Customer feedback can be a valuable resource in many aspects of business. When it comes to your site’s SEO and internet marketing plan, customer feedback can be an absolute gold mine of information. That is, if you can get it.
It is an unfortunate fact of business life that people rarely tell you about the good stuff. People, whether they are online or in the real world, are rarely motivated to provide positive feedback. Most of the feedback businesses receive is of the negative kind. This is, of course, also very valuable, but it’s a little demoralizing to only hear the criticism and never the praise. Read more »
News Blaze reported about a new social platform for artists and art lovers called TheArtistFinder.com.
TheArtistFinder.com, as the name implies, is a site where you can browse at the work of artists worldwide, click on the artist whose work catches your eye, and get information (links to sites) on where you can buy that artist’s work or contact that artist.
According to BoundlessGallery.com/TheArtistFinder.com President Luke Terpstra the website is designed to “to support original artists online.” He also says that the “online marketplace [is] changing from the old guard of big one-stop shops like eBay and Amazon, to a new order where the actual site you buy from matters less than finding the perfect product. “ Since artists usually have their works displayed/scattered on different websites, consumers have to either hunt down each site to be able to view their favourite artists’ works before deciding on which artwork to buy or settle for the handful of choices available in the current site they are on. This is why TheArtistFinder is very useful because it gives consumers a convenient way of finding all the other available works of the artist they like. No more need to use search engines to hunt artists’ works down since they have a one-stop shop where they can find all the contact details they need.
As you can see social platforms are getting the nod from all kinds of industries, now including the art industry. With this development we can only wait and see how else social platforms will be used.
Building a successful social media platform is a challenging venture, but if you’re properly prepared for it, it can become very easy, and even fun. However, this means that you must seize every opportunity you get to grow your platform, and expand as much as you can – this includes saving up as much money as possible, in order to have flexible funding. One of the costs that tend to burden any operation are the phone charges – if you can cut down on those, you’ll be netting some considerable savings for your business. And a calling card is one of the best ways to achieve that.
If you look around the market for a bit, you’ll find some good deals on calling cards, in some cases with features such as unlimited calling. This can make the card a very convenient tool for you, as it would let you take care of those lengthy conversations for arranging your next moves and coordinating with your partners, without having to worry about the hefty charges that you’ll have to cover later.
Unlimited calling in itself is good, but make sure you examine the other factors related to the card as well – it needs to have a good overall plan, as features like unlimited calling are often used to lure consumers into getting cards that don’t really benefit them in a long-term use. Always make sure the cards you’re buying would serve you for a long time and knock some points off from your monthly expenses.
When talking about platforms, especially for web designing or website development, a few names are there which always beat the competition and are considered as leading players of the market. The overall idea behind selecting appropriate platform to develop your website is that how much money can you spend to solve the purpose, how much time do you have, how many people you have in your team to develop the site, etc. All these key points, when joint together, help you determine which platform you should choose to create your own website or blog. There are various best cheap hosting services available which offer you the facility to create your own web page with just a few clicks. These web hosting services have WordPress, Joomla! or Drupal running at their servers. These software applications are although open source development tools and are license free they allow programmers to develop the entire website within a fraction of time.
It is hard to determine as which of the above open source website development application is better as it totally depends on the programmer as on which platform he has his expertise. No matter what platform a developer chooses the main idea behind every selection is that the website should look attractive and should pull as many numbers of visitors as possible at a single given time.
If you are planning to launch your own website you need not to worry about web page or website development as many best cheap web hosting services are there which will allow you to create a website free of cost and that too almost instantaneously.
Experts say that social media is a big way for reaching out to the countless masses. Here are few tips that you should keep in mind while working with the numerous social media platforms for achieving success in business.
Determine the platforms on which you want to come into sight.
There are many best hosting platforms that come to use such as Facebook or MySpace and Twitter etc. The best way is you should focus on a select few and concentrate using your energy on the chosen platforms. Though it makes sense using as many platforms as you can, you may find that if many social platforms are to be managed the spread out is thin.
Be active.
This is the main reason due to which you should narrow down your best hosting social networking sites. You must be quite active on whatever social platform that you have decided to use. Otherwise, you might be defeating the main purpose of these social networking sites. If you are not able to update and not replying to messages, and so on, then you cannot promote your business.
Remember that giving value must be your top priority.
Marketing campaigns carried out all over the websites. Customers are looking that they should get more than only selling points. They want something that is actually useful. Keeping this in mind there must be creation of content, which the customers will found valuable. It can be a simple blog post but the customers should find it valuable.
Social media companies will be happy to hear that marketers are planning to increase their budget for social media marketing this year. What they wouldn’t be too happy to hear is that the increase wouldn’t be that dramatic. Still with everyone cutting corners these days the fact that budgets will be increasing is great.
Forrester’s report “Social Media Playtime Is Over” states that more than 50% of the 145 interactive marketers that participated in their survey plan on increasing their social media budget. They stated that the reason for budget increase is social media’s ability to “inexpensively and quickly get marketing messages out through interactive discussion and rapid word of mouth.” However, this budget increase also means that they will be looking for more quantifiable results and unless given a way to measure results will be unwilling to make the budget increase more substantive. As the Forrester analyst Jeremiah Owyang wrote, “interactive marketers must move beyond experimentation by making social applications a permanent part of marketing, measuring and demonstrating their value, and integrating them into marketing efforts.” Hence, until reliable measurement tools come out you can be sure that the majority of the interactive marketers will stick with their budgets, which according to the survey is around $100,000 or less.
Aside from the non-significant increase what should bother social media marketers more is that most of the survey participants indicated that their social media efforts are not really integrated in their overall marketing strategy. This means that they are still very unsure as to the effects of social media marketing. Until this is overcome we cannot expect these marketers to give more thought to the social media marketing efforts.
Social networks that are hosted on a good reliable web hosting service are bound to produce good results. There are lots of advantages associated with reliable web hosting services. One of the remarkable advantages with web hosting service is that it gives you a strong platform for your business to grow big.
A social network when hosted on a reliable web hosting service will help you get a secure and safe hosting service. Your network can’t be easily hacked by others. Hacking can be dangerous for your social network, and reliable web hosting service can provide you with secure hosting.
Once your social network goes live on a web hosting service, you automatically get a virtual server, and apart from that you also get associated internet domain, along with reliable web hosting service, which enables each user of your network to use it.
A good web hosting service provides you with a platform for advertising. You can choose to promote your newly laid ideas on internet. One major advantage associated with reliable web hosting is that social networks are fully secured. There are security patches built in the system, to help your social network function properly.
Social networks also gain immensely with reliable web hosting service offering a site specific search engine. Social networks won’t get jammed on the high web traffic with reliable web hosting, and that can help social networking sites to gain viewership. There are plenty of benefits which a social network can gain out of reliable web hosting facilities.
If you thought that social platforms are solely for marketing purposes that where you’re so wrong. Social computing technologies are emerging that will help businesses not just in the marketing world but also in product development. In the embedded YouTube video below Robin Saitz, Senior Vice President for Solutions Marketing & Communications of the Product Development Company (PTC) discusses the use of social computing in product development.
According to Saitz their latest product, called Windchill, was developed as a solution to difficulties encountered by companies developing products that have teams that are globally distributed. She also says that, “Product development has always been about collaboration and these technologies can take product development to a much higher level,” and that, “The combination of social computing with product development is the emergence of an initiative that we call social product development.”
If social product development seems very revolutionary right now Rob Gremly, executive vice-president of PTC, says that it is actually how the status quo of the work environment in the future. Gremly said, “Social product development is the next step in the evolution of how people work together. The idea that social product development was ever considered to be a new and revolutionary model will seem inconceivable to the next generation of engineers who have grown up with social networking as a normal vehicle for information sharing. Organizations that are able to harness the power of social computing in their product development strategy will quickly outpace their competitors with greater operational efficiency and ultimately better products.”
So make sure you aren’t left behind and start harnessing the power of social product development in your own business.
Scott Monty, Ford Motor’s social media head, recently wrote an article that reminded me how easy it is to get tunnel vision. Admittedly, I focus all my energies on the “most popular” social media sites namely: Facebook, MySpace, Twitter and Bebo. I dabble with other social media sites (who doesn’t watch YouTube?) but lately these three have been the only ones I have been really putting significant effort at least when it comes to business. My excuse for this one is that at least these four are the ones that are really popular among my target market. However, as Mr. Monty reminds us, “Facebook does not rule the world. At least not yet.”
Anyway here’s a quick guide on the other social media sites you should be paying attention to and pouring some effort in based on the country/region your business operates in. Please note that both the map and the table is from Scott Monty’s blog. Visit the blog for the interactive map.
I ask you–Is there no end to the social platforms that are floating around? It seems like as soon as I think I’ve got a handle on the major ones, I find out one of my friends is already submerged into another one.
That’s what happened today when I was reading the new posts on David Krug’s Twitter account. I followed a link he shared, and was taken to his Pownce account, which basically does the same thing as Twitter as far as I can tell.
News Blaze reported about a new social platform for artists and art lovers called 
Social media companies will be happy to hear that marketers are planning to increase their budget for social media marketing this year. What they wouldn’t be too happy to hear is that the increase wouldn’t be that dramatic. Still with everyone cutting corners these days the fact that budgets will be increasing is great. 
