Twelpforce’s day-to-day operations demonstrate the know-how of Best Buy employees, and their customer-service expertise, right before tweeters’ eyes!

Here’s how Twelpforce gets it right:

• Its service is run by real employees—people to whom customers can relate.
• It operates 24/7, and no tech questions are off-limits.
• It’s approachable, even for those who don’t “get” Twitter. Twelpforce’s user page explains how to pose questions. It also links to Best Buy’s social-media policy.
• No waiting! Gone are the days of digging for phone numbers, navigating labyrinthine automated systems and waiting on hold to the tune of elevator music.
• Transparency. A Best Buy feed shows you what conversations are occuring in real time, giving a sense of how thorough respondents are and how long it takes to address questions.
• Dynamic FAQs. The aforementioned feed also lets you search for answers, provide feedback and ask questions directly. Basically, it’s an FAQ that changes and is updated as fast as technology can move!

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Though it may seem obvious to public company executives and PR professionals, creating and submitting press releases is a great way to boost your online and offline credibility. Yet I hardly see any small and medium sized businesses actively engaging in this type of in-the-trenches PR work.

Even if you’re not at a large corporation, the reasons to submit a press release are many. Apart from the fact that they’re read by journalists and can result in genuine press coverage, the backlinks to your site from major news sources are great for SEO.

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Fantastic keynote from Rory Sutherland at TED about “Sweating the Small Stuff”. This is a must watch at 12min 30sec that goes by fast.

He makes a compelling case that the world we live in wants to believe that big, important problems require big, important, and expensive solutions. However, the reality is that what changes our behavior is disproportionate to the amount of force and expense we apply to it. In other words, the more resources and money we use to change buying behavior, the less real impact it actually has. Take for example Virgin Atlantic Airways, who brings a salt and pepper set in the shape of cute little airplanes to each passenger in coach. Some might like them so much, they consider pocketing the set. Then they turn the salt and pepper shakers over and engraved in the bottom are the words “Stolen from Virgin Atlantic Airways upper class”. Just these few words make the brand highly memorable each time you fly, and yet costs very little. Or, the elevator in a boutique hotel in Stockholm, Sweden where you are greeted with what, at first glance, looks like a set of floor buttons. Starting at the bottom it reads “Garage”, but then the next one reads “Funk”, then “Rythm & Blues” – that’s right, these are buttons to pick your elevator music! Again, highly memorable and not expensive – especially compared to the hundreds of thousands of dollars spent on upgrading hotel rooms to look like every other hotel room you stay in. Contrast this to something very large and massively expensive, like the AOL Time Warner merger which was heralded by Time Magazine in 2000 as the largest, single deal of all time. Now many people are customers of one or both of these corporations, and yet unless you were a shareholder or lawyer or dealmaker, did anyone notice anything different as a result of this at all? As Rory puts it, “You were engage in a huge piece of activity that meant absolutely bugger all to anybody”.

The essence of his argument is that we are socially conditioned to believe that to achieve big results, we need to have powerful people who develop big, important strategies, and spend a lot of money. However, what we really need is a class of people who have immense power and no money. That, every corporation should have a Chief Detail Officer and every governments should have a Ministry of Detail. People who take the time to comb over the little details to find minute opportunities to trigger significant change. Thank you Ben Young for sharing this video with me!

1. DIDs covering numerous destinations worldwide can be acquired online.
2. Through the use of a DID your customers will be able to call you at local call rates. This is particularly significant because it essentially eliminates the need for local representatives at every location and allows you to talk as much as you want at a reasonable monthly rate.
3. Operating a small business may require you to travel. You can change the forwarding destination of your DIDs, so you can still receive all of your calls when you’re on the road. The price of the DID will remains the same regardless of destination (mobile or landline) and you avoid paying the cellular companies’ excessive roaming rates.
4. You can receive calls to your different phone numbers on a single phone line, and able to answer more than one call simultaneously.
5. You will also be able to receive calls from those connected to the traditional PSTN network on your VoIP or Skype devices, making you more easily accessible.

In short, a DID is easy to set up, flexible, useful and cost effective. Using DIDs a small business can establish a global presence at minimal costs.

Note: This information was provided by the helpful people at DID World Wide, a leading global supplier of IP-based communications services including Direct Inward Dialing (DID) access solutions.

CloudOne Storage is built on the best-of-breed EMC® Atmos storage platform, which is known for enterprise level performance and security. If you host with PEER 1, you enjoy additional savings of free bandwidth across their 10GB SuperNetwork™ backbone. For more info, visit here.

There are a couple of things you need to know first, before you embark on a paid search campaign.

1. If your sales cycle is longer than 2 weeks from click to sale, your results might suck.

This is an important one, and many people miss the mark here.  If whatever you are selling takes multiple visits, multiple people in the decision process, or is a large, emotional transaction, chances are your paid campaign will suck.  Let’s look at a few examples:

Plumbing Service – you’ve got a overflow situation getting worse by the minute. Do you search 15 plumbers and call for quotes? No. You go to your computer (or mobile phone) and within 60 seconds search for a local plumber and choose the one that looks most   You might even pick the one who mentions “emergency service” or “available 24 hours” or “30 minute emergency response.” You probably don’t care much about the price either – you just want it fixed.

Real Estate – buying property is usually not an impulse buy. We look at lots of options, talk to lots of people, make personal visits and collect a lot of information before making the final purchase. This is definitely not an impulse purchase. Paid search can work in this case if the margins are high enough to where even if the conversions are dismal, one sale could pay for the whole campaign.

Air Conditioning Repair –Like the plumber, you need the next available company to service your system, because it is 100 degrees outside and your AC isn’t working. The first or second listing will get the deal.

Home Health Care – getting a parent or loved one into a home health care situation is an emotional experience. Not only is the sales cycle longer than 2 weeks, but the decision is usually not with one person, which makes it a harder deal to close. If clicks are going for $5-10 a piece, you could spend hundreds before getting a new client.

2. Send your clicks to a very targeted landing page.  Quality score matters and can greatly affect your cost per click.

We see a lot of businesses sending their paid ads to the home page of their website.  Sending someone to a page that has little to do with what the ad said will result in a poor Quality Score.  Secondly, your home page has lots of other links and things to distract a visitor (who you just paid for) to do just about anything other than what you want them to do – convert.

3. Find out what long tail terms in SEO convert well, and bid on those.

This is also an overlooked area in paid search.  If you take a gander at your analytics, you already know which organic search terms convert well.  Many of them are branded (include your company name), but some are not.  Many of them will be long tail, or terms which are extremely targeted and result in fewer visitors, but less bounce rate and higher conversions.  Bid on these long tail terms – they will be cheaper and will likely convert better.

Is the Apple iPad a funky tech fad or a game changer?

After listening to Wired Magazine Chris Anderson’s keynote at adtech San Francisco this year, the iPad is not only a game changer and will forever change the way we consume the Internet, but will also reinvigorate the gasping publishing industry. His main argument — the iPad and future tablets from HP, Google and the rest offer a controlled delivery and experience that you cannot achieve through the traditional html-web browser format we’ve become accustomed to – because they must be cross-platform friendly and therefore allow for less control over the final packaging. On the iPad, the experience is controlled, which allows the web product to be more packaged and polished. For example, examine the difference between reading the Wall Street Journal as a newspaper vs. through your web browser vs. through the iPad app version. The iPad app allows the WSJ to flow more like a newspaper as it was painstakingly intended to be by their design and publishing team. A beautifully packaged and intuitive experience rather than the after-thought feel of reading WSJ through Firefox or Safari. This, along with the simple touchscreen interface that anybody and their grandmother can use, makes the iPad a compelling piece of technology that is very, very hard to ignore.

Combined with the recent redesign of Moishes.com, this user-friendly interactive tool allows visitors to the website to simply drag and drop icons of items they plan to store, by room type, into a virtual storage space. The Moishe’s Storage Space Estimator calibrates the cubic feet of the items, suggests an optimal-sized storage space, and offers customers a price quote. Customers can then reserve their units online, schedule a free pickup, and upload the pictures of their goods for future inventory management all within seconds!

“Moishe’s has always been ahead of the curve when it comes to technology and customer service in the moving and storage industry,” said Moishe’s Moving Systems CEO Gene Lemay. “We’ve taken our online customer experience to a whole new level with the Storage Space Estimator, allowing customers to optimize their Self Storage costs.”

The initial launch of Moishe’s Storage Space Estimator serves Moishe’s Self Storage customers. Moishe’s has over 3 million square feet of state-of-the-art storage space in New York (Long Island City and Brooklyn) and Chicago. Moishe’s has filed for a patent for the Storage Space Estimator, and in the coming weeks, the online system will be expanded to serve Moishe’s Mobile Storage customers across the U.S.

A little history, the company was created in 1983 and by 1990, Moishe’s became the largest independent moving company in New York City, with a host of movers, a convoy of red trucks and several storage facilities. Five years later, Moishe’s was the largest moving company in the Tri-State area. Today, Moishe’s has hundreds of employees, scores of red trucks and millions of square feet of storage which utilize state-of-the-art technologies to assure the safety and security of their clients’ belongings. Moishe’s operates regional offices across the country and has established six specialized divisions catering to the unique moving and storage needs of thousands of individuals, families and businesses every day.

Business consultant and author Stephanie Chandler of The Leap! 101 Ways to Grow Your Business and The Business Startup Checklist and Planning Guide shares some great tips for business owners in this economy. Watch her video made exclusively for BIG Marketing for Small Business.

Social Media – start networking; it’s all about relationships. Don’t walk into a function thinking “What I am I gaining. What’s in it for me?” Go in there with the mindset that everything is an opportunity to build relationships.

Marketing Plans – get a vision; find what you need to make it happen. Where do you want to be in 5, 10, 15 years? What steps and goals must be accomplished to reach that vision?

Publicity Plans – create a month-by-month plan of publicity opportunities for your business. Know who’s covering what and when they are covering. Don’t forget about online!

Check out the video for more tips. She also talks about the Project Rev contest that could give your small business a $5,000 boost!

Here’s a video recap by NovusTV of the F5 Expo held April 7th, 2010 in Vancouver, Canada.