has closed on $900,000 in venture capital.Workface’s product lets people share content about themselves and their company with prospective and current customers. Humanizing online commerce is an idea whose time has come. The success of early dot-coms showed that people are happy to take humans out of the equation for certain types of purchases (books, CDs, commodity electronics). But the rapid spread of social media demonstrates that people still want human interaction for more significant and involved purchases (buying a home or a piece of large equipment). Paul Business Journal). MORE >>

Text chat has been employed for over a decade to help website visitors get a quick response when content addressing their immediate need isn't apparent or available. The Internet has made buyers much more sophisticated. According to a 2011 WebVisible/Nielsen study, 80 percent of consumers say they have researched a product online before buying. Many consumers will investigate multiple sources in the process, from websites that feature product reviews to social media such as Facebook and Twitter. Many visitors now expect real-time engagement when they visit your website. With 2.2 MORE >>

Combining social networking “netiquette” (being helpful, transparent and authentic) with business engagement on LinkedIn (for one-to-one interaction), Twitter (for immediacy) and Facebook (for content sharing) more fully involves employees in the organization and increases customer intimacy and trust. routing a comment to the appropriate individual for a response, based on content). Content sharing. In implementing the social business model, organizations apply social networking protocols and tools in a range of areas, potentially including: Marketing. Sales. MORE >>

Whether you are using an inbound content strategy, keyword and advertisement buys, or a combination of both, the obvious concern is improving your ability to capture lead information from more visitors (and justify the investment in getting customers to your website). Providing a directory of live agents at your website that empowers the visitor to self-initate engagement (via text/audio/video communications) has the following benefits to the visitor: Ability for visitor to ask questions not answered by website content. In the last month you had 5,000 visitors to your website. MORE >>

But, where social networks fall short is the range of content they can draw upon and display as results. The majority of results are text with a hyperlink, because to deliver results quickly, injecting images, videos, and other content would take longer to load and make for difficult consumption by the searcher. How can search engines become more social? By Lief Larson. Make no mistake about it, social media websites will start to operate more like search engines, and search engines will start to operate more like social networks. This assumes that any of the information (e.g. MORE >>