RT @JimKukral: 5 Plugins to Boost Contact With Your Readers and Users http://bit.ly/b6IFiG
A blogger or admin who takes the time to answer visitor questions, engage commenters or interact with readers always gets return visitors.
If visitor loyalty is important to your blog, you should do all you can to solve their problems, answer questions, respond to comments and messages – and even let them call you from your website.
Here are a few great Wordpress plugins that give you various ways to get in touch with your readers, streamline the communication process and answer some questions if need be.
FAQ Builder is a Wordpress plugin that lets you create a FAQ (frequently asked questions) page for your users.
Once you install the plugin, you can add it on any page. You can use the simple plugin interface to add questions, answer user generated questions, and organize your FAQs for ease of access. You can also add a search field for users to search through your FAQs.
Google’s chat badge is a wonderful tool that lets you talk to your site’s visitors using the familiar Gtalk.
If you have a Gtalk account, you can create a custom code and paste it into your blog. This will create a chat window for your visitors, and it will show if you are available for chat. Using this system, you users can talk to you from your website.
You can use the click2call plugin to allow users to call you directly from your website. You can modify the code to customize the design of the interface.
You can also download the optional Kermit app to setup a voicemail system that sends you an email transcription of your voicemails. Currently, you need a US or UK number to use this plugin.
Support tickets are important if you are running a major website with an active help and support forum.
They let you track visitor support queries and respond to them in an organized and efficient manner. Support Tickets is a Multilanguage enabled plugin that lets you create support tickets for your visitors. It uses the Contact Form 7 plugin to let you answer your users’ technical questions.
Wordpress-to-Lead is for bloggers or businesses that want to use the functionality of the Salesforce CRM and adapt it to their WP blog. It converts emailed contact info from your WP contact form into CRM entries that you can manage easily.
The plugin adds its own contact form for this purpose. Using the form will automatically convert emailed user data to CRM entries for you, and you will not have to go through the cumbersome stages of copy pasting this data into your Salesforce CRM.
About the Author: Loren Baker is a partner at Search & Social, a digital marketing agency with an emphasis on social media engagement and search engine marketing. He’s also a professional blogger and the owner of Search Engine Journal, an AdAge Top 10 marketing blog.
Google is fixing one of the features that landed its new social networking product Buzz in hot water with users, privacy groups and legislators alike. Today it will start suggesting people that Buzz users can follow, rather than automatically signing them up to follow people they most often chat or e-mail with.
When Google originally launched Buzz, it populated the product by having users auto-follow others they frequently communicated with through Gtalk or Gmail. While the suggestions were helpful in many cases, they were pretty awkward in others. For example, you might e-mail your boss often, but you might not want them following your status update stream. One enraged user wrote a screed that was widely passed around after she realized she and her abusive ex-husband were following each other on the service.
“Google got themselves into trouble by launching a public-facing service inside a service that people understand as extremely private.
Gmail seems like a logical integration point because people visit there regularly, but juxtaposing the two services created a cognitive disconnect in users’ minds. The result? Confused users believed that their emails were being made publicly accessible.”
Starting today, users will see the prompt pictured above when they access Buzz. They will be able to view and edit the people they’re following and the people following them back. They’ll also be able to choose whether you want those lists appearing on their public Google profiles. They can also adjust settings on any sites connected to Buzz like Picasa, Google Reader, or Twitter.
The changes are the latest in a series the company has made to clean up the PR mess the initial launch left behind. During the first week, it made links for blocking followers a lot more visible and allowed users to hide their contacts.
The company has to act fast as the uproar has already piqued the concern of legislators. Nearly a dozen legislators wrote a letter to the FTC earlier this month asking the agency to investigate whether the service violated user privacy.
Tags: Google Buzz, privacy
Companies: Google
The title provides a short answer to the question: Why do we integrate with Google Apps? An important emerging theme in cloud applications is the one-page or to be more accurate the one-browser-tab approach to design – i.e contextual integration of information across applications, so that whichever app the user happens to be, it pulls relevant information from other apps, and displays it in the right context. In the traditional desktop and client-server world, data is slave to the application that created it. In the cloud, data is liberated so it can contextually go where it is the best fit. We have used this as our architectural blueprint in Zoho, as we integrate Zoho services with each other (such as our CRM & Email integration), as well as in integrating Zoho with third parties.
Take the Google Apps marketplace announcement yesterday. At that event, there were plenty of demonstrations on how contextual integration works across vendors. Notable ones include Intuit Online Payroll integration with Google Calendar, Atlassian Jira.com integration with GMail/Docs/GTalk, and of course our own Zoho CRM and Zoho Projects integration with GMail/Docs. It is fair to say that every single case of integration demonstrated at the launch even yesterday takes the cloud based ecosystem functionality ahead of where traditional enterprise systems are capable of today. Even more important, we completed our integration with Google in under 2 months, even while they were still refining their APIs. We thank the Google team once again for inviting us to be a launch partner.
Why do we want to integrate with Google Apps? The most important browser tab, in a business context, is the one dedicated to email. Given that GMail is the cloud email provider of choice by far, it is natural for Zoho to integrate our suite with GMail and Google Apps. While we agree with Marc Benioff on enterprise apps taking design inspiration from Facebook (well, not too much inspiration, we are not sure we want to go around “poking” our customers!), we would also like to point out that email is where the majority of business users spend their time. Of course, given that Salesforce has no email strategy, it is natural for them to try to redefine the market away from email and towards social networking. This is Salesforce’s third attempt at making their CRM a business app platform, but unfortunately for them, email is a far more natural starting point than CRM – we say that as a company that has a strong CRM suite. Besides, to be a real platform, you have to have a degree of openness, and our experience with Salesforce demonstrates the opposite, and sets up a direct contrast to Google’s platform approach.
Now, what exactly is contextual integration? In a nutshell, contextual integration allows for the most relevant information to surface up to the user, regardless of where that information is stored. For years, if you wanted to get information on customers, you had to go to your CRM system. If you wanted to get information on employees, you had to go to your HRIS system, if you wanted to read email, you went to your email client.
The cloud is going to fundamentally change that. With contextual integration, everything comes together – emails, calendars, documents, CRM systems, project management, HR, accounting, all of it – all from within one single tab. In this new vision, application boundaries become fluid, in fact applications in the traditional sense take the back seat, and the user’s workflow and context dominate. The benefits are enormous, both for individual business users, as well as for IT organizations. Individual users can get more done faster, with tools that get out of their way. IT organizations reap enormous productivity gains in systems integration.
That second point, systems integration, is an important one. The vast majority of IT spending goes to systems integration/professional services. It is well known in the industry that in the old software model, licensing costs represent only 20-30% of the initial cost. But in the SaaS world, we are already seeing how much easier it is to share data among different, disparate systems. This of course, doesn’t mean that system integration costs will entirely go away. In particular, enterprise customers will still need to hire professional services to connect cloud services to their more intricate, legacy systems they still have in-house. While they might not go away, we fully expect them to substantially decrease. Small and Mid-size customers will even be able to do away with them, as cloud vendors are increasingly pre-integrating each other’s systems.
I will acknowledge that contextual integration is still in its infancy, but we (by which I mean the entire cloud ecosystem) are making rapid progress. The important thing to note about cloud applications is that, in the beginning, they were just about replicating the desktop experience. Want an email program? I’ll give you one, but instead of on a desktop client, on the web. That was step one. Step two was about improving some of the features that the desktop application provided: more storage, better scalability, better security, etc. But now cloud applications go far beyond that. Contextual integration is an example of how cloud applications – Zoho’s and everyone else’s – are bringing a whole new wave of productivity and innovation.
Sridhar Vembu is CEO of ZOHO Corp. Learn more about Zoho, a comprehensive suite of award-winning online productivity, collaboration and business applications for small and medium-sized businesses, as well as consumers, at http://www.zoho.com and the Zoho blog, http://blogs.zoho.com/. Follow the company on Twitter at @zoho.
GigaOM says the "privacy experts" weren't "placated" by Google's non-apology. I guess they aren't experts at GigaOM. http://r2.ly/xhcy
Google, after scrambling to alter certain features and add new settings to Buzz several times since its launch a week ago, has admitted that it rushed the service out the door. However, the search giant says it’s working hard to adapt to what users want and has set up a “war room” dedicated to responding as quickly as possible. The company told the BBC that while most Google services go through some testing with a small group of beta users, Buzz was released into the wild without this level of testing. Buzz product manager Todd Jackson admitted that many users of Buzz were “rightfully upset” and said Google was “very, very sorry.” He added that: “We know we need to improve things.”
Within hours of the Buzz launch, users were complaining about a number of features (or flaws) in the service, including the fact that their Gmail and GTalk contacts were publicly revealed for everyone to see, and that the setting for making that public or private was enabled by default and/or difficult to find. Users also said blocking followers wasn’t as easy as it should have been, that they couldn’t unfollow someone if they didn’t have a Google profile, and that it wasn’t clear who would be shown in their list of followers.
Many of Google’s new products and services first undergo testing with what the company calls its Trusted Testers program, in which a small group of users — primarily friends and family members of Google employees — get early access to the service and provide feedback before it’s rolled out in open beta. This was not the case with Google Buzz, the company told the BBC, although it had been used for some time internally by Google employees themselves. “Of course, getting feedback from 20,000 Googlers isn’t quite the same as letting Gmail users play with Buzz in the wild,” Jackson said.
According to both the Wall Street Journal and the Los Angeles Times, the company has set up a “war room” at Google headquarters that monitors what users are saying about Buzz, and that the company plans to make further changes to the service in response to that feedback. The most recent changes to the service — in which Google switched from an auto-follow approach, where users found themselves following Gmail and GTalk contacts automatically, to a “suggested follow” approach — was made on Saturday by a group of Google engineers and senior executives including VP Brad Horowitz and senior engineering VP Jeff Huber. The changes are being rolled out this week.
While the company has been applauded by many for its rapid response to user complaints and the addition of new features, that doesn’t seem to have placated some privacy advocates, who say Google’s approach was wrong from the beginning. According to the LA Times, the Electronic Privacy Information Center is planning to file a complaint with the Federal Trade Commission over Buzz. “”The bottom line is that self-regulation is not working,” center director Marc Rotenberg told the newspaper. “Google pushes the envelope, people scream and they dial back the service until the screaming subsides.”
Post photo courtesy of Flickr user So Gosehn
