The Business Helper

The Scottish Secondary Teachers Association believes teachers can reveal too much personal information on sites such as Facebook and Twitter. The union also fears they could become overly familiar with pupils. The General Teaching Council of Scotland is preparing new guidelines on social networking sites. This follows a number of recent cases brought before the GTC’s regulatory body.

Jim Docherty, assistant secretary of the SSTA, told BBC Scotland that teachers should follow his advice: “First thing is don’t bother telling anybody else about your social life. Nobody is interested about your social life and it doesn’t help. ”Secondly, never make any comment about your work, about your employer, about teaching issues in general. ”There is always a possibility it will be misinterpreted.”

Tags: Facebook, Teachers, Teachers warned over Facebook and Twitter use, twitter

In the past few days, Verizon and GoDaddy.com have both reversed courses, pushed to change policies and proclamations by a groundswell of customer dissatisfaction. After thousands of customers switched away from GoDaddy.com domains, prompted to do so by a social media campaign headed by Reddit users, the company reversed its approval of the SOPA Internet-censorship bill. Verizon’s ill-conceived $2 fee for one-time online payments couldn’t even survive 24 hours, immediately targeted by vocal web users. Both companies are just the latest examples of an age-old expression given a modern twist: The active social media customer is always right.

Perhaps the company that faced the most online backlash in 2011 was Netflix, which heard the clamoring hordes after CEO Reed Hastings announced Netflix would be splitting its DVD and streaming packages into separate services and charging more for each. The social media cries were nearly deafening, as Twitter timelines filled with cancelation threats. The company attempted to jog left by announcing a complete separation of streaming and DVD services – and the creation of DVD-by-mail service called Qwikster – but that change, too, was met with protest. Although some of the pricing plan change stuck, Netflix abandoned Qwikster a few short weeks later. Still, Netflix’s customer service ratings suffered as a result of its mixed message, even though the company eventually reversed course.

HP also announced a change in its business model, only to turn back (and change leadership) after hearing support for its personal computers on Twitter and other social media networks. In August, CEO-at-the-time Leo Apotheker announced that HP would be ditching its personal computer business, in favor of other markets. He was quickly removed from his position as HP CEO and replaced by Meg Whitman. Whitman announced that the company would continue to produce personal computers, although it will not make any more TouchPad tablets.

Verizon wasn’t the only company to change its mind about charging customers fees after customers took to social media to protest the change. After growing backlash – and public promises from competitors not to follow suit – Bank of America was forced to retract its announced $5/month debit card fees at the end of October. “We have listened to our customers very closely over the last few weeks and recognize their concern with our proposed debit usage fee,” said David Darnell, co-chief operating officer at Bank of America. “As a result, we are not currently charging the fee and will not be moving forward with any additional plans to do so.”

Social media has changed the way companies and customers interact, and often David ends up taking Goliath down. 2011 was a year of companies igniting social media firestorms and then putting them out by changing their tone – will 2012 continue the trend?

Tags: " Rodney King And Crooked Cops, Forbes, How Twitter Made Business Decisions For Companies In 2011, twitter

If you missed it a few weeks ago, The New York Times wrote a piece about redefining public relations.

You see, the last time PR was defined was in 1982. Yes, 30 years ago. And, in the last five years, our industry has been turned on its head.

All of the journalists we spent our careers building relationships with were suddenly unemployed. Companies began to rush to figure out how to make money with the newest and shiniest penny. Paid and earned media had a new sibling: owned media. And marketing, public relations, and advertising began the “who owns this” fight.

But we’re entering a new year, a year where all of these things are meeting their mid-level experience.

So it’s time to think about the key skills you need to have going into 2012 and beyond.

1. Search engine optimization. It makes sense that a lot of the content that is being produced comes out of PR. We’ve always been writers and readers. Now we have to take that skill and learn how to optimize our content so it’s being crawled by the search engines, while also being highly valuable and engaging.

2. Search engine marketing. This doesn’t typically fall into a PR pro’s toolbox because it’s pay-per-click and ads. But if you don’t have an understanding of how it works, how to do A/B testing, and what to do with the results, you won’t be #winning.

3. Content marketing. Content goes beyond the white papers and advertorials we’re accustomed to doing. Now, it’s videos, podcasts, blogs, emails, eBooks and more. The thing about content marketing is, if you don’t do it yourself, you’ll never truly understand it. Start yourself a personal Tumblr blog, get on WordPress, or even try out Blogger (though it’s not as good as the others). When you develop content for something personal, you begin to understand the applications it has for clients, as well as how to build community.

4. Inbound marketing. This goes hand-in-hand with content marketing because it’s all about the engaging and valuable content you’re creating. But it’s driving leads. You’re going to write content that drives people to your site and encourages them to buy. Content that has headlines around what people search. For instance, one of our highest read blog posts is PR vs. marketing. That’s because people search that term and we have content to fulfill their need (plus a webinar they can buy).

5. Integration. 2012 is going to be the year of integration. PR is going to work with sales. Marketing is going to work with advertising. Customer service is going to work with product development. Instead of the silos we’re all accustomed to having, we’ll become a hub where information is shared and the left and right hands know what the other is doing. No longer will we have the “who owns this” fight.

6. Results. Gone are the days of media impressions and advertising equivalencies. You need to gain some business knowledge (how the company makes money) and some marketing expertise (how to target audiences to buy, using owned media). This is the only way you’ll understand how the work you’re doing is not just generating sales, but creating profit.

It’s a great time to be in this industry. We get to learn, expand our horizons, and get out of our comfort boxes. So go do it!

Gini Dietrich is founder and CEO of Arment Dietrich, Inc. A version of this article ran on Spin Sucks.

Tags: 6 skills every PR pro should have, PR, Public Relations, skills

Young Entrepreneur Council, Contributor

Treat yours customers as if they were newspapers reporters; this is the new mantra for savvy companies of all sizes.

As consumers, we’ve become disenchanted with advertising and marketing of all sorts, having being duped, tricked or made to feel foolish on more than one occasion. The last true medium that holds sway is referrals from friends, colleagues, or online reviews from the likes of Yelp, AngiesList or TripAdvisor. According to a survey by the American Marketing Association, 90 percent of consumers trust peer reviews and 70 percent trust online reviews. It’s the last, true, medium that many consumers turn to when faced when inundated with choice, and confused by similar-sounding sales pitches.

Perhaps it is because reviews are the last sacred ground, that a flurry of outrage spread like wildfire across the Internet when news leaked that Reverb Communications (a PR agency) was paying interns to write positive reviews on iTunes for their clients Apps. Or when the occasional Amazon.com author gets ousted for disparaging competing books while positively reviewing their own. If you can’t trust advertising messages, and you can’t trust reviews, what else is left?

Based on my experience growing 99designs into a company that earns 7-figures per month, based largely on word of mouth, here are my three golden rules:

Think long-term reputation vs. short-term profit.
Trying to optimize profit on a sale-by-sale basis is a fool’s game, leads to frustrated customers and lost repeat business. When FedEx left an eBags package without a signature at our office building over the weekend which got stolen, a single email to the company resulted in a quick refund to my credit card. Compare that to a recent experience with a National Retailer, where a request for an exchange or refund took two store visits, three people, and more than 90 minutes of waiting while employees scoured the back-room for inventory that turned out to be non-existant.Even Apple lived up to its reputation recently, happily issuing me a partial refund on a laptop order after I failed to claim a discount I was eligible for. It would have been easy to transfer me around different departments, put me on hold, or outright say “no” to retroactively applying the discount. But the first person I spoke to happily made it happen even though they had no idea that we had 90+ employees on MacBook’s that we regularly refresh, spending thousands in the process. You never know who the customer is on the other end.

Identify your top customers and make them feel special.
With many companies, the most feverently loyal customers represent a disproportionately huge chunk of revenue. Knowing who those people are — and giving them special attention — is a must-do for every company. I recently had a conversation with the founder of a large Las Vegas based conference that’s been running for more than 10 years who used Klout.com to identify his most influential attendees. By offering just a little bit extra (free limo service to and from the airport), a dozen influencers directly contributed to over 100 additional tickets being sold with almost no additional marketing costs.

Make yourself available.
I had my personal cell phone number on sitepoint.com for 10-years (a site visited by more than 2.5 million people every month and ranked Top 1000 in the world), and was happy to answer more than 30 calls on Christmas Day, when a special deal we were running on the website went wonky. These days, we have dedicated support reps for us on three continents, and we’ve never outsourced to a call centre to cut costs.

Tony Hsieh from Zappos says his company loves to talk to customers, and classifies customer service as a marketing investment, rather than an expense that must constantly be slashed and analyzed. Zappos has no metrics that reps have to hit around calls per hour, average time per call, or other silly nonsense that leads frustrated customers.

Some businesses are even taking it a step further, by turning their most prolific fans into advocates and online sales people. Under Armour and Skullcandy have recruited an online sales force made up of their most loyal and knowledgable customers and are paying them with cash and gear for answering live chat requests from prospective customers on their websites. After all, who better to make authentic product recommendations and answer detailed product questions, than the customers already using them? No outsourced call centre team can match the passion, product knowledge and helpfulness of your most ardent supporters. There is hope.

Tags: Customer Service, Marketing, Why Customer Service Is The New Marketing

Tags: NJ Educator Accused of Taping Boys in Catholic School Shower!

Coders are such a different lot than us media people, but programmer Sean Grove’s story might prove instructive nonetheless.

After finding himself stranded in Mountain View and urgently needing to find a job, he sent out 50 applications, receiving email responses from most, asking for answers to coding questions or brainteasers (you know, the “how many golf balls can fit in a school bus” things).

He did well enough to get phone screenings from 40 companies. Practiced with a friend doing mock interview questions and ultimately passed 25 of those interviews.

“Of course, once you go through ~15 of these interviews, it’s no accident when you start to solve the problem in a more and more optimized way. After each failed interview, I’d ask for the right answer, and what they thought their right answer indicated. Learned a lot of interesting tips, and also the right words to casually mention during future interviews,” Grove writes. “Each and every interview was an experiment = given this input, what’s the output? How did that vary from the last? What are the typical questions that pop up? Somehow many people who asks these pet questions feels like they’re asking it for the first time and are blown away when you solve it properly – which is much easier to do the second or third time around… and certainly the 15th time.”

He used those “practice” interviews to help him prepare for his next set of 25 in-person interviews, and thanks to all that practice, received 6 job offers and ultimately the one he wanted.

It’s certainly a lot easier to get a “right” answer when you’re talking about programming something, but it’s also true that the more interviews you go on the more prepared you are to ace an interview.

“It’s a game,” says Grove. We don’t know about that, but getting hired is certainly a numbers game.

Tags: How To Get Hired: It’s A Game, Jobs, Preparation

Martin Nwoga

With Black Friday approaching next week, many stores have announced that they will start their Black Friday sales as early as 8pm on Thanksgiving night. This is definitely an advantage for bargain shoppers who live off buying discounted items on Black Friday. However for employees, this may cause great anger. Just imagine being scheduled to work at Target from 8pm on Thanksgiving night to 6am on Black Friday. That’s not a fun work shift at all. This is definitely a win for the companies and its customers, while this is a loss for the employees.

Tags: Martin Nwoga, Who Really Wins on Black Friday?

Check out this Deep House mix by Brooklyn resident Martin Nwoga.

Tags: Deep House, DJ, DJ Reese, Ike Nwoga, Martin Nwoga, music

JACKSON, Mich. — Former Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick walked free from a state prison early Tuesday after serving just over a year for violating probation in a 2008 criminal case.

A relative escorted Kilpatrick from a Southern Michigan Prison facility in Jackson to a sport utility vehicle waiting outside. Kilpatrick smiled but did not address reporters as he climbed into the SUV, which headed toward the Detroit area under police escort.

In a statement issued ahead of his release, Kilpatrick thanked all those who prayed for him and said he would speak openly about his time behind bars after he has reunited with his family. He planned to rejoin his wife and three sons near Dallas, where his parole will be overseen by Texas authorities.

“Detroit, I will return to speak frankly with you about this experience because it has affected all of us,” he said in the statement.

Before leaving the prison, Kilpatrick changed into his own clothing: jeans and a peach-colored shirt, state Corrections Department spokesman John Cordell said. Kilpatrick’s brother-in-law, Daniel Ferguson, and a lawyer greeted the former mayor and walked him outside, Cordell said.

Cordell said Kilpatrick told them: “It’s good to be out. I’m on my way.”

The 41-year-old Kilpatrick was released on parole but still faces a federal corruption trial that could send him back to prison.

Tags: Detroit, Ex-Detroit Mayor Kilpatrick Freed From Prison, Kwame Kilpatrick

The Shins are back! A new Shins album will come out next year on frontman James Mercer’s own Aural Apothecary label, via Columbia. The Shins have also added a few tour dates, too; check ‘em out below, as well as video of Mercer performing a new, untitled Shins song at a benefit concert for Portland, Oregon’s Puddletown School back in March.

The Shins:

08-08 Eugene, OR – W.O.W. Hall
08-09 Bend, OR – The Domino Room
08-10 Portland, OR – The Doug Fir Lounge
08-12 San Francisco, CA – Outside Lands Festival
09-22 Toronto, Ontario – Phoenix Concert Theatre
09-23 Philadelphia, PA – Popped! Festival
09-24 Boston, MA – Paradise Rock Club
10-15 Pensacola, FL – DeLuna Festival

Tags: Columbia Records, The Shins, The Shins Sign to Columbia and Also Announce Tour, Tour