If Social Media is so important,  then why I am I recommending that your company ban Facebook?

Facebook now has 350 million active users around the globe – that’s an increase of 40% in just six months .  Of these users at least 175 million log on every single day, and they’re posting more content to the site than ever before.  So it may seem inevitable that your company will jump on the Facebook bandwagon and let your staff post away.

But is allowing access to Facebook really the best thing for your business?  Let’s look at the facts:

Facebook Wastes Staff Time

Statistics suggest that a large proportion of Internet use in the office is for personal business.  And – even more shocking – that two-thirds of traffic to porn sites happens during office hours.  I’m not suggesting that Facebook is a hotbed of pornographic activity, just that Facebook is not appropriate use of company time.

If your staff are updating their status, tagging themselves in photos and leaving posts on their friend’s’ walls they are wasting your time and your company’s money.  And, if you allow access to Facebook for business use how can you tell the difference between genuine business activity and time wasting?

Facebook Strains Your Internet Connection

Research shows that a massive 50MB of bandwidth a day could be wasted on non-work activities.  That means you’ll be paying significantly more than you need to for you internet connection.  And any business that you do conduct online will be slowed down by the loss of bandwidth.

Not only are you throwing money down the drain but you are putting more strain on your IT department by letting staff use Facebook.

Facebook Could Ruin Your Reputation

Your previously immaculate reputation could go down in flames very quickly indeed from just a few careless Facebook remarks.

Virgin Atlantic employees are calling their customers Chavs, and say the airplanes are full of cockroaches.

More than 8,000 Vodafone customers received an obsene tweet sent out by an employee based in local Stoke, and hundreds replied thus propogating the message over social space.  Vodafone has had to do some serious grovelling to get out of hot water.  And more importantly, they have had to suspend the employee.

If you allow your staff onto Facebook – and they can mix business and pleasure while they are there – it’s only a matter of time before the headlines read “Facebook Disaster for [insert your company name here]”.

Facebook Could Land You In Legal Hot Water

While the Vodafone case is a story of a stupid joke gone horribly wrong it does show how easy it is to mess up.  Your company has a responsibility to keep your client’s private data private, and all it takes is a slip of a click for someone to accidentally broadcast confidential information to the world.

Not only could this be potentially damaging to you, your client and your respective reputations, but it could also put you in hot water legally.
And that’s without considering the damage a disgruntled employee could do all with the help of Facebook.

Facebook Could Get You Sued

One of Facebook’s best features is how easy it is to share content with other users – but this content isn’t always be appropriate for the office.  And, if an employee is offended or intimidated by the content their colleague is sharing via Facebook, your company could be landed with a lawsuit.

The easiest way to avoid the potentially unlimited payouts from a discrimination claim?  Block employees access to Facebook and other similar file sharing services.

So when you consider the additional costs to your company and potential damage to your reputation, can you really afford not to ban Facebook?

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Katie Saxon

I am trying out a new free customer feedback service that provides an independent, unedited source of evaluations from my customers.  I can display this feedback on my website, helping to build business trust and credibility as part of my marketing strategy. And of course it provides a valuable feedback loop as part of my process of continuous improvement of the business.

Feefo is a  customer feedback tool being used by household names like the BBC and Charles Tyrwhitt, as well as number of small businesses ranging from retailers to service providers.

The customer review process is quite simple:  I provide Feefo with all the email addresses of my customers and details of what they bought.  Feefo invites them to provide comments that will be published, unedited, on the Internet.  I have undertaken to give Feefo all my customer addresses (not just those who I think will say nice things!) and also understand that whatever the customer says, good or bad, will appear in my reviews. And finally, I do have the ability to reply to comments as appropriate.

Best of all, Feefo keeps the evaluation process short and sweet, with just two questions:  provide a rating of your product and give a comment.  Keeping it simple seems to work well.

It is a British company, and they have been very helpful in providing support when it was needed.  I think there are some areas that still need refining, for instance the icons aren’t particularly intuitive, and the reporting is a bit ropey, but I have the impression they are open to suggestions and constructive feedback.

The first question is an open ended box to write in comments. I have used Feefo’s very simple editor to write the introductory text:

Feefo can take automatic notifications of the details of your sales direct from your website, in much the same way you send details of your sales to your credit card payment processing provider.  Alternatively, you an upload the details of your sales by creating a simple file using a spreadsheet.

It is a free service, provided you only need 100 feedbacks per month. If you require more feedbacks, or want to customise the service, then they provide the Pro version.

Be sure to take a look at my article discussing the value of customer reviews as part of your Internet marketing strategy.

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My top 5 Internet Marketing tips for fighting the credit crunch.

The economy may be turning ugly, but the Internet offers small businesses opportunities to survive, and even thrive, during this recession we are all calling the credit crunch.

Businesses are looking more carefully at budgets, making sure we can squeeze every penny of profit out of our investments, and looking for the most cost effective ways of delivering our products and services.

And our customers are doing the same:  but they are still spending money.  They may be spending less, but we need to figure out what they’re spending their money on.  And they don’t want to risk wasting a penny.  They want to buy the right products, from companies they can trust.

And our customers’ use of the Internet will continue to grow – after all, it is free.

Marketing budgets may appear to be a soft target for businesses looking to make budget cuts.

But canny business owners will be taking advantage of the opportunities the Internet has to offer.

Here are my top 5 top Internet marketing tips for fight the credit crunch:

1.  Work Smart to Retain your Existing Customer Base

Out of sight means out of mind.  You need to keep in touch with your customers or you risk losing them.  And it is always cheaper to retain an existing customer than acquire a new one.

• Email marketing is the cheapest, easiest, and most effective way keeping in touch with your customers.  I’m not talking spam, and I’m not talking about marketing to get new customers.  You need to be sending out personalised, targeted messages to existing customers who want to hear your news.  And well crafted email messages make sales.

• Blogs are another free and easy way to publish information anbd keep in touch with your clients.  I am of the personal opinion that the majority of the UK population doesn’t know what to do with an RSS feed, but they sure know how to read blogs.

• Getting Social means engaging in conversations with your customers.  Qype, Facebook, Twitter:  these are places where you customers are reviewing your products, discussing their purchasing decisions, exchanging views on your business.  Use these tools to listen to your customers, hear what they’re talking about, learn more about your market.  And remember it isn’t about advertising, your contributions ot the conversation need to be valuable and appropriate

2.  Get Even More Visible in Front of Your Potential Clients

You have to get visitors to your website to make the sales.  And one of the best times to get found by potential clients is when they’re searching for what you’re selling.  You need to get found on the Internet, which means Google, but also means a range of other places on the Internet that your customers visit.

Spending on online marketing is continuing to grow, competition is getting more intense, and as a result it is becoming more expensive.

Now is the time to review which of the visibility tools are going to give you the best return on your investment.  Put together your plan of action for building your visibility on the Internet.

Your Tools Checklist:

• Search engine optimisation, pay per click advertising, banner advertising, classified advertising, online press releases, affiliate marketing, videos, sponsorship programmes

3.  Make Your Business Transparently Trustworthy

You an do all the advertising you want, but consumers trust each other more than they trust your carefully crafted marketing messages.  I have previously written about the importance of customer reviews in building trust.

If you’re selling business to business, then recommendations from colleagues, friends, accountants, and business advisers all have the greatest impact on building trust.

• Case studies and positive stories about your business form an essential part of the content on your website

• Plain speaking in the words you write may look easy, but it takes time and effort to write well.  Make your web copy and email messages sound genuine, and not hollow marketing drivel.

• Cultivate customer reviews.   Sites like Google Local Business Centre, TouchLocal and Qype are platforms for customer reviews and ratings.  I know businesses are scared of negative reviews, but remember even bad reviews contribute to the sense of honesty and trustworthiness.  Keep an eye on your reviews, and listen to what your customers have to say.

4. Measure, Measure, Measure

If you don’t measure, then you can’t manage.  And if you’re not managing, then you could be pouring money down the drain.

Measuring means accountability for your marketing spend.  You need to be measuring against your success criteria.  You may want to measure sales, or email enquiries, or phone calls, or visits to your website.

• You may be using low-tech ways of measuring, like a clipboard near the telephone, and making a tick every time a person says they found you on Google.

• You might be using a dedicated telephone number that is associated with your Internet marketing activities, and when that phone rings you know the web is working for you.

• Or you might be using a web statistics package like Google Analytics, and set up your Goals and Conversion Tracking to see who well your website is performing.

If marketing budgets are tight, then knowing what works makes it easier to make the decisions of where to invest your cash.

5. Test, Learn, Test

And finally, there is no one size fits all answer to the Internet marketing puzzle.

You need to try something new, experiment with a technology or technique you haven’t used before.  Measure your success, and learn from the experiment.

• Experiments should be quick, cheap, and easy to deliver.

• If it works, then well done, and more of the same, please.

• And if it doesn’t work so well, then kill the experiment and move on.  No harm done.  Be quick and be ruthless.  You will have tested something, learned from it, and moving on to test something new.

Have you found this article useful?

Why not contribute to the conversation by adding a comment, or bookmarking the site using your Social bookmarks.

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Customer reviews of your products and services can help to build credibility and engender trust with potential clients. Reviews can also increase the number of visitors converting to buyers on your site, and positive reviews can increase the price that clients are willing to pay.

Customers reviews form just one part of the huge wave of User Generated Content (UGC) comprising opinions, advice and commentary on the web. Reviews are found in blogs, discussion groups and forums, and social networking sites.

Small businesses are not paying enough attention to the value customer reviews can bring to their company websites and search engine rankings.

In my experience one of the biggest barriers to businesses implementing customer reviews is the fear of negative comment. Take a look at this article discussing how even negative reviews can benefit your business.

According to a global Nielsen survey of 26,486 Internet users in 47 markets, consumer recommendations are the most credible form of advertising among 78% of the study’s respondents.

Customer reviews and user generated content also plays an important role in your search engine optimisation strategy: 26% of search results link to user-generated content. (Nielsen BuzzMetrics)

And the Google search results includes local results Google Maps data displaying the number of customers reviews in the search result for any type of business:

Google Maps allows customers to write reviews about your business directly and then publishes the reviews immediately. Remember you must be logged into a Google account to write reviews.

Take a look at this comprehensive overview of how Google Review works.

Google trawls hundreds of different websites for reviews hotels, restaurants and the like, but for non-tourism and non-leisure businesses I found TouchLocal.com to be the primary source of UK business reviews that Google displays, aside from the reviews entered directly into Google Maps.

Update:  27 January 2009:  I am piloting the use of the Feefo free customer review and feedback service:

Listen to the automatic text-to-speech conversion of this blog posting here (1 Mb MP3 file)

One of the things I love about Britain is Radio 4. It’s great to listen to the news, listen to commentary, or listen to stories.

Sometimes it would be nice if somebody would read aloud to me all the stuff I have to read on my computer screen. I have to read a lot to stay abreast of Internet Marketing developments.

Speech readers used to be pretty rubbish, and I was wondering just how much they have improved in recent years

And so I’ve just tried NaturalReader, a free text to speech software application. It “reads” pages from Internet Explorer, Word documents, Outlook, PDF’s, and lots more.

I was very impressed, to say the least.

There is a free version, but I splashed out for the paid-for version(40 dollars) and got a much more natural sounding voice from a dude called “Paul.”

The software has the additional benefit of being able to convert your own text files into sound (MP3/WAV) files.

I did a little experiment converting this blog posting into an audio file: Listen to the text to speech conversion of this blog posting here (1 Mb MP3 file)

Clearly, it is an automated voice, but it is one I could listen to. The software was idiot proof to install, simple to use, and intuitive.

And many thanks to Andy from Local Conservatory for bringing NaturalReader to my attention.

What can your business learn from the “John and Anne Move to Panama” fiasco?

Well, firstly it didn’t take a rocket scientist to discover the whereabouts of mystery canoeist John Darwin and his wife Anne. Go to Google Images and just type in “john anne panama.” You’ll find them there Number One. Their photo was featured on the MoveToPanama website, and very helpfully including the date the photo was taken.

The photo has now been removed from the website, but the picture will live on. Forever. In Google cache. And on other people’s blogs and websites.

Google Universal Search integrates search results from web pages, photos, video, local information and other resources.

It may have caused John and Anne a bit of bother, but your business should be using this image optimisation to your advantage.

• Create a plan to publish a variety of types of content as part of your search engine optimisation strategy. Photos, videos, podcasts. Be sure to include your keyphrases in the surrounding content, the filenames, descriptions, ALT tags and the like.
• Use keyword research tools to see what your customers are looking for, and generate content the gives them the information they want.
• Monitor the media you put online – Google has a long memory, and you will need to be proud of the images for a long time coming.

Desire lines are those well worn paths that get us to where we really want to go – in sheer defiance of the official paved route.

Blogs gives small businesses an easy way to rapidly adapt web content according your visitors’ desire lines: what they actually want, rather than what we expect them to do.

I attended a presentation by Eileen Brown, Microsoft’s Technology Evangelist, where she applied the idea of desire lines to blogging.

One common sense way to discover your visitors’ “desire lines” is to review your web statistics and analytics. Your analytics can help you to learn about your audience:

• Which of your blog postings or web pages get the most hits from the search engines?
• Which of your recommended links do visitors follow most commonly?
• Which postings or pages hardly ever get viewed?
• What path do users most typically take through your site?
• And by extension, what do they really want?

Accommodating the your visitors “desire lines” in your blog is easily done and will provide satisfaction for those readers who want to go a different way, rather than being led:

• creating the types of content visitors most commonly read
• providing links to other credible sites
• tagging your content to faciliate discovery of related material
• comments from your readers with links to other interesting sites

On the one hand, blogging can be a powerful business tool to push key marketing messages to your readers.

But it can also act as a valuable instrument to learn more about those clients who want deviate off your planned route. Your visitors don’t always want to follow the path (read: navigation) that we lay out for them, and they don’t act the way we expect.

Learn more:

Peter Meholz (who invented the word “blog”) explains Desire Lines

RSS feeds. Wikis. Blogs. Pocasting. Social bookmarking. XML. Webinar. Cookie. Avatar. Web 2.0

How many of these Internet buzzwords can you say you really understand? And how many are you actually using for the benefit of your business?

Or are you irritated by all these Internet buzzwords?

Within Internet marketing, there is still a tendency to talk about the underlying technology, rather than the benefits the technology brings. There is a residue of geekiness that puts normal people off.

And as a result there is resistance on the part of businesses to adopt these new technologies. Business owners don’t understand the jargon, and frankly, they just don’t care.

But when these technologies are demonstrated in a real live working environment, then the penny drops for many business owners. They can see what the technology can actually do for their business.

They understand the benefits.

They may think the word blog sounds vaguely rude, but they are very interested in telling people what’s going on in their business in a cost effective way.

They may not care what Web 2.0 is, but they want to convert more sales on their website.

Internet marketing is still at a stage where the jargon and geekiness is still hindering adoption.

And as a result, so many small businesses are not reaping the rewards of relatively cheap, easy to implement solutions.

I’m going to let you in on a little secret. I’ve re-enabled the Comments facility on this blog.

Once upon a time I allowed comments, but the nasty blog spammers filled it with adverts and horrible self-serving links to their own sites. And so I turned Comments off.

But I have had a number of requests from genuine readers of this blog asking for the ability to contribute to the conversation, and stop it being a one-way stream of verbage from me.

So, comments are back on, but in the interest of protecting my own business and sanity, I’ve resorted to creating my blog comment policy.

• I welcome comments because they are the heart and soul of blogging space. Please feel free to join into the conversation.

• I always delete spam and am forced to moderate your messages by hand because Blogger does not offer a proper anti-spam tool. This means your comments may take some time to appear on the site.

• I reserve the right to edit or delete comments that I consider to be offensive, rude, off-topic, hateful, or using bad language.

• Go ahead and include links in your postings; relevant links improve the conversation and help us all to keep learning.

• Links in comments will not add to your inbound linking campaigns; all links will automagically use the rel="nofollow" tag, so they’ll receive no PageRank boost in an effort to stop blog comment spam

I’ll be working on the layout of the blog to improve comment legibility, and your comments and suggestions for layout would be most welcome.

Why can’t folk in Britain see the cool Google stuff the Americans can see? Since when did we become second-class Googlers?

In the USA they see Google in it’s full glory, with the additional Google OneBox information. OneBox gives you information you need straight away in the search results, without having to click on any links.

London’s weather is better in America:

And they’ve even improved The Tube:

Why haven’t you seen this before, assuming you’re a Brit? If Google thinks you’re foreign, then it tries to redirect you to your local content. And our local UK content ain’t got no OneBox.

Do you want to be an American Googler? Try searching using www.google.com/ncr

‘NCR’ in the link above probably means ‘No country redirect.’ Try it, and you will see some quite surprising differences.

Here are some more examples to make you jealous of Google Yanks:

They make it easier to get from London to Rome:

Google will answer your most important questions:

And there’s even better business data:

No doubt all this functionality will rollout (someday) to our shores, but until then…