now. * * * * *
Anil Dash: I am a blogger first and foremost, and I have been blogging at Dashes.com for 13 years. That has taught me a little bit about how the tech world works and about how the media world works. Small Business Trends: Are you surprised at where we are today with blogging and social media? Anil Dash: Yes and no. I think everything we do in terms of posting to Facebook, blogging and Tweeting, I consider that to be within the realm of what we thought blogging was going to be. It's actually something similar to, if you say, "We knew hip hop was going to take over the world." And right now, what you call pop music, even if Justin Bieber is singing it, it sounds like hip hop. I think the same thing is true in tech. In the early days of blogging that first hundred people, that was part of that community I was part of. I absolutely took it as an article of faith that there we're going to be a hundred million people that are going to do this, or a billion people. There was no question. Nobody had a doubt about that. I think that was part of why we seemed particularly crazy. So the good and the bad part of being in an early community is there is a little bit of grid thinking. But in retrospect, I think it must have been like that for whoever worked on I Love Lucy. Television had been around for 30 years before they made I Love Lucy. Then you are working on I Love Lucy, and you think, "Man, this is the sitcom that this medium was made for; we figured it out." Small Business Trends: I guess it's the same kind of cycle we are going through with all of this social technology, huh? Anil Dash: That is exactly right. I think there were probably two or three networks that existed even before I Love Lucy launched right? I don't know what they were doing. It's kind of like personal computers 20 years before the internet came along. What were we doing on them? Then we had the Internet for decades before social media comes along. What were we doing on it? That is one of the things, where it takes a lot of time to reveal it. If you are somebody like me who makes software, makes technology, cares about those parts, what you are hoping is you are making the camera that somebody is going to shoot their I Love Lucy with. Small Business Trends: Have consumers of the technology actually gotten ahead of the creators of technology? Anil Dash: In some ways yes and in some ways no. At its best, yes. If you made a piece of software, or website, or app, or tool that can be used in ways you did not expect, then you are winning. Then you are really succeeding. The examples that everybody loves to point to on Twitter are the Hashtag or the @Reply. Those weren't invented by Twitter, those were people saying I am going to spin this turntable backwards and I am going to make something magical out of that. Even to some degree, Twitter just announced what they are calling "Cashtags," which is putting the dollar sign in front of the stock ticker. It will link it to information about that company. That is something that emerged from the community Small Business Trends: How is it different creating new Web based businesses now compared with when you helped build Six Apart? Anil Dash: It is night and day. I remember this distinctly, late 2002, I was spending days and nights in Microsoft Excel, making spreadsheets, trying to figure out how much it should cost to have a website on the blogging service. Because nobody had ever made a service that you sign up for, and paid money for as a consumer that was a host service on the Web. I was slaving on it for months and we were doing, what sounds silly now, calculations about how much it costs to run a server and how much it costs to pay for disk storage for your blog if you had to have a lot of pictures. All of that is gone. Now I talk to young folks doing startups and I try to mentor them, especially here in New York City where I live. They just wave their hands kind of like, "I don't have to worry about that, I use Amazon EC2, or I use Rackspace, or whatever the provider is. It is all in the Cloud. I don't even think about it." I know I sound like an old timer, "Back in my day, it was up hill both ways." But that was our liberation. Now I don't have to know any of that stuff. I can focus on, "Is this going to be useful to somebody?" Or, "How do I tell the story of why this product is useful?" Small Business Trends: What recent startup has your interest today? Anil Dash: Kickstarter is just a box of text that a person types into, so it is just a payment system. But they are using Amazon payments and didn't really build their own payment system. There is no technology or algorithm that makes Kickstarter particularly unique or anything you couldn't have done years ago. What's amazing is the culture changes. First of all, recognizing a large class of things that people want to pay for that are not about business, but instead, are all about good will and artistic expression and creativity and all of these other positive things, which is really amazing. The second part behind it is just building the site and telling that story in a great way. Because they had to attract a film maker, a musician, somebody with a great idea for a software game, or whatever those people are. You had to be appealing to the creative types and have a place they can go and do it. Kickstarter is for people that do creative things, I think it is astounding. Small Business Trends: Where can people learn more about what you are doing? Anil Dash: The best place to go is Dashes.com. This interview is part of our One on One series of conversations with some of the most thought-provoking entrepreneurs, authors and experts in business today. This interview has been edited for publication. To hear audio of the full interview, click the right arrow on the gray player below. You can also see more interviews in our interview series.
From Small Business Trends This posting includes an audio/video/photo media file: Download Now |
| Posted: 17 Aug 2012 05:00 AM PDT
Apparently this guy was some sort of frog prince. And after what I must assume is some time under this terrible spell, he’s released by a beautiful maiden’s kiss. Wow! So what’s next? Guy goes into work, gets some coffee, and chats about it with his nonplussed buddy. The quiet banality is somehow funnier to me than any number of animals talking about exploding robots. From Small Business Trends |
| Facebook Fixes Its Ad Problems Posted: 17 Aug 2012 02:30 AM PDT Social networking giant Facebook is relying more and more on advertising, which despite the company’s Wall Street woes, remains highly profitable and a major part of the platform’s appeal. But questions raised over the effectiveness of that advertising are a constant thorn in the company’s side, too. Here are some ways Facebook is tackling that challenge: Facing FactsWhen “likes” just aren’t enough. While originally Facebook ads were only helpful for getting more “likes” on your brand’s page, advertisers wanted something more. Now Facebook may be considering sharing data on how many people are talking about a company’s brand, what they’re saying, and some basic demographics. The Atlantic Wire Adding up the value. The latest flap over the value of Facebook advertising began last month with a story suggesting that many businesses were simply wasting their money on the service, only to get “likes” from people with no interest in their product, from fake accounts run by robots, or from accounts that misrepresent personal information. BBC News Advertising InnovationReaching beyond your Facebook page. Facebook is also testing a new advertising product that reaches beyond a company’s Facebook page to deliver marketing messages that might otherwise not reach certain users. The new ads will appear within Facebook’s desktop and mobile news feeds and function as sponsored links. PC Mag Don’t annoy your customers. Though Facebook execs seem convinced their new “sponsored stories” ad will be hugely effective both for themselves and for users, company leaders say they are proceeding slowly. The reason why is simple–to find out whether Facebook’s most valuable resource, its users, will buy in. Business Insider Socializing SpecialtiesOther Facebook business complaints. There are other complaints about Facebook besides the doubts concerning the effectiveness of the site’s advertising services. Businesses use Facebook for marketing, customer service, and much more. Here are some problems with which you may be familiar if you’ve ever tried to use the platform for your company. Small Business Bliss Proving your worth. Despite these complaints, however, Facebook “likes” and activity on your page remain key “social proof” of your blog or site’s popularity, so their importance cannot be ignored. Here’s how to use this integral aspect of Facebook to your best advantage. Keep Up With the Web Tumbling down. Facebook stock dropped by 6.3% Thursday as early investors were allowed to unload their disappointing shares. The drop in stock is another all-time low for Facebook, falling below $20 a share for the first time since the company went public. But the site’s services remain valuable to some marketers and businesses. Wall Street Journal From Small Business Trends |
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