Hosting Company Media Temple Is Bought by GoDaddy |  |
- Hosting Company Media Temple Is Bought by GoDaddy
- Is Your Work At Home Policy Spurring Jealousy?
- Best Buy Offers Microsoft Surface Trade In
- How to Get More Positive Customer Reviews, Using Get Five Stars
- Foursquare Ads Now Open to All Small Businesses Worldwide
- 6 Tips That Will Fix Your Broken Social Media Message
| Hosting Company Media Temple Is Bought by GoDaddy Posted: 16 Oct 2013 02:00 AM PDT GoDaddy has made another acquisition – its sixth purchase in less than two years. The company best known for domain names has bought Media Temple, a hosting company founded in 1998. Media Temple, which also goes by the unusual designation (mt), has over 125,000 customers and hosts more than 1.5 million websites. This is not specifically a small business play as some recent GoDaddy acquisitions have been. However, small businesses and entrepreneurs know and use Media Temple. But the company also hosts websites of some very large businesses, including Volkswagen and The Wall Street Journal. Media Temple views its mission as serving the technical community of Web developers and designers. GoDaddy CEO Blake Irving added in a prepared statement, ”The people at Media Temple ‘get’ Web pros and developers.” He adds that as a result of the acquisition, GoDaddy will “reach a more technical audience” than it has historically. The different market targets are obvious when you look at the two companies’ websites. The GoDaddy website now appears less technical under Blake’s leadership, appealing to small business owners and marketing types. The Media Temple website unapologetically speaks “geek” to a technical audience. Media Temple to Operate IndependentlyMedia Temple will be run as a separate company and not integrated into GoDaddy. There are FAQs on the Media Temple blog indicating that hosting will continue out of the Media Temple data centers. Discounts and coupons are not interchangeable — GoDaddy discounts cannot be used at Media Temple, nor vice versa. One Media Temple co-founder, John Carey, will be leaving. Co-founder Demian Sellfors will be “shifting his focus to other projects” although it’s not clear precisely what that means. His hand-picked successor, Russell P. Reeder, will remain as Media Temple’s President. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed. The Media Temple FAQs are unusual because they confront GoDaddy’s reputation in the tech community. The FAQs say, “GoDaddy has been transformed in recent months and is essentially a new company. If we did not like what we have seen, we would not have joined the GoDaddy family.” And on Twitter, Media Temple founder Sellfors seems to be having to set the GoDaddy record straight for some who are unhappy with the news. One response he made is, “I do not support their old advertising either, but this is not their direction anymore.” Since 2011 GoDaddy has had new owners/investors. With the infusion of cash it has brought in a new management team and gone acquiring. Virb Website Builder Not Included in DealVirb, a $10-per-month website builder acquired by Media Temple in 2012, is not included in the deal. Virb will be sold back to its founder/investors, who are the two Media Temple founders along with Brad Smith, according to a statement on the Virb blog. GoDaddy has its own website builder product. The statement says GoDaddy’s vision for the two products is different. Media Temple, based in Los Angeles, has 225 employees. GoDaddy, based in Scottsdale, Arizona serves 12 million customers and has 4,000 employees.
Image: Media Temple Twitter profile The post Hosting Company Media Temple Is Bought by GoDaddy appeared first on Small Business Trends. |
| Is Your Work At Home Policy Spurring Jealousy? Posted: 15 Oct 2013 04:00 PM PDT
Do you let your employees work from home at least some of the time? That's great. Dozens of studies have shown that the ability to work remotely is one of the biggest perks employees of all ages desire. But is your work at home policy inciting jealousy and resentment in the ranks? That's not so great. But chances are, according to a recent survey by Kona, that's what's happening. Seven in 10 workers in the Kona survey say they would rather telecommute than work in the office. Among those between the ages of 35 and 44, the number is even higher at 81 percent. But the majority of employees (57 percent) in offices that allow remote work say the policy spurs jealousy among those who don't get to work at home. How can you make sure working at home makes your employees more productive, not more resentful? Your Work at Home PolicySet a Work At Home PolicyYou should write a work at home policy as part of your employee manual. Every employee should read and acknowledge it. The work at home policy should cover issues such as hours to be worked per day or week, how the person will protect the business's confidential information, liability issues, what equipment will be provided and how the employee will be monitored when working at home. Be Sure Your Policy Can't be Construed as DiscriminatoryClearly, not all jobs can be done at home. For instance, your accounting clerk might be able to work from home, while your retail sales clerk can't. What's important is that you treat all employees in the same job classification or with the same duties the same when it comes to working at home. If you let one accounting clerk work from home because she has children and don't allow a childless accounting clerk to do the same, you could be at risk of a lawsuit. And you're likely causing gossip and resentment. The only reason to treat employees in the same job differently is if one has a legitimate reason for needing to work at home that is not discriminatory. For instance, if one worker has a disability that requires working from home. As you can see, this area can be tricky, so it's best to consult an attorney to review your work at home policy. Communicate ClearlyCommunication is key for businesses with virtual workers. When employees who work in the office feel they can never reach the work at home staff, or don't understand why certain people are working at home, resentment grows. Everyone on your team should know the expectations for work at home employees, including what hours they are supposed to be available, multiple ways to reach them (email, phone, IM, etc.) and what tasks they are working on. Emphasize to work at home employees the importance of keeping a high profile so others on the team see that they're working. Monitor Work At Home EmployeesThere are many ways to do this, from having them check in with status reports every few hours to using time-tracking software like Toggl to using software that monitors what they're doing on their computers. Assess ResultsResentment occurs when employees feel that others are taking advantage of your work at home policy. To ensure employees aren't abusing the privilege of working at home, it's crucial to regularly review their productivity, progress and results. This can be done differently depending on the job and the person, but you might want to set daily or weekly goals or quotas. Check in with remote employees quarterly or even monthly to make sure that everything is still working out. Remind workers that telecommuting is a privilege that must be earned, not a right, and you'll get better results. Reserve the Right to End the Work At Home PolicySpeaking of privileges, your work at home policy should state that you have the right to forbid telecommuting at any time. Otherwise, you may find yourself in legal hot water if you want to pull a Marissa Mayer (or Tony Hsieh) and have everyone work in the office. Address Jealousy OpenlyDespite your best efforts, it's inevitable that people will get jealous—they're only human. When these issues arise don't push them aside. Be alert for resentments that are brewing. Address these issues with the person who's expressing jealousy. You may find the root cause is something completely different than someone else working at home – and that you can nip it in the bud to create a much happier employee. Jealous Photo via Shutterstock The post Is Your Work At Home Policy Spurring Jealousy? appeared first on Small Business Trends. |
| Best Buy Offers Microsoft Surface Trade In Posted: 15 Oct 2013 01:30 PM PDT
If you business is interested in quickly liquidating its existing Microsoft Surface RT and Pro tablets for upgrade, one retailer is offering a simple option if not very lucrative option. The Surface you might have paid $500 to $1,000 for originally, will only be worth $200 to $350 at trade in now at Best Buy. But the electronics chain is providing a quick and easy way to turn your tablet into credit toward another device. The Microsoft Surface trade in offer announced recently on the Best Buy website also includes a few terms and conditions. Microsoft Surface Trade In: RT or Surface ProFirst, devices need to be in working order. This means able to power up, and without cracked screens or water damage, terms on the website state. Microsoft Surface trade ins are only available by visiting a Best Buy store not through the website. And the offer is only valid through Oct. 21, which is the final day before the new Surface 2 and Surface Pro 2 arrive in stores. The Microsoft Surface trade ins are for Best Buy gift cards only to be used to buy additional merchandise from the chain. Better Deals AvailableObviously the trade-ins from Best Buy represent a drop from at least the original retail cost of both devices. Initially the Surface RT cost $499 and the Surface Pro started at nearly $900 and could easily pass $1000 with ad-ons. Microsoft has since dropped the price on both. Still you could probably get a better deal on Craigslist or eBay, reports Chris Welch of The Verge. But if getting rid of the old devices quickly is your goal, Best Buy may be the better option. Image: Microsoft The post Best Buy Offers Microsoft Surface Trade In appeared first on Small Business Trends. |
| How to Get More Positive Customer Reviews, Using Get Five Stars Posted: 15 Oct 2013 11:00 AM PDT Online reviews have become important — and positive reviews are crucial for businesses. Two customer review trends are important to know. First, prospective customers are increasingly relying on online reviews to make purchasing decisions. Second, there’s been an explosion in fake reviews online. It’s gotten so bad, that sites like Yelp and the New York Attorney General have been cracking down on fake reviews. Where does this leave small businesses? Businesses have an increasing need to get positive customer reviews. At the same time, small businesses also have to keep things ethical, even in the face of competitors who may be playing dirty. A product called “Get Five Stars” can help satisfy both of these needs. What is Get Five Stars?Get Five Stars is an online app or tool that guides you through the process of how to get positive customer reviews. It helps you:
After all, if a customer is willing to recommend your business, don’t you want to show that review off? And don’t you want as many other prospective customers to see it as possible? Plus, the proactive nature of Get Five Stars helps you catch negative reviews. That way, you can attempt to resolve any issues before they cause lasting harm. In essence, Get Five Stars gives you a process and shows you how to get positive customer reviews. It helps you organize and streamline the process of requesting and displaying customer reviews, and increasing their visibility online. That way you can make the most of them for online visibility and to convince new shoppers to buy from you. How to Get Positive Customer Reviews – Getting StartedThe process to request reviews from your existing customers is straight forward. Right in the dashboard, business owners can insert customer names and email addresses. You could add customer data from your invoicing system, a Contacts app, or a CRM database — or insert it manually. Then, of course, you are going to want to communicate with customers. To do that, you call up pre-built email templates (see image below).
Customize your email message, and then send it to your customer requesting feedback. It’s a two-step process with customers. As part of the process, you:
The process is kicked off when the customer receives an email that looks like the image below, with an invitation to leave a review by clicking a big button “Provide Feedback”:
Simple Review Process Based on Net Promoter ScoreCustomers are busy. Most don’t have the time to spend writing a long review or filling out a lengthy survey. The beauty of Get Five Stars is that the review system is easy peasy. Get Five Stars uses the Net Promoter approach to customer feedback. There are just two short text fields to fill in — the title of the review, and a brief comment with a maximum of 250 characters. Customers then are asked one question, “How likely is it that you would recommend our company to a friend or colleague?” Customers then rate the business from 1 to 10, with 10 being the best (i.e., most likely to recommend). The customer simply moves a sliding scale button to rate (see below).
If a customer answers by giving a rating below a 7, then the small business gets the information and can follow up. In this way, potentially negative reviews can be addressed proactively. Some small business owners and managers may not be familiar with the Net Promoter feedback scoring system. The app gives the business owner a little tutorial on Net Promoter scores in a popup window. Once the customer feedback is returned, you have a place in the dashboard where you can see all your feedback. Then from there, you can send out another followup communication to customers that left positive feedback, asking them to leave the review on various public review sites such as Google, Yahoo Local, Citysearch, Facebook and other places. On the app’s dashboard you choose which review sites you want to request the customer to leave a review on. Remember, you can’t place the review on the public for them — but the app makes it easy for you to request and assist the customer in doing so. Interestingly, co-founder Don Campbell downplayed Yelp when we spoke with him. He said seeking out Yelp reviews may not help you. “Unless the reviewer is an avid Yelper the review is often filtered out and doesn’t show up publicly on Yelp,” due to Yelp’s algorithms. Also, he points out, the app’s language does not actually request leaving a Yelp review. It is against Yelp’s guidelines to ask for reviews. Therefore, the app simply includes a small message in the email asking customers to visit the business’s page on Yelp. Place Testimonials on Your WebsiteThe reviews you get back can also be embedded on a page on your company’s website (see below) using a small embedded bit of javascript code. There’s also a WordPress plugin to put the testimonials into WordPress sites.
The embedded testimonials also appear as HTML on your website page. The reason that’s important is that when they are in HTML format, the reviews can get indexed by search engines. Reviews are structured using the Schema.org format, a markup language that Google understands. That means they can under certain circumstances show up in the snippet of text presented in Google search result pages. When you have gold reviews stars appearing near your website name on a search page, it helps your brand stand out. Getting too many reviews too quickly can be almost as bad or worse than too few reviews. To a search engine or review site getting too many too fast may seem suspicious. So let’s say you start using the product and do a one-time communication to all your recent customers asking for reviews. You’re going to get a lot of reviews back. You may not want to display them all or encourage all those customers to leave public reviews, at one time. The business owner or manager has control over the timing. Monitor Reviews at Public Review WebsitesGet Five Stars also monitors key review sites, as part of an ongoing reputation management process. You get a dashboard that is regularly updated, to see how many reviews you have and the average rating (below).
This way you don’t have to visit each of the review sites separately. The Get Five Stars system will also send you an email when a new review appears. According to co-founder Don Campbell, by being proactive you can have a big impact on how your company is presented to the world. He described the case study of an optometrist that had just one review showing on Yelp and it was a very bad “1 star” review. The optometrist knew this customer. His frames had broken, but that incident had been fixed. The optometrist KNEW the customer had been made happy. In that case the optometrist was able to contact the customer. The monitoring dashboard would help to let you know so that you could contact the reviewer and ask him to update the review if you know the issue has been resolved. Or you could leave a message yourself clarifying inaccurate information in the review, such as a restaurant review that gives a bad rating for a dish your establishment does not even offer. Using Get Five Stars just as a review management platform would mean only scratching the surface of what this tool has to offer. Get Five Stars is capable of serving as a proactive reputation management mechanism. If you use the tool to its full potential, it can pay for itself many times over. Who “Get Five Stars” is Best ForGet Five Stars is ideal for B2C businesses with large customer bases as well as service businesses, especially professional service businesses. If you are serious about using data to improve your systems to grow sales and increase customer loyalty, then Get Five Stars can make the end-to-end process efficient and manageable. The Get Five Stars system is a cloud software service. You access it and use it online. It is designed to review a business, not review individual products. It’s priced at $29.95 per month (discounted to $24 per month if you pay annually). There a 15-day free trial offer, too. No credit card is required for the trial. This app is designed to be used by a single business, a business with multiple locations, or an agency (such as a marketing agency) managing a number of businesses. The individual business can also manage their reviews directly even if they get access through an agency. Discounts are available for agencies. Even small marketing agencies managing four businesses will find it cost effective and a time saver. The Get Five Stars system was developed by Mike Blumenthal, an expert in local search, and Don Campbell and Thomas Hasch from Expand2Web. The company is headquartered in the San Francisco Bay area. Get Five Stars is a valuable tool for any small business that takes a customer-centric approach to growth. The post How to Get More Positive Customer Reviews, Using Get Five Stars appeared first on Small Business Trends. |
| Foursquare Ads Now Open to All Small Businesses Worldwide Posted: 15 Oct 2013 08:00 AM PDT
Back in June we reported that Foursquare was offering a paid promotions program to New York City based businesses in a limited pilot. Today Foursquare announced that its paid ads program now is open to all small businesses. The company says it has 1.5 million claimed-business users. The expanded ad program would give business access to consumers in the pool of 40 million consumers that use Foursquare. An update on the company’s blog notes:
Ads appear at the top of the user’s list, in a different color along with the word “Promoted” next to them (see image above next to the arrow). Businesses can create an ad using the Foursquare ad platform online or via mobile. Businesses will only be charged for a consumer who actually ”acts on your ad – either by tapping to see your business details or by checking in at your business.” The ads will be shown to those consumers who are near your business and who Foursquare says are likely to become customers. Foursquare will evaluate the consumer based on whether they’ve checked in previously at similar places or searching for something similar to your business. Foursquare says it will never show your ad to someone who is already at your business — thus you won’t be giving up discounts to those who are already customers. Right now American Express is offering a $50 ad credit to U.S. based small businesses to try the new Foursquare ads. Nothing else about how you use Foursquare as a business appears to have changed. It remains to be seen whether this will result in less activity unless you pay for it. Image credit: Foursquare The post Foursquare Ads Now Open to All Small Businesses Worldwide appeared first on Small Business Trends. |
| 6 Tips That Will Fix Your Broken Social Media Message Posted: 15 Oct 2013 05:00 AM PDT
Social media is an important way in which your business should be communicating with the world. If your social media has become ineffective, the results can be detrimental to your brand and eventually to your bottom line. Fortunately, there are some easy fixes to a broken down social media campaign. Social media expert Lisa Barone suggests some of the top options for bringing your social media campaign back to life. Here’s a list of things you should be considering now to fix your broken social media message. Get More VisualVisual content grabs attention, so the more you use the better off you’ll be. An infgraphic from Marketo gives an overview of six kinds of visual content you may want to start incorporating into your social media. They include more obvious options like:
But there are also some ideas you may not have thought of yet, like:
How are you using visuals to share you message? Become a Trusted CuratorBarone explains the importance of content curation in social media:
Content curation is a perfect option for channels like Facebook, Google Plus and LinkedIn where you can share links to blog posts, videos, infographics, resources and more. Your contacts and customers will become as interested in the content you share as in the blog posts you write. So this content too can be very helpful in establishing your brand. Stop Misusing FacebookThere are some big no-nos where Facebook is concerned. Ignoring them puts your marketing message on the most popular and highly used social network on the planet at risk. But don’t worry. Barone has created the ultimate guide to things you should never do on Facebook. Do you still:
If you’re doing any of these or other things on Barone’s list, it’s time to stop now. Ignoring these problems could ruin your reputation on one of the most powerful and pervasive social platforms around. This is a tool you want working for your business, so be sure to handle it right. Develop Metrics to Measure EffectivenessIf you have no way to measure what you’re accomplishing in social media, how will you know whether you’re a success? It’s simple. You won’t. Barone recommends a simple method of developing metrics that can measure your success. Simply start by asking yourself what you want to accomplish. For example, with social media you might be trying to boost your brand recognition, Barone surmises. Or perhaps you’re simply trying to shorten your sales cycle. In the first instance, Barone recommends documenting the number of times your brand is being shared and where you are being cited or linked to. In the second, Barone recommends benchmarking your cost per customer acquisition today verses your cost per customer acquisition a year ago. No matter why you’re using social media, you must have a way of measuring whether you are achieving your objectives. Get Comfortable with Self-PromotionThere’s an old saying. If a tree falls in the woods and no one hears it, does it really make a sound? It’s kind of like that with social media, says Barone. You can spend a lot of time and energy creating cool content. But if you don’t get it in front of your target audience, what’s the point? Instead, Barone suggests building an email list, finding followers on Twitter, working harder to get people to “like” your Facebook page, going more all out with blog outreach and so on. Without these efforts, your great content and awesome social media channels will be just a tree falling in the woods, with no one there to hear a sound: Silent and ineffective. What ways can you think of to make people aware of your product, business or brand and of the great content you create? Get Help When You Need ItFinally, if you still find yourself overwhelmed, it may be time to get some help. Barone recommends:
This could be as simple as hiring a social media consulting firm to do an audit of your company and its potential audience. This step could help you see the parts of your social media plan that are missing the mark and help you develop strategies to take advantage of some of the opportunities you’ve missed, says Barone. What do you think? Do you need some help with your social media strategy? What efforts are you putting in to make sure your social media message reaches the right audience? The post 6 Tips That Will Fix Your Broken Social Media Message appeared first on Small Business Trends. |
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