Measuring Customer Satisfaction

So the question is simple, “Are You Measuring Customer Satisfaction?” You must ask yourself this question now. Finding out what customers want to tell you may be as simple as asking them. There is a natural tendency to want to know as much as possible about what your customers think and feel about your product.

It is no secret that companies want to hold on to their customers. After all, repeat customers are a key part of success in the business world. The general belief is that it costs companies much more money to get new clients than it does to simple keep existing customers. This is why measuring customer satisfaction is so vitally important.

If customers shop at your online store or retail store and end up unhappy, then the odds are good that they won’t be returning. You have not only lost their business, but you have to suffer the potential fallout from others that they complain to about their experience at your store. These are some of the problems that result from the lack of measuring customer satisfaction.

The bottom line is that you want your customers to be happy, and the importance of measuring customer satisfaction cannot be discounted. There are a wide variety of ways in which you can assess how pleased or displeased your clients may be.

If you run a business in which your employees interact with customers one on one, of course you can simply ask them in person. For example, restaurants frequently ask customers, “How was everything tonight?”

However, with many other types of business, including online stores, it can be trickier to find a way of measuring customer satisfaction. The good news is that there are new methods available that perfectly suit ecommerce. For example, there are now customer feedback questionnaires and satisfaction survey software that is easily integrated onto your website.

If you are running a business and not measuring customer satisfaction, you may be losing valuable profits each year. It is time to reassess and start finding a way to gauge the happiness of your clients. As a result, you can often make much needed changes to your company that result in a better functioning business.

Post from: Social Media Vision

Are You Measuring Customer Satisfaction?

You can now see what’s being said inside your city.

Twitter has over 55 million status updates per day. That is a ton of data that is being published online what’s happening right now. With more and more users using mobile devices to post status updates, and with more users opting in to include their location with their Tweets – more and more of the 55 million updates are being tagged with a location. This is going to spawn interesting tools for internet users.

One of these tools was recently launched in the form of Sency for Cities (http://sency.com/cities.php). This tool, allows anyone to see what’s being said right now by people inside of Atlanta, Baltimore, Boston, Chicago, Dallas, Houston, Los Angeles, London, New York City, Philadelphia, San Antonio, San Francisco, Seattle, & Washington DC. So, when there is a topic that you want to get the publics thoughts on – you can now do that by performing a search at one of these city centric engines. Sency for Cities also shows you what’s hot right now in each city via 10 current trends listed under the search box. Lastly, this initiative will show you where people are at right now based on recent status updates in a city that provide an actual location.

All of this data can you help you learn more about what is going on right now inside of a city. It is also interesting to compare the current sentiment in your city with what the mood is in a rival city. Or, when a new movie comes out – you may be curious what all people are saying about it – but Sency for Cities can also show you what people in your city – are saying about it right now.

As time goes on – this data will get even more rich. You will eventually be able to see what’s being said at actual locations as opposed to just inside a specific city. And as the data becomes more targeted and helpful – more uses will come out of real time location search. But the great thing about it is that it’s different for everyone, so a way you utilize and learn from it may be extremely different from how the next person uses it.

The plan is for more cities to be added to Sency for Cities – so down the line – more people can see what’s going on inside of their respective city.

Post written by Evan Britton, founder of Sency

Post from: Social Media Vision

Sency for Cities

Everyday more online retailers are adding customer surveys to their checkout process. Without consumer ratings, often merchants find that assessing whether or not customers are pleased is a somewhat of a guessing game. Consumer ratings have many benefits including the fact that merchants can gain valuable feedback about the shopping experience from the customer’s point of view.

Adding customer surveys to your online store can be one of the most effective ways of increasing the loyalty of your shoppers. As a result, this method can be extremely beneficial for growing sales. Not only will your customers be more likely to turn into repeat clients, they may be so pleased with their experience that they recommend your products or services to others.

On the other hand, often when your customers are unhappy with their experience, they won’t say anything. They will just disappear for good. Needless to say, you have lost their repeat business. Often you will find through customer surveys that the issues that your clients have are quite small and can be easily addressed. However, just these issues could have very easily equated to customers choosing another shopping destination for future purchases.

There are a variety of ways to easily add customer surveys into your transaction process. For example, one company called Shopper Approved adds customer surveys that come up right after a customer orders his or her product. This way a client’s initial thoughts can be expressed through the means of this customer survey form.

Through the Shopper Approved software, customers can also opt-in to participate in a longer survey after receiving their purchase. This sort of automation through the means of software allows customer surveys to be a smooth and easy process for your customers. Luckily, computers allow online customer surveys to be a thoroughly automated process. As a result, confusing paperwork and/or mailers are now a thing of the past.

What is Shopper Approved?

If you own an ecommerce website, then you know that ratings and reviews highly influence new customers to buy.

The problem is that most ecommerce sites don’t effectively gather customer reviews. And most of the sites that do, don’t know how to leverage those reviews to boost their online reputation and increase their sales.

Shopper Approved is the perfect solution.

By adding the Shopper Approved rating/review service to your website, your customers will be able to provide you with valuable feedback, ratings, and reviews automatically. You can then give your new customers easy access to this brand building information by displaying our exclusive ‘Shopper Approved’ trust seal in a prominant location on your website.

Shopper Approved is so effective at gathering feedback that on average, almost 1 out of every 2 of your paying customers will provide initial ratings and/or reviews, and nearly 1 out of every 3 will opt-in to complete a full customer survey once they receive their order!

To learn more about Shopper Approved online customer surveys software visit ShopperApproved.com

Post from: Social Media Vision

Online Customer Surveys

The iPhone and the iTunes AppStore have become a staple of our culture and our daily lives in a very short time. Over fifty million iPhone and iPod Touch units have been sold and users have downloaded billions of apps from the AppStore.

Do you remember when the World Wide Web was new?

In 1995 there were only 25,000 websites in the entire world. Today there are billions of web pages.As of this writing there are approximately 140,000 apps in the AppStore.

What do you think that will look like in a few years?

That’s right. Millions.

If you had the foresight to create a website years ago, would you have done it? Of course you would. It would increase your chances of having visibility and greater success with your business.

THIS is the time to build your own iPhone App.

And I’ve got the perfect solution for you…

My App Creator

My App Creator is a complete turnkey system that absolutely anyone can use to create their own iPhone app and have it placed before tens of millions of iPhone and iPod Touch owners in the Apple iTunes AppStore!

If you are an author, speaker, entertainer, musician, athlete, business or anyone else that could use a presence in the AppStore, this is the solution you have been waiting for!

Imagine being able to create your own app populated with your blog, twitter feed, audios & videos, calendar or events and more content.

Choose from one of My App Creator’s standard templates or apply your own custom design to your app.

Once complete, the App gets uploaded to the iTunes AppStore for you. You don’t even need to apply or pay for an iPhone developer account.

Custom iPhone application development can cost thousands or tens of thousands of dollars. But My App Creator has created a robust service with pricing so affordable that there are now no barriers to entry.

So what do you need to create your own app?

1) A news feed. Basically, this is your blog. As
long as you create content regularly, it will
work in your iPhone app.

2) A Twitter feed. There’s no reason you
shouldn’t be using it to grow your network and
enhance your brand. Imagine your app users being
able to access your most current tweets.

3) Media. This can be audio or video. If you
create these they can easily be placed into your
app!

That’s it!

If you’ve got a calendar of events, you can place those events in your app.

Do you want to change the message that displays on your main page and link it directly to a web site?

Easy! Once your app is in the AppStore, you can change your content directly from My App Creator’s web-based interface.

There are more features, but the easiest way to discover them is to visit the site and get started with your own app.

Visit My App Creator Today!

Post from: Social Media Vision

How To Build Your Own iPhone App Fast!

Card.ly

I wrote a post a while back on MeeID a simple web ID profile similar to Retaggr.  Well now there is a new entry in the mix, Card.ly is a new online web profile that displays all your contact information and social profiles into one unique looking online profile link.

Card.ly is a site thats main purpose is to allow you to have your own mini business card profile, without needing to have any design or programming skill. We will host it for you also. Most parts of the site are free as well.

The Features:

• Personalized link to establish more of an online presence and exposure - http://card.ly/examplehere
• Emebedablle option to display on website and blogs
• Simple and Elegant with many designs to choose from
• Free & Premium designs available
• Perfect link for your 1 stop shop on your Twitter Profile to be your online hub to all your other services and sites you own
• Add any link you can think of

With all the VCards out there and even Facebook, Card.ly is still a solid simple choice for your online hub of profiles.  I especially have seen it very popular on Twitter profiles recently instead of people placing their Facebook or other links.  Definitely grab the personal vanity url if you are into SEO and exposure if anything else.  Enjoy!

Post from: Social Media Vision

Card.ly the new player in the online business card profile

Twitter Clean Up

I wrote a post before on how to do a Twitter cleanup by using FriendorFollow.com to remove all non-followers on Twitter and using Twitter directories like Twellow.com or Wefollow.com to find and increase your niche follower count. The reason for a Twitter clean up is to remove all the non-engaged followers in your Twitter stream (besides celebs and news profiles).

Why follow these users if they don’t follow you back and provide relevant and engaging conversations? The 2nd step of a Twitter clean up is to increase your niche and social network of Followers that’s relevant to you.   The Twitter directories was a way to focus on finding new friends who you can target more effectively than friend  search.

New Twitter Account Management Tool for Maintenance

Well I have found a new website tool called InRev TwitIn at http://www.buzzom.com/ In their words

Welcome!!! Experience the new Social Media Tool. To follow and unfollow people in Twitter is just a click away. Just type in your Twitter Id and get on. Have Fun!! Manage your Twitter Account with faster operation and methods found nowhere else, secured by OAuth.

I recently came across this site and have found this tool to be the All-in-One ultimate resource for account management.  I also found this to more effective and faster than using friendorfollow in which I will explain why here shortly. To use the site, you must first log in using OAuth (an open protocol to secure access to a website with protected data)

Once in you will notice 3 major features for this website

1. Flush – Unfollow who are not following you

2.  Grow - Grow network, follow new people

3.  Reciprocate – Follow your followers back

The Flush Button

The Flush button is used to bring up 50 users (hit “refresh list” to bring up more) you are following but are not following you back.  Take advantage of this method by removing all the users in your Twitter stream who provide no engagement or value.

There is however the exception with Celebrities, News and other High Profile accounts that you may follow but don’t expect them to engage or follow back. Buzzom does have a great feature for filtering out these users and still pursue the rest.  These features are considering “locking”.  You have the “Follow Lock” and the “Unfollow Lock”.

• Locking – Locking users will place all the users you checkmark in an area where it won’t be in your future results anymore.
• The Follow Lock – All locked users you checkmark while searching for new users to Follow will be placed in the tab.  This is great when searching for new people to Follow on Buzzom, you can filter out all the Spammers, Bots and non-relevant people you don’t want to follow.  This is not a block feature but simply a filter to not show these users in Buzzom.
• The UnFollow Lock – Every user you Checkmark to Lock while “Flushing” away or finding users who you follow but they don’t follow back will be placed in the Unfollow Lock tab.  People place here are your typical Celebrities, News Feeders or High profile users who don’t typically follow people back.  Don’t worry if your afraid of removing a Twitter user who you like to follow but don’t mind they follow back, you can “SAVE” them or “LOCK” them so that way you won’t remove them from your Follow list.

Everything you Lock will be saved for all future uses due to OAuth.  Once you login Buzzom it will save your information for future use.  So Flush away and be sure to “SAVE” the users who you want to keep following while “FLUSHING” the rest of the users who don’t follow you back.

The Grow Button

This action provides you the list of people who are likely to follow you back. You can select the people from the list and follow them all at once.  You can also “LOCK” users who you do not want to follow and have Buzzom show them in the future searches.

The list is actually relevant to your profile and the users do have a high follow-back ratio.  Just because Buzzom automates the list you can still manually scroll down and un-check mark users you may feel not be worthy in following and adding to your network.

One of the fastest methods I seen to accurately grow your Twitter Network effectively and efficiently.  Other great methods Buzzom provides are:

• People Search - This search you can target new people to Follow by using keywords to locate in the Bio’s or Tweets.  This is a great search that I have found to replace the Twitter Directories like Twellow.  For instance I would use Twellow to locate “Real Estate Agents” or “Virginia” in the categories or search.  Buzzom now takes the search 1 step further by also allowing to switch to keywords in Tweets too.  So in essence this is an all-in-one search in this one stop shop site.
• Cross Follow - This cool feature will allow you to choose which Twitter user you want to show data for either all of his/her Followers or all of his/her users she is following.  In essence you will be comparing your data with thiers and will only show the people not in your network to allow to add to yours.  You can start selecting all the Top profiles in your niche to Cross Follow, it’s all about surrounding your self with like minded success individuals right?

The Reciprocate Button This action will bring up all the users who are following you that you haven’t followed back yet.  Now mostly the users you have skipped may be due to spammers or bots but you may occasionally skip a few on accident and this feature is great for finding lost stragglers.  These users who are following you should deserve a follow back if they are not spammers.

Post from: Social Media Vision

Ultimate Twitter Account Management Tool & Clean Up Maintenance

Chat Catcher by Shannon Whitley was one of my favorite WordPress plugins in capturing Twitter messages and beautifully displaying them as blog comments.  There was also a great support module on Drupal.

I had announced earlier this month that Chat Catcher was shutting down due to high upkeep costs and lack of funding.

May 15th 2009, I received a teaser e-mail from Shannon explaining that Chat Catcher is not shutting down and there was more exciting announcements to come soon.

This was great news indeed and I was very curious to see what else was in store. 

Earlier today I recieved a message on Twitter from Shannon.

Ocasta Labs have injected both funds and resources to extend the Chat Catcher team and to accelerate development of the service thus keeping Chat Catcher alive!!  Hooray!

I have been using BackType Connect plugin to replace Chat Catcher but for some reason due to my blog theme, I was not able to make the plugin show the beautiful avatars on Twitter but the replacement plugin still worked nonetheless which doubled my comment count because I still had Chat Catcher on while waiting for the service to shut down.

Now that Chat Catcher is up and running I am going to keep Chat Catcher and also still use BackType connect because its customizable where I can filter out the Twitter messages and keep the other messages like “Blog comments” and “Digg” scans which Chat Catcher doesn’t support.

So in essence both plugins will compliment each other for my blog and I love it!

Thank you Shannon and Good luck with the funding!

P.S – The founder of Backtype Connect - Christopher Golda, was very helpful in reaching out in providing support to me about trying to fix my avatar problem, I was impressed and greatly appreciated his help.

Post from: Social Media Vision

Chat Catcher Plugin Revives With Funding

TweepME Still Alive? https://www.tweepme.com/

The run down on TweepME is that its a Web service that Auto-Follow Application on Twitter promoting to gain Followers based on Self Replicating Followers who use TweepMe service.  Bottom line is sheep of followers who mindlessly auto-follow who ever is in the scam network.

TweepMe has been Suspended many times on Twitter and recieved much criticism over the past months on how this service is a joke and is missing the whole point of Social Networking.

TweepMe started out if you ReTweeted the Web Site link you get added to the network for free as long as you login your Username and Password which is stored from the Twitter API.  This is why it was called a Virus or Trojan because it would manually follow and followback all people associated in this shady network.

Now TweepMe is charging members to join?  The latest ad as seen in the picture above on my blog is asking for$12.95, the sad thing is people are still gullible in doing this service.

TweepMe is pointless because……

• It’s a scam and a waste of money
• It has a bad reputation already and you don’t want to associate with them
• Most accounts who follow you are FAKES with no AVATARS
• You lose your connection and personal side with your followers

If you want more followers, use the simple approach………

• Use Services like www.twellow.com to find followers in your niche like Location, Business, and Interests.
• Connect with your followers more and then in turn you will get noticed
• Join twitter directories like Wefollow.com
• Use Followfriday #Hashtags in hopes to get some follow love back
• Have a complete written profile with strong keywords to be searchable
• Provide Quality Tweets and you will get noticed

Post from: Social Media Vision

TweepME Will Not Go Away, Don’t Waste Your Money On This Site

The Blame Game

Over the years, there has been many articles written about how certain Social Networks were causes for certain events.

Below are a few examples:

• Mashable writes about how Facebook Can Get You Fired, Dumped, And Yes, Evicted
• Gawker explains how a bank intern gets fired because of Facebook.
• Another story of getting fired from Facebook is from Switched, a teen calls job “boring”
• Most recently, the famous story about how a would-be cisco employee would of got hired except Twitter got him fired.
• Americanshelflife talks about how she got dumped because of Facebook

Now noticed, all the articles have one thing in common and that is doing the blame game.  It seems like placing the blame of the bad news on the Social Network is more shocking than comparing it to a normal event without Social Media involved.

It appears with the new hype and phenomenon of Social Media taking place that these stories get hyped due to having the event take place on Social Media.  This maybe the case, but they are still all missing the main point and that’s being accountable for their own actions.

Social Media Are Just Communication Tools and Mediums

Twitter, Myspace and Facebook are just Social Networks.  They are communication tools that we use on a daily basis.  Although these are great sources for communication, they are just that and doesn’t force us to do anything  against our will.

If you ever heard the saying….

“Computers don’t make errors, people make errors”

“Guns don’t kill people, people kill people”

These sayings imply that to not blame the tools but to blame the users.

Be Accountable For Your Actions

There is a great movement and book out there if you haven’t heard it, it’s called QBQ – The Question Behind The Question and Personal Accountability.

That’s what this is all about, these users on these Social Networks need to stop blaming Social Media for their actions and take personal accountability for what they did.

It’s not Facebook’s fault that the users got fire for posting incriminating information…..

It’s not Twitters fault for displaying a users Tweet on his careless opinion about his future employer…

It’s not Myspace’s fault that you got dumped……

Let’s look at the cold hard facts.  These users are all soley responsible for their actions and just because they have the ability to showcase their information to the world they should have the common sense to be more careful in what they put out there on the net.

Just because you entertained the idea that you will never get caught because it’s Social Media, doesn’t make it right.  If you published your hatred opinion in a book instead of Facebook, don’t think you will not fall under the same consequences.  Doing something wrong is doing something wrong regardless if you get caught or not.

Bottom line is that Social Media is not to blame….the blame is upon yourself…take personal accountability for your actions and next time make better judgement calls before you go out and do something you will regret.

Post from: Social Media Vision

Don’t Blame Twitter, Myspace or Facebook; Blame Yourself

Seesmic Desktop Launches

Twhirl was pretty much the only competition for Tweetdeck and was naturally crushed by Tweetdeck’s great organizational columns and clean interface.  Twhirl was purchased by Seesmic last year and just couldn’t find a way to catch up to Tweetdeck’s success until now, maybe…

Seesmic just launched a new third party Twitter client called Seesmic Desktop which is only in “Desktop Preview” which basically means beta or alpha stage still.  Go to Seesmics website http://desktop.seesmic.com/ and input your e-mail address to get an invite.    

Keep in mind this is a Desktop Preview, so there is many bugs and issues to be resolved still.

The main focus is having Multiple Accounts     

Seesmic has seemed to answer out Twitter prayers by providing a client that can handle multiple accounts at the same time!  I love this feature and I have been following the TweetDeck suggestion boards for a while and I am surprised TweetDeck has never implemented this highly sought out feature.

It is so simple to switch accounts and manage all your replies, main streams and even direct messages.  You can even reply in which ever account you want to display in the client.

Why have multiple accounts?

Most users have multiple accounts to fill in different niches.  For example myself, I have a business and a personal Twitter account.  I of course Tweet my business updates via my Twitter business profile and my personal tweets via my personal Twitter profile.

Now instead of logging off Tweetdeck everytime I want to Tweet in my business profile, I can seamlessly switch to either account on the fly.

The clone is missing the Facebook feature

Yes Seesmic Desktop has pretty much copied Tweetdecks main features the one feature that Seesmic did not take as of yet is the Facebook feature which TweetDeck has.  TweetDeck just recently came out with a new update just in the nick of time when Seesmic launched, coincidence?

Other Cons

Like I mentioned before, not to be too harsh on Seesmic because they are still in preview mode….below are some cons I am frustrated with

• The interface is really ugly and the fonts are not clean compared to TweetDeck.  It’s really hard to read sometimes Twitter users profiles and other messages because of this.  They really need to get a good graphic artist to kick this up a notch.
• Adding people to groups is really a pain because unlike Tweetdeck you can only add people by finding the people you want to add in your Twitter Stream Archive or using the search feature.  There is no master user list where it populates all the Twitter usernames in your follow list so that way you can just check off the ones you want to include.  This is very frustrating and I hope they fix this soon.
• Errors…Errors…Errors….I really hate when I shut down the client it does not save my groups and I get this annoying error window.

Fullfillment

Bottom line is that for users who were craving for the multiple account feature, well now you can fullfill that with Seesmic and I am pretty sure that the final released version should hopefully clear up these issues before then….

Post from: Social Media Vision

Seesmic Desktop Replaces TweetDeck For The Multiple Account Twitter Client