GoDaddy websites down

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Our websites should all be fine one or two clients may have email issues but remember the recipient of any email you send may be down

According to TechCrunch, many customers are reporting that web hosting giant GoDaddy is down — taking out all kinds of websites with it.

A Tweet from the official GoDaddy account said: “Status Alert: Hey, all. We’re aware of the trouble people are having with our site. We’re working on it.”

The company is also saying to users who Tweet at them: “We’re aware of the issues people are experiencing and we’re still working on it. Thanks for your patience.”

TechCrunch is also reporting that customers say e-mail from GoDaddy websites is also down.

Mashable is reporting that the security leader of Anonymous is taking responsibility.

GoDaddy websites down

Print | Comments (0) Posted by Joe Allen-Black  September 10, 2012 02:25 PM

6 Internet marketing tips for relationship managment

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Internet marketing = Relationship Marketing

Internet marketing = Relationship MarketingWhen everything you do revolves around your community – customers, fans, followers, employees, etc. – the answer is clear. You will have the reputation, loyalty and love that keeps your business alive and thriving. You will have a connection with your audience, and that’s the key to success for your company.

Take the focus away from the dollar signs attached to your products and services, and focus on what’s really going to affect your sales: relationships.

 

Relationship marketing online is a fine balance
of technology and personality.

Something that has remained constant throughout the years is the power of relationships in business. Relationship marketing these days is just present in a different arena – online.
There are people who may insist that there were no problems of disconnect until the Internet came along. This simply isn’t the case. Technology is not the cause of this disconnect; the cause is the people behind the computers.

If your online presence is genuine and your brand is “real,” relationships will blossom.

And since nearly 90% of consumers use search engines to make purchasing decision (Digital Influence Index), you better believe that a strong community presence will feed your bottom line.

Relationship marketing from the ground up

To create a healthy community online, set up a steady foundation for your relationship marketing.

  1. Understand your audience. Identify your niche market and how you plan to solve their problems. Have a clear vision for who your products and services are going to help so you can target them more directly with a message that resonates more powerfully.
  2. Engage with your audience. Write with your audience’s wants and needs in mind. Listen to their feedback – good or bad – and give them a say in the conversation. Conversation is a two-way street, and there’s a difference between talking to people versus talking with them.
  3. Be a part of your community. Be present in conversations about your own brand and your industry. A good relationship marketing strategy covers all aspects of a community – from customers to competitors. Find ways to join in on relevant conversations, offering your own opinion, experience, expertise and input. Just be sure you have something worth saying.
  4. Demonstrate your expertise. One component of your relationship marketing strategy must address the fact that there is competition for what you’re offering. People will respect and listen to you more intently if your language is confident, clear and beneficial. If you’re not the expert in a certain area, that’s okay. Seek the advice or help of a non-competitor who knows the subject through and through, and give them credit for their knowledge.
  5. Answer questions. Create free downloads, pay close attention to what people are asking on social media sites, and set up a blog dedicated to helping visitors find the answers to their most common questions. Your customers want to be acknowledged and appreciated.
  6. Provide excellent service. Don’t just stop online with your relationship marketing. Continue the process offline and really show your customers that you appreciate them. Treat them with respect before, during and after a sale.

Final thoughts

The purpose of relationship marketing is to put the “people” back in business and ignite that “warm and fuzzy” feeling. It’s about having actual human beings dedicated to nurturing your online presence and every person that is a part of it.

Take the focus away from profits, put it back on relationships, and trust that the profits will come as a result. That’s relationship marketing in a nutshell.

Are you building relationships with your internet marketing?

10 Things You Didn’t Know About Yelp

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Don’t under estimate the power of social media. I find I use Yelp often especially when traveling. As a business owner it is worth your time an effort to learn about these sites and use them to your advantage. I get asked about #10 on this list all the time, avoid the “The Streisand Effect.” Here is a great list from  of 10 things you may not have known about YELP.

Next to Google, there’s probably no more important site for small businesses than Yelp. Yet perhaps no other site is as poorly understood. For instance, is it a good idea to encourage your customers to give you good reviews on the site? Does Yelp pay for reviews? How do you go about countering bad reviews?

Since Yelp is such a juggernaut, it’s important to get the facts straight. With that in mind, take a look at these 10 things you may not have known about the service.

1. Most of Its Traffic Is From Its Home Page

You might think that in 2012, most people would be accessing Yelp from their smartphones, but that’s not the case. Sixty percent of searches are from desktops, and the company’s mobile apps are used by about 7 million people. Yelp.com gets 78 million visitors per month. However, like other social media companies, the trend is definitely favoring mobile.

2. Restaurants Aren’t the Biggest Category

Yelp’s biggest category is actually shopping. Shopping reached parity with restaurants in September 2011, but has since surpassed that, says Darnell Holloway, Yelp’s manager of local business outreach. Though Holloway says that perception still lingers; he believes that restaurants have a natural advantage because they get so many customers compared to, say, a dentist. Says Holloway: “If I’m a diner, I’m probably going to see more people coming through the door.”

3. Encouraging Customers to Post Reviews is a Bad Idea

 

 

It might seem like closing a sale with “And don’t forget to tell people about your experience on Yelp!” is smart marketing, but Yelp discourages this practice and other forms of review coercion. “We recommend that people focus on awareness rather than asking for reviews,” says Holloway, “because then it becomes an arms race.” But wait, should Yelp want more reviews? After all, more reviews equals more traffic and, in theory, better reviews if you believe in the wisdom of crowds, right? Not according to Yelp. The company believes in quality over quantity. Moreover, “We don’t believe that consumers necessarily want to be seen as a promotional vehicle.”

4. Those ‘People Love Us on Yelp’ Stickers? You’ve Gotta Earn Them

The Yelp sticker pictured above is a genuine accolade designed to be akin to a high Zagat rating. That means that you can’t order a “People Love Us on Yelp” decal for love or money. Instead, the company doles them out twice a year to companies that get overall high ratings.

5. Yelp Provides Free Signage Via Flickr

Though Yelp discourages merchants from bugging customers to write reviews, it is a proponent of more subtle means of persuasion. For instance, the company provides downloadable signage via a Flickr stream. Holloway also recommends putting a Yelp link in your email signature and on your business card.

6. Yelp Has Paid For Reviews in the Past

Though Yelp strives to maintain the purity of its reviews, the company has in the past paid people to write them. CEO Jeremy Stoppelman told The New York Times in 2007 that “there was a time in our earlier days where we experimented with paying for reviews directly in cities outside of San Francisco to help get the ball rolling in our otherwise empty site.” However, the company has not done this for at least four years.

6. Customer Service Appears to Have the Strongest Effect on Reviews

Yelp’s research has found that a customer whose review praises “customer service” is more than five times as likely to give a 5-star review than a 1-star review. Similarly, nearly 70% of those who trash a business’ customer service wind up giving a 1-star review. In a May blog entry on the topic, Yelp featured a word cloud of terms that popped up in positive reviews:

 

 

Obviously, it seems to pay to be friendly, nice and helpful.

7. Every Star in a Review Leads to a 5-9% Jump in Revenues

A study by Michael Luca, a professor at Harvard Business School, found that there was a correlation between a high Yelp ranking and revenues. Luca just looked at the restaurant industry in Seattle, but his findings were a ringing endorsement for Yelp. Among other things, it found there were far more Yelp restaurant reviews than there were from Zagat or The Seattle Times.

8. Yelp Tends to Favor Independent Businesses Over Chains

If you’re a McDonald’s franchisee, don’t waste any time worrying about your Yelp reviews. According to Luca’s study, Yelp’s effect on chains is “statistically insignificant and close to zero.” Luca also found that when Yelp penetrates a market, “there is a shift in revenue toward independent restaurants.” This is not by design, but based on the fact that reviewing a McDonald’s in St. Louis is a rather absurd exercise since it will likely be very similar to a McDonald’s in Kalamazoo, Mich., or Newark, N.J.

9. Business Owners Can Dispute Reviews on Yelp

If someone trashes your business on Yelp, you don’t have to sit back and take it. In fact, Holloway recommends business owners go on Yelp and dispute. The reviewers can then answer the business owner if need be.

10. Legal Threats for Bad Reviews Can Trigger ‘The Streisand Effect’

Yelp reviews operate in a grey area between journalism and customer service. If you’re a business owner and see a scathing review that is completely incorrect, you may consider it akin to slander and be tempted to call your lawyer. However, Yelp cautions against this. In an FAQ on its site, Yelp evokes “The Streisand Effect,” in which an action has the unintended consequence of drawing more attention to the problem. (The term got its name from Barbra Streisand, whose attempt to suppress photos of her home backfired.) As Yelp counsels:

“Far from being cowed, recipients will sometimes go public with them as a warning to others not to patronize your business. Second, beware of lawyers who are quick to file lawsuits without telling their clients that it can cost them dearly. Last, take a step back: if you find yourself insisting that a review is obviously untrue, there’s every reason to think that your customers will draw the same conclusion as you. Even if they don’t, Yelp’s review filter is always on the prowl, and it may be able to put enough pieces of the puzzle together over the long-term to filter out the bogus review.”

 

This post originally appeared on the American Express OPEN Forum, where Mashable regularly contributes articles about leveraging social media and technology in small business.

Another reminder of the power of Twitter.

scottidesignNews & Updates

N.J. Man Gains 4,000 Twitter Followers
After Users Mistake Handle For Saudi Company

NEW YORK (CBSNewYork) – A New Jersey man whose Twitter handle spells out the name of a Saudi telecommunication company suddenly found himself with more than 4,000 new followers in a 24-hour span.

And not all were happy.

ArabNews.com said that the guy goes by St. Chris on Twitter.  His handle, @StC, had customers of the company with the same name — STC — tweeting him about service issues.

He promptly changed his Twitter bio to say, “I am neither a Saudi phone company nor a shopping mall in Jakarta, but I’m pleased to make your acquaintance.”

You never know what will happen next in the “Twitterverse.”

Inline image 1

Reprinted from CBS

Google’s Fiber basic five-megabit service for $0 per month

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Inline image 1

Never before have so many people all of a sudden thought, “I wonder if Kansas City is a nice place to live?” That’s because Google recently announced the details behind Google Fiber, its incredibly fast new Internet service that’ll cost eligible Kansas City residents $70 per month. Another $50 will add a cable TV package to the mix as well. All in all, $120 is in line with what you’d expect to pay for similar TV-plus-Internet service from other major cable providers.

So why would someone in Kansas City want to make the switch?

The Need for Speed

Google is promising download and upload speeds of up to one gigabit per second, which it says is about 100 times faster than the average U.S. broadband connection. Remember back in June when Verizon announced its FiOS Quantum package, which offered theoretical download speeds of 300 megabits per second and theoretical upload speeds of 65 megabits per second? That package costs $210 per month. Google’s theoretical download speed is more than three times as fast and its theoretical upload speed is more than 15 times as fast for a third of the price. If Google Fiber ever gets out of Kansas City, other Internet providers better watch out.

Best. Remote. Ever.

If you sign up for both Internet and cable for two years, you’ll get the coolest remote control ever made: Google’s new Nexus 7 tablet. Normally selling for $200, it’s arguably the best non-iPad tablet on the market, equipped with an app that lets you control your TV and search for shows with a swipe of your finger. Not only that, you’ll be able to watch TV on your tablet from any room in the house. The app will also be available for certain Android and iOS devices, letting you use your smartphone as a remote control as well.

Ultimate DVR

The standard DVRs from most cable providers do a decent job, but Google has an added bonus for its customers: Its storage box can record up to eight TV shows at one time and features two terabytes of storage. That’s a lot of episodes of Real Housewives of New Jersey (500 hours worth, to be exact). Plus, if you ever get bored with what you’ve recorded, you can stream Netflix or YouTube from the DVR. Searching for stuff to watch on TV will include relevant streamable results, too, all in the same place.

Who Needs Hardware?

Google is offering one terabyte of Google Drive storage for Internet subscribers and is heavily pushing its Chromebook for $299. This, my friends, is what this whole Google Fiber thing is all about. As long as people have slow Internet connections, relying solely on Google’s cloud isn’t really an option. But if you have a one-gigabit-per-second connection? All of a sudden using a Chromebook with Google Drive as your primary computer doesn’t sound so crazy.

Free Internet

Even if you don’t want blazing download speeds and a cool tablet for a remote control, you can still get Google Fiber’s basic five-megabit service for $0 per month. Granted, you’ll need to put down a $300 construction free, but after that your Internet connection will be guaranteed free for the next seven years. Not bad if you’re just a casual Internet user or have been looking for an excuse to get grandma hooked up to the web.

Not So Cool…

Google’s TV package includes almost every channel you would want, with one notable exception: ESPN. As I’ve noted before, ESPN charges cable providers around five times more than the average network. Also absent from the list of available channels are TNT and HBO, both owned (along with TIME – full disclosure) by Time Warner

Gluten free?

scottidesignNews & Updates

There are currently two organizations that certify food to be free of wheat, barley, and rye gluten at levels that cause problems for people trying to avoid gluten: the Gluten-Free Certification Organization and the other is the Celiac Sprue Association. Gluten can hide behind vague labels like "artificial flavoring," so buy certified products if you're really trying to avoid gluten.

http://www.gfco.org/
http://www.csaceliacs.info/treatment_of_celiac_disease_product_listing.jsp

The most cost effective advertising

scottidesignFacebook, Social Media

This post originally appeared on the American Express OPEN Forum,

This is something we have talked to many of our clients about social media the most cost effective advertising and is impossible to ignore

5 Signs Your Small Business Should Be on LinkedIn

1. You Employ 1-50 People

LinkedIn distinguishes companies by many factors, not the least of which is size. As a company presence on LinkedIn, your small business will likely fall into one of two categories: 1-10 employees or 11-50 employees. Not surprisingly, the former category hosts the largest number of small businesses, with 854,000 accounts.

Don’t get discouraged by the “competition,” though. Users will be able to discover your company using LinkedIn’s advanced search tool, which enables users to narrow results by keyword, location, industry and company size, among other metrics.

With that kind of specificity, your business can’t afford to not be on LinkedIn. After all, people are probably already searching for you, or at least for similar companies. It’s an opportunity for visibility that otherwise goes to waste.

2. You Have Something to Say

As a business, your first instinct is to create the obligatory accounts on Twitter and Facebook. That’s important — we’ll give you that — but consider LinkedIn another of those necessary, rewarding social presences.

Share content on LinkedIn by creating updates and company announcements natively on the platform. You can include links to external websites, images and YouTube videos. Once shared, your update will post to the activity feed on your company overview page and to the homepages of LinkedIn members who follow your company.

You can also opt to share blog posts within a widget that lives on your company page. Check out Mashable’s “Recent Blog Posts”, for example: These updates live separately from the aforementioned announcements (which are stored in the activity feed on a page) because they refresh automatically as your blog updates, and will not post to your followers’ homepages.

Like many other social platforms, LinkedIn users and the network itself discourage update spam. That means you shouldn’t overload your followers with excessive, self-promotional content — you’ll lose followers fast.

3. You’re Hiring

LinkedIn is a network for job seekers and professionals. Thus, it makes sense that you would use it to post your latest job openings, whether they’re full-time positions, consultant opportunities or freelance projects.

It’s also a great excuse to open a LinkedIn account if you haven’t done so already. You’ll draw more interest to your page with updates, such as job openings, press announcements and general company news.

You may post an available job to LinkedIn for $295 for a 30-day period. Once posted, these jobs will not only appear in search results, but also in the “Careers” tab on your company page.

4. You Need Advice

This applies for both personal and company accounts on LinkedIn. The network is a valuable resource for people who seek tips and resources to support their professional endeavors.

Before signing up for a company account, browse the company pages of similar businesses to see how the moderators manage the content and direct the conversation. Learn what type of content shares well, whether it’s blog posts, company announcements or sexy images.

If you have a personal account, find groups that speak to your industry (e.g. Women in New Media or Developer & Technology Professionals) and ask for advice from fellow users on how to create a strategic company presence on LinkedIn.

5. You’re a Non-Profit

Your charity or service organization most definitely has a place within a professional network. In fact, non-profits may enjoy more benefits on LinkedIn than regular companies and, in fact, LinkedIn encourages it.

As a non-profit, you may choose to either create a LinkedIn company page, a group or both. Determine how invested you want to become in the platform, and then create your presence around your goals.

Company pages like charity: water’s are useful for general information, updates, events and job offerings surrounding an organization. But a LinkedIn group page can host richer discussion and engagement, though it requires moderation and management to guide the direction of the group. You may appoint more than one person for the job, but keep in mind that you’ll need to put in some work to make a group truly valuable for your non-profit’s supporters.

Whether for personal or business purposes, how do you use LinkedIn to build your professional network and skills? Share your experiences and tips in the comments.

16 Ways you get more attention.

scottidesignAnnouncements, How To, News & Updates, Search Engines, Social Media

Here are 16 ways you can get more out of your business using Public Relations techniques.

get the most out of your public relations

Recomendation from Sterling Horticultural Services

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Susan Olinger, APLD

Susan hired you as a Website designer in 2010

Top qualities: Great Results, Personable, Expert

“Jeff and his staff did a great job designing our site, and is always available and willing to make changes or help out with technical support. Our site has never looked better.” January 5, 2012

Sterling Horticultural Services was started with the expressed intent of providing a quality-minded, responsive and progressive approach to landscaping. We pride ourselves with over twenty-five years in the green industry.

This is just a little creepy, Target knows your pregnant first.

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How Target Figured Out A Teen Girl Was Pregnant Before Her Father Did!

Every time you go shopping, you share intimate details about your consumption patterns with retailers. And many of those retailers are studying those details to figure out what you like, what you need, and which coupons are most likely to make you happy. Target, for example, has figured out how to data-mine its way into your womb, to figure out whether you have a baby on the way long before you need to start buying diapers.

Charles Duhigg outlines in the New York Times how Target tries to hook parents-to-be at that crucial moment before they turn into rampant — and loyal — buyers of all things pastel, plastic, and miniature. He talked to Target statistician Andrew Pole — before Target freaked out and cut off all communications — about the clues to a customer’s impending bundle of joy. Target assigns every customer a Guest ID number, tied to their credit card, name, or email address that becomes a bucket that stores a history of everything they’ve bought and any demographic information Target has collected from them or bought from other sources. Using that, Pole looked at historical buying data for all the ladies who had signed up for Target baby registries in the past: