Posted April 13, 2010 by cgseo under under
Legal,
Pay-Per-Click San Francisco District Attorney Kamala Harris has announced, social network Tagged, has agreed to pay a fine of $650,000 for sending millions of deceptive emails in a 2009 campaign to boost its membership. “Whether you’re doing business on Main Street or in cyber space, you can’t deceive the customer,” said District Attorney Harris. According to the District Attorney’s Office, Tagged sent 40-60 million deceptive emails that falsely stated that a member of the social network had sent the recipient a photo or private message. Before the recipient could access the photo or message they were required to register with the site giving Tagged access to the users email contact list. Tagged repeated the process by sending the same misleading email to the recipient’s email contacts. Many consumers later learned Tagged had sent bogus emails in their names to all the people in their contact list. “We cannot in the name of aggressive marketing allow social networking sites and other tech companies to use unfair practices that breech our trust, invade our privacy and tarnish our good names,” said DA Harris . In addition to ordering Tagged to pay $650,000 in penalties and costs, the company must also put in place a set of safeguards for future business practices. Tagged must provide clear disclosures and get the consumer’s consent before sending any email in the consumer’s name to people in the contact list.
Tags: attorney, consumers-later, customer, cyber space, Kamala Harris, Legal, office, Review and Story, safeguards, street, the-recipient, unfair practices
Posted April 8, 2010 by cgseo under under
Pay-Per-Click Back in November, Salesforce announced its Chatter product, which it referred to as Facebook for the Enterprise . It launched in private beta in February, and now Chatter is set to become integral to the very core of what Salesforce has to offer. I spoke with Kraig Swensrud, senior vice president, product marketing at Salesforce.com ahead of the announcement, who tells WebProNews, “Chatter is at the center of our entire strategy moving forward.” Cloud 2 Swensrud explained this concept of “Cloud 2″, which is an internal term the company has been using, and basically refers to the next generation of cloud computing, which stems from the rise in general social media use and mobile/smartphone use, where people are accessing the Internet more from their pocket, as opposed to their desktop. Salesforce sees its strategy as “accelerating the market shift” to Cloud 2, which it says is “inherently social, collaborative and delivers real-time access to data and information across new mobile devices.” Swensrud tells us that since the company formed in 1999, they’ve been taking many of the leading trends on the web and applying them to the enterprise. Chatter is simply an extension of this. In fact, Swensrud says the company’s mantra now is along the lines of “Why doesn’t all enterprise software work like Facebook?” Milestone One announcement Salesforce is making today is that Chatter has achieved a new milestone of 500 companies in its private beta, with another 1,000 companies on the waiting list, and it will be coming to all customers later this year. With the Force.com platform, users began using Facebook-style collaboration technology, Swensrud says, and users started thinking, “why don’t we have the same-style collaboration in all business apps – not just CRM app – basically, anything that runs inside of a company?” That’s why Salesforce is allowing companies to build Cloud 2 apps with Force.com, Swensrud says. It will run all over the web and have all the features of Chatter. Companies can “Chatterize” any app they build with Force.com – Cloud 2 apps. 20 companies are going live with such apps right away. AppExchange2 and ChatterExchange Salesforce today is also introducing AppExchange2, a new version of its market place for cloud business apps, with a new category of social enterprise apps – the ChatterExchange, which will include the apps from the 20 companies and others that get built in the future. This can be found at appexchange.com/chatter Service Cloud Goes Chatter A big part of Salesforce’s announcement is that Salesforce.com’s Service Cloud 2 is going Social with Chatter. The company has extended the Chatter private beta to more than 250 Service Cloud 2 customers. Salesforce says that in combining the Service Cloud and Chatter, companies can boost productivity gains by empowering service agents with new capabilities for: – Monitoring Priority Cases: Service agents can stay on top of high priority cases, updates to critical knowledge articles, and the latest product updates – Locating Expertise: Service agents can follow experts across their organization and instantly get help from other agents, other departments, or from across the company – Real-Time Case Collaboration: For high priority cases, service supervisors can assemble the best expertise and information to close complex cases faster – SLA Management: Salesforce Chatter proactively can alert service agents of upcoming service level agreement milestones that they must meet – Sales-Service Alignment: Service agents and sales reps can share the latest case and opportunity updates for their customer to ensure good service means good business Swensrud says the companies in this private beta range in all sizes and across industries, with the largest being in the Fortune 500. ServiceCloud2, he says allows companies to not only communicate with customers via social networks and search engines, but when they receive customer inquiries, they can now use Chatter to work with all the departments within the company to sort things out. Salesforce Chatter will be included in all paid editions of Salesforce CRM and Force.com. Service Cloud 2 is available now and pricing starts at $65 per user per month. AppExchange 2 and ChatterExchange are live today, and customers should contact partners for pricing and availability of their applications.
Tags: chatter, cloud, cloud 2, cloud computing, customer, departments, desktop, mobile devices, platform users, Review and Story, salesforce, swensrud
Posted April 1, 2010 by cgseo under under
Pay-Per-Click Microsites are commonly used by brands in online marketing. Dynamic Logic , a firm that evaluates the effectiveness of branded microsites, says that 7.8% of people become aware of a campaign’s message who otherwise would not have, when there is a microsite involved. WebProNews spoke with Michelle Eule, Managing Director for Dynamic Logic’s research application AdIndex , about this and other recent findings regarding microsite effectiveness. Microsite Effectiveness I wondered if that particular finding couldn’t be construed as a call to improve a campaign’s message overall, if its message isn’t clear before the customer views the microsite.
Tags: Advertising, consumer awareness, customer, display ads, drive traffic, dynamic logic, effectiveness, eule, real estate, research application, time
Posted March 10, 2010 by BlogPostman under under
Web MarketingSo, you’ve been in business for a few months now, and you’ve seen your customer base grow from just a few friends and family members to enough local action to keep you busy on a daily basis. You’re probably thinking that you’re doing alright without any web marketing campaigns, but that’s where you’re wrong. Too [...]
Tags: brick and mortar, business, complete obscurity, customer, email marketing, Internet, internet advertising, Internet Marketing, internet marketing firms, marketing, mortar businesses, relevant search results, targeted web traffic, web, Web Linking, Web Marketing, Website Advertising, website directory submission
Posted March 8, 2010 by cgseo under under
Pay-Per-Click A recent survey from E-Consultancy, in association with the Online Marketing Summit, found that most businesses are still only experimenting with social media. With this in mind, it seems worth paying attention to how some big and successful brands use social media in their own strategies. One company that is finding social media incredibly useful is Intuit , makers of popular financial software like TurboTax, QuickBooks, and Quicken. Seth Greenberg, Director of National Media Buying and Digital Marketing for Intuit’s consumer group answered some of our questions about how effective the companies efforts are in social media. Intuit actively participates on Twitter and Facebook daily, as well as YouTube, and some advertising with MySpace and LinkedIn. When asked if they focus on any networks the most, Greenberg says, “Currently, Twitter and Facebook are the focus because more than 50% of customers use it. Twitter offers a transparent, real-time engagement with customers and prospects on questions, issues or general comments they may have.
Tags: business, customer, free answers, Friends, Live, marketing, media strategy, online, product experts, product management, SEO, turbotax, Twitter, youtube