BlueCamroo Blog Posts

From a social CRM perspective, it's critical to keep an eye on the online buzz about your company. Where are people talking about the products you sell? Where are they finding out the best place in their community to buy your product?

WSI has an annual European conference ("Excellence and Innovation") in spring. This year it was held in Paris. BlueCamroo was invited to present at the conference and man a booth. It was a great opportunity to meet many of the European users of BlueCamroo and future users of BlueCamroo.

Take a step back. What ARE you protecting? The Crown Jewels? Then crank up the CAPTCHA. A random spam comment showing up once a week on your company blog? If you're running a company blog, you're going to want to be vigilant anyway. Cleaning up some spam isn't that onerous of a job. You can also make your blog comments requiring approval before posting. The danger in this approach is the honest blog commenter is robbed of the instant gratification of seeing his/her words posted immediately. If you're trying to nurture engagement, it's a good way to snuff it out.

An important lesson to learn is there can be a gap between the tacit permissions your customers think they have given you and the permissions you think you have to engage and promote. There's a very fine line between keeping users informed of critical updates and not making it seem like you're unnecessarily spamming them with fluff.

If you talk to a lot of people online, you're going to encounter someone trying to convince you of the truth of a claim or you're going to have to convince someone about the truth of your claim. One of the things that bothers me the most is when you ask someone to establish a claim, they hand wave to a 30 minute Youtube video.

The stats are pretty hard to deny. Blogging leads to more traffic and more leads. If you blog on at least a weekly basis, you can double the number of leads. With so much buzz about Twitter and Facebook, blogging seems downright old school. Social networking has not replaced blogging, any more so than cardio exercises replace strength training. They work very different aspects.

Sometimes we're conditioned to think companies ignore suggestions. When companies do respond it's both delightful and maybe a little disarming. I've been struggling with the Microsoft Surface. It was a Christmas gift. (Thank you, guilt-ridden divorced dads of the world!) I tilted between returning it and keeping it. I've largely concluded it's about finding new ways to do things I'm comfortable doing in Android. At some point I used the feedback link on an app and the developer got back to me within hours. I didn't expect that. If our suggestions are actually being read, we generally just assume they're kind of collected and synthesized in a kind of zen like way and then, maybe, eventually, we'll see something not entirely resembling our most cherished feature request.

Most of us are familiar with hashtags on Twitter. Maybe there's a chance you found this blog post from the #scrm hashtag I used in my Tweet about it. On Twitter hashtags are a way of creating ad-hoc communities or discussions organized around a certain topic, like social CRM. Or the NHL. Or some political movement. Need a quick and dirty idea how sentiments are trending on a certain topic? Follow the hashtag.

What makes Wikipedia valuable is it's a quick and dirty tool is for many topics it's a great way to quickly get up to speed on certain topics. If used with the proper nuance, Wikipedia is an invaluable source of information.

The biggest mistake people make about trying to sell online is reasoning "people who want to buy X can be found in social groups devoted to X." Yes, you and 2,000 other merchants have thought about that. And you're all in that social group waiting for some potential customer to join. And then everyone pounces on the poor guy with their pitch.