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Two years ago Savannah Peterson worked as the head of marketing for a design firm in Silicon Valley. She was introduced to a company making a newfangled photo device. The gadget, called Instacube, ...
Instacube launched a Kickstarter campaign in August of 2012 with the promise of a March 2013 ship date. The Internet fell in love with Instacube, and the device raised nearly three times what it sought. Cut to March of 2014 and not one Instacube has been shipped. Today, at a one-on-one interview at South by Southwest, Peterson told her story....
It worked. Peterson was able to wrangle an article by Engadget, and from there the dominoes fell. Instacube was on CNET, Mashable, and TechCrunch. The campaign had intended to raise $250,000. Within the first 24 hours it had secured more than $100,000. By campaign’s end D2M had raked in $621,049.
Then D2M had to build it. This is where things begin to fall apart. The March 2013 deadline came and went and zero devices had been shipped. Backers, understandably, became impatient....
Back in May, Google announced a partnership agreement with online customer service ratings firm StellaService. The licensing deal is designed to bolster the search giant as the go-to destination for product search. The actual integration has yet to launch, and Google is remaining quiet on any roll-out details.
A Forbes report earlier this week claims Google is planing to launch the Trusted Stores initiative with StellaService this fall.
A launch in time for the holiday shopping season would be ideal. Google has declined to comment on timing, however. The article also says StellaService data will appear alongside Google Trusted Stores’ check marks in search results, but again, Google hasn’t announced what the integration will look like or where ratings will appear....
What do you do when you have a problem with a brand’s product or service?You go online, right?
You’re not alone. Close to six in ten (57 percent) of customers search for a solution online before taking any further action, and they’re increasingly reaching for a brand’s social media outposts. Almost half of social media users (47 percent) have received customer care on a channel such as Twitter or Facebook, and 37 percent now prefer customer service through social media rather than by telephone.
But brands still have work to do. While 80 percent of Twitter users expect a response to a consumer service enquiry within a day, just 40 percent of tweets to the 25 largest online retailers are answered within 24 hours, and many are ignored altogether....
U.S. consumers have fallen out of love with tech giants Apple and Google, according to recent market research by YouGov BrandIndex.The two companies have fallen off the top ten list of best-perceived brands in 2013. Google was listed at number 10 in the second half of 2012, while Apple had already dropped.
However, it doesn't seem to be technology the public has lost interest in: Amazon made two appearances in the list with its Kindle e-reader brand at number nine and Amazon, which took out the top spot for online retailing, came in at number two out of all brands....
With business priorities you manage, how important are online reviews, really, for you? Answer: Very. The stats very clearly show why.... You know generally that reviews are important for your business, and you may even know that they are becoming more imperative every day. But with all the day-to-day business priorities you manage, how important are they, really, for you? Answer: A lot. A great infographic just came out on this topic with some great statistics to share here. Depending on how your reviews currently stack up, some of these numbers are good and some are bad, but all are noteworthy: - 75% of reviews posted on review websites are positive. - 95% of unhappy customers will return to your business if an issue is resolved quickly and efficiently. - 71% agree that consumer reviews make them more comfortable that they are buying the right product/service - 70% of people consult reviews/ratings before purchasing....
An online shirt shop kicked off Amazon for trying to boost its numbers with randomized apparel phrases runs out of cash.... As a company with six employees relying on a computer algorithm to spew out T-shirt catchphrases, you'd think Solid Gold Bomb would have wanted to dedicate some time to eliminating words like "rape" from its list of cleared random phrases. Nope. Just days after Amazon (AMZN +0.11%) shut down Solid Gold Bomb's accounts after it produced shirts with phrases like "Keep Calm and Rape a Lot," company founder Michael Fowler told CNN Money that his company is "dead in the water" as a result. According to Fowler, his company, based in Worcester, Mass., has enough cash to make payroll on Friday and that's about it. Fowler issued an apology on his company's website, but the red flags leading to his company's demise should have been easier to spot than the offensive slogans on the company's shirts. Fowler started producing the “Keep Calm” T-shirts as a parody of the British "Keep Calm and Carry On" propaganda posters from World War II that were embroiled in a copyright dispute both here and in Europe. He decided to “create a large-scale release of parodies (something T-shirt companies often do) and relied on both computer based dictionaries and online educational resources.”...
As social media tears down the walls between brands and consumers—and puts a premium on visibility and engagement—companies are finding that getting their CEOs out in front of online channels is becoming a more essential part of a brand’s business strategy. When public relations firm Weber Shandwick looked at the online activity of CEOs from 50 of the world’s largest companies in 2010, only 36% were considered “social”—meaning they engaged on a company website, appeared in a video on the company YouTube channel or had a public and verifiable social network profile or blog. In 2012, when Weber Shandwick studied the same brands, nearly double that percentage were deemed a “social CEO,” at 66%....
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A new study from social software provider Lithium reveals 53 percent of consumers expect a brand to respond to a tweet within an hour. That number jumps to 72 percent of consumers expecting a response if the tweet is a complaint about the brand or its products.
Lithium commissioned Millward Brown Digital to conduct the study evaluating consumer expectations when interacting with brands on Twitter. Surveying 501 respondents who claimed they actively engaged with businesses on Twitter, the study found a brand’s response time to tweets can significantly impact the brand’s overall reputation.
When asked how quickly a response is expected from a brand on Twitter, 65 percent of the survey participants said they want a response in two hours time or less, with 20 percent expecting a response in 30 minutes or less....
...If you read the profiles of many of the heads of customer service on LinkedIn (or the service areas of their company’s websites), you might be forgiven for concluding that they were almost all focused on the lofty goals of “exceeding customer expectations” and/or “creating customer delight”. Maybe your organisation claims the same.
But ground-breaking recent research by the CEB (the organisation that brought you “The Challenger Sale”) makes a strong case for all this talk of delighting customers being a stupid and – for almost every company on the planet bar a few shining stars – ultimately unprofitable strategy. As anyone who has had cause to phone O2’s customer service line (note: other mobile phone companies offer an equally awful experience) will recognise, I think most of us would be prepared to sacrifice the occasional opportunity to have a truly “wow” experience in return for not ever having to suffer any more of the much more common “doh!’ experiences....
It’s now more evident than ever that CEOs who don’t engage in social media, may as well be conducting their business in a cave....
...CEOs and their executives ride shotgun in setting the cultural tone of the organization. Simply put, participation in social media promotes the use of social technology, which can only increase its competitive edge in adapting to technological market changes. Having a transparent and open organizational culture is imperative in establishing an effective social media strategy; it gives everyone a clear and common focus to tailor to the needs of the social consumer – a fact that escapes a lot of today’s CEOs.
BrandFog 2012 CEO Survey concerned this exact topic and reproduced some baffling results: - 82% of respondents were said to be more likely to trust a company whose CEO actively engages on Social Media. - 77% of respondents were recorded to be more likely to buy from a company whose mission and values are defined through their leaderships’ involvement in Social Media....
An anonymous startup founder has created a Tumblr blog called "My Startup has 30 Days to Live."We found the blog thanks to a tweet from Monty Munford.On the site, the startup founder says : "Through a series of unfortunate events, I took a bootstrapped (and profitable) startup onto the VC rocket ship. Now it's crashing into the ground. Hard."...
Too many business owners throw their hands up and give up on reviews. It’s personal and it’s painful to read how someone misinterpreted and mis-characterized your service, product, or business. But, the absolutely dead wrong response is to walk away.... We spend a lot of time writing about reviews and thinking about how we can make review management easier for our customers. Every new piece of research we read, every anecdote we hear, and every personal experience we have all point to the value of managing reviews. Too many business owners throw their hands up and give up on reviews. We get it. It’s personal and it’s painful to read how someone misinterpreted and mis-characterized your service, product, or business. But, the absolutely dead wrong response is to walk away. Out of your sight may mean out of your mind, but the research continues to point to the fact that it is still top of your mind for your prospective customers. The folks over at PeopleClaim have done some research and put together the following infographic to help visually explain the impact of reviews on people’s decision making processes. It’s chalk full of statistics and it’s a quick (visual) read. Here are some our favorite statistics...
Which CEO has the most influence when it comes to social media? Warren Buffett? Nope. Michael Dell? Not a bad guess, I suppose. Twitter’s Dick Costolo? He’s up there. AOL’s Steve Case? Good try. Richard Branson? You’re getting warmer. Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg? According to this study, he doesn’t even make the top fifty. Yes indeed. According to the Reuters & Klout 50, which measures the most influential executives online, it’s Oprah Winfrey who ranks as the most influential social CEO, ahead of Rupert Murdoch, Richard Branson, Mark Cuban and Tim O’Reilly. Twitter co-founder (and now Square CEO) Jack Dorsey placed in fifth, while Twitter CEO Dick Costolo was fourteenth. Check out the incredibly well-designed infographic below for your top forty....
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A cautionary technology tale.