Every day on the crowdSPRING Twitter account and on my own Twitter account, I post links to posts or videos I enjoyed reading or viewing. These posts and videos are about logo design, web design, startups, entrepreneurship, small business, leadership, social media, marketing, and more! Here are some of the links that I’ve liked and shared this past week!
The video above shows Australian Magician James Galea performing an unbelievable magic trick with a deck of cards. How does he do that?
Every day on the crowdSPRING Twitter account and on my own Twitter account, I post links to posts or videos I enjoyed reading or viewing. These posts and videos are about logo design, web design, startups, entrepreneurship, small business, leadership, social media, marketing, and more! Here are some of the links that I’ve liked and shared this past week!
The image to the left is a fun look at what a movie poster for an Oscar-nominated film would be like if it literally wanted to communicate what the movie was about. More fun posters in the Other section below.
Every day on the crowdSPRING Twitter account and on my own Twitter account, I post links to posts or videos I enjoyed reading or viewing. These posts and videos are about logo design, web design, startups, entrepreneurship, small business, leadership, social media, marketing, and more! Here are some of the links that I’ve liked and shared this past week!
The video above is a new Super Bowl commercial from Honda, featuring Matthew Broderick and reminding us how much we loved Ferris Bueller’s Day Off.
What Zappos Can Teach You About Becoming Irresistible to Customers – http://t.co/3UxbuL0b
Gamification: The buzzword that can ruin your apps and business – http://t.co/bdsJOO6q
Every day on the crowdSPRING Twitter account and on my own Twitter account, I post links to posts or videos I enjoyed reading or viewing. These posts and videos are about logo design, web design, startups, entrepreneurship, small business, leadership, social media, marketing, and more! Here are some of the links that I’ve liked and shared this past week!
The image above is a fun look at bottled water from Apple – if Apple made bottled water. That post, and other interesting posts are in the “Other” section below.
Crowdsourcing: a 7+7 Primer (tips for businesses on leveraging crowdsourcing) - http://bit.ly/wxqtb5
Starting a new biz with a friend? Good interview with @mike_samson about biz w/ friends – http://bit.ly/wBFfBv
Women Small Business Owners – America’s New job Creators [infographic] – http://t.co/74nUB76D
crowdSPRING’s Small Business Spotlight of the Week: Studyers -http://bit.ly/wy7Qty
crowdSPRING’s Small Business Spotlight of the Week: Twittapolls – http://t.co/aFHWJTmq
So, we all know that social media is this thing that we’re supposed to use to promote our businesses. There are a billion articles telling small business owners that this is REALLY IMPORTANT and NECESSARY and VITAL, or else we should go crawl into an analog, Web 1.0 hole and end it. This is mostly for good reason. After all, it makes it relatively easy for your company to interact directly with customers and for said customers to submit feedback and suggestions. However, organizing this feedback can prove to be quite the challenge.
Twittapolls is a service does just that: organizes the feedback you gather from social media sites. It’s simple to use, too, all you have to do is launch a poll, the service immediately promotes it on Facebook and Twitter, and then gathers the results to view and share in an easy and compatible format.
Below, Dave shares a lot of insight on starting a small business, especially one in such a popular medium:
How would you explain what you do to somebody’s grandmother?
(assuming everyone’s grandmother is as smart as mine….)
Granny, you see there are FREE services on the Internet called ‘Twitter’ and ‘Facebook’. They enable people to share personal opinion quickly in short messages using your computer and/or phone. They are very popular, and are in fact used globally….
However, while expressing opinion is easy, it is NOT easy to collect opinions and organize them. We created a service called “Twittapolls” (twitt-a-polls) to make that possible. Users can simply launch a poll, and automatically promote and share it using their existing Twitter and/or Facebook account. Results are collected automatically and are available immediately for everyone to view and share.
It was designed for use by Radio and TV stations to connect with their audiences, but is also used by individuals around the world. Oh, and we make money by providing the service and selling poll sponsorships (e.g. This poll sponsored by…).
What are some industry specific challenges you faced?
Getting people to re-think their own views of “success” in social media.
We honestly think the number of followers is completely irrelevant in the grand scheme of things. In our view it is about the “passion” of your crowd; specifically, what percentage (%) of your friends/followers are actually participating, passing it on, and how often, and what is the trend? Twittapolls is the perfect measuring stick for that “passion” because it captures feedback and opinion by using polls using your Twitter and Facebook accounts – measuring your crowd’s responsiveness and engagement to your brand/account.
What was your biggest learning curve/experience?
Awareness is HARD to get in social media – there I said it… If you are not offering something obvious, cool, easy to use and works… you are not going anywhere fast. (more…)
Every day on the crowdSPRING Twitter account and on my own Twitter account, I post links to posts or videos I enjoyed reading or viewing. These posts and videos are about logo design, web design, startups, entrepreneurship, small business, leadership, social media, marketing, and more! Here are some of the links that I’ve liked and shared this past week!
The video above contains 160 of the best one liners from Arnold Schwarzenegger movies. That post, and other interesting posts are in the “Other” section below.
Every day on the crowdSPRING Twitter account and on my own Twitter account, I post links to posts or videos I enjoyed reading or viewing. These posts and videos are about logo design, web design, startups, entrepreneurship, small business, leadership, social media, marketing, and more! Here are some of the links that I’ve liked and shared this past week!
The image above is taken in Takotna, Alaska during the Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race on March 9, 2011. The green in the sky is the aurora borealis. More phenomenal photos from 2011 are in the Other section below.
10 New Years Resolutions For Small Businesses and Startups – http://bit.ly/t7wmEP
Every day on the crowdSPRING Twitter account and on my own Twitter account, I post links to posts or videos I enjoyed reading or viewing. These posts and videos are about logo design, web design, startups, entrepreneurship, small business, leadership, social media, marketing, and more! Here are some of the links that I’ve liked and shared this past week!
The video above is “Resolution”, performed by the John Coltrane Quartet (featuring McCoy Tyner, Elvin Jones, Jimmy Garrison and John Coltrane). This video was captured in 1965.
I have written several times about customer service and how important it is for small businesses and startups to deliver it effectively. Great customer service is about several things: accuracy, honesty, fairness, efficiency, and – perhaps most important of all – speed of delivery. How many times have you sat on the phone listening to bad music and marketing messages while you wait for an agent to answer your question? How many times have you sent an email request and waited… and waited… and waited… sometimes for days just to get an answer to a simple query?
Two key indicators of customer service speed are what we refer to as “assign-time,” or the number of hours or minutes it takes for an agent to receive a request, and “solve-time,” which is the length of time it takes to resolve a support request. It took us several months in the beginning to figure it out, but at crowdSPRING we are proud of the fact that we have been able to successfully reduce the time it takes to respond to a request, and the time it takes us to both assign a support request and find a resolution for the customer. The chart at the left show how we have been able to reduce these key times, in the face of significant growth is user requests.
Your customer service structure should be built to deliver that speed and this means designing support systems with three things in mind: contact methods, support cycles, and capacity planning.
1. Contact methods
Contact methods should be designed so that your customers can contact you the way they want to. Email, phone, social media, and chat are the most common methods of contact; our surveys show that the vast majority of our users prefer to contact us by email, but many still like the phone and more and more contact us via Twitter, Facebook, and Google+ to request help. Make the contact methods as easy to access as possible – every page on your site should have a ‘contact us’ link, your phone number should be as visible as possible and should clearly indicate what the phone support hours are, your social media accounts should also be displayed prominently so users can easily click through to Facebook or Twitter. Of critical importance is how you route these touchpoints; I recommend that you have a central repository for support contacts and many of the leading support and help desk software packages allow you to do this. Keep a log of calls, organize email or tickets by groups or agent, funnel your SM requests into your help software to create tickets there and forward miscellaneous email contacts into your help desk where you can track time and performance data.
2. Support cycles
Support cycles are simply the days of the week and the times of day that customers are likely to want help. Look closely at your own data to understand when customers want support. For instance if you find that 50% of all requests come into your customer service team between the hours of 10am and 3pm, then make sure you have enough agents working during those hours to handle the additional volume. The same goes for days of the week: if you know that Monday-Wednesday are your busiest days for support requests, then be sure that your agent’s schedules reflect the volume.
3. Capacity planning
Capacity management is crucial to providing high-quality and speedy support to your customers. Look closely at trends and plan for increases and growth. The time to hire and train a new customer service agent is not after you are swamped but rather when your data indicates that you will need the extra capacity in the future. For instance, if it will take you 3 months to fully train a new agent, means that you want to hire that person three months before the next crunch. The same goes for day-to-day planning – if your data tells you that weekends do not see the same volume of requests as on a weekday, plan for lighter coverage on those days. If on the other hand weekends are a busy time for you and your customers demand support on Saturday and Sunday, then the answer is simple – staff up!
Every day on the crowdSPRING Twitter account and on my own Twitter account, I post links to posts or videos I enjoyed reading or viewing. These posts and videos are about logo design, web design, startups, entrepreneurship, small business, leadership, social media, marketing, and more! Here are some of the links that I’ve liked and shared this past week!
The image above is an for Red Bull. More fun ads in the Social Media & Marketing section below.
crowdSPRING is the world's #1 marketplace for entrepreneurs, small businesses, nonprofits and agencies who need custom logo design, web design, a new company name or other writing and design services. Over 110,000 designers and writers work on crowdSPRING. We are trusted by more than 27,000 happy clients around the world.
