Axero Pulse » social platform

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.

ASP.NET Community Software: URL Routing added to Communifire

Tim Eisenhauer — Tue, 07 Apr 2009 18:51:38 +0000

Today we added a cool feature to Communifire, a social networking platform in ASP. NET.

URL Routing / Mapping – The URL Mapping module will help you maintain your existing search engine rankings for the various pages in your website. When you upgrade into Communifire from your old website, you can map your old URLs to the new URLs you create within the Communifire platform. This is done using dynamic 301 redirectes from within the system.

How does this help you? Well, it makes sure that all of your “old pages” maintain the same rank, apart from seeing the benefits of the new custom URLs.

Social Networking Platform – Article Manager Features

Tim Eisenhauer — Tue, 07 Apr 2009 18:36:43 +0000

Communifire, our social networking platform in ASP.NET, contains a ton of functionality…including forums, events, friending, 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 Article Management System. So, I thought it would be a great opportunity to share those features with you…

Communifire Article Manager features

The Communifire Article manager is an advanced Content Management System that allows your community users to have and share their own voice by posting articles and news under different categories, dynamically. Allowing your users to post and submit articles is a very powerful way to generate content for the community and will increase your visibility in search engine rankings, amplify the stickiness of your community, and encourage the discussions and communication surrounding the content people prefer.

Publishing features

Publish unlimited articles. The Article manager is created to handle the management of thousands and thousands of articles. We’ve build the software to be extremely robust, scalable, and easy to maintain as much content as you and your community can publish.
Unlimited categories – Create an unlimited number of categories and sub-categories to organize your articles.
RSS feeds for all categories – Each category is syndicated using RSS / XML feeds. Your users can subscribe to your RSS Feeds using their feed readers to stay updated when new articles are posted.
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.
Related / cross reference articles – relate article to others by associating them when you publish them. Related articles are displayed below the article, pointing the reader to content that may be similar

Images, Media, Files

Upload attachments - Upload an unlimited number of images or file attachments to each article. You can display the images anywhere within your article and non-image attachments will be nicely displayed with your article.
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 images next to your headlines.
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

Articles homepage – the article homepage shows a list of all categories (and sub-categories) and a list of the most recently published articles. Each article contains a snippet of the article and also a teaser image that you are able to upload when publishing. Clicking on a category filters the list of articles to display only those articles published into that category.
Article page – The article page displays each individual article and provides a number of different functionalities to benefit the end user, including:
- Print - the print option displays a printer friendly version of the article, making it simple for your customer to print your articles.
- Download to PDF – clicking on the ‘PDF’ link generates a PDF of your article on the fly, making it easy for your readers to download your article and read it off line. PDF’s are also commonly circulated by email within people networks, helping your article be spread by virally.
- Email / Share with a friend – this option allows your readers to forward articles to their friends or colleagues by email. The emails that are entered are automatically saved to a database so you know where your articles are being distributed.
- Comments - Strike up conversation and allow your readers to comment on your articles. Add unlimited comments to each article. You 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.

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 articles and article categories. 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 article you create. 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 article and category. Search engines have been known to favor pages with relevant page titles. If you don’t want to create a custom page title, the article manager will use the article title.
Custom Meta Descriptions and keywords – the article manager allows you to create custom Meta description and keywords for each and every article and category. 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 articles.

Ok, so there you have it. The features of the Article Manager in the Communifire Social Networking Platform. And if you’re interested in checking out a live social networking running on Communifire, you can check out CodeASP.NET– an ASP.NET Community. You can click here to see the article manager.

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