This is a guest post by David Murton, whose company, a small orange, provides personal and business hosting services.
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Mar
16
2011
19 Reasons to Use Google Analytics for Your Business
Jan
17
2011
7 Social Media Monitoring Essentials
Monitoring is an essential part of any Internet or social media strategy. Even if people aren’t talking about your products or company, they’re probably having conversations that would be helpful — either for product development, customer service or marketing. Listening is a huge part of the value of social media and monitoring can help you keep up on the important conversations. Here are the essentials you should be monitoring:
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Jan
04
2011
Common Sense Guidelines for the Legal Use of Social Media
There are legal and best practice guidelines for how social media should and can be used by companies (Disclaimer: I don’t claim to be a lawyer. For legal guidance on these issues, please seek one out). The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has governance over trade and advertising in the U.S. and they have set up guidelines for how social media should be used by companies. While the guidelines are meant to protect consumers, following them will also help you create a reputation for trust. Feel free to read the full guidelines yourself, but here are some general common sense principles that should help:
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Jan
03
2011
7 Social Media Resolutions to Improve Customer Engagement
Being on social media is nothing new. A lot of businesses are on social media. Many are even spending a lot of time and effort on social media. But are they using social media to actually engage their customers? Treating social media as another advertising channel is a big mistake. Here are some social media resolutions that can improve your customer engagement and lead to true return on investment (ROI).
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Dec
17
2010
Impact of Measuring the Wrong Metrics in Social Media
You’ve got your social media strategy and tactics in place. You’re measuring everything you can: tweets, retweets, followers, friends, shares, visits, bounce rate, etc. But what do all these numbers tell you about how successful your strategy and tactics are? What if you’re measuring the wrong things? What’s the impact to your social media strategy?
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Dec
15
2010
Using Social Media to Increase Brand Loyalty
Every company wishes for brand loyalists like Apple attracts. Airlines use frequent flier programs to try to increase loyalty. Local restaurants and coffee shops use stamp cards (buy 10 and get one free). Social media can also be used to increase brand loyalty if we first identify what makes someone loyal to a brand.
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Dec
07
2010
The Importance of Consistent Brand Identity
Logos and brand names can be fun to create, but having too many may be confusing to your customers. Logos and brands help create associations with certain attributes or features within customers’ minds. Using different names or images for the same brand can make it difficult for customers to know what associations they should have. The same may be true if you’re using different profile names and identities with social media.
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Dec
01
2010
Social Media as a Vital Customer TouchPoint
When you’re thinking about your customer touchpoints, are you considering other ways customers may try to communicate with you or about you? Are your company or products mentioned on social media by customers having problems? While you may have the greatest customer support process in the world, it’s only good if people are actually using it to let you know about problems. Even if you’re not doing any other type of social media outreach, at the very least, monitoring for mentions of your company and products can go a long way for improving your online reputation.
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Nov
23
2010
Considerations for Using Facebook for Business
Businesses get really excited about Facebook when they see news like:
The amount of content consumption taking place on the popular social network has also grown substantially where nearly 1 in 4 page views in the US took place on Facebook.com for the week ending November 13, 2010. The market share of page views for Facebook.com was 24.27% last week, 3.8x the volume of the 2nd ranked website YouTube.com with 6.39%. – Facebook.com generates nearly 1 in 4 page views in the US | Hitwise
Nov
19
2010
Review: Shoeboxed.com – Get Organized
With Shoeboxed.com
(affiliate link), businesses can organize paper documents like business cards, receipts and bills. Just mail in your documents in a special pre-paid envelope and Shoeboxed will process, digitize the records and send back the originals. Each document is verified by a human and then the information is available online through a secure website where it can be managed, organized and exported. Shoeboxed let me try a free trial of their Classic plan by sending an envelope of business cards and a few receipts. Here are the results…
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Digital Marketing & Strategy
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