Local business reviews are a new kind of social media, in which customers review their experiences with brands over the internet. Business directories such as Yelp, Citysearch, and Yellowpages.com allow for customers to post what they think of the businesses that they have dealt with.

These reviews are seen by the customers who visit such sites, and can serve to gauge the public opinion people have of your brand. The ability of customers to do this has caused the business world to react in many different ways, ranging all the way from ignoring it altogether to overreacting and becoming paranoid. The important thing about this type of social media is that it is transparent. It cannot be altered or removed by the businesses that are being reviewed.

These reviews are important because they affect your brand reputation, they allow you to get feedback from your customers, and they get your brand in the search engines. Because of this, as much as is possible, businesses should respond to the negative reviews to the extent that they can. In many cases this can cause the customer to become a bigger fan of your business than if they hadn’t experienced any problems to begin with, which has a tremendous effect on word of mouth regarding your brand.

One way to do this is through the use of several programs that allow you to track these reviews, such as Cymfony, Trackur, and Marchex. In addition to responding to negative reviews, you can also use these tools to publicly thank people who have given you heartfelt, five-star, positive reviews.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Here there is a video about what actually motivates people and it’s surprising what he’s come up with. Sales people may not want to watch though so be warned

Work, work, work… but what’s my motivation? – Feeding the Puppy.

Keep checking back as we’re going to be posting lots more links to articles and blogs we find interesting and think you might like to read too.

What they don’t go on to say is how unsafe it has been for many years. With the likes of Firefox being far superior in many ways to IE and being far safer is it still too little too late from Microsoft?

Consumers Duped By Fake Bank in New IE8 Ad [VIDEO].

As good as IE8 is, we’d strongly suggest you consider the options open to you in the browser market. Don’t just continue using IE because you’ve been using it for so long. Have a look at some of the other offerings available.

Using social media will, undoubtedly increase your website traffic. Will more visitors arriving at your site, the advertising potential can significantly increase. To ensure you know where your traffic is coming from and have the ability to segment your traffic, Google Analytics will provide you with a great insight into the who and where of your users.

Once you have planned your target audience, set up customised goals to keep track of whether the right type of user is arriving and interacting on your website. By identifying where your users are leaving, you can quickly move to optimise the weaker pages.

More for social media use, Hootsuite and Tweetdeck are both free, third-party applications that help you easily manage all your social accounts in one place. You can also set up ‘columns’ that notify you of when your brand name or a requested ‘keyword or phrase’ is mentioned in the social sphere. This immediately offers you an advantage to respond to any comments made by customers about your brand. You can also join in with subjects that are of interest to you, providing you with extended platforms to reach out to your customers.

For companies just strating out in the social world, you would find all the information you initially need from these tools, however, once you start enhance your campaigns and find yourself needing additional data, other subscribed tool will be needed.
Need help starting out in the digital market? Get in touch with a bunch of friendly, hard-working marketers looking for the next social media challenge!

Take a look at our tips below, and hopefully you will be in a better position to exploit the social media market for your business.

Blog
Your company blog is the primary starting point of all social media success. As the driving mechanism for attracting website traffic, your site SEO can immensely improve with regular content. User-generated content is highly engaging, and produced regularly and becoming in-demand, you will soon obtain regular subscribers to your RSS feeds.

Social Networks
There are millions of them out there, not all containing the right audience and appeal for every business. The main attractions are Facebook, Twitter and Linkedin, but not all of them offer the marketing platform your business needs.

Facebook demands highly interactive and regular content flowing through a fan page. In comparison, Twitter is an easy tool for establishing followers, for whom to advertise your content to in the hope of being distributed further. Linkedin remains the more corporate of the three, creating an ideal location for marketing the profile and individuals of your company.

Multimedia
User-generated content such as videos and graphics are the most popular type on the web. Content needs to be engaging to ensure users return, but also redistribute. Virals have become a driving point for many marketing agencies looking to ‘spread the word’ of a brand. Adding essential characteristics such as humour and controversy will ensure the message reaches a larger audience.

This can be achieved using a brand channel within YouTube and feeding content through the company blog so that the content can be easily distributed via your RSS feed.

As the first instalment of a two-part post for social media, we will reveal essential tools for monitoring social media to ensure desirable brand reputation is maintained next week.

The user’s journey begins on the home page after arriving via the search engine. A common user will have an idea of what they want or need, therefore won’t be looking to spend too much time flowing through your website.

People don’t visit every page and the majority also skim text to obtain the key information they require.

The navigation needs to be plain and simple. Use simple words that explain precisely what lies behind each link. Users will lose patience with a website that sends them to pages that consist of nothing related to what was being advertised.

Make it easy for users to see what their next step should be. Include clear calls to action on every ‘business’ page that jump out at the user. You can omit them on secondary pages that just provide information.

Try to ensure your HTML page titles are valid and relevant. This is not only useful for SEO, but for users who bookmark your website. Choose a favicon that stands out next to those of competitor sites that users are likely to visit and bookmark alongside yours.

Our last tip would be to create regularly updated features such as a blog, ensuring an RSS feed is available for subscribers. Try not to bombard users with sales messages, content such as this provides greater value in the long term.

Hopefully these initial factors can help you identify essential elements of your website navigation. Want to talk more? Keep in touch via our Twitter account @themediacube.