Spice Up Your Business Facebook Page
Nowadays social media is something that virtually everyone is a part of, a way to stay connected to friends and colleagues, and a way to have the world at your fingertips. Of all the social media networks in cyberspace Facebook is clearly the most popular.
Many businesses have turned to Facebook pages as a vital marketing avenue and you can/should too. Having a Facebook page for your company can be an enormous business asset. Given that the number of people that are currently using and engaging in social media, the potential of Facebook is limitless and if utilized correctly can be immensely profitable for you and your business. By simply following these suggestions below to “spice up” your Facebook page, you can set yourself apart.
3 Simple Suggestions to Follow:
1. Give Brand a Personality – Business is about being known, and about being known for a purpose. Ask yourself these questions:
-“What sets you apart from your competition?”
-“How do your represent your business?”
– “How do your customers view you?”
It is very important for you to decide on the brand image that you want to portray to your clients and stay consistent with it. Consistency instills loyalty, and loyalty is a great trait to have associated with your brand and is definitely something that customers look for.
2. Frequently Update Your Page – If a potential client were to visit your page and see that it has not been updated in a while it could give off negative thoughts of abandonment, forgetfulness, or disconnectedness. Those are things that you do not want to be associated with or have others think that your business is. To avoid that, update your page regularly. It can be something simple like what is going on in the industry, what you are doing, a promotion that you are running, blog post, new service offering, etc. However, you will want to stay away from bashing your competitors, or posting anything negative, because this ultimately creates a bad impression on you and you always want to shine a positive light on your business. Make it worth the while to come back to your page. Offer visitors something in exchange for becoming a “fan” of your business page like discounts, or special offers. Adding incentives to becoming a fan or to “like” your page will add leverage to your efforts and the likelihood that more visitors will become fans will increase over time.
3. Make Your Page Interactive – Make your page more exciting by adding a bit of interaction to it. Have giveaways, hold contests, include pictures, videos, and links that will engage visitors and make them want to come back again to see what your business is up to. Another way to make your page interactive and to get your visitors involved is to encourage them to engage in conversation. Making your page more interactive will give it a whole new look and feel. When posting status updates, try ending with a question. This will spur action in your fans. In some cases you can even add your own comment to get the ball rolling a bit. Also comment on their posts so that they will return to your page when reading previous posts. Encourage fans to keep coming back to your page to add their own comments and ask questions. Do your best to respond to your fans comments and questions as soon as possible, this will show them that you are in tune with your customer base and that you are reliable.
In the end, by continuously following these simple suggestions to “spice up” your business’s Facebook page, you will be able to increase the number of fans while you establish a lasting brand, build credibility, and of course effectively use your Facebook page for advertising and marketing purposes.
“Like” us on Facebook!!! https://www.facebook.com/ExchangeDefender
Stephanie Hasenour
VP Marketing, ExchangeDefender
stephanie@ownwebnow.com
Jogging Towards Success
For better cardiovascular health, I very recently start jogging again. I say “again,” because I have tried numerous times over the years to establish myself as a jogger or runner, but I never turned into one. Looking back, I realize that this was simply because I never fully gave the exercise a fighting chance. I would experience pain such as shin splits and sore muscles. My rib cage would feel like it was about to burst out of my chest. And then I, your brain, would save us by yelling, “Dude, this is why we bought a car!”
By listening to every muscle in my body telling me this exercise was hurting more than helping, I would quit. As the expression goes, “I couldn’t see the forest through the trees…” Yes, my body was hurting. Yes, my lungs were gasping for air; and yes, my heart was in the red. But isn’t this the definition of exercise? From my couch potato point of view, I just decided to go for a jog. “Hurting? We were about to DIE!!”
One of the problems I was facing was that I didn’t fully and clearly define what I was about to do: Exercise. Call it lifting weights, call it Zumba, or call it jogging. It all boils down to you getting off your butt and moving around vigorously—which if you are not use to it, hurts. Even if you are use to it, exercise can still be painful. But hopefully by that time, you would have comes to terms with the bigger picture (remember trees and forest; short-term pain, long-term health.) Screw the trees. Screw the forest. Flatten it all and put up a McDonalds!
Secondly, I never set any reasonable or measurable goals for my “new hobby.” By not setting any goals, I couldn’t measure any progress I may or may not have been achieving. I would simply quit, stating I wasn’t seeing any results. What results??? I never set any goals to see results. I just got into my head that I wanted to start jogging. I didn’t prepare my mind and my body for the effects that jogging would initially have on them both. I didn’t notify them both of the risk, i.e. pain associated with exercising. “What pain? We use to run all the time… when we were 12 years old…”
Lastly, I didn’t fully evaluate my findings. Yes, I glossed over the obvious pain and determined I was too out of shape to jog. However, if I stopped and truly evaluated what was happening to my body, I would have come to the logically conclusion that this pain is normal for someone who is sorely out of shape—both physically and mentally. I allowed my body to convince my brain that I wasn’t a jogger. Because logic dictates that if joggers felt this way, they wouldn’t do it either. “No matter, you’re more of a thinker anyway. And besides, we have a car, remember?”
So why is this story about jogging on a business blog?
Trees and forest, trees and forest. Remember, without trees there would be no forests. What were the trees of this story? Did you pick up on them as you were reading? If not, here is what you should be doing in your business (and personal life as well):
-Clearly define your realistic expectations and actions;
-Set reasonable and measureable goals
-Identify risks
-Evaluate decisions
Notice I am using words like realistic and reasonable. Don’t get me wrong; there are times to dream big. But you have to crawl before you walk—and you have to walk before you run.
Michael D. Alligood
Partner Sales & Support, ExchangeDefender & Shockey Monkey
michael@ownwebnow.com
(877) 546-0316 x707
We Hear You (Part 2)
To continue from my blog post from last week, another pain point has been the inability of a thread to stay whitelisted. If you’ve brought this issue to us in the past you’re familiar with the explanation. The way our technology works is we insert a hashed message thread ID into all outbound messages, and if we find a match upon return it passes whitelisted. This worked well for a long time. Against technology is our best friend and our worst enemy. The increased adoption of “privacy” appliances and application” and Exchange header size limits basically made this solution inconsistent.
Exchange has a header size limit that can be adjusted, this setting basically starts stripping non-essential (non exchange header inserts) items, so what we found is after a few replies to a thread, our keys would get pushed out. As far as privacy appliances go, they basically clean headers every time so those would fail a lot faster and quickly.
We had to pull out the big guns and pull Vlad out of code retirement for this one. The new whitelisting engine works similar to a standard address based whitelist that doesn’t relay on an element we can’t control (headers). We’re still working on it but the bulk of it is live and you really should see a decrease in complaints from there as well.
Next week, we’ll look at spam engine rewrites that will knock your socks off! Well unless you’re the guy that thinks getting 2 pieces of SPAM that you signed up for or whitelisted in day means getting SLAMMED!
Carlos Lascano
VP Support Services, ExchangeDefender
carlos@ownwebnow.com
(877) 546-0316 x737
Shockey Monkey – Developer’s Journal
Shockey Monkey has been our major (development) focus over the course of Q1. We have found this experience to be very challenge, while also being very rewarding. The biggest challenge has been standardizing code throughout the portal. Some of these standardizations include areas of focus such as: (structure, formats, error handling, and security).
Why is this important?
This is important as we move forward, to help achieve a rapid development environment. We’ve actually been doing this gradually over the last few years and the process is becoming easier and easier. We have already seen the benefits of this design method, as you will see from the content and enhancements that have been produced in only a couple of months. This will also play a huge role when we push further towards internationalization of Shockey Monkey.
So what’s new?
Ticket Dispatch
This feature allows you to schedule technicians to a service ticket. You can have one or multiple employees assigned to a ticket and it will appear on their calendar.
Schedule Control
Every employee has a personal calendar that they can: (use, modify and share) and link into service tickets, to help keep them on track of their daily assignments. The schedule component is also HTML5 compatible, so it can be accessed directly from any HTML5 compatible smartphone.
Vendor Management
This allows you to keep track of your 3rd party companies. You can manage things like (documents, address information, primary contacts, sensitive information, etc.). It centralizes all of this information for easy access and management.
Career Management
This allows you to keep track of your employees (achievements, goals and reprimands).
Service Boards
This is by far one of the best features in my opinion. It allows you to configure (private & public) service boards for use within your portal. Public boards are presented to users when they open a ticket, things such as (support, billing, and sales). While private boards give your employees a way to sort & manage all the internal workings of the company.
Theme-able!
Yes, Shockey Monkey is once again theme-able. Taking advantage of Jquery UI theme packs and standardizing all of our (tables, divs, controls, elements), themes are now easily applied and have a consistent look between browsing platforms.
Experimental Features
This section has been expanded to allows up to give you immediate access to feature requests that you may want, however don’t really fit anywhere inside of the portal quite yet. Check it out periodically; we have already added 5 options to this section.
Hank Newman
VP, Development
hank@ownwebnow.com
Keeping a Close Eye on the Competition
For many IT companies and MSP’s, competition can be a big threat to business and bottom line revenues. Local competition in some areas can be so fierce, that strong territorial lines are drawn and owner wars are waged. These may be extreme cases but the threat of competition and an ultimate plan of offense and defense should be in every business owner’s strategy.
The more information that you can gather about your competition, the better; some things you will want to know:
*Hourly Rates
*How Managed Services are priced (Flat Rate, Per Seat, Block Time)
*Estimated Number of Employees
*Years in Business
*RMM and Ticketing Platform Used
*Solution Stack and Product Portfolio
*Certifications Held
Most of these can be found by doing some Internet research and checking the competition’s website. By gathering the above information, you can provide sales staff a solid foundation for combating potential competitive objections, you can gear marketing efforts towards products or solutions your competition doesn’t have, and most of all you will know a lot more about your competition than you do now.
Local competition is one thing but in the managed services world, national competition is becoming a really big threat for some. Large national companies are buying up MSP’s, cloud services, and remote monitoring companies in an effort to manage your customers. This threat may be even more severe than local competition in that these large corporations have big money behind them, large sales teams, and a drive to penetrate the space.
Many of these companies have trusted brand names and are easily given opportunities to speak directly with customers. These threats must be treated in a similar manner as local competition. It is important to gather as much information as possible about potential national companies that may be trying to move in on your market.
As much as information gathering is important the most important part of any competition defense is offense. It is imperative that you meet with and speak with your customers regularly. Building loyalty and making sure your customers know about the competition and the differences in what you provide, is another critical part of a good offense. Market yourself as the local hands-on service with a smile company to combat national faceless competition, and be on the constant lookout for potential threats moving in on your business. By having as much information as possible and creating an actionable plan to deal with competition, you will be much more likely to come out on the winning side of any competitive situation.
Frank Gurnee
VP, Channel Services, ExchangeDefender
(877) 546-0316 x4777
frank@ownwebnow.com
We Hear You (Part 1)
Over the past 6 months Vlad and myself have been gathering a lot of feedback both positive and negative: positive (support’s effort is appreciated across the board, which makes me not have to inflict physical damage on anyone) and negative (development items from core engine stuff (which I can help with) and some GUI stuff (which I may be able to barter some live chickens in exchange for features, unless my hand is cut off during negotiations). This first quarter and going into the second quarter, we have undergone massive build outs and redesigns. For those of you that headed our heads up and stayed us, thank you for the bottom of our hearts. We understand that while we’re working on things the end user perceives it as “well I don’t care it’s still not working, when will it work like I want it to?” and it puts pressure on your teams and your staff. Over the next couple of few weeks I’m going to touch on some things we’ve done and others that are in the pipe line.
This week the one I’m going to focus on is probably a big one for your support staff, whitelist handling. In the past we’ve had issues caused by the increased adoption of BATV addressing and address handling in our engine. Here’s the bottom line, the from address line can be spoofed so we’ve always toted the line that for the safety of your clients against spoofed phishing attacks we test against the envelope address. However, this became a problem as BATV grew in adoption because basically your clients would continually submit whitelists that were never ever going to work. Of course, this would give you and by association us a huge black eye, with the feeling that our software “doesn’t work”. We went back to the drawing board on this issue and made some core changes to our engine. We are no able to, without sacrificing security, evaluate and track these correctly. You should see a huge decrease in “the whitelists don’t work” complaints as long as the senders are using RFC compliant BATV address. We wrote the code based on this, so if their sender’s mail providers did not follow the guidelines there may be a handful of issues literally.
This does NOT affect SART addressing though, which is used for newsletters only and they’re formatted a bit differently. But your clients can rest assured that folks behind bounce address protection are being safely whitelisted now. Next week I’ll touch on another biggie. Thread whitelisting.
Carlos Lascano
VP Support Services, ExchangeDefender
carlos@ownwebnow.com
(877) 546-0316 x737
Would You Like Some RAM with That?
Remember the days when PC upgrades were big business? Adding RAM, upgrading hard drives, installing CD and DVD drives, setting up video cards for gamers, and adding those sound blaster audio cards. Well the days of add-ons and upgrades are all but gone. Today, the world of IT has changed drastically.
PC’s have evolved from build your own, to big brands, to now desktop replacements. With portability being a big factor for business users, and devices having fewer replaceable parts, hardware has become disposable. This has made the days of upgrades and add-ons, a thing of the past.
IT businesses are finding new ways to add-on and upgrade customer experiences without the need for expensive hardware upgrades. The key for IT service companies has been to find common needs and issues that plague customers and can be resolved through software or cloud services. There are a number of these issues that can be bundled into a suite of services or provided individually. Most of these products can provide recurring revenue to the business as well, which creates additional stickiness to customers.
Some of the common solutions are:
*Spam Filtering
*Backup Hosted
*Email Services
*Security/Compliance
*Cloud Storage
*Hosting/Website Services
New and emerging solutions:
*Password Protection
*Social Media Marketing
*SEO/Keywords
*Mobile Device Management
*BYOD Policy Management
Treating these services and products just like the hardware upgrades and add-ons of the past, will provide a new source of revenue for those businesses looking to replace lost hardware upgrade sales. These types of upsells are not only easy, but they provide customers with much needed services that can help their productivity and bottom line.
Frank Gurnee
VP, Channel Services, ExchangeDefender
(877) 546-0316 x4777
frank@ownwebnow.com
ExchangeDefender Marketing Collateral
Introducing the NEW Marketing Collateral section of our website!
We are constantly posting up new additions to our collateral page and now you can easily access them! It is now easier than ever to pick and choose what types of collateral that you would like to have branded just by browsing through the pictures. You have the choice to either download the materials and brand them yourself OR you can fill out the form at the bottom of each section and we will brand the collateral for you. All you have to do is reference the branding request title and you will have marketing collateral that is branded with your color scheme and logos within 24-48 hours.
The best part about the Marketing Collateral is that as a benefit of being a partner with ExchangeDefender it is completely FREE! Check it out!
Stephanie Hasenour
VP Marketing, ExchangeDefender
stephanie@ownwebnow.com
Increase Revenues Through Standardization
IT companies and MSP’s are providing a number of services, support, and products to their customer base. For many, providing just what the client wants, provides a satisfying enough business experience. The one thing that most IT providers would most likely agree on, is that the customer does not always know what they want, or better yet, know what they need. In this, there is a good amount of opportunity for IT companies to educate customers as well as provide a standard suite of products and services to help protect customer businesses.
Standardization is a pretty well implemented practice for most MSP’s and helps drive profitability in termed contracts by creating predictability, prevention, and ease of troubleshooting. When most customer contract networks are similar or alike, they are much easier to manage and allows for your staff to gain more experience and knowledge.
Now imagine if you apply these same standardization practices to any network you encounter. By believing and knowing that this standard set of products and services is needed by all companies it becomes less of a sale and more of a passion. We know that there are a number of standard solutions that businesses need to be efficient, safe, and secure.
*Security – Antivirus, AntiSPAM, Firewall
*Backup –Archiving, Compliance, BDR, Offsite/Cloud Storage
*Network – Switching, Battery Backup
*And many many more…
Create a set of business core minimums that you can discuss with your customers. These minimums will set the standard for any network you encounter and can provide a baseline for the serviceability of any environment. Your goal should be to bring any network up to these baseline standards whether they are a contract customer or not.
It may be surprising how many customers have not implemented minimum standards due to lack of education. Many IT companies are afraid to discuss additional needs based on the fear of customer rejection. Just remember it is always better to educate and have a customer say no, than to never provide the information and have the customer ask why you did not inform them.
Frank Gurnee
VP, Channel Services, ExchangeDefender
(877) 546-0316 x4777
frank@ownwebnow.com
Lucky Promotion!
We hope that everyone had a great St. Patrick’s Day!!! Don’t forget about our St. Patrick’s promotion!
Until the end of March we are running a promotion for Compliance Archiving for 50% off! Please take advantage of this! The promotion will be valid on any new account that is signed up within the promotional period.
Simply use the coupon code that is located on the postcard that you will receive in the mail or email me, stephanie@ownwebnow.com to receive the code. If you have any questions just let us know!
Stephanie Hasenour
VP Marketing, ExchangeDefender
stephanie@ownwebnow.com