SEO Werkt!

This is a super clever way to use the potential power of social media for something good. Something truly good. I hope the Natalia Project gains worldwide recognition and wins a Nobel Prize.
The objective of the Natalia Project is to provide human rights defenders at risk with a personal assault alarm in the shape of a heavy-duty wristband.  It allows the bearer to send out a distress signal in case he or she gets into trouble. That signal triggers a series of events that all aim to alert key contacts and as many people as possible though Facebook and Twitter.

Because, as the Civil Rights Defenders organization puts it, if there’s one thing that regimes and dictatorship want to avoid it’s international attention. Just the fact that the whole world could potentially be aware of an attack instantly creates virtual protection around civil rights defenders at risk.

The Natalia Project is named after Russian human rights defender Natalia Estimerova who was abducted and murdered in 2009.  It actually started as a school project but is now in production with the first 10 Civil Rights Defenders having received their personal alarm. Creators are Hyper Island students: Daniel Rørbæk, Anders Sjönvall, Mathias Normark, Tobias Snall & August Segerholm.

Please support the Natalia Project: http://www.facebook.com/NataliaProject

It can easily tarnish a brand’s identity when a user brings his or her complain on the social media. But it also goes the same for reaping compliments for your customers. In order to take advantage of social media for your business, it is best that you know how you can properly integrate it to your customer support service

Means of Communication Between You and Your Fans

It may be counterintuitive for your campaign to let users post complains on your page, but it is more ideal than letting them rant elsewhere. You can easily respond to your customers’ issues if you let them post on your page. If you do it right, you can turn their opinions around because of your superb customer service. Just remember to open the floor for complaints with a concrete plan on how you would handle them.

Bring Your Existing Fans to Your Page

Using you current means of reaching out to your customers, bring your existing fans to your social media profiles. Run a contest or a promotion on your Facebook, and include it on your product’s packaging, newsletter, or email. After all, they already “like” your brand in real life.

Connect with Your Customers

People uses social media to connect and be heard. Interact with users who talk about your brand, whether it’s a compliment or complaint. Don’t wait for someone to post on your wall or mention you in his or her tweet. Make them happy by listening to what they have to say.

Give Your Brand Ambassadors a Bonus

Always keep on searching for your brands, and think of ways on how you can rewards them. Turn them into advocates of your products by making them feel special. It can be as simple as pitching new or upcoming products, giving them a free sample, or giving them an office tour.

 Share Compelling Content

It will be difficult for your brand to engage your customers through social media if you don’t have anything special to say. That’s why use your online platform to share useful and relevant content to your customers. Every brand can—and should—create and share quality content.

Be Dynamic

Other than texts, you can also share content in other media form such as images or videos to make it more engaging. Moreover, encourage your customers to participate and share contents on your page. That way, you are making your online presence sound and look human, and your interaction with your precious clients is more personal.

Using various social media for your business can impact your brand big time. So use it to its full extent, but don’t forget to learn how you can handle it properly.

Source: Social Media Magazine by Thomas Hendele | Flickr

The post Taking Advantage of Social Media for Customer Service appeared first on About Social Media.

Delivered-to-the-door subscription services are a popular way for consumers to try out a curated selection of products they might not otherwise have come across, and we’ev already seen this model is especially prevalent in the food industry – with startups offering gourmet food for men, organic baby food and high quality coffee on demand. Offering a new twist on the concept, GothamBox is sending out location-inspired foods enabling those living elsewhere to enjoy the cuisine of a particular city.

As part of a monthly ritual to help her son feel at home after moving from the West to the East Coast, the mother of co-founder Jonathan Chim sent a parcel of food to remind him of his hometown. Based on this idea, the aim of GothamBox is to provide people who have moved away from a location to carry on enjoying its unique culinary treats, or for those who have never been to get a first taste. Subscribers to the service can sign up to receive a monthly parcel of assorted foods – from coffee and biscuits to ingredients for entire meals. GothamBox has teamed up with small brands from each location – currently New York and San Francisco – to offer a sample of products unavailable elsewhere. A subscription costs USD 20 per month and the company offers free shipping. What’s more, for each member who joins the service, GothamBox donates a meal to hunger relief charities operating in their city of choice.

It seems the subscription model is still going strong across multiple industries and formats. Are there any areas left untouched?

Website: www.gothambox.com
Contact: info@gothambox.com

Spotted by: Murray Orange

Wetenschappelijk onderzoek is (uitzonderingen daargelaten) een betrouwbare basis voor het algemene kennisniveau. Het is met name erg waardevol wanneer het aansluit bij de praktijk, en nog beter wanneer het hierop vooruitloopt (in deze categorie behoort bv. Duncan Watts). Helaas moeten we constateren dat het (Nederlandse) onderwijs, zowel HBO als universitair, achterloopt op het gebied van online. Iets wat ik zelf ook heb ervaren toen ik op social metrics afstudeerde aan de Radboud Universiteit. Het is dan ook erg goed om te zien dat het Radboud de lead heeft opgepakt het kennisniveau van online customer service marketing naar een hoger niveau te tillen. Hiertoe organiseerde het onlangs de Thought Leadership Conference Service marketing, en ik was erbij. Lees meer over: Thought Leadership Conference: Service marketing door de ogen van de wetenschap.

Dropbox is an awesome service. You can back your files up to the cloud, sync them between computers, and share them with your friends. That’s not all it can do, though. Here are our top 10 favorite clever uses for our favorite file syncing program. More »

In response to reports from iDevice owners complaining of problems connecting to Google’s Gmail service, the company issued a statement on Friday notifying users the issue is under investigation and a fix is in the works.

If you’re in the market for an iPhone 4 or 4S, you can get the service of Apple Retail with the prices of Target and Best Buy just by mentioning it to a salesperson. More »

Hey, how you doing? You’re really pretty in that dress and those shoes. Are those shoes new? No? Could have fooled me. Sit down a minute. I just want to look at you. Did you see that fight outside? Totally two guys hitting each other over some girl. Would you ever let guys fight over you? I would.

Do you know I paint? You should sit for me.

So there’s this new thing, MySecretLuxury.com. It’s totally legit. It was founded by Stacy Rybchin, a really foxy lady who is part of an e-commerce incubator. Smart is sexy. I know.

So they’ve got this site. Totally sexy. Totally angel backed. So Stacy, who I can totally introduce you to, built a subscription and concierge service for your lady parts. Totally sexy. The concierge service is totally cool. You set up these totally sexy experiences for each other. Like this one:

I know, right? You like books, right? I do, too. Totally read like a Mötley Crüe biography a few years ago. Totally read that book about Jenna Jameson. Anyway, that 50 shades thing is a book.

You also can sign up for special subscriptions that range from $500 to $5,000. That gets you toys like once a month. Totally sexy. Why sex toys? Why now?

Stacy totally told me about that in an email. “In the past three years (during a worldwide economic slump), sales of sex toys have reached an all-time high with manufacturers of ben-wah balls reporting a 300% increase in sales and manufactures and distributors of bondage tools reporting a 40% spike in sales,” she said. Recession is sexy. I know, right?

“These compelling numbers and proprietary research conducted by Denslow along with the obvious gap in the marketplace for luxury goods and a guide to help navigate the pleasure product market began the journey to develop MySecretLuxury.com, a site where people could expect high quality, sophisticated design and upscale products delivered with impeccable customer service.” So sexy. Totally.

You’ve got lots of sex toy operators out there, but do you know any as classy as this one? I know, right? Totally. Maybe JimmyJane but do they sell a $15,000 gold-plated dildo? No. They don’t.

Totally sexy, right? So can we get out of here? I can totally set you up with a 50 Shades box if you want. Really? Where, over there? Oh, cool. Totally. Can I have your number?

Yeah, totally understandable. I lost my phone, too. Later, beautiful. Later.

Terms of Service and Privacy Policy agreements are next to impossible to read in their entirety. Most of us agree to them and then get upset when something goes wrong down the line. Terms of Service; Didn’t Read is a new service that offers a quick rating of the Terms of Service and Privacy Policies of most major web services. More »

Dave Girouard, the former president of Google Enterprise, has struck out on his own with a new startup called Upstart, which offers crowdfunding and mentorship tools to help college graduates pursue (in his words) “a more entrepreneurial path.”

Girouard argues that there’s currently a “misallocation of capital in our economy” — the fact that large companies spend lots of money to recruit and hire college graduates, yet given their lack of traditional credit history, the graduates themselves “couldn’t raise $30,000 if their life depended on it.” Usually, of course, their life doesn’t depend on it, but that kind of money could help people pursue their big ambitions and dreams, rather than settling for a corporate job that they’re not that excited about.

With Upstart, people can raise personal funding (the company’s website declares, “The startup is you“) in exchange for a share of their future earnings. After they sign up, students create a profile with their achievements and goals, verify their academic credentials, then identify how much money they want to raise. With that data, Upstart calculates how much of their income they’ll need to share with investors in order to raise that funding. (Girouard notes that some college graduates are going to be better bets to earn more money, so they’ll need to commit a smaller percentage of their income.) Then investors can commit to backing a graduate for an amount of their choice, in increments of $1,000.

The payments are made on a monthly basis, and are verified based on annual tax returns. The maximum amount of your income that you can commit is 7 percent, and you don’t have to pay for years where you make less than $30,000.

Girouard argues that this approach is particularly suited for the entrepreneurial lifestyle, where your income is likely to be “lumpy and inconsistent.” The payment size varies based on how much you’re making, so if you have a lean year, hopefully you don’t have to worry about how you’re going to be able to afford your payment. On the other hand, in the years when that hard work pays off in a big financial reward, your backers will benefit too. And if you become the next Mark Zuckerberg, that doesn’t mean you’re going to be writing insanely large checks to those investors — the payments are capped at a 14.99 percent annual return.

It’s not just about the financial backing, either. The point is to connect students with people who will provide mentorship as well as money — indeed, they’ll be particularly motivated to provide that mentorship thanks to the financial incentive. (Girouard also suggests that as with many early Kickstarter projects, participants will raise a lot of the money from people they already know.) This emphasis on connecting students with mentors is, Girouard says, a big part of what sets Upstart apart from other “income-based repayment” efforts like Thrust Fund.

Another question is whether people really need more incentive to become entrepreneurs — if anything, I’m hearing complaints from investors and entrepreneurs that it’s too easy to start a company nowadays, leading to startups that aren’t driven by big ideas. (That also makes the general recruiting landscape more difficult, which is a big source of those complaints.) Girouard says that may be true in Silicon Valley, where graduates of Stanford and other schools have access to “a lot more options and capital,” but he says the area is just “a very narrow slice of the country.”

Upstart should help fund a much broader range of efforts than just your run-of-the-mill tech startups. For example, Girouard notes that one of the schools participating in the pilot program is the Rhode Island School of Design, where graduates might want to start their own small design shops rather than going to work for someone else. Upstart funding will also be available at Arizona State University, Dartmouth College, University of Michigan, and University of Washington this fall.

The company has raised a $1.75 million seed round of funding from Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, NEA, Google Ventures, First Round Capital, Crunchfund, and Dallas Maverick’s owner Mark Cuban.