Archive for category Twitter

Twitter to FB to website – a practical example of social media at work!

I was looking at my Tweetdeck this sunny (it still exists!) Friday and saw we had been retweeted by someone from Canada, so I went to their site from the link, read their comments on FB pages and instantly changed ours on Morello … I’ll also let you guys know their site address http://bit.ly/8X9dmt … so they get an extra link into their site, you guys get to read something good on Social Media and I feel happy because I have shared something useful.

Everybody wins!

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Its sensible to embrace Online reputation management

If you are the owner of a business you may already be aware of how your potential customers are using the internet as a way to help them make decisions on which product and brand to purchase. Whether you own the business or if it is part of your job title, you must remain aware of what your current and potential customers are saying, who they are saying it to, and where.

You need to either be trained in this ability yourself or at least be aware of the tools you can use to help manage the reputation of your business. Online reputation management is a key aspect of running a business in today’s environment and it will probably become more and more important as more people use the internet to help them decide on products and services.

Of course it could be that your business or organization currently has an excellent reputation. Perhaps your support team, your sales group, and other customer-facing pieces of your business do a wonderful job and their efforts are reflected as such on the internet. While this may be true, you have to know for certain this is the case. Guessing is not wise.

If, on the other hand, you have a bad online reputation, deserved or not, you need to know. Perhaps there was an incident that caused a pain for one of your customers, or maybe your competition is being malicious. Either way you must be up to speed on what is being said, where they are saying it, and what your options might be.

If you are going to run a successful business in today’s internet environment you will need to be aware of both the good and the bad things that people are saying about your products and services. You will need to recognize the way these comments can help to determine your company’s bottom line at the end of every month.

With the popularity of the internet all it takes is one bad apple, so to speak, perhaps even something typed as a joke on a social networking site, to bring your reputation down considerably. News travels fast on the internet, and bad news travels even faster, and consumers will stick together if they believe a company has taken advantage of a customer.

Managing your reputation online is not a single action but rather a process. This includes maintaining high visibility, positive publicity, and the right kind of marketing. They move beyond the negative you need to do everything within your power to gain high web site rankings from search engines. This can help to keep the negative comments off the first page of search results.

You will find it necessary to keep a close eye on the opinion of the public. Watching social networks and blogs are essential. You will have to take a long look at the comments being made and you must make every effort to protect and defend your company’s trademark and logo.

As you research online reputation management you will find there are a number of companies available to help you keep your reputation clean or help you cleanse one that has been tarnished. Find out what each company offers and consider using one to help you manage your business image and reputation. Remember that information on the web travels fast and you need to be one step ahead of those who might seek to affect your bottom line in a negative way.

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Collective Buying Power- Is Social commerce the next big Internet play?

Collective buying power is when a group of consumers come together and use the old rule of thumb, there’s power in numbers, to leverage the group size in exchange for discounts.(source Wikipedia)
Collective Buying power is nothing new, but with the advent of social networks, internet companies are leveraging this concept with considerable success. This is social commerce – the use of social media in the context of e-commerce. It has never been easier to form social networks, and we know that we are all on the hunt for a deal! Take Groupon (www.groupon.com)- the main “social commerce” web site in the US. They already have 4m users in the US and this number is growing fast. Their target is 100m users, and the recent financing deal has valued the company at an eye-watering $1.35bn.
I see a number of reasons for the rapid growth of this. Peer recommendations are the strongest form of advertising, and if your friend sends you a discount voucher or recommends something to you; you are much more likely to go for it, than if a company has pushed it on to you. We know that social media gives the customer control rather than the advertiser, and this is simply another example of that. Through promoting the offer via their social network, the customer (and not the promoter) gets to decide whether it is a success or not. The seller is the individual and not the company. It is a trusted environment, and that is key. The potential for sales from a company perspective is huge if done right. Just think about it. You as the company send a customer an offer on 2 for 1 lunches provided 50 people come through the door on a certain day. The customer likes it and tells 3 friends. They in turn tell 3 friends. And so on. A viral loop is created via social networks. You can track the message, how it has been received, who has responded to it and the call-to -action. As a means of clearing stock for firms, this can be one of the most powerful means yet. Watch this space. Groupon have probably had another 100 subscribers in the time it has taken me to write this blog!

Here is an introductory video to show what it’s all about Collective Buying Power

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Social Media: Are we making the right moves?

We continue to twitter, add blogs, post articles we feel are relevant to our “followers”, but are they really out there and taking all this information in; never mind acting upon it? Social Media can be frustrating, and seem that at times, we are simply getting no return for our efforts.  But we know at Severn Internet, that social media, has generated significantly more enquiries and ultimately business for our clients. So we know it works, and encourage you all NEVER to give up on it!

But we have put together a few of the common mistakes that are made in Social Media, in the hope that you can avoid the pitfalls, and ensure you make the time spent on social media much more effective.

1. Don’t follow people for the sake of it! You will spend too much time being interrupted by irrelevant tweets, blog posts and status updates. Results are achieved slowly, and over time. Followers, “friends” etc. does not equal sales necessarily.

2. You don’t need to use every social media tool. Focus on the social media sites that are most relevant to you and your business. The ones that are a good fit to you.  If you are selling holidays to the over65s, then designing a glitzy page and profile on MySpace will not be the cleverest move you will make.

3. No flash in the pan. It is not easy to keep going..we know that, and we sympathise with you.  If you are not prepared for the long haul, you simply won’t get anywhere.  You need to have a long-term social media strategy.

4. Don’t treat it as kids stuff either! Give it the respect that it deserves..it is not easy, and you must not take your company’s online reputation in any way for granted. Set expectations and create policies in-house to enhance your online reputation.

5. Social Media is not free. You can sign-up for accounts on Twitter and Facebook for free, sure, but your goals will not happen without a significant investment in time and money. Start allocating a budget and some resources to it ..no budget, no time = No results.

6. Don’t say things for the sake of it! Your company has far too  much to lose if you ruin your online reputation. Make everything relevant, honest, and in line with the values of your company and your clients.

7. Measure your progress..set realistic monthly targets for social media. Experiment all the time, but benchmark the time and money against the targets. Social Media, like all other marketing efforts, must result in a positive ROI/ Return on Investment.

8. It won’t happen overnight..small steps…

We know it’s not easy; but our clients continue to be surprised by the measurable results they are achieving working with us on their social media strategies. Drop us a line, and let’s see what we can do for you!

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Three Tuns Brewery goes from strength to strength

I make no bones about the fact that John from the Three Tuns Brewery is one of my best mates, but that doesn’t guarantee you a mention on this blog! Even if you are the oldest licenced brewery in the UK!

I thought I should write up a little post about how well the brewery are doing. I played golf with John last Friday and he tells me that they are even getting business from Twitter now – which of course I will claim full credit for putting him onto! The Shropshire Star wrote a good article on his tweets last week – click here to read what they said.

In my opinion a brewery, like any other business, needs to have excellent customer service. Having a number of John’s clients as clients myself I know that they are really good, but it is the fact that certain things others fall down on are considered “de rigeur” that sets them apart – if I was running a pub I would want to know that my beer would arrive on time – apparently this is not a given in the licenced trade, but it is with The Three Tuns Brewery who have never been late with a delivery since John and Bill took it over.

They are really busy and approaching capacity again – John even suggested there might be a waiting list soon! My advice therefore is get in touch with them sooner rather than later – my personal recommendations would be the XXX and Clerics Cure beers – excellent, if a tad too moreish!

I’m sure John would also agree that their website, designed and built by Severn Internet of course, has not done them any harm either!

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Congratulations Matthew … and Pippa!

Everyone here at Severn Internet would like to extend our congratulations to Matthew and Pippa on the birth of their baby girl Elsie, who we understand weighed in at just under 7lb. Mother and baby are doing well. We look forward to wetting the baby’s head Matt!!

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Server upgrade commences next week …

It is easy to forget that if your website crashes, your business is also affected. You probably won’t receive any emails either unless you run your own Exchange server.

At Severn Internet we recognise this and that is why we have always hosted our client sites on a quality dedicated server. For those of you who wonder why hosting costs can vary so much it is more than likely that you are not comparing like with like. When we say a “dedicated” server we mean exactly that – our server only has our sites on it. This means that you are not potentially sharing your site with some dodgy porn site that could end up getting your own site blacklisted by Google through no fault of your own!

As a company, Severn Internet uses Rackspace to look after our server. They are by no means the cheapest, but as with most things in life you get what you pay for. A server is just like any other computer – it will occasionally develop some sort of glitch – what one needs is a company that fixes those glitches quickly – that is why we use Rackspace and also recommend them to those clients who need their own server too.

After a couple of years happily living in one box, we are going to be moving our sites to a new server over the next few weeks. For those of a technical nature, this is the spec of the new machine:

Dell 2970
OS : Red Hat 5 (64 bit)
PLESK 8 (unlimited domains with Spam Assassin and Dr Web)
Processor: Single Quad Core AMD Opteron 2347 processor
RAM: 4 GB RAM
Hard drive: 4 x 146 GB SAS Hard drives
RAID: – Hardware RAID 5
Hot swappable drives
Dual power supplies, Nics, Fans
Fanatical support,
Rackwatch Platinum
Managed Backup Agent + MySQL Agent

It is rather a good machine and has all the usual security, firewalls and back up you would expect. We look forward to improving our client’s hosting environment over the next few weeks.

If you are unhappy with your current hosts, please give us a call and we will be more than happy to give you a quote on our managed hosting services.

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Pay your employees to leave!

It is surprising what one comes across after a period of random surfing, but this one was pretty amazing to me. I ended up there from reading about Amazon’s takeover of Zappos, but the Zappos culture is surely one of the reasons why they are so successful http://bit.ly/T0pWt gives you more information, but in a nutshell Zappos gives people the option to walk away early with a $1000 bonus! Sounds crazy? As they say though, it does mean that you know everyone who stays is a committed employee!

At Severn Internet don’t go quite that far, but we do have relatively relaxed working practices with people working from home, coming in a bit later or other such things. I think a relaxed environment makes for a more productive environment – no doubt they will all be in here soon asking for tomorrow off! It also helps the environment of course so a good thing all round really.

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