Earlier today, the BBC News website posted an article entitled Are Twitter and Facebook changing the way we complain?, focussing on how, in a digital age, the way in which we contact big companies has shifted away from the stern letter or phone call and instead to public messages via social media sites such as Twitter and Facebook.

It's definitely an interesting topic, and one which rings very true. Over the last year or two, as a fairly active user of social media, I've certainly seen a shift in brands using social media sites as customer service. Complaints will generally be sorted promptly (brands want to avoid 'public humiliation' as much as possible) but it also provides a great platform for companies to engage and interact with their customers too.

Take HMV for instance, who, alongside their main Twitter account, also have several social media co-ordinators each with their own account. They will deal with any problems customers have had, but also ask questions, recommend films and music, and post images from their offices.

Much in the same way, the team who manage the Tesco Customer Care Twitter account will help resolve any complaints and respond to positive comments too. Back last year I myself tweeted that I was tucking into a Tesco BLT sandwich, only to receive a direct response back moments later complimenting my choice.

Social media is a great way to help a serious-fronted corporate brand be personal and connect to the customer base they rely on. It doesn't have to be anything spectacular, but simple messages that show an understanding of where the customers are coming from can create a stronger connection or loyalty to the brand, which can only help sales in the long term.

An important point in the article comes from Richard Dodd, of the British Retail Consortium, who says that "If you are actively engaging in social media you are setting up an expectation amongst customers that they will receive a response, so you have to be geared up to fulfil those expectations." You need to be able to manage a social media strategy effectively so as not to unintentionally damage your brand.

Of course, it's absolutely fine to have a social media presence and not be too heavily involved in it, but it's an area of communication which is only going to grow and so it is something that companies need to seriously think about.

Whether you've just dabbled and would like to improve your social media presence, or have no experience at all, Real Point can help. We can plan an ongoing social media strategy for your business or even take on managing campaigns for you. See what we can offer by calling us on 01676 521 444 with your requirements.

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Post tags: customer service, Facebook, Social Media, Twitter

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Back in January, Michael Gove revealed his intention to carry out a major overhaul of the UK's school ICT curriculum. Now while I'll admit to not being Gove's biggest fan, I do agree with him on this and I'm relieved that there is finally a proposal to shake up ICT lessons, which have simply become dull and uninspiring.

Coming from the generation who witnessed the personal computer boom while at school, I was fascinated up until taking my Applied ICT GCSE, when as students we increasingly found ourselves more competent than the teachers.

Long gone were the days of typing in green against black on a Acorn BBC Micro computer, waiting excitedly (and patiently) for my work to be printed on perforated paper, or playing basic games and drawing in Paint when Windows domination began.

By 2005, the internet had come along, we all knew everything (what teenager doesn't!) about computers, and to be quite honest I got more fun from animating the Word Assistants (the dog and the wizard were my favourites) and trying to access blocked websites than learning how to mail merge.

Therefore I'm glad to finally see the Education Secretary describe ICT lessons as teaching "a curriculum that is out of date, that is basically glorified typing." He went on to say they're "not about creating the new applications of the future….it's not about being genuinely creative."

Talking to pupils who currently attend my old school, it doesn't seem like anything has changed since I left. While the school has started to upgrade to Windows 7, some PCs are still running XP and Office 2003, so pupils have more up-to-date software at home.

Current ICT lessons that focus predominantly on Office are set to be replaced with an 'open source' curriculum in computer science and programming, which can only be good for improving pupils' knowledge in using technology to solve problems, rather than constantly teaching processes and skills. By allowing pupils to gain a deeper understanding of the technical and creative ways of using technology, they will be much more prepared for working in a world where these skills are going to be required, and empowering our next generation of entrepreneurs.

Over the next few years, the way technology is used in education is going to be very exciting, and pupils, teachers and parents will be able to see the benefits. The Raspberry Pi computer is launching later this month, and the MIT Center for Mobile Learning's App Inventor (formerly Google App Inventor) will be launching during the first quarter of 2012. Both of these technologies will likely play a part in enabling kids to learn computer programming.

Of course, there is also the work that Apple has done in reinventing the textbook for the iPad, working with publishers to engage a more tech-savvy generation. But that deserves its own blog post!

© chris for Real Point Blog, 2012. | Permalink | One comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: education, technology

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If you're thinking of starting up a business in 2012, there are a whole range of marketing challenges that you need to be aware of, many of which simply didn't exist just a few years ago.

Over the last 10 years, the marketing landscape has completely changed, in large due to the emergence and subsequent rapid growth of the internet. Where direct mail was the main source of advertising for many companies, the internet has taken its place, and the amount of direct mail in the UK has plummeted. In fact, the only post we tend to get to the office at all now seem to be bills!

The most effective way to get your products and services seen by potential customers is through a company website. Whatever business you're in, your customers are online and therefore it's essential they can find the information they're after in the easiest possible way.

However, you can't expect immediate success overnight. It takes time for you to work your way up Google's search listings and get people to your website. A website also cannot stay static and remain relevant; it needs to grow with your business, keeping your information up to date and helping to raise your profile, advertise your products and services and generate sales leads.

Of course, updating your website frequently can also be counter-productive, and it might confuse potential customers who return to your site. But by using a combination of different social media and adding a blog to your website, you can generate new content (without editing your main information pages), build up a trusting following and feed people through to your website.

Your online presence is a critical marketing and advertising tool that you need to nurture to bring your company success. It won't necessarily be a walk in the park to start with, but it gets easier as you become more familiar with all the online marketing tools at your fingertips.

Although print advertising has suffered a large decline, the value of physical, printed business cards is still very high. Of course, while the ability to connect with a business contact through LinkedIn by bumping your smartphones together is extremely useful, it only takes weak phone signal to render this useless, and smartphones haven't become universal just yet. The maxim that "people buy from people" is still true, so even if customers initially find you online, being able to physically leave your contact details with them may push them into calling and arranging a meeting to see how you can help them.

Real Point have worked with clients of all sizes, from start ups to SMEs in the public and private sectors, and by utilising business stationery, website design and online marketing techniques, have helped them to grow. We are also now offering a series of social media training workshops, helping you to take control of your online identity and use it to boost your business. At just £55 + VAT for a morning's workshop, it's a steal!

See our GetOnWith website for more details, or give us a call on 01676 521 444 to see how we can help you with a bespoke website solution or online marketing package.

© chris for Real Point Blog, 2012. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: blogging, Online Marketing, search engine optimisation, Social Media

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Starting a new business or got a new product on the boil? One of the hardest challenges for a new business venture is coming up with a great name. The following are some of the tips we share with clients when we start working with them on the launch of a brand identity project. We hope you find them useful and if you have tips of your own, then please do share in the comments.

Define your customer

Try and create as close as possible a profile of your target customer. It may be that you have several products or services appealing to different customers in which case define a profile for each. Define their interests, buying power etc. Dependent upon whether it's Business to Business or Business to Consumer you may want to look at the other consumer brands they buy, for instance, which fashion labels they wear - are they an Armani or a Fat Face wearer? Or which mobile do they use - iPhone or Blackberry?

Look at your offering

Create an elevator pitch, a 30 second summary of what your product is and why I should buy it from you. What difference will it make to your customer's life?

Look at your competitors

See what they are branding themselves as. If you have the time, create a collage of their logos, colour schemes etc. How can you stand out from the rest?

Define the feeling

What's the feeling associated with your product or service? Fun and sexy? Safe and secure? Traditional? Warm and fuzzy? It's very important that your name and logo design match with what you're trying to sell. If I were to create a traditional product, a lime green colour scheme and a name like 'Squik!' (Yes, a complete invention!) is unlikely to connect well with my target customer.

Look at your complementary brands

Look at brands that complement the market space that you are entering. For example, if you are launching a new gardening product then the logos and packaging of garden centres, seed manufacturers, garden furniture and watering cans should be examined. Of course, you still have the same decision in a similar way to competitor analysis of whether you want to follow the crowd or stand out.

Descriptive or Abstract?

A final thought can be deciding whether your name (and your logo) should be descriptive of your product or abstract. An abstract name allows greater freedom of direction in your company's future, while a descriptive name can help your customer to best understand the product. However, this is often best considered after your initial brainstorm so you don't narrow your thinking too early.

If you can get a group together to brainstorm, then so much the better. Start with some basic descriptive words, colour names and feeling words, have a dictionary and thesaurus to hand and don't rule out anything at this stage.

Read through the elements mentioned above and write down as many ideas as possible. Then review what you've come up with and repeat the process.

Once you have a selection, test them out on people matching your target audience. How do they respond? Does it spark interest, incite suspicion, turn people off?

This should refine your list further, with which you then need to do the following:

• Google it to see if it's in use
• Check the urban dictionary for possible "questionable" meanings
• Check the name for available domain names (including potential misspellings)
• Check for available social media names eg. Facebook Page, Twitter ID
• Check that it's not a registered trademark
• Check that it's not a registered company name at Companies House
• Check for meanings in other languages

Note that if the above come back with names already matching, it's not insurmountable but care needs to be taken and thought given to how it could affect you in the future.

Once all that has been done you've carried out all of those steps you've probably narrowed down a shortlist, do a bit more testing on customer response if possible but at the end of the day, it's time to make a decision!

At Real Point we can help with all of the steps involved in name creation, logo design and brand creation, give us a call and arrange a meet up over a coffee.

© ian for Real Point Blog, 2012. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: branding, logo design, name creation

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One fantastic app I was waiting to come to the iPhone has now been out since December 2011, and it's an absolute beauty.

If you've got an iPad (I'm hoping to get the next generation, fingers crossed), you may have already discovered Flipboard, a gorgeous app which takes the content from social networks and other websites and reformats it into a digital, interactive magazine.

Flipboard was named Apple's iPad App of the Year in 2010, and as of September 2011 had been downloaded 3.5 million times. No official figures have been announced since then, but I'm sure the number has increased substantially since the release for iPhone.

With an attractive, image rich interface, Flipboard really is impressive. The content page has a panel for each feed, which when tapped reveals the article content, beautifully laid out like a magazine. Slide your finger across the screen and and the page flips over.

However, just writing about it really can't do it justice; you've got to experience it yourself. And as it's completely free, you've no excuse not to. Download it here.

© chris for Real Point Blog, 2012. | Permalink | One comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Apps, Flipboard, iOS

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You may have read the article 2011: The year when a lot happened on the BBC News website on Monday. Highlighting the Arab Spring, the deaths of Bin Laden and Jong-il, the Japanese earthquake and phone-hacking scandal amongst them, there have been so many high-profile news stories hogging the headlines that 2011 has definitely felt "somehow more momentous than an ordinary year."

However, the author, Tim Footman, suggests that it isn't simply that there have been such big stories, but the way in which news has broken and spread that has made 2011 such an interesting year. He reminds us that the "first inkling of the raid that killed Osama Bin Laden came not from President Obama's solemn press conference, but from one of the al-Qaeda leader's unwitting neighbours in Abbottabad, musing aloud on Twitter about the US helicopter that had suddenly disturbed his evening."

The speed at which news spreads highlights how important and relevant the internet and social media are, and especially how mobile technologies are changing the way we find out and interact with the world around us. Footman asks "how many people first got the news of Steve Jobs's death via one of his own devices?"

Of course, people can be accused of 'oversharing' and it's important not to cross the line of privacy. Let's not forget the aptly-named US Congressman Anthony Weiner essentially lost his job sending very intimate pictures to women on Twitter.

However, there are so many advantages to using social media for business, that it would be naive to ignore it. With over 30 million Facebook users in the UK alone, social media provides a fantastic platform to help increase brand awareness and enables you to engage with current and potential customers. While Facebook and Twitter are great advertising tools, they are extremely useful for providing customer service.

Real Point have launched a series of 'Get on with' courses, to help local businesses make the most of utilising social media. During these hands-on sessions, we'll share with you our knowledge on using Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Blogging with a focus on practical business benefits to help grow your bottom line.

With new courses being added all the time, see online for details of all our upcoming courses or give us a call for more information.

(Word Cloud: Tagxedo.com)

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Though fake technical support phone calls started appearing a few years ago, one of our home IT support clients recently had a call from someone claiming to work at Microsoft.

If you're not aware of this scam, the basic reason for the call is that you have "viruses and problems with your computer". They'll likely give you a website link which downloads and installs an application that shows 'the problems' before offering to remove and fix the issues - for a fee of course.

Luckily our client involved has a Mac, so with the mentions of Microsoft and Windows was quick to pick up on the situation, but looking online others haven't been so lucky.

Microsoft (or Apple for that matter) don't have access to your computer, so stay alert and put the phone down if you get a similar call. And if you are having any real IT problems, give us a call.

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The must watch TV tonight for me was BBC2's documentary "Inside Facebook", a Money Programme look at what makes Facebook tick.

With the inevitable challenge of trying to make it suitable for all audiences, it often swung too far to the basics at times. However, it did provide some interesting insights and anecdotes on life at Facebook, from how it all started, to how it's grown from a "geek idea" into a multi billion dollar business while Mark Zuckerberg demonstrated his commitment to Facebook by his continued turning down of increasingly large offers to buy the company.

Facebook & Privacy
One of the most telling moments in the programme was when the question as put to the VP of Public Policy at Facebook about the use of users' pictures in advertising for pages they had "liked". There was a long pause, after which he tried to defend sponsored stories as "ranking mechanism" not advertising, a very wooly answer, and hitting at the heart of Facebook's reality. That, in reality, the product they are selling is you - the user - if you're not paying for something it's very unlikely that you are the customer. The cartoon featured with this post, tells that story perfectly. Thanks to Mike Ashworth for sharing with me, sourced from Very Demotivational.

Is Google Plus a challenge?
This question was put to Mark, and the pause and slight smirk that passed across his face gave the real answer, while his lips gave a polite response.

Paying for poop
The other, sightly disturbing, highlight was when one user told how he paid one pound (real money!) to buy a virtual display case to display his virtual pet poop! This demonstrates one of the other ways, in addition to advertising, that Facebook is monetising its site, by allowing users in games to pay real money to buy virtual elements and advantages within Facebook games.

Advertising models
There was some good coverage of the advertising model and business promotion methods within the Facebook platform, from how to target particular audience groups, testing adverts for effectiveness, to making effective use of business pages. Very useful if you're investigating how to promote your business on Facebook.

In summary, I would highly recommend viewing of this programme for anyone learning about using Facebook for their business. It would also make great viewing for those who are trying to understand just what all the fuss is about or are starting to have concerns about their online privacy. But for those of us who work and live our lives highly engaged in the various social media platforms, there was little new to learn. And the most interesting discussion about it was happening on  . . . . Twitter!

© ian for Real Point Blog, 2011. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Facebook, Social Media

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I came across this infographic yesterday from Breaking Copy's blog. It's an amusing but helpful guide on what to post where on which social media platform. Most importantly it has an important reminder of what not to post, following my rule of thumb: never post anything you wouldn't want your parents, children, boss, clients or colleagues to see and if you're not sure leave it till you are.

And I'd love to hear your opinion on Breaking Copy's jibe at Google Plus, are you on it? Do you check it regularly if you are?

© ian for Real Point Blog, 2011. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Social Media, status update

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Ever felt like you have to keep banging the same old drum to get the message through? Yesterday, we spotted an article on the BBC news website which told us that someone else is banging the same drum we are . . . . disaster recovery planning for your IT systems.

A report by IT Group EMC said 74% of respondents (1,750 surveyed) were not very confident they could restore their networks and 54% had lost data or suffered downtime in the past twelve months. The conclusion? Firms need to place a greater emphasis on backup and recovery systems. Have you considered the cost if you don't?

We've blogged about this in the past:

• What is the cost of IT Failure to your business?
• Disaster recovery

But day by day we still come across companies and individuals who have failed to make adequate provision for backing up their data and to plan for how to get back up and running as quickly as possible in the event of a disaster. If you're worried that could be you, why not give us a call today and arrange a consultation with one of our IT support engineers?

© ian for Real Point Blog, 2011. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Disaster Recovery, IT Support, PC failure

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