John Smith’s company just got on twitter… He owns a toy store with it’s own custom toys. They manufacture these toys in house, and sell them off to bigger distributors. He first began this adventure into the world of twitter based on the recommendation of those who had done his website. SEO, SEM, RSS – and now he’s tweeting, using @’s and #’s in a way that doesn’t include cartoonish profanity. His head is still spinning with all of this new development, but he’s latching on, growing and doing his best.

If he wasn’t sure of the value of twitter yesterday, today he is.

John learned about something called twitsearch. It’s like Google, but for searching twitter to see what people are saying about specific things. He did a search for two specific keywords – his company’s name and their most popular toy, Hubert the Helicopter Hippo.

He discovered several positive comments.

He discovered two even more valuable tweets.

The first was a person complaining about the return policy at his flagship store. The second was a different person, a mother, complaining about how the toy had broken and could not be replaced, as they had sold out over the Christmas season.

John quickly replied to their comments, and sent each a DM (direct message) respectively. He invited the first person to offer feedback on how they could better adjust their return policy. He went one step further and invited them to meet with him at the store with the product they wished to return, where they could tackle the problem together. To the mother, he asked her how the toy had broken, and for her to send her address in a direct message so that they could replace the product for her.

This kind of quality control is a rarity in terms of customer service. The next time you’re in your kitchen complaining about how the coffee pot leaks to your wife, it’s unlikely that the owner of the company is going to run into the room with a replacement for you. Because it’s such a rarity is what makes it so newsworthy in social media. The first person who John was able to help was so impressed that she tweeted about his prompt response, and how impressed she was. Another influential blogger with a scope of tens of thousands of readers is impressed as well, and he re-tweets about this customer service coups. The second woman is a mommy blogger who writes a rave review in her blog about how pleased she was. She also writes for magazines, and does a product review in Parent Today magazine.

For the price of a few minutes of his time and replacing some faulty merchandise, John has gotten priceless advertising, a reputation for having stellar customer service, and invaluable feedback to help make his company better.

From the Online Strategy Blog of !escunid

No related posts.

Well, there could be thousands of answers. It all depends on what you’re looking for. But we’re going to start off with ten.

Ten Reasons Your Organization Can Use a Blog

1. Search Engine Marketing: Also known as Search Engine Optimization. Jenny has a static website for her window washing company. Laura’s window washing company’s website has a blog. Jenny’s website stays the same, the information unaltered, constant and unchanging. Laura is able to add fresh information to her website, using her blog. She can write a post informing her clients that she is holding a summer sale, or a post about the benefits of her all-natural cleaning solutions, or even a picture she took hanging from the 32nd story of a skyscraper while washing windows. Search engines, like Google and Yahoo, are going to display Laura’s website at the top of results, rewarding her for her frequent updates. Blog=increased online visibility.
2. Direct Communication:  The internet can be faceless. If you want to hire someone, a bland website doesn’t show you a genuine person, a human being who you can relate to and trust. Blogs provide a way for you to speak directly and honestly with your customers, letting them see a human side through the web. They have the opportunity to comment on your posts, giving you valuable feedback to help improve and expand your organization.
3. Brand Building: What are the core values that you are trying to build with your brand? Blogs serve as another channel to let your customers know what you’re all about. Perhaps your company is proud of it’s contributions to sustainable living. Write a post updating the world about what you’ve been up to. Maybe you firmly believe in open communication in client care; tell your clients how in a detailed post. Make your customers aware that you are the type of organization they can be proud to work with.
4. Competitive Differentiation: With blogs, you can tell your story over and over again. You can put a spin on it, change paces, change direction. The world changes quickly, business evolves, and your website should be able to keep up with it. Show potential clients that you know this, understand it, and aren’t a dinosaur. You can roll with the punches. If your competition can’t, then they’re down for the count.
5. Relational Marketing: A good website tells it like it is. There’s no extra fat, stuffing or padding. However, in a blog, you can explore the fat. It’s an opportunity to further expand upon your business, from a personal point of view, rather than an objective, business-only standpoint. You can grow a trusting relationship and bond between you, your clients, and your readers.
6. Exploit Your Niche – Blogs help you fill your particular industry niche Are you a force to be reckoned with within your specific niche? Then exploit it by making yourself a presence within it. When one of your readers needs someone that does what you do, who are they going to turn to? The blogger who they read on a regular basis or some random company they googled? With a blog, you can be the first thing that comes to mind when someone thinks about your niche.
7. Media & Public Relations – This may be listed as number 7, but at times it rivals number 1. Blogs are a powerful communication tool because the information can go viral organically with the touch of a few buttons. On the net, bad news can practically travel at the speed of light. Did your company botch something? Did another blogger write a negative review of one of your products? If you’re active in the community, you can search and see these things. Then, respond on your own blog. Publicly controlling the outbreak puts you in the drivers seat, not the naysayer. There are many cases where slanderers were turned into evangelists, because of proactive blogging strategies.
8. Reputation Management – This is an extension of the former reason. By blogging, you have a voice to respond with in the online world. If all the world is talking, and you’re sitting quiet, then a likely scenario is about to unfold. I’ll call it the telephone game – you know, the one where you sit in a line, and whisper a phrase to the person next to you, and they pass it on? By the end, the message is nearly always some mutated version of the original. Facts get shifted around as information is passed through the internet. Add your voice as the voice of reason in the conversation – let your clients know the truth, straight from the horse’s mouth.
9. Position You as the Expert -  If you are passionate about what you do, then you probably have a lot og ideas on the subject. Share them, and show people that you are their first choice because of your vast expertise.
10. Intranet & Project Management – Blogs make grat, easy-to-use applications for internal communications within an organization. That may be one of the least well-known and underutilized areas of blogs. Encouraging employees to blog within the company is adding one more community element. This can help them to spur one another on, inspire, help each other, and just work together to make any improvements or changes they come across throughout the process.

Once again, why you might blog really depends on what you want to get out of it. Be sure to set clear, defined blogging goals before beginning – this is the key to successfully tackling the blogging niche in your industry.

From the Online Strategy Blog of !escunid

Related posts:

1. What is a blog? Blog is two words combined together: web and log. Like...

But what does it really mean?

A blog is a series of articles, referred to as posts. It looks just like any other website; you may have visited dozens of websites before without even realizing that what you were reading was, in essence, a blog. So, if it is so similar, then what exactly makes it different from a website alone? A website is static. If you want to change the information on it, and you aren’t tech-savvy, you might have to hire somebody to do it. Again. And again. And again. But a blog is updated regularly by it’s author, known as a blogger. So, the differentiating factor between a blog and a plain-Jane website is that it’s fresh, evolving, growing with every additional post.

The most recent, or current post on a blog will be displayed most prominently, at the top of the web page. The preceding posts are organized underneath the current post, in order of freshest and newest, all the way down to to the oldest. Blogs also have archives, so that even if you write thousands of posts, readers can still access your oldest posts. You can keep information that is relevant visible by organizing the posts into categories, so that your best information is displayed and still available at the click of the mouse years later.

It can be like a textbook, a diary, a photo-album or a newspaper.

Another common aspect to blogs is that readers can comment on each post. Some bloggers choose to disable the comment function on their blog, making it simply a vehicle for information. Others thrive on feedback, making their blog a vehicle for communication.

Who can blog?

If you didn’t even understand what it was until reading this, you might think that only very tech-savvy people can blog. However, the platforms that have been developed for blogging are incredibly user-friendly. Even the greenest computer users can quickly learn to navigate, operate and confidently blog within as short a time-frame as few hours. It’s easy.

What can a blog be about?

Anything. There are millions of blogs, with almost as many topics. There are people who make blogs about their families, keeping their relatives and friends up to date with their lives. Some bloggers like to write about a niche subject, like wine, and use it as a platform to display themselves as an expert in their field. They might use images, links to other blogs, writing, or even videos to make their point via their blog.

Many organizations have adopted blogging as a practice. It’s a great way to keep people up to date with all the exciting things going on with the company. Kodak, Walmart and CNN all use blogs.

In a nutshell...

Blogging is a way to compile information, to send out a message, in a neat, organized package. It’s a way for your website to be as current as you need it to be. It can be an arena for your clients to sound off, to give feedback, ideas, and encouragement. It’s an opportunity to show people you are passionate about your products and services, your industry.

From the Online Strategy Blog of !escunid

Related posts:

1. Why Blog? Ten Reasons That Cut Through The Hype So, why blog? Well, there could be thousands of answers....

We use our own custom solution which utilizes a custom branded design, content management system, web blog (which you are currently reading), and all the other bells & whistles.

Let us know what you think!

Related posts:

1. What is a blog? Blog is two words combined together: web and log. Like...

Related posts:

1. Welcome to the Re-Launch of escunid.com! To better serve our clients and communicate all that !escunid...

Related posts:

1. Welcome to the Re-Launch of escunid.com! To better serve our clients and communicate all that !escunid...

Scaffolding kingpin Warren Dunn, 45, of Scaffold Depot wants to conquer the world. But he knows the world doesn’t operate exclusively in English.

A big part of Dunn’s strategy is to reach non-English-speaking markets through a new technology developed by Vancouver web firm goodboog.

“A company anywhere can take my information and understand my product and check to see if I have what they want,” says Dunn, whose Surrey-based company grossed $14 million in revenue last year. (www.scaffolddepot.ca.goodboog.com).

Goodboog’s “global virtual catalog” allows someone in, say, Japan to read about Dunn’s company in Japanese, in Norwegian in Norway, in Finnish in Finland. How does this work?

Essentially, goodboog organizes its clients by having them classify their products and services using its database of 76,000 categories. Since all 76,000 categories have been translated into 25 languages, users across the world can read about a company’s products and services in their native language.

“Ninety four point nine percent of the world’s population using the Internet is located outside of North America,” says Michael-James Pennie, a native of Vancouver and goodboog’s chief marketing officer. “With emerging economies worldwide, businesses have to think globally. For you to have a website that’s only in English is very limiting.”

Dunn, who signed up with goodboog three months ago and has 250 “Catalog Cards” displaying his scaffolding products, has received inquiries from China, Germany, South Africa, Brazil, and the United States, resulting in deals from China and in the United States.

He anticipates he’ll be hearing from non-English speakers using goodboog’s “Communication Translator,” which includes 4,000 pre-defined business correspondence phrases. “They can send me back a few reference phrases that can start the conversation. It’s about opening doors that would be closed otherwise,” Dunn says.

Dunn’s products can be found through the goodboog’s search engine as well as through search engines around the world. “We’ve partnered with Google, so we push the Catalog Cards in the Virtual Catalog through a web feed to a system called Google Base in order to allow direct product search engine indexing,” Pennie says.

Since Dunn’s scaffolding products are funnelled through Google Base (which is Google’s product search engine), when a customer searches for “ladder,” Dunn’s goodboog site will figure higher in the page rankings.

“It will increase their page ranking,” says Pennie. “It’s a process that a company on its own would have to pay thousands of dollars to integrate and we do that automatically, which makes their products that much more visible.”

Goodboog is currently working to build similar partnerships with search engines worldwide, and as the company team embarks to Beijing with the BC Trade Mission this month, it will meet with Baidu, China’s equivalent of Google.

Goodboog currently has 2500 companies signed up with their own Virtual Catalog. “We have people from all around the world – China, India, Turkey, Hungary,” says Milan Hucko, 43, co-founder and CEO of goodboog. In his Kitsilano office, Hucko displays the online analytics map of the world, which shows a list of countries and the number of people currently surfing the catalog. The site receives between 22,000 and 30,000 hits a day.

Goodboog has been savvy to attract a customer base. Any company can list its business card for free. In total, about 3 million free firm-business cards are listed worldwide, with 97,000 in Canada. And newly rolled out this month is their virtual rolodex, in which business professionals can profile themselves and network with other professionals worldwide for free.

A “newbie” on the internet, Cynthia Newman, 50, owner of The Little Skin Care Company, is enamored of goodboog’s easy-to-use platform. “This is a good way for people just starting up in business. It’s easy, simple, and you can control and update your own site any time and it’s very inexpensive.”

She is hoping that The Little Skin Care Company will move beyond “cottage industry” size with its exposure 1. in goodboog’s global virtual catalog.

“I’m looking at mega size,” says Newman, who works out of her West Vancouver home. Newman cooks up a natural, multi-purpose skin creams from a recipe that her Swedish grandmother in Chicago developed for her husband in the 1920s to help soften his hands, which were calloused and coarse from fixing cars and farm equipment.

Newman’s creams, some industrial strength and some cosmetic, contain baking soda and Hawaiian sea salt and a number of secret ingredients that are all natural. To her delight, the creams have also been useful for contact dermatitis, acne, and psoriasis.

A recent subscriber to goodboog, Newman was pleased to see the number of hits her products received – 112 within the first day of set-up. “I had a person call the next night asking me to send a sample to New Zealand … I was really impressed. Wow, this is working already!”

Newman calls goodboog a “one-stop shopping” for her online needs: a website, a domain name and she’s looking forward to the possibility of adding interactive web 2.0-like features to her site, such as video of her cooking up the creams (www.psor-relief.ca.goodboog.com).

No related posts.

Beijing International Business & Technology Summit Attendees at the closing dinner.

Executive Director of !escunid Online Business Development Michael-James Pennie, CEO of goodboog Global Virtual Catalog Milan Hucko, President & CEO of the British Columbia Technology Industry Association Pascal Spothelfer, Technical Director of !escunid Online Business Development Gwyn Pritchett

No related posts.

Global News covers the story below:

Images below are of the BC Canada Pavilion and depict BC Premier Gordon Campbell signing his name on the glass plaque in addition to !escunid’s Executive Director Michael-James Pennie and Technical Director Gwyn Pritchett:

Images Below depict !escunid’s Technical Director Gwyn Pritchett and Executive Director Michael-James Pennie with the Chinese Olympic Committee Vice President Tu Mingde, British Columbia’s Minister of Economic Development, and Minister Responsible for the Asia-Pacific Initiative and the 2010 Winter Olympics Colin Hansen, President of the Justice Institute of BC Jack McGee, and the President of the Canada-Asia-Pacific Rim Alliances Paul Stinson:

The BC Canada Pavilion will serve as an introduction to business, tourism and industry highlights in British Columbia, Canada. Exhibits are characterized as a journey to a land of pristine beauty, multicultural communities, rich natural resources and innovation in business. Additionally, it provides a flexible business and meeting center, open between May and September 2008, where government and private industry representatives from China and Canada can liaise to explore business opportunities and cultural exchange. !escunid is pleased to have attended the grand opening and utilize the business space provided.

No related posts.

The first day kicked off May 20th, 2008 with !escunid Executive Director Michael-James Pennie presenting to a packed BC Canada Pavilion of over 120 delegates consisting of both government, private, and public sector companies from both China and Canada in the audience.

All in all, a lot of buzz was created around the event and !escunid generated a very positive reception in creating many opportunities that are now being discussed further.

!escunid lends a personal thank you to the British Columbia Technology Industry Association and the British Columbia Ministry of Economic Development for making this event happen.

No related posts.