Month: January 2015

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Looking for a Few Good Customers Who Want to Be Guinea Pigs

Guinea Pig
I’m Looking for a Few Guinea Pigs!

I’m looking for just a few guinea pigs for a service test that I am strongly considering for my business. And I am willing to discount my typical hourly rate for my test program to identify if what I feel can legitimately be done to boost reviews and remediate negative reviews works.

If you are a business owner who has been unfairly targeted by a competitor who has posted illegitimate reviews about your firm in order to boost there own placement please kindly consider giving me a call.

What I am considering doing is only totally legitimate – no bogus reviews, no hidden IP posting to Yelp.

Here’s what I am thinking of doing:

1. Create a website online review form and encourage your team to put this link at the bottom of all emails to solicit reviews that can be put on your own website coded with Google’s rich snippets.

2. Create a testimonials page on your website and house the top rated reviews there.

3. Set up a BlogSpot blog to showcase your online reviews as blog posts.

4. Call customers for you to solicit quotes that can be used in marketing on your behalf.

5. Monitor your online reputation to see if these website and off-site tactics help to remediate a reputation problem.

I won’t take all comers and will be selective over who I take on in this test and I’ll drop my hourly rate for these services by 20% for this limited test. You will need to allow us to use your results in our next whitepaper is you are selected as a test candidate.

If you think you’d like to be one of our test subjects, please send me an email.

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Should I Do an e-Newsletter? Isn’t it Passé?

Are there Pros and Cons to an e-newsletter?
Are there Pros and Cons to an e-newsletter?

I cannot begin to tell you how many times I’ve heard, “I love your newsletter, it has value to me, and now that I need X, I thought to call you first.”

If you are not creating great content that is shareable in an e-newsletter format, not only are you missing potential sales, but you may be missing ways to create loyalty with your current client base. When you create loyalty with your current base, you protect your business from “poaching”, build advocates for your own services, enhance referral actions, and protect your business from price shopping.

Doing an e-newsletter is easy, especially if you are blogging at least twice a week. We recommend to our blogging clients that they use the best blog post (or two) as the content for their monthly e-newsletter. I’ve found that typically the person who reads your blog is not the person who subscribes to your e-newsletter. If you feel that using blog posts may be too redundant for your audience, enlarge the blog post or add additional content value to it for the e-newsletter version.

With so many options for prefab e-newsletter templates you don’t need to have a custom one built necessarily, but some of our clients like one that reinforces their own brand.

Once your subscriber list size is about 100 or so you are ready to start working on creating and publishing your e-newsletter.

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Try It Friday – Samsung’s WatchOn App

It’s been a while since my last Try It Friday video. It’s because I have to learn how to use something before I make my video for you and I have had some real fails that have simply not made the cut. However, this app has! WatchOn by Samsung is a real jewel. Watch my video below or at YouTube here http://youtu.be/OZZJWXgLuMo. You can also view it on my website here: http://www.mccordweb.com/video/index.php

What I love about this app is that it allows me to be purposeful about what I watch on TV. I don’t have cable and don’t get a TV guide, so I don’t know what great shows may be playing or coming up – but now I do.

I can even control Netflix with this app and if I wanted to buy movies to watch at Vudu.  I am now ready to throw out the 4 controllers I have for my TV as now I can control my TV, DVD player, DVR and any other auxiliaries (set top box if you had one) all with one master controller. Thanks Samsung I’ve got to say I love WatchOn.

Available for free at Google Play: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.sec.watchon.phone&hl=en

iTunes: I am not sure you will find it here. Looks like it is just for Android – sorry.

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Your Online Reviews Really Matter

Ostrich
Don’t Stick Your Head in the Sand When You Get a Bad Review

This is the struggle for businesses and it is real – get a bad online review and how do you deal with it and move beyond it. First you should not ignore a bad online review. That does not mean that you have to respond to one, but you definitely want to think about your strategy when you get one.

1. Review the legitimacy. Should you change something you are doing?

2. Decide if and should you respond. Not every comment about your business deserves and needs a response.

3. If you do respond, don’t respond in anger. Craft your response and sit on it for several days, read and re-read your response. Make sure you are not venting.

4. If you know who left the review, try to fix the problem and then ask for an update to the review.

Negative reviews can be very damaging to your business but sometimes your own response can make it even worse. You should be regularly monitoring your business reputation online and looking at what others are saying about you. Especially as Google and Bing are now highlighting reviews that they find around the web and meshing them with location specific results in the Knowledge Graph side bar on their search pages.