"We have our customers. They signed our contract. The rest is up to them. They can deal with Support on a case to case basis.”

This kind of mentality may appall you, but it is sadly all too common among B2B organizations. At first glance, an online community may seem like a lame ploy to add a unique branded B2B social media aspect to your website, but it’s actually the best thing to come to Support since online chat! Basically, a B2B online community consists of a collection of people online sharing knowledge and perspectives with one another. This not only builds customer service and success, but boosts brand loyalty and awareness to a new level of respect.

Why having an online community is an essential component of a successful revenue engine?

Some reasons:

* Support
* Customer loyalty
* Collaboration
* Gaining Insights


Read full article: blog.marketo.com

Social networking makes for social recruiting.  Could Facebook soon rival LinkedIn as a job-recruitment tool? A Wall Street Journal article says it could be possible sooner rather than later.

Joe Light wrote, that recruiters troll Facebook for candidates they like :)

More companies are trying to tap Facebook Inc.'s 750-million-plus user base to find new employees, threatening traditional job boards and competing with LinkedIn Corp., which has dominated the online professional networking arena.

Facebook's use as a job-recruitment tool remains small, but its appeal may be growing. Some recruiters say they have all but eliminated their spending on job boards, which can charge a few hundred dollars per job posting, depending on volume. Others note that while LinkedIn contains a more comprehensive résumé database, candidates tend to value referrals from their connections on Facebook more.


Read the full article at online.wsj.com

How Does Google Copy? Let Them Count The Ways…

• Yelp gets popular? Copy their info, shove Yelp to the bottom of the page and put Google Places and reviews at the top.
• Groupon won’t sell? Spend billions from other businesses to destroy them.
• Twitter and Facebook innovate on search? Take their content, whine when they try and stop you then spend billions to prevent their growth and hopefully destroy them.
• Apple working on a touchscreen smartphone? Spend billions from another business and copy everything you can, down to swipes and apps.
• Need a smartphone operating system with Java. Take Java and use it for your own ends.
• Need a location mapping technology and Skyhook won’t sell? Spend billions from your monopoly profits and strongarm your partners and drive Skyhook out of business.
• Buy up the big travel search sites.
• Claim you are open source but share nothing related to what your business claims to be about — search, and nothing related to how you make your money — advertising
• Claim you are open and standards based but control who gets access to your smartphone operating system
• Like all rich monopolists, they spend millions hiring high priced lobbyists and public relations teams inside the Beltway — for their direct benefit

Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.

Cell phones are the new credit cards. Phones are evolving so fast they will soon be the only thing in our pockets. Like how they destroyed the MP3 player, we’ll have our drivers license, credit cards and car keys all on different apps. The keychain companies will take a hit, but think about always having open pockets for other things.

• How mobile phones are becoming the new credit card?
• How the mobile payment market is growing?
• Who are the biggest contenders?
• How near field communication (NFC) works?

Read full article, download infographic at dailyinfographic.com

Who are you online?

Whether you are 17 or 67, Facebook is the standard method to make friends, to keep friends, to spy on friends and to invite friends to events. Facebook creator Mark Zuckerberg championed the cause for Internet authenticity, encouraging users to have single online identities.

On the opposite extreme of the argument, 4chan, a collaboration of anonymous users, has churned out both creative Internet trends and headline grabbing pranks. 4chan’s founder Christopher "Moot” Poole believes this anonymity is the key to online authenticity.

Daily Infographic's infographic shows these divergent philosophies of Internet culture and, most interestingly, what the average Internet user thinks about the privacy of their information online.

• What type of user are you?
• Do you prefer anonymity or transparency?
• What is so great about having a single identity?
• What is so great about anonymity?
• What is the current situation?
• What worth to know about privacy and types of online adult internet users?

Download infographic from dailyinfographics.com

Are you a Twitter fan who hates the intruder? Are you a reluctant Facebook user desperate for a new option? Are you a die hard Googlite jumping for joy over yet another Google product? Smartdatacollective.com decided to find out who the fans of G+ are.

First, the standard Conversition methodologies were applied including collecting thousands of comments about Google+, Google Hangouts, and Google Circles from across the internet.

Second, they evaluated how positive or negative the opinions were. Third, they examined the sentiment based on the source of the opinions.


Read the full article and download the diagram from the page smartdatacollective.com

Savvy business to business marketers realize that social media involves much more than opening corporate accounts on Facebook and Twitter.

Today, social media offers B2B marketers significant, quantifiable and predictable results. This column explores the top four reasons B2B marketers should engage in a proactive, social media program, and offers specific tips on getting started.


There are four tips to launch B2B marketing in social media:


1. Influence Your Online Reputation
2. Better Position Your Brand
3. Engage Prospects & Customers
4. Improve Customer Service


Four suggestions for handling negative customer feedback obtained via social channels:


1. Be completely transparent and honest (i.e. admit your mistake)
2. Do something remarkable to rectify the situation.
3. Proactively respond. Try to recreate a similar story and conclude with a better outcome.
4. Don’t make the same mistake twice!


Read the full article: searchengineland.com

If you and I talk on our cell phones, we're actually not speaking with each other, but with each other's avatar - writes Stephen Baker on Smart Data Collective's blog. The real you is where your body is. The "you" that I experience is a digital representation of your voice.

Through the conditioning of the modern age, we've come to associate these strings of numbers with ourselves and each other. But still we increasingly deal with each other's avatars. This trend is not going to slow down.

So it might make sense to put more thought into the avatars we create. After all, they're going around the world representing us. For many people, they are us. In fact, it's safe to say that most of the heavy lifting in our personal and professional relationships will be carried out through avatars, and that traditional person-to-person dealings will be something of a boutique offering.

Read the full post: smartdatacollective.com

Millions of dollars are spent developing and launching new products each year, but the reality is only 10 percent will succeed. While this has been the accepted norm and considered the "cost of doing business,” a new approach unveiled at Nielsen’s U.S. Consumer 360 conference improves the likelihood of new product success to 75 percent.


What are the 12 steps of consumer adoption?


1. Distinct Proposition
2. Attention Catching
3. Message Connection
4. Clear Concise Message
5. Need/Desire
6. Advantage
7. Credibility
8. Acceptable Downsides
 9. Findability
10. Acceptable Costs
11. Product Delivery
12. Product Loyalty


Read the full article at blog.nielsen.com

Businesses on the Internet today can rise and fall with the power of search. To survive in this search-based economy, a business must be able to be found easily on google search, have a location in Bing maps to navigate too, and a phone number that can be easily brought up in a yellow-pages query.

The problem is that the format of the web is also changing — changing from the once-static HTML and hyperlink model to a sleeker dynamic page model, where many factors can determine the type of content being shown, whether it’s videos, downloads, pictures, flash animations, or plain HTML.

This dynamic aspect of the web can make it difficult for search engines to find and index your website, because search engines don’t try to input values or guess how to find the page. Search engines only follow links inside of pages, an activity known as "crawling”.

Crawling dynamic pages is difficult and can even hurt search ratings if there is an error in the site. This is where Search Engine Optimization Software (SEO) comes in.


Read the full post: smartdatacollective.com