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Real Time Status for Your Business with GeckoBoard
Feb 6th
Ever felt like you’d like the 911 status on your business, in one view, one place? All the vitals so you can see, at a glance, what’s going on in the different areas of your company? If you have wanted to combine your web analytics, CRM, project management, sales pipeline, customer support requests, to name just a few, then this review of GeckoBoard is for you.
The first thing to understand about GeckoBoard is that it aggregates the stuff, the information, you need or want to see in one dashboard view. That dashboard might be on your iPhone or laptop or it might be an HD television hanging in your office lobby or manufacturing floor. Each device or monitor counts as one connection and, depending on your account, you are allowed a certain number of simultaneous connections.
For small business owners who are already managing too much information, GeckoBoard provides a way to streamline and simplify the information flow across your desk.
After you sign up for a free trial, I’ll admit it can be a little intimidating to figure out. However, it doesn’t take long to get it working. They are creating a new category of web-based application — a tool that pulls all of your disparate software and applications into one view. The company calls it a “real time status board.” I can live with that. The app comes with some basic parts installed so you can view samples. By clicking “Add Widget” you quickly see how many apps are already easy to connect to, such as:
- Highrise for CRM
- Gmail and Mailchimp for email
- FourSquare for location updates
- Basecamp or Github for project management
- Salesforce, Twitter, Freshbooks, Google Analytics, to name a few more and the then you have tools to create custom widgets linking into datasets that are just your own. The custom widget button helps you build from scratch.
Frankly, it is a bit mind-boggling. And that’s my only real wish for the GeckoBoard platform — that they do a bit more work on explaining what it all means for you as a small business owner. For some, it is a big “aha” and quite intuitive; for others, it’s a rabbit hole of “what does this do, really?”
Here is a sample dashboard I created in less than five minutes; after I got up the courage to hook into different data sets of my own. I set up a search on Twitter for “makers” and “inventors”; then hooked into my Gmail account (I had just emptied my inbox to look organized). I also hooked into one of my websites Google Analytics account and it was all point and click and authorize. Here’s a quick screenshot below. I left the three default sample widgets that are right on top.
If you find yourself jumping from application to application to keep up with your inbox, your tasks, your social media, you could use GeckoBoard to put it all on one screen. More so, if you have information that you want to share on a big screen with your team or your customers as they come into your company offices, you could use it that way, too. It is fairly easy to use and offers a lot of potential for those trying to see a lot in one glance. Plans start at $9/month and scale up based on connections. No credit card to sign up for a free 30-day trial (which is what I used to test it out).
Learn more about GeckoBoard.
Real Time Status for Your Business with GeckoBoard
View full post on Small Business News, Tips, Advice – Small Business Trends
Status and Happiness: Review of “I, Mammal”
Nov 26th
“You can’t be mad at the world when you understand the mammal brain,” says Dr. Loretta Graziano Breuning, author of I, Mammal: Why Your Brain Links Status and Happiness.
All mammals, including humans, have social behaviors to help increase their chances of survival. As a bonus, there are parts of the brain, called the limbic system, that reward us for these behaviors by releasing chemicals that feel good.
Before you think that you’re more evolved than other mammals, though, think again. These social behaviors and their chemical rewards do apply to everyday human behavior. When a customer calls to complain, you feel threatened. I, Mammal explains what is actually happening in your brain and why your heart is still racing even after the customer hangs up.
How We Evolved
In a group setting, the mammal brain must constantly decide when to grab something to meet its needs and when to hold back for fear of being injured. The mammal brain rewards successful survival behaviors with happy chemicals and releases unhappy chemicals when our survival is threatened.
You mammal brain doesn’t care if you have a full pantry at home. It works moment to moment. Say you and a friend both grab for the last piece of chocolate. If you get the chocolate, your mammal brain will reward you with happy chemicals. If your friend gets the chocolate instead, your mammal brain will react as if your very survival is at stake, and unhappy chemicals will be released.
These reactions go beyond food, though. Humans also have a large cortex that handles abstract concepts of what success and achievement mean to us. The limbic system still reacts though as if situations were life or death. Let’s say your business is competing against an archrival on a bid. If a competitor gets the bid instead of you, the limbic system reacts with the same level of unhappy chemicals as if your life were threatened.
The mammal brain doesn’t deal in the grey areas of modern society, only in the black and white of our ancestors. That is why next time you may lower your prices to get the bid, which feels good, but in the long run may hamper your success if you can’t cover your costs.
Why Happiness Doesn’t Last
It would be fantastic if we could get our happy chemicals to be released all the time, but that’s not how our mammal brains work. We get our “reward” when we win, but the chemicals fade quickly after that so we can go back to taking care of our survival.
When these happy chemicals fade we feel less happy, and our cortex interprets this as a sign that something is wrong. So we start looking for a reason, and often we find a problem where one doesn’t exist. When we become more aware of our feelings and what is driving them, we can save ourselves fruitless searches for nonexistent problems and ultimately be able to savor the times when we do experience happiness.
The Author
Dr. Loretta Graziano Breuning is Professor Emerita of International Business at California State University, East Bay. She has a background in international trade and worked for the United Nations in Africa. Her prior book was “Greaseless: How to Thrive Without Bribes in Developing Countries” and she has lectured in many countries on preventing bribery.
Growing up she witnessed firsthand how status worked in her Mafia-controlled neighborhood. She says:
“Your brain longs for status the way it longs for rich food, attractive mates and the safety of the herd.”
More Resources
Dr. Granizano Bruening has a regular blog through Psychology Today. She also has many resources listed on the I, Mammal website. There is even a recommended list of movies to watch where you can see mammal brain behavior in action.
Who Will Benefit from I, Mammal
If you have ever been frustrated it is probably because you are comparing yourself to others. Consider your next business networking event. Observe how people talk to one another and see how they try to trump the other person. Realize that everyone is doing this unconsciously to help themselves feel good. Even cows have social rivalries!
I, Mammal helps you to become more aware of these comparisons and get past them. Instead consider appreciating our brains, which have evolved over 200 million years and helped our ancestors to stay strong, mate and protect their children. Next time, let the other person brag. They will feel better about themselves, and you can focus on building an alliance that helps you in the long run and feels good in a different way.
The Bottom Line
While we can’t fight our mammal brain, we can work with to find ways to stimulate our happy chemicals without resorting to behaviors our cortex knows are bad for us. The solution is actually within you, not “out there” in society.
Status and Happiness: Review of “I, Mammal”
View full post on Small Business News, Tips, Advice – Small Business Trends
The warning signs of defending the status quo
Aug 29th
When confronted with a new idea, do you:
- Consider the cost of switching before you consider the benefits?
- Highlight the pain to a few instead of the benefits for the many?
- Exaggerate how good things are now in order to reduce your fear of change?
- Undercut the credibility, authority or experience of people behind the change?
- Grab onto the rare thing that could go wrong instead of amplifying the likely thing that will go right?
- Focus on short-term costs instead of long-term benefits, because the short-term is more vivid for you?
- Fight to retain benefits and status earned only through tenure and longevity?
- Embrace an instinct to accept consistent ongoing costs instead of swallowing a one-time expense?
- Slow implementation and decision making down instead of speeding it up?
- Embrace sunk costs?
- Imagine that your competition is going to be as afraid of change as you are? Even the competition that hasn’t entered the market yet and has nothing to lose…
- Emphasize emergency preparation and the expense of a chronic and degenerative condition?
Calling it out when you see it might give your team the strength to make a leap.
View full post on Seth’s Blog
Monitoring Relationship Status
Jun 10th
Monitoring Relationship Status
This content from: Duct Tape Marketing
Growing a business these days is really about managing relationships.
Business owners must learn to manage and juggle a complex and shifting combination of customer, partner, vendor, staff and advisory relationships in order to survive and grow.
One of the greatest challenges in doing so is monitoring the current status of all of these important relationships.
Some companies take a stab at this with the traditional customer satisfaction surveys, but these tools typically have more to do with research than current relationship status.
I believe businesses need to find ways to gauge the real time status of how they are doing in the minds of their most important constituent groups and do so in a way that is dead simple, but still elicits an honest and constructive measure of relationship status.
I’ve started to employ a one question survey tool that only asks the recipient to do one thing – click on one of four responses and that’s it. The survey goes out by email and I can tailor the question and response to a handful of situations and monitor feedback in real time.
Obviously, you can’t build relationships through an online form, but you can monitor relationship status in a way that demonstrates you care and are listening and you stand a far greater chance of repairing a damaged relationship when you make it easy and appropriate for someone to tell you that something’s wrong.
Here are some of the ways I employ this tool:
Customer happiness – The most obvious use of course is to get a quick response to work you’ve done or a product you’ve shipped.
Referral generation – By monitoring when a customer tells you they are really, really happy, you can immediately target these customers for referrals, case studies and testimonials.
Go deeper in organization – Many times your work is done only with one person at an organization, but it impacts many others. Using a simple tool you can gauge the overall value your work has to the organization and help that “buyer” build a case for keeping you around.
Partner monitoring – Anytime you receive a referral from a strategic partner you can create a tool that makes sure you are performing on the referral in ways that are making them look good. This is so critical if you plan to build a strategic partner platform.
Internal customer – How often do you take the internal temperature? How happy is your staff? It may be one of the most important reflections of the service your customers receive. How about monitoring the relationship between internal teams like sales and marketing?
Event follow-up – A quick way to monitor how your webinar, conference or presentation went.
The tool I currently use for everything described above is called Customer Thermometer. I like it because it makes it very easy to create simple, recipient friendly and fun one question relationship monitoring email surveys and monitor feedback in real time.
Of course you could easily use a tool like Survey Monkey to do the same thing, but Customer Thermometer does this one thing very well in my opinion and is easy to get going.
I did get a free month as an incentive to try the service out, but I also arranged a deal where my readers can get 2 for 1 for their first month by using the code ducttape. (Just so we’re clear, I don’t receive anything for promoting this tool, I just think it’s the right one for this use.)
View full post on Small Business Marketing Blog from Duct Tape Marketing
Sadly stuck with the status quo
Dec 29th
JetBlue is ordinarily smart with their web site, which is why their broken system is particularly useful to take a look at. I’m guessing that at some point, management said, “it’s good enough,” and moved on to more pressing issues. And then, of course, it stays good enough, frozen in time, ignored, and annoying.
The problem with letting your web forms become annoying is that in terms of time spent interacting with your brand, they’re way up on the list. If someone is spending a minute or two or three or four cursing you out from their desk, it’s not going to be easily fixed with some clever advertising.
Here’s an illustrated guide to things to avoid, JetBlue style:
First interaction wasn’t so great. If you even bother to build a “please wait” page, be sure it says something useful, or perhaps interesting, as opposed to confusing. Should I press continue?
Throughout the form, JetBlue frequently asks for dates (of birth, say, or issuance). Everywhere else on their site (and in the country they’re based) the format for dates is July 10, 1960. But here, just this one time, the format is 10, July 1960. And you can’t just type in the date, which is fast, you need to wrestle with pull down menus, menus too dumb to list all twelve months of the year at once, but instead requiring you to scroll if any date is after April…
Alert readers know that pull down menus with more than thirty total choices are a petty annoyance for me, and this one is particularly vexing. There a more than a hundred and fifty countries here, including a few I have never heard of. The United States, home to 90% of JetBlue’s customers, is listed near the bottom, but not at it (hint: if you insist on this sort of error in form design, list the popular choices at the top, at the bottom and in alpha… no penalty for multiple listings). (A far better alternative is the auto-completion guessing trick Google now uses in search).
Worse, if you try to type the country (U…n…i) it takes you to… TUNISIA!
Four passengers; 8 times I had to scroll down all the way, then slowly scroll up and then click…
It gets more annoying. For each passenger, I had to choose, “Travel document type”. But of course, there’s only one travel document permitted, “Passport” which hardly requires a pull down choice I think. Rule of thumb: when in doubt about a question, don’t bother asking.
They also wanted to know the nationality of traveler, which is fine, but then two items later, they wanted to know, “Issuing country.” While I’m confident that there are a few travelers who have a nationality in one country and an issuing country in another, my guess is that it would be considered a nice gesture if the form remembered your answer from three seconds ago and automatically entered it for you, no?
After painstakingly filling out the form, I was presented with these two buttons at the bottom of the page… hmmmmm.
Doesn’t really matter which one I pressed, though, because lady and the tiger style, I got this:
NOOOOOOOO!
And I had to start the entire form over again, from the beginning, with no fields remembered.
I know, I know, this is a rant. But it’s a rant with a point:
Fill in your own forms. Make your executives do it. Watch customers do it. See what your competitors are using. Improve the form. Don’t use pull down menus for more than 12 choices unless there really is no choice.
“Good enough” is a hard call, but I think we can agree that most online forms, aren’t.
View full post on Seth’s Blog
Duvys Media achieves Gold Status Solution Provider in the Constant Contact Partner Program
Sep 1st
| (EON: Enhanced Online News)–Constant Contact®, Inc. (Nasdaq: CTCT) today announced that it is proud to congratulate Duvys Media… |
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Status Tagging Your Facebook Updates
Aug 17th
Status Tagging Your Facebook Updates
This content from: Duct Tape Marketing
As Facebook continues to grow and provide more and more search functionality so does the need to think strategically about optimizing some of your status updates.
About six months ago Facebook introduced status tagging, a feature that allows you to tag and link to pages and people that you like from your updates. When writing an update you simply start with @ and the person you want to tag and Facebook will add a link in the update to that person and (depending on privacy settings) post your update to their wall and notify them they’ve been tagged. (The tagged person can always undo the tag)
Careful use of this practice can lead to increased exposure of your updates and pages. Somewhat recently Facebook also started building “community pages” – a way to build pages on topics and help bring people together around common interests. While most of these pages exist purely from people saying they like something on their profile, some have begun to get some real niche followers and traction.
It’s beginning to make sense for people on Facebook to start to take the time to research topics related to their business, interests and industry and start “liking” a number of popular community pages with an eye on status tagging these pages in your updates.
Here’s an example. Yesterday I wrote about public speaking and mentioned the popular TED Talks and Toastmasters groups in my post. I went to Facebook to share the link for the blog post and tagged the public speaking, TED talks, and Toastmasters International community pages. This action placed my update on all three of these community pages and exposed it to another 30,000 or so potential readers. (You must be a fan of these pages to use the tagging feature and there may be a lag in the time you like them and they show up in tagging.)
Because TED is so popular (over 500,000 fans) I also took the time to post to the TED page wall. Understand that this was content that was very relevant to this audience and not just a post to grab eyeballs. Strategic optimization of your status updates can take a little more time and thought, but the additional exposure through sharing quality content and updates is becoming well worth the time.
I wonder how this might become a play for local businesses routinely tagging community pages for their city?
Like this post? Share it with others
View full post on Small Business Marketing Blog from Duct Tape Marketing
Get More From Facebook Status Updates
May 6th
You want to be savvy about your social media presence. You know not to ignore your blog for Facebook, but you’re smart enough not to completely write it off either. So each day you go in and post a Facebook status update that you hope will inspire your fans to visit your site. There’s just one problem – no one’s actually seeing your status updates.
When you post a message on Twitter, that tweet will automatically show up in the feed of those that choose to follow you. You don’t have to do anything special to make sure of that. However, Facebook works a little different. Facebook uses an algorithm called EdgeRank to decide which of your updates will be appear in a user’s News Feed. If they showed everything, you’d probably be swamped. Instead, an algorithm was created to weight the importance of certain updates. This algorithm is influenced by three things:
- An affinity score between two users (how often they interact, view each other’s profiles)
- The type of engagement (comment vs a like)
- The freshness of the content.
That means if you want to make sure your audience is seeing your updates, you need to constantly be creating new content designed to get a reaction.
Here are some tips to help you do that.
Stop automating it
Each time you automate part of your Facebook involvement, you make it harder for the community to trust that you’re there to engage and talk to them. That means even if you’re updating your status daily, if the bulk of your page looks like an RSS feed, you’re going to have a difficult time establishing relationships. Users don’t want to engage with brands and businesses that aren’t really there. Stop automating your social media presence. You’re just shooting yourself in the foot.
Ask questions
We know that the more people engage with your content, the greater an ‘edge’ Facebook will give it, and the greater the chance that update will appear in your customers’ news feeds. How do you get people engaging? Ask them questions!
If you’re an entertainment Web site, ask users what they thought of Tuesday’s episode of Glee (awesome!) or Lady Gaga’s hairstyle. If you’re a local mechanic, ask where customers will be driving their cars this weekend or the lowest they remember gas ever being. The point is to ask questions as a way to drive engagement and prevent your update from becoming an also-rain that no one ever sees.
Polls
An off-shoot of asking questions is to use site polls to get user feedback. Yesterday, Tamar Weinberg blogged about how to use Facebook for business and marketing (bookmark that!) and gave the example of how Ben & Jerry’s was using polls to spur interaction. The ice cream manufacturer simply asked people how they like their ice cream and, 800+ likes and 250+ comments later, you can be sure that update appeared in users’ news feed to create top of mind and get users to visit the page. Asking people for their opinion is a great way to light a fire and make them more invested in your brand.
Ask them to ‘like’ statements they agree with
Sometimes getting someone to ‘like’ something is as easy as asking them to do it. For example, this weekend ask people to Like your status update if they had a great Mom who made a difference in their life. Or ask them to Like your update if they agree that tights are not pants. Agree or disagree-type updates tend to be flooded with not only Likes, but with comments because they force people to take sides on an issue. Even if the “issue” is debating who had the greatest Mom or how awful it is when girls go outside without pants on. Statement updates are a really fun way to lure people out from the corners they usually hide in.
Hold contests
You run a local bakery and you’re trying out new cupcake flavors – why not let your customers name them? Hold a contest via your Status Update asking people to offer up their best cupcakes names based on flavor combination. The winner of the contest receives a free batch of cupcakes and you get hit with so many Likes and comments that Facebook has no choice but to show your update on customers’ home pages. And of course, if they get involved, the update will also show on all the pages of the folks they most actively engage with, as well. What a great way to spread the word about your local bakery. I mean, who doesn’t like cupcakes?
Target them to specific groups
If we know anything about social media it’s that targeting is key. And that rule applies to your Facebook updates as well. Luckily, Facebook now gives you the ability to target a specific update to any group you want. This allows you to create more compelling updates with tighter calls to action.
For example, if you’re a local vet, you may be able to create an update that specifically targets those users with dogs and comments on the new dog park down the street. You know that these users will be more interested in the new park and therefore more likely to Like or comment on the update. Dog people also tend to hang out with other dog people, who will see they commented on the update and be encouraged to visit your page. Because you can target updates to specific friend groups, updates can be better targeted for hot buttons and interest levels. The more you can hone in on a person’s specific interests, the better you can create content they’ll want to engage with.
The worst thing you can do is dedicate time to creating a presence on Facebook that no one ever sees! When you’re creating content, making sure you’re targeting the people who are most likely to be advocates for what you’re saying and that you’re putting content out there that people will want to comment or support. The more interaction you can spur, the more eyes you’re going to get on your page.
Get More From Facebook Status Updates
View full post on Small Business Trends
Greener Grass Ideas at Business Part-Time Jobs Database (jobsdatabase) ’s status on Friday, 09-Apr-10 18:04:28 UTC -…
Apr 9th
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Http://ptJobsDB.com Gendercare.com- Gender Therapy Online, Health & Fitness # StatusNet software license Identi.ca is a microblogging… |
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Dear Internet, Meet Facebook Status Optimizer (Boom, Mind Explodes)
Mar 31st
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Keep up to date with the most current News, Tips & Highlights from the search marketing industry with the daily SEO Blog. Dear Internet, Meet… |
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