Plus, Zappos is a died-in-the-wool customer-service-centric company with an aggressive visionary founder. Photo credit: edrabbit. really believe it’s bad advice to recommend that companies fire their social media consultants, experts and agencies only to bring everything internal. While “everyone” is on Facebook , social media is no longer a land of tinkerers, it’s a land of consumers. Someone who has completely rebuilt itself to over-serve its communities. Kudos, but seriously a truly exceptional example. It always lands on one person’s shoulders. MORE >>

After all, if an organization is going to succeed, it’s got to grow its customer base, and nobody’s better at doing that than a strong marketer. 91% of senior marketers believe successful brands use customer data to drive marketing decisions; yet, 39% say their own company’s data is collected too infrequently or not real-time enough to be useful (source: BRITE Study). 51% say a lack of sharing customer data within their own organization is a barrier to effectively measuring their marketing ROI (source: BRITE Study). Photo credit: Wikipedia. That’s good news. MORE >>

You just eavesdrop on your customers and they tell you what is on their mind. When you combine social listening with traditional market research, you create an unbeatable combination for customer intelligence. Photo credit: dmhoro. Most of you know that I serve Converseon as Chief Strategist, and I’ve watched Converseon’s great research team pull insights from social media conversation that have astounded me. But some people still don’t believe that social media  can deliver real market research value. Traditional market research works. It’s unprompted. MORE >>

Claim Your Custom URL. If you haven’t claimed your custom LinkedIn URL yet, your profile will be much more difficult to find, especially in Google. Improve the searchability of your profile’s links by customizing the text with keywords. 'Image via CrunchBase. LinkedIn isn’t just the world’s largest professional networking website–it’s an empire with over 200 million members at last count. new member joins every two seconds. Getting noticed on the network requires a deep well of connections, and some site-specific SEO magic. My URL is [link]. Finish Your Profile. MORE >>

And don’t worry about needing to provide too much new and exciting content all the time — 80% of all online content-production is just interaction, responding, being smart, being there, helping people out, answering questions, doing some customer support. When speaking about what Reputation.com does, people often think of Online Reputation Management (ORM) as a defensive strategy. And for some, it is. However, Google is often the first impression anyone gets when they’re introduced to your brand online. What are on them? Are they about you? Are they positive? MORE >>