United Breaks Guitars – Dave Carroll's social media payback for horrid service

Did you see the United Breaks Guitars video, which has now been seen by more than 5 million Youtube viewers?  It's a damning expose about United's horrid handling of  Dave Carroll's Taylor guitar-- and he used social media to slam back. Most successfully.

The video puts a glaring spotlight on how the quality of a company's service offerings will be transparent -- for bad and good. If a company doesn't provide the transparency, customers will.

And it also doesn't matter whether a company is participating in social media. Customers are.

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Website site architecture considerations for SEO

So much gets written about SEO in terms of content it’s easy to overlook the other half of the optimization equation.  That would be site architecture – or the behind the scenes contribution to the SEO challenge.

Let’s look at three contributors to site architecture – headers, page layouts, and navigation -- and how to use them to your benefit.

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Buying patterns shaped by how well companies interact with customer

Let’s be real.  Buyers today are just as demanding as those in the past.  What’s different today is they have access to a lot more information about companies and their products from a variety of sources.  That information empowers buyers and stimulates them to be much more forthright with their demands in partnering with the companies they buy from.

We hear a lot today about social media and it’s for good reason. Participation in social media channels is exploding.  That said, though, buyers still turn to corporate websites for information.

Makes it easy for your prospects and customers to find the information they need.  Let’s talk about how website information architecture can help you do just that.

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Intellicore Design offers Enterprise Information Architecture & Development services

We’ve long said it.  Intellicore Design Consultants are business strategists first and foremost with an IT specialization.

We decided to create better alignment between our one of our key market differentiators and our service offerings.  That’s why we’re pleased to offer an array of strategic services focused on Enterprise Information Architecture (EIA).

Additionally, another unsung strength of ours – until now – is our conceptual software development capabilities.  In revamping our service offerings, we’ve added Conceptual Software Development to the slate.

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Enabling Technologies Corp — New website leads to phenomenal visitor increases

Enabling Technologies Corp, a Microsoft Gold Partner, is a fast-growing global IT consulting practice focused on providing messaging solutions for medium and large enterprises.

The IT firm, the 2009 Microsoft Unified Communications Solutions Award winner, recently turned to Intellicore Design Consulting to design a new website and the results are phenomenal.

The new site recently scored 1,414 visitors between May 1 through July 15, 2009 — and this is 1078% of the total visitors in the entire previous 6 months. Enabling has also captured 144 conversions — Contact Us requests — during the same 45-day period, up from about 12 per year with the old site.

Click here to read the complete case study.

How to calculate the ROI on collaboration software – Building the business case

One of the big questions on social media software solutions is ROI.  The general thought is it’s hard to determine.  I disagree.

Just so we’re on the same page, by collaborative software I’m thinking of feature functionality like wikis, file sharing, and discussions.

What you want for a return on any business investment is either revenue generation or cost savings. 

 

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How social media helps customer service - Up close examples

I just bought a new cell phone – starting with an AT&T Pantech Matrix Pro before switching to an iPhone.  My goal, beyond making phone calls, was to download emails from multiple email accounts, send text messages, and Twitter.

Guess what?  I experienced configuration problems.  No surprise there, what with a new phone and all. Besides, that’s what tech support is for.

In trying to solve my problems, though, I experienced an up close and personal view in how three companies – AT&T, Pantech, and Rackspace Email – use Twitter’s social media channel to their benefit...or in the case of one company, to its detriment.

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Community-enhanced versus traditional websites – what’s the what

One of our Intellicore Design Consulting clients needed help in understanding the value of a community-enhanced website versus their traditional website.  You know, “community” as in social media outreach.

I put together a short PowerPoint presentation to explain what’s the what and thought others might also want in on the whata.

Check it out.

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