Business

Sarah Worsham / Apr 2, 2009

Why Customer Satisfaction is the New Marketing ROI

No one is certain why business valuations keep climbing above assets, but there is a good hypothesis. The theory is that businesses are realizing an increasing level of value from intangibles—things that help a company create value, but that don’t show up on the balance sheet. Identifying those intangibles so they can be modeled, measured and optimized is a powerful market driver that is sending managers scrambling into every corner of business operations. – Christopher Kenton – What’s Really Behind The Drive Towards Metrics

satisfactionandrecharland Thanks to the Internet and social networking, customers have more input than ever before into a company’s intangible valuation. Marketing and brand management are no longer done in a vacuum with a company broadcasting how it thinks customers should feel about its products. Customers are talking directly to each other about companies and products. Word of mouth marketing is trusted much more than anything a company says about itself. Therefore, how customers feel about a company (customer satisfaction) is an important measure of a company’s intangible valuation.

Luckily, increasing customer satisfaction usually has a direct effect of increasing sales and profitability. When customers have a good experience, they will share that experience with others who trust their judgement. They are also more likely to purchase from the company again. And vice-versa for poor experiences. Successful marketing strategies take into account the customer experience and satisfaction to create long-term gains for the company.

(photo by Andre Charland @ Flickr CC)

Technorati tags: customer experience, customer-centric, experience centric, business, strategy, marketing

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Sarah Worsham / Apr 1, 2009

SocialToo – Automate Twitter Following & Unfollowing, Send Surveys

If you’re of the mind to follow everyone who follows you on Twitter, SocialToo can save you time and effort by automatically following anyone who follows you. You also have choices on how and whether you unfollow anyone who unfollows you. There are also options to block automatic DMs (direct messages) from other services and to send you a daily email with statistics about your followers.

Most of SocialToo’s services are currently free, but they also offer some paid (although cheap) services. For $5 (each), they offer services to unfollow anyone you’ve manually followed who aren’t following back and to catch up on following people before you started using their services. For $25, you can delete all your followers.

For users interested in tapping into the collective intelligence of their followers, SocialToo gives the ability to create a one question survey (with an option for comments) through it’s SocialSurvey service, which can then be sent to a Twitter account. All of SocialToo’s services seem to be setup to eventually intergrate with multiple social networks, similar to Ping.fm, but for now, just Twitter and some Facebook integration is possible.

Technorati tags: twitter, internet marketing, business, socialtoo, marketing

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Sarah Worsham / Mar 31, 2009

Twitter Tip – Automate Sending Articles to Twitter from Google Reader

I used to mark articles in delicous to be automatically sent to my Twitter feed via Twitterfeed. Now, I am able to mark articles from anywhere with my iPhone and have them sent automatically to my Twitter feed using Google Reader. This method requires both a Google account on Google reader, and an account on Twitterfeed (both are free).

In Google Reader, in the upper right, click on Settings
Click on the Folders and Tags tab.
Click on the checkbox next to “Your shared items”
Go up to the box that says “change sharing…” and select Public.
Click on View public page (it’ll be empty right now).
Now go back to the feed in Google Reader. At the bottom of any post you want to share, click “share”.
If you refresh the public page, you’ll see your items show up.
On the right side of the public page, you’ll see an item that says Atom feed. Click on it (it’ll probably show a bunch of code stuff.) This is the feed to the items you want to share. Copy the URL at the top of the window
Goto twitterfeed.com and sign up for their free service.
Login to the service. Click “my feeds”
Click “Create new feed”
Enter the username and password for your twitter account (you can then test to see if it’s working)
Paste the URL of the Google Reader public page where it says “RSS feed URL”
Feel free to mess with the other options, but they should be fine if you want to leave them, so click “Create”.

Twitterfeed will automatically check what you’ve marked as “Share” in Google Reader every hour (or whatever you set as the frequency) and then send it to your twitter feed for you.

(photo by jurvetson @ Flickr CC)

Technorati tags: twitter, google reader, internet marketing, business, content, content strategy, twitterfeed, marketing

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