Your content has to be able to engage readers on that same, deeper level.  It has to connect and resonate with them in a way that doesn’t sound like a pressuring sales pitch.  To do this, try incorporating these points into your writing:

Say it Out Loud
Some people find that they can get their message across better by writing the way they speak.  If you force yourself to proofread everything you write with the hawk-eye of an editor, it will come across as dry and uninspiring.  On the other hand, if you talk with enthusiasm about your product and what it can do for someone – your excitement comes through in your writing.  You sound much more convincing without having to slather on the hype – and that can often make the difference between getting the sale, and getting nowhere with your prospect.

Visualize the Results
Imagine your product in your customer’s hands.  What will they do with it first?  Imagine their reaction when they first see the results.  How can you best put that experience into words?  By visualizing the results, you’ll come up with some detailed words that don’t necessarily have to sound like they were ripped right from the pages of a college thesaurus.  Talking over and above people’s heads is an exercise in creating content that doesn’t get read.  Talking to them on their level, in a way that engages them and creates a mini “light bulb moment” is what gets them to take action.

Break Up Your Paragraphs
People don’t read email. They don’t read web pages either.  They’re not poring over your words and hanging off your every post.  They scan – and if they like what they see, they go back and read in more detail.  Take advantage of this by breaking up your paragraphs into smaller, more easily “scanable” chunks.   Use bullet points to cut right to the facts and follow up your writing with stories that illustrate or testimonials that cut right to the heart of the message you’re trying to get across.  Your readers can tell the difference between a truly involved writer and one who’s desperate to make a sale. 

Remember, when writing content for the web, less really is more.  Ask yourself what you can afford to trim from your writing and how you can make it more easily accessible to your ideal customer.  When your writing speaks directly to them, you’ll immediately see a much higher level of engagement – and a sense that yours is a company who truly “gets it”.

LifeLock spent millions spreading its CEO’s Social Security Number all across America. Now the firm will spend $12 million settling claims that it engaged in deceptive advertising and failed to protect customers’ personal information.

The Federal Trade Commission and 35 state attorneys general announced on Tuesday that Lifelock is changing its business model to address allegations of unfair and deceptive business practices. 

“They developed a market to capitalize on consumers’ fear,”  FTC Chairman Jon Leibowitz said at a news conference.  “They were exaggerating the service they offered to consumers. This was a fairly egregious case of deceptive advertising.”

Consumers who signed up with the service as early as 2005 — about 1 million customers in all — will be eligible for refunds. The fine is steep for the firm, said Leibowitz.

“We’re taking all the money they had on hand,” he said.

The firm remains in business, and has agreed to change its advertising practices. Leibowitz said its services do provide some protection against identity theft, but not the level it repeatedly promised consumers in its well-known advertising campaigns.

LifeLock made a name for itself by plastering CEO Todd Davis’ Social Security Number across billboards and other advertising. Many of the ads suggested that LifeLock could provide absolute protection against ID theft.

In one ad, the firm said it could make consumers’ personal information “useless to a criminal.”

“Consumers received far less protection than they were promised,” Leibowitz said.  For example, Lifelock was useless against identity theft involving existing credit cards or bank accounts, he said.

The firm also collected extensive personal information from consumers when they registered, and promised to keep that data safe. The FTC says LifeLock failed to do so. In its complaint, the FTC says the firm:

* Did not encrypt data, but stored and transmitted it in clear text.

* Failed to require employees to use hard-to-guess passwords.

* Did not install patches and critical updates.

* Did not plan for common vulnerabilities to their network, including SQL injection attacks.

* Did not install antivirus software on employee computers.

* Allowed faxes with personal information to be available in open office area.

Illinois Attorney General Lisa Madigan said LifeLock engaged in “scare tactics” while advertising to state residents.  She said the firm sent letters to individual consumers implying they were at heightened risk for ID theft — one of which was mailed to her at home.

“Don’t be scared into spending your hard-earned money,” she said, addressing consumers. 

Lifelock has numerous imitators in the marketplace.  Madigan said her office will continue to monitor their advertising.

“Know that if you are misleading consumers, we will go after you,” she said.

LifeLock CEO Todd Davis said his firm has addressed all concerns raised by the FTC and has long since abandoned many of the techniques the agency said were misleading.

“This has has no impact on current practices or products,” he said. “We haven’t used the (Social Security number) ad in quite some time.”  He also said personal data stored by LifeLock is now carefully guarded, and that the FTC complaint refers to vulnerabilites that have been addressed.

He said he welcomed new federal regulation in the competitive field of ID theft protection, comparing the industry to the early years of automobiles.

“When cars came out there weren’t speed limits,” he said.  “We were told we were speeding. We understand and accept responsibility. We don’t want in any way for someone to be misled.”

LifeLock consumers will soon receive letters explaining how they can apply for refunds.

Madigan added that most of the services provided by paid ID theft prevention firms are available to consumers for free.  They can place fraud alerts on their credit files at the credit bureaus, and get copies of their credit reports at AnnualCreditReport.com.

Find out how a travel insurance company doubled the amount of content visitors shared on third-party networks with a simple site redesign. We offer five insights they gleaned from this simple, eye-opening test.

World Nomads sells traveler’s insurance in 150 worldwide markets, and relies heavily on user-generated content to attract visitors to the site. Some 8,500 travel bloggers have published more than 55,000 stories and 600,000 images through the team’s platform.

The site’s blogs are free to create, and this content provides a wide funnel to introduce visitors to the company — typically through travel-related searches. But social sharing is increasingly helping them fill their funnel.

“We recently noticed that people were getting far more connected in their social media lives and their social networking, and we just did a tiny little redesign in how our share tools were displayed,” says Christy McCarthy, Community Manager, WorldNomads.com

A simple redesign — making social sharing a more prominent option — doubled the amount of the site’s content shared through social networks like Facebook and Twitter. If you’re offering social sharing tools on your site, you may have a similar opportunity to increase usage.

Here are five insights about how to encourage sharing that McCarthy and her team gained through the test:

Insight #1. Content and audience required

The team has welcomed travel bloggers to their site for about five years. The steady stream of content developed an audience, and the presence of an audience was required for their redesign to have impact.

- Existing tool had some traction

The team had offered social sharing on its blogs for about 18 months prior to the redesign. The tool was a single grey “share” button that contained very small images representing three popular methods of sharing, such as via Hotmail or social bookmarking network Delicious.

Once clicked, the tool presented a longer list of networks from which users could select. The tool automatically prepared the core information users wanted to share, such as a post’s headline and hyperlink.

“We knew that people were using it somewhat,” McCarthy says. “We thought if we made it easier for them that they might use it more.”

Insight #2. Strive to simplify

The team’s new creative director mentioned that the share feature likely could be redesigned to improve performance, McCarthy says.

So the team made simple changes:

- They replaced the single gray button with several separate icons, each representing a network through which readers could share content. For example, if a reader wanted to share on Facebook, he or she would click the Facebook icon, login and share the content (see creative samples below).

The new design simplified the user experience by one click. Previously, users had to click to share and then select a network. The redesign combined these steps.

- They added sharing buttons to the bottom of each blog post. Previously, the single share button was offered in a right-hand navigation column alongside blog posts, but not at the bottom of each entry.

Insight #3. Use data to select networks

The team tracked their audience’s use of the older share button for 18 months. By examining the data, they identified the most popular networks, and those which brought the most traffic to the site.

The team selected the following icons to feature:
o Email
o Favorite (in a Web browser)
o Twitter
o Facebook
o Delicious
o Digg
o Google bookmarks

Here’s what they saw in the data:

- Facebook accounted for more than half of all sharing.

- Email was popular but declining.

- Digg was used by a minority of people, but was a powerful traffic driver when used.

The team also added a “+” button to reveal dozens of lesser-known networks through which users could share.

Insight #4. Anticipate snags

To add the original grey “share” button, the team only had to add two lines of javascript to their website. When they started adding and customizing individual icons, the process became more complicated, McCarthy says.

For example, the team launched the new buttons in a short time, but they quickly noticed the tracking did not work. According to reports, no one was using the buttons.

“It took us three cracks to get rid of the bug. But it also wasn’t the highest priority,” McCarthy says. “I knew we were losing data, but of all the data across the whole business, losing the amount of people sharing is something I could live with.”

Insight #5. Look for optimization and research opportunities

The team achieved a twofold increase in content sharing with the simple redesign. But the process left an opportunity for further growth realized through A-B and/or multivariate testing.

The team’s redesigned buttons have been live for less than a month. McCarthy is looking forward to crunching the new data her team is gathering to examine:
o Which networks the audience prefers
o Types of content they prefer sharing
o Types of content are most likely to arrive on networks with the biggest impact

Reprinted from Marketing Sherpa

When it comes to keeping your best customers, what methods do you use?  The fact is, in a sluggish economy, cutting back on purchases and spending is what most consumers do first.   Companies, on the other hand, figure they can afford to trim back their sales force, customer service staff, and their marketing budget.  Those companies assume, without the support of sound statistical evidence, that they can manage search engine marketing, display advertising, and email retention programs in-house.  They think they can handle it all themselves.  Numerous case studies indicate otherwise while demonstrating that it is more cost effective and profitable to out-source to companies that specialize in a particular service. 

What companies discover is that, more often than not, the difficulty in finding prime talent, paying the salaries and benefits that will keep these professionals, and the investment needed to obtain the “tools” (i.e. the technologies they’ll need to succeed), amounts to more than the service fee an agency would charge.  Not to mention that oftentimes revenue is lost to competitors while companies trying to manage their marketing in-house struggle with the inefficiencies that become hurdles when companies stray from their core competencies.   The digital landscape is littered with examples of companies that have created problems for themselves by trying to stretch their resources too thin only to see mediocre, or even worse, degraded results.  Think Yahoo!

It’s Not (Just) About the Software

Sure, there are all kinds of tools and programs out there to help you manage your customer relationships more effectively but none of those will take the place of human to human interaction.  If a customer feels well treated then you have increased the probability of developing a relationship that will span multiple conversions.  If your company misses the opportunity to treat that shopper with care and clarity then you’ll lose that conversion and will have missed the chance to convert that person into not only a sale but into an influencer who will spread the good news about the positive experience that person had with your company. 

It takes real, personal interactions with your customers to truly make your business shine.  Staying committed to building and managing your client relationships, even when times are tough, demonstrates forward thinking.  Admittedly it’s tempting to push the “magic” button flooding your database with yet another email offer because the revenue will roll in.  But that’s short term thinking.  You’ll eventually burn those people out. 

Remember those “records” — those names and email addresses — represent real people.  Give them something of value from time to time for free.  Offer newsletters, tidbits, or even a coupon to use later.  But don’t ask them to buy each and every time you contact them.  Sure, building and managing client relationships is capital and labor intensive but the conversion rates when you do run an offer will more than make up for the investment.  And you’ll keep them as yours for years.  Showing someone you’re genuinely involved with them gives evidence that you’re not just focused on the bottom line.  As a result, your bottom line will grow by leaps and bounds. 

Now is the Time to Get Involved

You can’t manufacture a sales force full of robots to do your bidding and hope your brand doesn’t suffer because of it.  You can’t plug a bunch of names into a database and hope its meager personalization efforts will make your customers feel “warm and fuzzy” about your company.  People are hungry for real contact with companies that care.  Now is the time to step up and start making customer relationship-building your number one focus.

Douglas Atkin, who wrote The Culting Of Brands: How To Turn Customers Into True Believers, observes that brand communities have mushroomed since he published his book six years ago, and social tools like Facebook and Twitter have exploded. But, he says, most brand stewards are confused about what “community” means.

“Being a fan or follower is not the same as being a member of a community,” he writes. “Membership delivers a whole higher degree of commitment. It also demands a whole other level of engagement from participants and, consequently, a deeper appreciation by the community leader of their responsibilities.”

Atkin then offers five different strategies for building a community along with examples of marketers who have done so. But the golden rule in the brand-community business, he says, is “BE USEFUL.” If you prove that you genuinely care about the people who are giving you their hard-earned dollars, “the social networks will enable people to tell others. If you don’t, they’ll also enable people to tell others.” – Read the whole story…

Real Age is a great example of what Facebook could do. Real Age takes the user through a form of health and lifestyle questions and at the end gives that person their “real age” as opposed to their “biological age”. The user feels they’ve benefited from their participation. And Real Age has a form of medical information that they sell to the medical community at about $50 a pop. However, participation in the Real Age process is anonymous. The information you offer up is not. 

Below is a link to an article written by Helen A.S. Popkin that we thought would be of interest to you, Your Facebook profile: An open invite to crime?

The $83 billion overall cost of poor customer service in the us came from:

* Business abandoned and lost to entire industry, $32.4 billion
* Customer churn and defections within industry, $50.6 billion

Furthermore, the problem has become more complicated as customer interactions move beyond the contact center. According to numerous industry researchers, more than 90% of all transactions initiated over the Web are abandoned before any transaction is completed. And virtually no researchers have accurately measured the value of customer service across communication channels, says the report.

Across 16 key economies (countries), the total loss for poor customer service  in US dollars is $338 billion annually or  the average value of each customer relationship lost to a competitor or abandoned of $243. In addition, 86.4% of consumers would welcome extended offers or help during self-service transactions.

The biggest losers at the industry level are in cable & satellite TV, financial services, and consumer products. Nearly one quarter of consumers in the US said they abandoned a cable/satellite company in the past year, resulting in over $12 billion in lost revenue. And financial services companies suffered more than $10 billion of losses alone. Industries that were previously safe from competition, such as utilities in deregulated regions, are also feeling the pain, with $1.75 billion in lost revenue.

In the U.S., 71% of consumers have ended a relationship due to a poor customer service experience, and the average U.S. customer surveyed had 11 interactions each year and ended 1.2 relationships. The average value of lost relationships in the U.S. is $289 per year.

Younger consumers differ sharply from older consumers in their willingness to switch:

* Consumers aged 27-43 terminated relationships most frequently, at 1.52 times per year
* Consumers under age 26, at 1.43 times per year
* Ages 44-62 did so once per year
* Those over 63 years old did so 0.71 times per year

Assisted service is well developed, with 78% of consumers saying their most satisfying experience occurred because of a capable and competent customer service representative. But self-service lags because it is not often intelligently integrated with assisted service. Consumers feel the most significant root causes of poor service are:

* Repeating themselves
* Being trapped in automated self-service
* Forced to wait too long for service
* Representatives don’t know my history and value
* Cannot switch between communication channels easily

33% cite voice self-service  as the most challenging channel compared to only 1% who find it most satisfying. And 38% of consumers said it is critical to improve voice self-service to make it more intelligently integrated with human assisted service. Where they were trapped in an automated system, consumers spent, on average, more than 9.5 minutes trying to reach a human.

When thinking of their most satisfying experience, consumers said competent service representatives played the largest role, while proactivity makes a significant difference. Consumers satisfaction is increased when four key needs are met:

* Competency
* Convenience
* Proactivity
* Personalization

Consumers felt that companies had done much more to improve in the area of competency than any of the others..

The Most Significant Factors In Satisfying Customer Experiences (% of Respondents)
 
Experience                                                                                                      % of Respondents Wanting
 
Competent customer service representatives                                                       78%
The communication channels were convenient                                                    48%
The company was proactive in reaching out to me                                              37%
The transaction was personalized                                                                                 38%
Source: Genesys, October 2009
 

Consumers overwhelmingly said they would like more proactive outreach. More than 83% of consumers said they would find proactive engagement either a “strong benefit” or would “welcome proactive assistance” when they were stuck on the Web or in self-service.

Consumer Views of Proactive Contact

* “No Thanks”   9.5%
* Strong plus   48.8%
* Welcome   41.7\

In prioritizing improvements cross-channel conversations, consumers want companies to enable them to:

* Start in voice self-service and get assistance from an agent
* Start on the Web and get voice assistance or chat from an agent
* Receive an e-mail and then get assistance from a contact center
* Schedule callbacks to avoid wait times
* Add chat or instant messaging to Web interactions

In conclusion, the report notes that poor customer service has a clear and immediate impact on a company, and the first step should be to understand and measure the direct business impact of customer service, and identify the gaps between the customer experience and expectations.

 The Next 30-Day Retail Index, which represents the number of electronics, appliances, and yard and garden equipment consumers said they’re planning to buy in February plummeted to 6.9 from 8.9 the prior month. That’s the lowest level it has been since August of last year.

The hesitation to spend money is not the result of personal financial hardships, however. The consumer Reports Trouble Tracker showed real improvement. It declined to 53.4 in February from 58.2 in January. The top difficulty reported in February: the inability to afford medical bills or medications (14.7 percent, up from 12.7 percent in January).

According to another Consumer Reports survey in January, nearly 70% of the survey respondents who regularly take prescription medications took steps to afford their drugs in the past year. 28% resorted (without their doctor’s or pharmacist’s knowledge) to at least one potentially dangerous measure:

* 16% failed to fill a prescription
* 16% skipped a dose
* 11% took an expired medication
* 10% cut pills in half
* 4% shared a prescription

Overall, nearly half of consumers reported reservations about generics. They said that the medications have different side effects (27 percent), aren’t as effective (22 percent), don’t meet the same federal standards (18 percent), and aren’t as safe (16 percent) as brand-name drugs. People under 65 without prescription drug coverage were especially likely to take those risky steps.

Many people also cut back on necessary purchases or resorted to dubious financial practices in order to afford their prescription drugs. For example, they:

* Spent less on clothing (30%).
* Cut back on groceries (23%).
* Relied more on credit cards (23%).
* Postponed paying other bills (15%).

The Employment Index remains unchanged, but there is a significant trend emerging, says the report. Over the past several months the proportion of Americans reporting a job loss in the past 30 days steadily declined to 5.7% in February, versus 7.8% in October. However, fewer Americans started a new job in the past 30 days (3.8% in February, from a recent high of 6.2% in September).

As a result of the overall mixed picture, the Consumer Reports Sentiment Index has remained virtually unchanged in February (43.9) from January (44.1).  The Consumer Reports Stress Index is now at 59.9, on par with January (59.0), but down from December (63.0).

In an almost concurrent report, comScore reported that a strong holiday season kept online retail from finishing 2009 in negative territory, and offers hope for a better year for e-retailers in 2010. The web remains a relative bright spot for retailers, comScore says. “New buyers continue to enter the channel, and as average spending per buyer rebounds off its 2009 lows, the e-commerce channel should return to healthy growth rates.”

The “African Americans Revealed” study of more than 80,000 African-American consumers on multi-media engagement and digital applications, shows African-Americans are very tech savvy, with roughly 31% of African American discretionary spending dollars, or $39 billion, going toward the purchase of computers, cell phones and electronics – a proportionally higher percentage when compared to non-African-Americans.

African Americans:

* Spend more weekly time online (18 hours) than watching television (15 hours)
* 93% go online traditionally via their PC’s, while 76% access the web via their cell phones
* 60% have downloaded music, a TV show, movie or ringtone in the previous month
* 50% regularly update and access a social networking account

The included segmentation study revealed that African-Americans are not a monolithic group but rather break down into seven distinct groups defined by similar characteristics, including buying power and habits, media consumption, and influences: 

The Strivers are mostly in their late 20’s to early 40’s and are adventurous, fashionable, social mavens and opinion leaders who have their eyes on climbing the executive ladder
Conscious Sisters are selfless women that are spiritually connected and highly conscious of their culture
Tech-Fluentials are digitally savvy and travel in globally conscious circles
Bright Horizons are young adults in high school and college that are aware of all available technology  and electronic gadgets
Inner Circle Elites are working women rich in their cultural, ancestral and spiritual roots
Urban Dreamers are young, urban adults who are social magnets and trend setters intent on and focused on living life to the fullest
Survivors are a group of risk-taking teen and young adult males who are hustling to keep their existence in check

A 2010 Census study, within “African Americans Revealed,” predicts that the upcoming Census count will find that 42 million African-Americans reside in the U.S., a 13.4% increase from the 2000 Census – a higher growth rate than the projected 9.8% increase for the total U.S. population.

Matthew Barnhill, Senior VP of Corporate Research at BET Networks, says “African Americans Revealed shows us that the black community should never be referred to as one homogeneous population… We hope this report will help organizations better connect with an audience and intimately recognize all of its complexities.”

For additional information about African-American buying power, please visit here.

These companies and these actions make it harder for the rest of us to make an honest living.

The pupose of the “Online Social Responsibility” fan page is to create an awareness that the web is an environment, and like the three dimensional world around us, it’s vulnerable to pollution, and other types of degradation. We want to create an association of companies that care about the future of the web. This is still a work in progress. Much needs to be defined and, in fact, we depend on your thoughts and opinions. We’d like it if you became a fan of “Online Social Reponsibility”. 

The article, Legit Web sites team up with shady operators