BlueCamroo Blog

Last blog post we covered some ways to handle the inevitable: finding a customer, tearing down your product or company on some social network. To sum up: take a deep breath, respond with empathetic language, and remember you're playing to the customer's audience.

BlueCamroo's Social Network Scout provides a number of ways to monitor your online reputation. Searches under Social Network Scout Buzz and Support channels can keep you on top of bad PR wafting its way through Twitter and Facebook. Unfortunately, even Social Network Scout can't (yet) provide the kid gloves needed to handle these types of situations. What do you do?

BlueCamroo has a Group rights system that allows you to add internal users to your own customized groups. For example, you can create a Sales group and a Support group. Internal users added to these groups then can receive similar access rights. It's a quick and logical way of managing rights. Instead of fiddling with rights for each user, you set them for one group and then add users to the group. We've recently extended the Group concept. The Group has added flexibility, allowing you to assign task while retaining accountability. The gobbly gook out of the way, what does that really mean?

Is a hammer a bad thing? You can use it to build someone a home or you can use it to clock someone over the head and invade their home. Tools are only as good as the people wielding them and the limits placed on them by their own moral conscience and laws. Using any kind of service, notably ones provided free online, usually come at a cost of giving up some amount of privacy. Everyone has their comfort level. What's important is decide how much of your personal life you're willing to let into the hands of a service provider and the risks of that information being sold or stolen.

The problem with Facebook is it's not a great platform for lead generation. Lots of businesses are there because their customers and potential customers are there. But leads have to come to you. They have to find your "fan" page. And since there's no company accounts you can create on Facebook, you have to engage them via your personal Facebook profile. You have to treat customers like friends, giving them access to the baby shower photos, your beach outing photos, and whatever drama might play itself out on your wall.

A lot of us plan each work day. We will spend X hours working on Project A. Y hours working on Project B. Z hours on support tasks. How does that plan typically go? Accurate? Or is the hour you devoted to Project A interrupted by Brush Fire Q and Curbside Consultation M? Project plans in some offices are best thought of the "suggested serving" photos that accompany products found in the frozen foods section. They are useful wire frames but the real world can confound the modeling. How do you account for your real day with any accuracy? Or do you just lump it all under your original project plan and mentally write off these intervening tasks as the cost of doing business?