Axero Pulse » Social Network Software

Where Do Your Customer’s Live Online?

sbishop — Sun, 19 Apr 2009 02:14:33 +0000

Your customers are active online, that’s a given. So where exactly do they live? Meaning, where does the online action for your product, business, and industry take place? If you cannot immediately answer that question, your business is missing out on some very big potential.

Do your customers leave comments and reviews on sites like Yelp and Amazon? Do they spend the majority of their time online interacting on Face book fan pages? What LinkedIn groups are active about your industry? Who’s leading the charge on Twitter about you or your industry? What hot topics are being discussed in forums? These are just a few of the basic options your customers have to engage with online. I’m leaving out a wide variety of other options and depending on your business and industry, it is likely your customers are interacting within a vast array of online communities.

So I’ll ask again. Where online does the action take place for your business? If you’ve got this under control, congratulations, you’re definitely in the minority and ahead of the pack. But, if I was a betting man…you have no idea where your audience hangs out online.

By not knowing where your customers are spending their time online, here are some of the things your business is missing.

Proactive Customer Service: Companies can and should take advantage of social networks to become proactive with their customer service. By waiting for problems to come to you, it may be too late and you’ve lost a customer. Or worse, you just never hear from them again and never even know there was a problem.

A good example of proactive customer service is Comcast (NasdaqGS: CMCSA). Comcast currently has an entire team dedicated to serve as the company’s customer care tweeters. Customer service manager, Frank Eliason, started tweeting with Comcast customers in April 2008. His strategy was to use Twitter’s search capabilities to dig up search terms for Comcast and search for #Comcast hash tags inside of Twitter posts. From these simple searches, Eliason was able to easily identify customers having difficulties and quickly send them messages. (note: being a Cable customer, it wouldn’t take long to locate complaints).

Over the past year, Eliason’s team of tweeters has grown from one to ten, and he expects that more employees will start using Twitter in the future. The effectiveness is for you to decide, but that speaks louder to Comcast’s internal issues and not the strategy to proactively engage customers on their own online turf. According to Eliason, 22,000 customers have been helped through social media, which includes a combination of Twitter, Facebook , online forums, and blogs.

Gather A Loyal User Base: Coca-Cola (NASDAQ: COKE) ‎has the second most popular page on Facebook , second only to Barrack Obama. The most stunning fact about this is not that 3.3 million people have decided to follow Coke; it’s that this enormously successful page wasn’t started by the Coca-Cola Company. It was started by two Coke drinkers from L.A. This top ranked page and at least 250 other fan pages devoted to Coke have also sprung up on Facebook.

On one hand, what could be better for Coke than to have 3.3 million fans chatting and interacting on one Facebook page? But since Coca-Cola did not create the page, they had absolutely zero control over it. That means that they were completely at the mercy of the fan page founders, who won’t have corporate brand strategy at the top of their priorities. Last November, Facebook tried to offer more control to companies and brands by creating a policy that says anyone creating a branded Facebook “page” must be authorized by or associated with the brand or company. Rather than delete the page and start over, likely annoying 3.3 million Coke drinkers, Coca-Cola instead proposed a better alternative. They decided to let the creators keep the page, as long as it was also run with a few of Coca-Cola’s senior interactive folks. By becoming engaged, Coca-Cola now has an active community building loyal users and expanding their brand online.

Dig up New Sales: Finding where your customers interact can often lead to new sales that might have never come to you, or worse, gone to a competitor. Dell (NASDAQ: DELL) has learned to adapt quickly to the opportunities on Twitter and has taken full advantage of tracking customers on this social network. According to an article at Internet News, “Dell says Twitter has produced $1 million in revenue over the past year and a half through sale alerts”. You’re not guaranteed to have these same results, but if you can increase sales by even a few percentage points, the return on your investment should be well worth the effort.

For the sake of this post’s length, I’ve used only three examples of companies using some of the most popular social networks; Twitter and Facebook . This list could easily be expanded to a wide variety of other possibilities; we’ll dive into those on other posts. The point is, your customers are actively engaging each other online. But that doesn’t mean they’re engaging with you or your business. If you’re most organizations, you’re not where the action is. You’re monitoring page hits on a static non-engaging website while your customers and targets are busy building their own communities. If you want to stay relevant, you need to be engaged and active. What communities are you building?

Stay tuned for action plans with what you can be doing in a follow up post.

Scott S. Bishop is editor for AxeroPulse.com and a social media and marketing strategist. He is @thescottbishop on Twitter

ASP.NET Community Software: Exception Handling Framework in Communifire

Tim Eisenhauer — Wed, 15 Apr 2009 19:28:06 +0000

ASP.NET Community Software Communifires’, Flexible plug-n-play Exception Handling Framework

In today’s fast paced software development models, even the most stable applications will experience an occasional situation in which an error pops up. Even after extensive testing and quality assurance, it’s possible to still experience errors from time to time. Sometimes errors will occur due to invalid user input, misuse of a certain feature, or sometimes there may just be a bug in the code. We’ve all come to live with the possibility of an error within an application. Until a breakthrough is made in artificial intelligence, software applications continue to require that the users interact with them in a fairly well defined manner.

What’s important, is how an application responds, handles, and recovers from the error.

When an error does occur, the software application must clearly communicate to the user:

why the data is not valid
make it easy for the user to recover from the error, and
allow the technical team behind the error to easily fix the problem

Communifire, our ASP.NET social networking platform, is no exception. With such a large code base containing hundreds of thousands of lines of code, there is still a possibility for an error to occur here and there. And when an error does occur, we stand behind our product and promptly fix the bug in the code. With this in mind, and to combat the “blue or yellow screen of death,” we have built in a comprehensive exception handling and logging framework. Every section of code within Communifire, from the database layer, to business later, to the UI layer, contains error handling.

All exceptions are handled and logged within in code, along with all the necessary technical information to pinpoint, analyze, and fix the error. The system is smart — after making sure that the exception has been logged, the layer in the code where the error happened will re-throw a user friendly exception message to the user interface, informing the user of the error. This friendly exception message is necessary because the end users do not want to see the technical details of the exception. All errors are logged into a database and accessible from within the administration section of the social networking platform, allowing our technical team to download the error details, analyze them, and promptly fix them.

A few salient points to ensure your satisfaction when dealing with errors:

Communifire logs all exceptions and re-throws “user friendly” messages.
The complete stack trace is recorded to insure that programmers can have access to all the details related to the exception that was thrown.
The exception and logging system is based on the “Factory Design pattern” to easily allow developers to extend the framework and add custom logging classes. This also allows you to log exceptions to the database, in the event log, to a custom text or XML file or all of the above.
All user-friendly exception messages are stored in an XML resource file. You can easily alter the friendly error messages without the need to re-compile the code.
Errors are usually simple to fix, due to the organized and well documented source code.

You have just read an overview of the features of the error handling and exception logging functionality in the Communifire Social Networking Platform. If you’re interested in checking out a live social network running on Communifire, you can check out CodeAsp.Net – an ASP.NET Community.

And to learn more about Communifire, click here to read about the Social Networking Platform in ASP.NET.

Social Networking Platform – Blog Features

Tim Eisenhauer — Mon, 13 Apr 2009 08:04:17 +0000

Communifire, our social networking platform in ASP. NET, contains a ton of functionality…including forums, events, friending, article management, internal messaging, photo sharing, video sharing, blogs, and much more. In addition to the functionality I just briefly listed out, Communifire contains a very extensive and feature rich blogging system. Here is a rundown of a list that I wrote up to share those features with you…

Communifire Blog features

Communifire Blogs is a simple, yet powerful blogging system designed to increase the interaction between the community members and engage your readers and customers.

Publishing features

Multi-author support – Every user in the community gets a blog to publish their content and thoughts on for the community to read.
RSS feeds for all blogs – Each blog is syndicated using RSS / XML feeds. Your users can subscribe to your RSS Feeds using their feed readers to stay updated when new posts are made.
Advanced commenting system – Comments are a very important aspect of a blog. Strike up conversation and allow readers to comment on all blog posts. Add unlimited comments to each blog post. Blog authors can enable or disable comments, can mark comments as spam, or delete them using a very user friendly interface. Administrators have full control of how the comments are managed; choosing whether they are automatically published or you can choose to moderate them before appearing publically.
WYSIWYG Editor – The article manager contains one of the most well known and most used rich text editors. There is no need to know HTML to format your articles – just use the built in editor.

Images, Media, Files

Upload attachments – Upload an unlimited number of images or file attachments to each blog post. You can display the images anywhere within your blog posts.
Image resizing – You set the size of the images that are uploaded. If the images exceed the size you set, they will be automatically resized.
Image thumbnails – Whenever you upload an image, a thumbnail is automatically generated for you to display as teaser image next to your blog post title.
Embed videos – Easily embed YouTube, MySpace, Google, or any other types of videos into your articles. It’s as easy as copying and pasting the video code into your article.

Public features

Blog homepage – The blog homepage shows a list of all user blogs, a list of blog archives by month, and a list of the most recently published posts. Each post item contains an excerpt of the post and also a teaser image that you are able to upload when publishing. Clicking on a user filters the list of blog posts to display only those published by that user. Clicking on a blog archive month displays only those blog posts published during that month. You can also filter the blog posts per user and per monthly archive.
Blog post page – The blog post page displays an individual blog post, the bio of the user who made the posting, and provides a number of different functionalities to benefit the end user, including:
- Print – The print option displays a printer friendly version of the post, making it simple for your customer to print your blog posts.
- Email / Share with a friend – This option allows your readers to forward blog posts to their friends or colleagues by email. The emails that are entered are automatically saved to a database so you know where your blog posts are being distributed.
- Ratings – Get instant feedback on blog posts. Members of your community can rate each blog post indicating whether they found the post helpful or not. Ratings help to improve content quality, remove confusing content, and filter the wheat from the chafe.
- Change text size - Users can conveniently use this feature to increase the text size of the blog post for easier reading. User can increase or decrease the text size three times.
- Latest blog posts – The sidebar contains a list of the users’ latest blog posts as well as a list of the latest blog posts made by the entire community. This helps to increase readership and the time spent on the website by providing options for users to read additional content.

Search engine optimization features

SEO optimized out of the box – We spent a great deal of time optimizing the layout of the HTML and using the proper HTML tags to help search engines index and understand your content.
Keyword friendly URL’s – Create keyword friendly URL’s for your blog posts. URL’s that contain keywords are often given higher rankings in search results because they appear to be more relevant.
Customizable H1 tag – You can create a custom H1 tag for each blog posts you publish. H1 tags are known as heading tags that describe the content on the page. Search engines are known to give emphasis to those pages with highly relevant H1 tags.
Custom Page Titles – You can create your own optimized page title for each blog post. Search engines have been known to favor pages with relevant page titles. If you don’t want to create a custom page title, the blog platform will use the post title.
Custom Meta Descriptions and keywords – The blog platform allows you to create custom Meta description and keywords for each and every post that is published. Search engines often use the Meta description and keywords to describe your website within search results. Provide an optimized custom description to entice users to click through to your blog posts.

Administration features

Moderation - With our advanced moderation tools, you can remove obscene or inappropriate content quickly and easily.
Management - All blogs, posts, and comments can be fully managed by an administrator

Ok, so there you have it — a listing of (most of) the features of the blogging functionality in the Communifire Social Networking Platform. And if you’re interested in checking out a live social network running on Communifire, you can check out CodeAsp.Net – an ASP.NET Community. You can click here to see the blogs.

And to learn more about Communifire, click here to read the Social Networking Platform in ASP. NET.

Social Networking Platform in ASP.NET

Vivek Thakur — Fri, 06 Feb 2009 19:58:44 +0000

Communifire our main product, is a unique social networking platform in ASP.NET. Basic social networking is out there with many vendors reaching out on the ever growing demand. Social networking is the way to go, and still many businesses have to catch-up to the bandwagon. What most of us do not understand is that the social networking is NOT just a simple collection of forums or blogs software or just videos and photo sharing. Instead it is a platform which encourages user interaction building up the community spirit amongst its members. Forums, blogs, videos etc are just tools of trade which it may/may not use to achieve the high level goals. The core engine of a successful community platform should:

1. Encourage visitors to sign up and become a part of the group by promoting content relevant to the business of the community: well designed landing pages, planned email campaigns and member-rating system helps to achieve these goals.

2. Provide simple and user-friendly means to add content to the community: easy to use CMS, attractive UI, faster loading pages are crucial for a community websites’ survival in the long term

3. Provide valuable resources to its members (which can be in form of videos, blogs, articles etc): these resources should be SEO optimized because 90% of people visiting your website would have landed there using some kind of search engine like Google. By having SEO optimized forums, blogs and articles you can convert a big percentage of these online visitors into community members

4. Provide a means to share these resources across the Web in a platform-agnostic way: this is where WCF comes into picture! Once you launch your community, other popular websites might need to index your resources and your platform should be ready to handle that. For financial communities, having a scalable system which can support legacy B2B and B2C interactions is very crucial.

5. Provide multi-disciplinary approach to notifications and information dissemination: Emails are passé, now RSS and ATOM feeds are a must in every community. Having dedicated RSS feeds for your community content will not only make the content easily accessible to a wider audience but also widen your range of offered services increasing the depth and effectiveness of information adoption. Besides, RSS never has a SPAM problem!

6. Flexible marketplace system: More members essentially implies a bigger “market”. Having a community section catering to buying/selling of goods/services is a an important business model add-on for your community adding to the revenues. WCF plays an important role here.

7. Centralize your interactions with the members: A template-email system plays an important role in sending custom emails to members on a regular basis. Such emails play an important role to keep the community “alive”.

There are a lot of on-going developments in this sphere and the next generation social networking communities *should not* aim to absorb and implement everything, as it may not be logistically and economically feasible. Instead the community platform should be flexible and scalable to “leave enough room” for upgrades and improvisations.