From MainStreet.com
By Seth Fiegerman

MeasuredUp.com

Are you not on speaking terms with a particular business? Well, MeasuredUp.com essentially acts as an intermediary between you and the companies you hate. Big name business like Home Depot, Wal-Mart, Orbitz and Best Buy have signed up with MeasuredUp to respond to consumer complaints on the site. Consider it a way to get around talking to representatives on the phone. (It’s also worth noting that there are thousands of posts on this site that are actually positive, which doesn’t seem to be the case on the other sites we mentioned.)

Read entire article: www.mainstreet.com/article/smart-spending/best-customer-complaint-sites

Vote for MeasuredUp.com at Discoveringstartups.com

www.discoveringstartups.com/measuredup-com-customer-service-resolutions/

From MediaPost.com

by Marc Karasu,

You can give your small business marketing a spring cleaning and burnish your brand without having to spend much money.Leverage the following marketing tactics to raise the profile of your small business, stay a step ahead of your competition and increase revenue:

1. Social networking Many of your customers of all ages are using social networking sites. You don’t need to be a computer expert to use them and for a few minutes investment you can learn how to create a company presence on them that benefits you for years to come with little further effort other then maintenance.

Facebook: Go to www.facebook.com and build a “company” page.

Twitter: Go to www.Twitter.com and make a page for your company.

Share your new online presence with your customers with counter cards at the register or signs in store windows.

2. Customer service As the boss, you see your employees only on their best behavior. In today’s economy, no single thing matters as much for your sales as building a great customer service brand. Whether you already have a good reputation or need to build one, these simple steps can get you on your way fast.

Call your company Anonymously, call your business at several different times of the day and ask some hard customer questions to see how your employees react and interact with a customer. This will allow you to identify problem areas with your customer service and address them with training.

Returns Have a friend try to return something and document the experience to help identify areas of strength and weakness.

Online reputation and reviews You have likely come across some negative reviews about your company on a search engine. Many current and potential customers use search engines to help guide their online research in deciding where to buy. You can leverage the world of online reviews in your favor by asking your customers to review you on customer service sites like ours or business sites like Yelp.com.

By confidently asking customers for customer service reviews, you will in no time have dozens of complimentary reviews of your company online. These will help negate any bad reviews and potential customers will be able to find and trust you when researching online.

3. TV Google.com now offers small businesses the opportunity to produce a TV commercial and buy targeted TV on which to run your ad inexpensively. You could produce your ad for as little as a $250. For a few hundred dollars a week, you could run your new TV commercial in your local market or region on the networks you feel best target your customers.

Smart companies are using TV to build their brand and beat competitors.

Go to www.Google.com/TVads to learn more.

4. Email Start collecting email addresses of every customer. Request their email address politely and explain you will never share it and would like to keep them updated on specials, useful info and new products.

Tell them you will email them once a month and that they can opt out at any time. Explain that this is for special customers and that you will be distributing exclusive promotions through your company email newsletter.

Starting and maintaining a company email newsletter costs almost nothing and allows you to keep track of your customers and build a database. Not every customer will want to give you an email address but many are happy to.

Go to www.verticalresponse.com and start a newsletter today.

5. PR You have more to say about your business then you realize. Regular press releases about important company events, news or upgrades will help local media keep up to date on your business and will often lead to journalists calling you for quotes or more info that can lead to inclusion in articles.

These help raise your company’s credibility, build your reputation and keep your brand in front of customers. Once you get some articles written, you can use those publications logos on your website or on in-store signage, further building you company’s profile.

Go to www.marketwire.com to learn more about creating press releases.

With these five easy and inexpensive marketing tips you can quickly start to raise your small businesses profile, increase sales and build your online reputation while further distancing yourself from your competitors at a fraction of the marketing spend.

From Retailcustomerexperience.com

By Marc Karasu

Being an executive in this economy is tough. Being a marketing executive is almost impossible.

Whether you are at an established company with a well-known brand or at a startup, the pressure on you to deliver is immense. To make matters more challenging, it is likely that your marketing budget has been cut. Every dollar you spend is questioned for ROI and in most meetings you are asked about developments in social networking, customer service and PR because it is all anyone reads about and promises tantalizingly high yield at low cost.

Whatever category your retail business is in, the following tactics will help you build, track and keep up on the buzz about your brand without the need to invest large amounts of money. These ideas compliment almost any brand at any budget.

1. Social networking – You probably already have a Facebook and Twitter page that may or may not be yielding results for you. To help these pages along and to build up your social networking reputation or refute complaints, you should be leveraging these pages further.

What you can do now – Task a junior member of your team to be your “social outreach ambassador.” This role is focused totally on trolling Facebook, Twitter and blogs to “invite,” “reply” and “request” connections with current and potential customers and groups. By spending 20 or so hours a week on this effort you will slowly help along your Facebook and Twitter following, refute untrue online blog statements and reply to customers who have questions. This is a hard position to measure effectiveness on, so it could be hard to justify in your budget. But you have to consider this proactive marketing. The opportunity cost saved is not having uncontrolled rumors online. Many PR firms are starting to offer this service, but they don’t really get it and won’t be able to react as quickly as someone in your company culture who understands your brand.

Start with an intern and scale from there.

2. Customer service – In today’s economy no single thing matters as much for your sales and loyalty as building a great customer service brand. This is an area of marketing often overlooked or muddled with expensive and hard-to-use processes. If you are even aware of your customer service problem it is likely you first came across it the way most consumers find you: You found a review about your company online, via a search engine, and it was probably not flattering.

Online reviews are here to stay and many current and potential customers use them to help guide their online research in deciding where to buy. You can leverage the world of online reviews in your favor and often have more effect on purchase intent than the best TV commercial.

Whether you have a large customer service department, no customer service department, already have a good customer service reputation or need to build one, today many new online customer service tools exist that are often free or low cost.

What you can do now - Start asking your customers to review you on business sites like Angieslist.com and customer service sites like MeasuredUp.com. By confidently asking customers for business and customer service reviews, you will in no time have dozens of complimentary reviews of your company online. These will negate most bad reviews, increase your positioning on search engines and help interested, potential customers find and trust you when researching online. The goal here is not to have only good reviews as even the best companies have some bad reviews about them online. The goal is to have a balance and to demonstrate through association that your brand is focused on improving.

3. Online comments – The Internet is talking about you whether you like it or not. On thousands of sites, content that mentions you or a competitor is constantly being added. You need to join this conversation, even if you can’t control it.

What you can do now - Take that intern who is working on Facebook, Twitter and blogs and have him also spend five hours a week searching for reviews about your company or articles about something that is relevant to your business. When there is a comment field, have the intern write some intelligent content in response. State that they are an employee of the company and include a URL to your site. Do not try and pretend to be consumer as this will likely be found out and create further uncomplimentary content. This effort will help rebut negative views, show your company cares about its reputation and will help drive traffic to your company Web site. If you come across compliments, add on a quick “Thank You” comment, saying that you care about your reputation and appreciate the support of customers.

4. PR - You have more to say about your business than you realize. Regular press releases about important company events, news or upgrades are often overlooked. Generate interest from journalists by creating content that will interest them.

What you can do now – You know your business and the kinds of things the press wants to cover. Often, the press does not have the resources to generate data for a story. Create a poll on your Web site based on a topic of interest and then pitch the results to your press contacts. This will often lead to an exclusive or inclusion in a larger story about the topic.

If you have good contacts you also can pre-pitch an idea to them to gauge interest and then create the poll customized to their needs. Polls like these help raise your company’s credibility, build your reputation and keep your brand in front of customers.

With these easy and inexpensive marketing tips, you can quickly augment your existing marketing efforts and start to raise your company’s social media, customer service, online and PR profile while helping increase sales and build online reputation.

Spending 3 million dollars on :30 seconds of an ad is a scary thing for many companies.  However if you have the right brand for the audience, the right product and the right idea for an ad it can be a great investment in your company leading to increased sales, traffic and brand.

Given the economy this year it is an even more risky bet to run an ad in the Superbowl.

At MeasuredUp we think many companies that advertised in the SuperBowl could have spent their moeny better by investing it in customer service programs, social networking and reputation management.  These efforts in many cases would have increase revenue more then an ad in the SuperBowl.

Having said that we think a few companies spent their money wisely and put together effective ads in the SuperBowl.

Winners:

Hyundai – New products, good prices and an implosion by Toyota could help Hyundai step up to the big time.

Cars.com – Smart ad, good message, well executed.  A great way to take leadership in the category.

Google.com – The first ad from google is distinctive, smart and clear.  Not sure who does not use google already but if they saw the ad they do now.

Why bother:

Bud Light – Keeping your brand top of mind is one thing. Dumb commercials dont sell more beer.  Try creating a quality message.

Sketchers – No idea why this brand is here.

Bridgestone – No message.

Total waste of money:

Boost Mobil – Might have well given phones away to customers with the money to build usership.

GoDaddy.com – Reliably running the worst ad each year.  Too stupid to comment more.

Vizeo – Garbage ad. Totally useless.

Each year advertisers as a group largely miss on this event.  While blame to ad agencies is clear it also takes a supremely stupid client to buy off on many of these ideas.

The shame is that too many of these agencies and clients are trying to win a popularity contest that means nothing.  What they should be doing is creating a smart ad on message that pays off on what their brand does.

From Media Post

by Laurie Sullivan,

Search technology: Some companies will license it, while others build it from scratch. It depends on the egos of executives working at the company. Real-time search and social media have pushed technology to the forefront. Companies need sophisticated algorithms that can sort and index structured and unstructured data.

A recent Accenture report titled “Social CRM: The New Frontier of Marketing, Sales and Service” ties it all together. Joe Hughes, senior executive from Accenture’s customer service and support business, confirms that enterprise companies have begun to build search engine technology that will integrate into software applications and consumer hardware to help marketers, advertisers, agencies and others sort through the mounds of data created by social media.

Hughes defines social CRM as the conversation data from social media networks. And as marketers continue to try and make sense of the mounds of data flooding in from real-time search, Twitter streams, Facebook status updates, and behavioral targeting tags, they will need a faster method to sort, index and access data. Wow, are you overwhelmed yet?

Marketers need technology that can move feedback from customers and call center agents between channels with as much automation as possible. That will become the only way to analyze the data. Natural language query processing will also become a focus, to search through documents of unstructured and structured data as the mounds of social media data continues to mount.

Last year, tools measuring buzz metrics in social networks emerged. This year, the focus turns toward integrating the social data into traditional CRM platforms from companies like software-as-a-service (SaaS) provider Salesforce, which late last year integrated the feature, allowing people to search on that data in real time.

Until now, CRM packages did not allow marketers to view data collected on Twitter alongside traditional queries. But the real-time search movement has sent companies looking to improve search results back to the drawing board to build engines that can process structured and unstructured data, as well as sentiment analysis, taxonomy, classification and entity extractions, according to Hughes. “The strategy of combining structured and unstructured data will become more important,” he tells me.

Read the rest of the article here: http://www.mediapost.com/publications/?fa=Articles.showArticle&art_aid=121505

By Robin Wauters

From TechCrunch.com 

Integrated marketing services provider Alteriantoday released the results of their seventh annual survey on social media marketing adoption.

The survey covered 1068 marketing professionals worldwide (actually, it was 98% North America and Europe and only 2% Asia Pacific and other regions).

Alterian found that 66 percent of respondents will be investing in social media marketing (SMM) in 2010. Of those, 40 percent said they would be shifting more than a fifth of their traditional direct marketing budget towards funding their SMM activities.

Read the article here: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/01/21/AR2010012101040.html

By JOSEPH SZCZESNY
Of The Oakland Press

The delivery of exceptional customer service is at the heart of the effort to rebuild General Motors Corp.’s reputation and image.

“GM, of course, is a dramatically different company than we were a year ago. And while we still have a long way to go to get to where we need to be, we’re making rapid progress in building a new company from scratch,” Mark Reuss, president of GM North America, told an audience at the Automotive News World Congress.

“Within the company, we’re simplifying the way we operate. We’re focusing on fundamentals,” he said. “Our new vision for GM is to design, build and sell the world’s best vehicles, and everything we do as individual employees and as a company is being re-evaluated now on its ability to support this simple vision.

“There was a time when GM did a great job being all things to all people, when we had a U.S. market share of 50 percent. We made refrigerators and locomotives and aircraft engines. Then, the U.S. government was concerned that we were taking over instead of going under,” Reuss said. “Well those days are gone, and that company is gone.”

However, GM has an opportunity to rebuild by doing something it hasn’t done in a long time — listening to customers and asking them what GM has to do earn their business, he said.

Read the rest of the article here:

http://www.theoaklandpress.com/articles/2010/01/14/business/doc4b4ef873858af426530835.txt

Google simply doesn’t have the kind of customer support that mobile-phone users are accustomed to.

Tom Kaneshige, CIO.com From PCworld.com

Google’s comeuppance is at hand, as two of the most innovative Silicon Valley companies face off. I’m betting the veteran Apple iPhone clobbers newcomer Google Nexus One in the early rounds.

It won’t come down to cooler technology, nor better battery life. Wireless carriers? Nope, despite a great many iPhone owners and wannabe owners begging for Apple to end its exclusivity deal with AT&T. Google’s arrogance will lead to its downfall.

For whatever reason, Google is selling Nexus One directly to end-users. That means many users are turning to it first, reports IDG News Service, and the search giant doesn’t have the kind of customer support that mobile-phone users are accustomed to.

Wireless carrier T-Mobile lacks Nexus One support documents and refers people back to Google, according to a customer going by the name of Roland78. IDG News Service also reports that Google appears to be only accepting email customer queries and pledges to reply in one or two days.

Among consumers, that’s not going to cut it.

Read the rest of the article here:

http://www.pcworld.com/article/186847/customer_service_will_be_nexus_ones_achilles_heel.html

Jan 13, 2010

Elena Malykhina from Marketing Daily

Barnes & Noble is the No. 1 brand when it comes to customer experience, according to a survey released this week by Forrester Research.

Forrester asked more than 4,600 U.S. consumers about their interactions with companies across various industries as part of the “Customer Experience Index, 2010.” Participants rated the usefulness, ease of use, and enjoyability of their experiences. Forrester calculated the results for 133 companies in 14 different industries and found that retailers, hotels, and
parcel shipping firms ranked the highest for all categories, while health insurance plans, TV service providers, and Internet service providers ranked the lowest.

The second and third highest-rated companies behind Barnes & Noble were Marriott Hotels & Resorts, and Hampton Inn/Suites, respectively. Amazon.com and Holiday Inn Express rounded out the top 5. On the other hand, Charter Communications, United Healthcare, and Citigroup, among others, were at the bottom of the list.

“If you step back and look, a lot of the industries at the bottom haven’t had the need for competition in terms of consumers—including health insurance providers who traditionally competed for employees. Other organizations just haven’t grown up in terms of being customer-centric,” said Forrester analyst Bruce Temkin, who worked on the survey.

According to Forrester, only 13 firms had an “excellent” customer experience rating; 35 received a “good” rating, 40 got “okay” ratings, and 45 received either a “poor” or “very poor” rating. (See the complete survey results here.)

Read entire article here – http://www.brandweek.com/bw/content_display/news-and-features/direct/e3i5b45383f2cd3f8b3848cb4869a779206