Could this map of the social media landscape be one of the reasons that General Motors pulled its FB ad budget a few months ago?

Digital marketing is confusing—really confusing—as this insane graphic makes clear. Trying to navigate through the various new social media categories, blogs, sharing sites, and social media firms is an absolute mess.

Want our opinion?  There are only a dozen or so things that you need to do to stay ahead of the curve (and your competitors) to get more traffic from this source of noise but if you ignore SM altogether, your brand will suffer.

SOPA PIPA

It’s about the Internet. Our Internet. Your Internet.
The foundations of the Internet are at risk!

SOPA and PIPA legislation is about to construct a global firewall limiting free speech and putting websites at risk of shutdown for copyright infringement even if a person were to leave a comment on a page of the site that, in some way, breaches a copyright. In fact, even a search engine could face infringement charges and penalties for allowing links to sites that infringe copyrights.

If you don’t think this is right…
Call a US Senator today or visit http://stopthewall.us

The Internet is a thriving ecosystem that powers our economy and our society.

PIPA and SOPA threaten the web.

PIPA
PIPA is an acronym for the Protect IP Act, and was first introduced to the U.S. Senate on May 12, 2011 by Senators Patrick Leahy, Orrin Hatch and Chuck Grassley. It is also good to take note that PIPA is a re-written legislation, the original failed to pass and was called the ‘Combating Online Infringement and Counterfeits Act (COICA) of 2010′.

PIPA, if passed, would:

• Give U.S. corporations and the government the right to seek affirmative legal action with any website that they see as enabling copyright infringement whether of U.S. origin or not. Here is a breakdown of all that they will have the power to do.
• Force U.S. internet providers to block access to websites deemed as enablers of copyright infringement
• Seek legal action by suing search engines, blog sites, directories, or any site in general to have the black listed sites removed from their website
• Force advertising services on infringing websites, and those supporting of them, to remove them from their advertising accounts
• Give companies the power to sue any new websites that get started after this bill is passed, if they believe that they are not doing a good job of preventing infringement

SOPA

SOPA is an acronym for the Stop Online Piracy Act, and is a bill introduced to the U.S. House of Representatives by Rep. Lamar Smith on October 26, 2011.  SOPA is also built on previous legislation. This legislation was the PRO-IP Act of 2008.

SOPA, if passed, will work in conjunction with PIPA and is nothing more than a black list. Here is a breakdown of the power given to the US government and private corporations.

The U.S. Attorney General can now seek a court order that would force search engines, advertisers, DNS providers, server hosting firms, and payment processors from having any contact with allegedly infringing websites. You could lose your online business overnight!  You could lose your online business before even getting a date to defend your case in a court of law.

SOPA will allow private corporations to create their own personal hit lists composed of websites that they feel are infringing upon their copyrights. These companies would even be able to contact a website’s payment processor(s) directly and serve notice to cut off all payments involving the targeted website. The payment processors and website in question will have five days to act before the site is simply taken offline by the government authorities. Payment processors will have the power to cut off any website they work with as long as they can provide a reason why they believe a site is violating copyrights. Truth be told, payment processors can do this today too but SOPA forces them to be extra diligent and receptive after receiving correspondence from a corporate attorney who desires to attack using this broad brushstroke method of putting you and your site out of business.

If this isn’t scary enough, just imagine the internet becoming a hunting ground for any potential copyright violation. Of course the US government loves blogs and bloggers, so it is only natural to think that they will receive a lot of special attention. These acts make the blog owners responsible for everything that is displayed on their site, including comments left by visitors.

So say that an article is published on a blog featuring a logo, or trademark, of a given corporation and that given company doesn’t like that it is being put on display on the blogger’s site. Forget for a moment that the author of this article could have used the marks and logo as a teaching aid, critique, model of good design, or anything else, the author could be charged with copyright infringement and risk having the entire blog shut down within five days as they get added to the SOPA black list.   Think about it for a moment….The entire blog might not even belong to that author.  Is that a power that you want to put into the hands of corporations whose only interest is in discovering and shutting down cases of alleged copyright infringement online?  Please contact your Senator or or visit http://stopthewall.us today.

This is fabulous technology that one of our partners has come up with during the past years and now, it has reached a level of maturity where the start to finish cycle of initiation to delivery can be as tight as 3 weeks. The more desirable and considerably less stressful, planned implementation is a 5 to 6 week cycle. In order to deliver such a project, we need quite a bit of information, often local government approval and a firm commitment from each of our Clients and their sponsors but the end result is an audience gasping for breathe as they witness something 3D that defies explanation and gives fresh meaning to the phrase “you had to be there”. Today, not even Disney is doing this sort of thing but, we expect them to catch up very quickly.

Have a look for yourself,
It’s pretty amazing stuff.
Here is a collection of projects that our team Nuformer delivered.

If you’re buying a car, do you check Facebook or MySpace? Or do you read up on Kelley Blue Book values and Comparis reports and scour the company website for every spec, from horsepower to miles per gallon? What about music — do you check Top 40 radio charts or scope out what your Facebook friends are actually listening to on Spotify before making a purchasing decision?

Social media has infiltrated the purchasing funnel, helping consumers make informed decisions, from what to have for lunch to where to go on vacation. Depending on the decision, sometimes you turn to your social graph, and sometimes you turn to Google. So, as a brand marketer, you need to know what online channels you should be targeting in order to reach the ideal audience for your product.

But regardless of what kind of consumer you’re trying to reach or what you’re selling, your SEO better be top notch — search is still the most important influencer on the web.

The infographic below, featuring data from M Booth and Beyond, analyzes the differences between high and low sharers and various purchasing decisions, helping brands to understand how to target consumers more effectively.

What kind of consumer are you? Let us know in the comments below.

There are a few interesting ways to personalize an advertising experience for reasonable cost and one of them is to ask the viewer for some basic information that can be integrated into a storyline and used in a video playback to generate more views and even viral distribution. Sure, this could easily go viral when you hit your target audience’s hot buttons and that’s what BOA was able to do with the Ad below a few years ago.

Dan Ariely has a fascinating story to share about irrational behavior…

His book held my full attention for several hours and in addition to being a good writer, Dan is a superb public speaker. The presentation you are about to watch, offers some insight into how people make decisions. You may want to check any preconceived notions at the door, this video offers a glimpse into the reality of how effective marketing can be when the marketer is able to tap into a predictable pattern of behavior. Naturally, our consultants leverage many of the concepts that Dan covers in this video but, I did not want to sell you on our services here… I simply wanted to share great video content, especially when the speaker is a professor at MIT. The presentation is refreshing and interesting but above all else, Predictably Irrational.

MARKETING CHALLENGE:
Increase sales of exam gloves and meet sales quotas
Launch a new product and create buzz to boost the brand image at the same time.

PRODUCT LINE:

Medical Examination Gloves
(yawn)

BACKGROUND:
Medline is the leading provider of healthcare supplies and equipment to the long term care market. One of their product lines is gloves. They had already delivered latex gloves to the market for 40+ years, added a strong and durable line to deal with high-risk and high-stress settings, expanded with vinyl for the low cost market and the latex intolerant and even added aloe to the inner coating to soothe and moisturize. Management was struggling to come up with an innovative product that could both enhance the line and draw more attention to their brand.

CONCEPT:
Support a charity.

Get one or more Customers to participate and produce a viral video.
The charity: The National Breast Cancer Foundation
The product: http://www.medline.com/breast-cancer-awareness/pink-glove.asp
The Customer: Providence St. Vincent Medical Center in Portland, OR USA
The video: (see below)

THE GIVING:
Medline has donated almost a half million dollars to the National Breast Cancer Foundation to provide education and free mammograms to those in need.

THE EARLY RESULTS:
The Charity: Thanks to the increased exposure and awareness, donations increased by 9% during the past  month period not including those donations made by Medline.

The product: According to internal sources, sales quotas have been exceeded for the quarter but exact numbers were not yet available.

The Customer: More than 200 employees of Providence St. Vincent Medical Center took part in the team building event which strengthened moral and brought many diverse groups together to support the project.

The Pink Glove Dance video has been viewed more than 8 million times on You Tube!

Networks such as Facebook and MySpace basically help us socialise and communicate with friends en-masse. LinkedIn, Xing and Viadeo concentrate on work-related communication on a variety of topics. The sites aimed at professionals, although much smaller than the ones for hanging out with friends, are having an interesting effect on job and job-search markets.

In many ways the world of commerce is a perfect place for a social network to flourish. Doing business, after all, boils down to managing a web of relationships with Customers, prospects, suppliers and others. Professional networks make it easier for people to maintain such relationships and to forge new ones. LinkedIn, for instance, has over 500,000 groups—some better than others—on specialised subjects that people can join to share ideas and make new contacts. Such connections may prove useful later on.

Research has shown that the more distant members of people’s professional networks are often the best source of new job leads. Job-hunters can also use their networks to gather intelligence about prospective employers and to solicit recommendations that strengthen their candidacies, and they can benefit from some of the career tools that networks provide. LinkedIn, for example, has launched a service that aggregates data it holds to show career paths for certain professions. So someone who wants to become, say, head of consulting at a large company in ten years’ time can see what sort of jobs have led to such roles for others in the past.

Online networks have attracted plenty of attention from corporate recruiters too. Olivier Fecherolle, the head of Viadeo’s French operations, says that for an employer the networks have several advantages over online job boards. One is that people visit them frequently, so profiles on the sites tend to be more up-to-date than those on job boards. Another benefit, he says, is that the networks’ rich profiles help recruiters get a good feel for a candidate without having to spend time on and delve into a detailed curriculum vitae.

But perhaps the biggest attraction is that the professional networks help firms to cut search costs.

Don Cooper, a recruiter at Intel, reckons that they save millions of dollars a year in fees by recruiting senior managers through LinkedIn rather than using headhunters or executive search firms. US Cellular, a telecoms company, says it saved over $1m last year by using LinkedIn that produced good candidates for its jobs faster than traditional recruitment channels.

Mr Piskorski of the Harvard Business School thinks professional networks have been successful because they offer a way for people to participate passively in the job market yet still claim plausibly that they are seeking out information to do their current job better. Companies put up with this, he says, because the benefit they get from better-informed workers more than offsets the cost of losing them when they get poached.

All this makes labor markets more efficient. By cutting out middlemen such as headhunters and executive search firms,  corporations save money. And by looking at rich online profiles of candidates, they can cut the time it takes to get the right people into jobs. Network users, for their part, get what Reid Hoffman, LinkedIn’s chairman, calls an “active sonar” system that publishes their skills to a broad marketplace with minimal effort and collects the responses that ping back with job opportunities.

Social networks have made the labour market more transparent in another way too. A survey by CareerBuilder.com of about 2,700 executives in America last year found that 45% of them looked at job candidates’ social-network pages as part of their research, and more than a third of those had unearthed information there that put them off hiring someone. Time to turn up those privacy settings?

Want our team members to show you how to make Linked In and other similar services work for you?  Just contact us on this page today.

We love to give really good Customer support. Let’s face it, good Customer support rewards your company with repeat business. Great Customer support turns a potentially sensitive issue into a viral sales tool.

Since we want our own Customers to walk away feeling so good about their experience with us that they just can’t wait to tell others, we need to be sure that we empower the right people closest to our Customers, that they have an appropriate level of authority and that they have the right tools supporting the entire process.

If you deal with Customer service issues on a daily basis then you need a set of tools that help make your job easier. Customer service is a process that can be a pleasure for all involved if you know what to do next, have the appropriate tools working for you and are able to deliver satisfaction to your Customers effectively in both written and verbal form.

Now, don’t get me wrong, not everyone is cut out to be a Customer service rep – it takes a special person to do well with this kind of challenge. In our experience, those who excel in such a role are the type of individuals convinced that their Customer is King. For these lovely people, I’d like to extend a personal thank you as both a business owner and as one of your Customers – you folks are the reason that I recommend your products and services to my list without hesitation.

Who are we to recommend something in the Customer support space? Well, over the past 10 years BoxOnline’s b6group consultants have implemented more than 60 Customer service solutions for our Clients and from that experience across a broad install base, I’d like to share some tips on improving your Customer service processes so that you too can focus on delivering world-class Customer service instead of fighting with technology that was not designed to treat Customers as King or to make your life any easier.

Let’s try to tackle these items one at a time with the objective of satisfying more Customers, following up with each issue in a professional, organized and sequential manner and also allowing these Customers to walk away feeling so good about their experience with you and your company that they just can’t wait to tell others about the great experience.

To deliver world-class Customer service you are going to need three things.
1. A ticketing system
2. An issue tracker
3. A platform for Customer service

While most software used to be installed directly on your computer or server, today there is a web application service model rapidly gaining acceptance. Three superb examples of such systems are Zendesk, JIRA and Get Satisfaction. I list these Apps specifically because they are not only three of the best Customer service web-based applications we have implemented in the past but also because they are now well integrated to provide a best of breed complete CS solution. Ticketing system Zendesk, issue tracker JIRA, and Customer service platform Get Satisfaction can now communicate seamlessly with each other.

Though much of this functionality was created independently by each of the three vendors, the result is a smooth connection between a public support tool, an enterprise issue tracker and a customizable help desk. Together, the trio delivers a powerful set of tools for responding to Customers in either a public or private forum.

The basic process outline is that CS issues and bug reports get submitted into the system by your Customer service reps (or your own Customers) then a ticketing system handles each request, humans prioritize and delegate the tasks and decisions if needed and then resolutions are shared and resolved via Customer dialog.

Get Satisfaction provides a friendly front door for Customers to enter into a dialog with your team plus optional access to positive communities where they can interact with others.

Ticketing systems are an enormously helpful way for a company to prioritize support issues, but for Customers it can be frustrating to report a problem and then be given a really long string of numbers and letters as proof that they submitted a problem to your team. But what happens then? If companies do the follow-up steps of ticketing poorly, they end up making Customers feel like they’ve been swindled. The exact opposite is what we refer to as Customer Zen and a company called Zendesk has tackled this issue superbly with an elegant and simple solution. They offer a great ticketing and tracking system.

To take this example one step further, let’s say that your business has a technical side to it and you have a software development team who need to identify and kill bugs regularly as they improve your software. Well, Zendesk has a plugin for JIRA (one of the best bug and issue trackers ever invented). This plugin allows anyone to draw tickets into the tracker, while any updates within JIRA are automatically mirrored in your Zendesk. This means that a developer can continue to use JIRA to resolve the bug while your support staff can use Zendesk to keep your Customer informed and both platforms are updated simultaneously and seamlessly.

Tying It All Together
The final piece of the puzzle is the Zendesk and Get Satisfaction integration. This is direct fusing of the two apps. Today you can send and edit Zendesk support tickets without ever leaving your Get Satisfaction interface.

So what this all means is that Get Satisfaction has evolved into a superb Customer Service tool that makes your Customers feel special while giving them the support that they need to resolve each and every one of their issues with your company, your products, your services and your staff. So if you are in need of a powerful viral marketing weapon – try giving great Customer service and then power it with both Get Satisfaction and Zendesk.

If you are lucky enough to receive one, here is how you can easily redeem a promo code for the Apple iTunes Store.

1) Launch iTunes…

2) Click the Redeem link in the Quick Links section on the right side of the screen

3) Enter the Promo code that you have been given

4) Wait for Apple to confirm the code

5) Enjoy the free App

keep in mind that promo codes expire within 30 days of issue by the vendor and that the vendor may have issued your promo code in bulk days or weeks in advance – thus… use it or lose it  ;-)