Using "The Machine"

 

... or a thumbs down ? Does your Web Site let your customers rate and provide comments for your individual products ?

One of the key capabilities of the Internet is the ability to interact with your current, past and future customers.  This post is going to cover how you can "Use The Machine" to add customer ratings or voting to your existing web site or blog.  This will allow your customers to very easily provide feedback for a specific product or service.

There is a great service called JS-Kit.com that provides not only ratings but also other functionality like user reviews, comments and polls.  They make it easy for anyone to add various user participation abilities on their web site.

So before we get into the details let me quickly say, that it can often create anxiety for small (and large) business owners to expose their products/services to ratings and comments from customers.  Everyone is afraid of the disgruntled customers and the bad ratings/reviews.  However, the Internet has proven that the value to the business owner is in the transparency, that is being open with their perspective customers about the good and bad.  Often the bad provides you an opportunity to not only improve your product or service but also allows you to address the concern in a manner that shows you care about your customers and their feedback. This in the end is invaluable and will help you win over new customers.

OK, on to Using The Machine...

On JS-Kit.com simply copy and past the line of HTML code that is provided for the 
 

<div class="js-kit-rating" starColor="Green" title="" permalink=""></div>
<script src="http://js-kit.com/ratings.js"></script>

That's it your done.. ;) well specifically for the ratings your done.. you need to modify the above HTML code some based on certain situations or if you want to customize how the ratings show up in your site. There is a list of all the potential customizations on the JS-Kit.com on the Customizing Page. That page shows you how to change the color, display the ratings in different ways and even handle problems like attaching the same rating to a product that might show up in multiple pages on your web site.

I'm going to change my star color to Green.

So here is my rating control for the post, please leave me a rating just click on the stars.

Please rate this Post:

Thanks goes out to Sue from Pinwheel Performance for this question. Remember, I love questions and no matter how basic or complex you think it is please feel free to "Ask a Question" and I will do my best to help you out.

Question Summary: What are some low cost Social Networking solutions that include document sharing capabilities (uploading/downloading) that are good for various types of Organizations (Profit/Non-Profit)?

As with most things there are a multitude of choices.  This is even more the case for Social Networking because it is fairly new and there are a wide variety of young companies competing to capture some of the emerging marketplace.

First, what is a Social Networking Solution ? Put simply think of this as software for online communities or software that allows communities or social networks to collaborate and share information.

Social Networking services/software usually have some basic functionality like ability to display/capture information about yourself (that is user profiles), message boards/discussion groups and file sharing capabilities.  Some of the more recent functionality has been integrating blogging, micro-blogging and multi-media capabilities like video sharing.  Social Networking is a hot area right now but long term it is really about the social networking features which will inherently be put into all types of software not just dedicated "Social Networking" software.

So how can Social Networks be used in your business ? There are many ways Social Networking software and Social Networks can be beneficial.  First, let's make the distinction between participating in an existing social networking service and providing a social networking service to your customers. I will save participating in existing social networking services like LinkedIn, MySpace and Facebook for another post. The latter, providing a social networking service can be a good way to give your customers a medium to show their passion for your product and/or services and interact with other customers. It is especially beneficial if your product is creative in any way, then a social network would give your customers a ways to share their creativity and ideas with others. This can build brand loyalty but also is a great way for your "fans" to sell/market your product to perspective customers.  Another great benefit is now you have a community of customers that you can interact with, that is find out what they want, need or don't like about your products and/or services.  Extremely insightful and valuable information can be discovered this way for your next product or version of a product.

So what are some ways you can "Use the Machine" to provide social networking experience to your customers or clients?  Let's review some distinct options, remember these are by no means extensive but are either services I have used or experienced.  

 

Ning -  Ning is a very popular service that let's anyone create a public or private social networking site for free. At first,  it might seem like Ning is too "Consumer-ish" that is not very professional oriented but if you look at some of the sample sites you might be surprised as to the variety and potential of the platform.  Ning has a rich set of functionality, sites can be public or private and can be branded to match your organizations existing web site.  Ning doesn't have built-in rich file sharing, files can be shared via forum posts but this probably is sub-optimal for many organizations that are document intensive. There are third party add-ons to Ning that provide file sharing capability, however, they potentially have additional fees associated with them. I would encourage folks to visit the ning.com and look at the many public sites and how they are being used.

• Popular Ning Sites

CollectiveX - CollectiveX Groupsites is less consumer oriented and more focused on providing features for companies and membership organizations. They pretty much have all the same features and more (depending on the pricing plan you buy).  Most importantly they do have dedicated file share/hosting capabilities as a core feature.  Some other interesting features are Email Alerts, so you can get notified with a summary of changes say on a message forum vs. having to visit the site directly.  I would suspect that most folks could use the a la carte pricing option or the $400 "Premium Bundle" a year plan. 

• Pricing Details
• Product Demos

 
KickApps - KickApps basically provides social networking capabilities, that is they provide a way to integrate social networking capabilities into your existing web site.  This is a different model but can be useful, especially if you already have a web site and want to have the social networking features integrated into the rest of your site instead of having a dedicated/community site. KickApps does require you to have some minor technical knowledge for the basic integration and more so if you customize it further. However, KickApps has been very successful appealing to large companies that already have established web sites.

• Pricing Details
• Product Demos

Google Groups - That's right Google... why not it's free is fairly customizable and provides all of the basic functionality.  Yahoo has a similar offering. These sites are fairly basic but could be a good way to test out whether you really need an online community/social network.

At the request of the question submitter my OSS pick:

Drupal - The open-source content management system would easily qualify as the best way to host your own social networking site.  Drupal has a huge community of developers who have created all sorts of capabilities which easily allow Drupal to qualify as "social networking" software.  I wouldn't normally include software that you are required to host yourself so did want to mention the hosted "Drupal" service at bryght.  Also check out acquia which provides a commercially supported Drupal based products.

Here is the second post focusing on alternative ways to display content on your web site.  In the first post we looked at how to use a slide presentation within your web site. This time we will look at how using a video can set you apart from your competitors and at the same time provide a more vibrant presentation to your perspective customers.

So UsingTheMachine is all about how to leverage the power of the Internet.  So do not expect this post to be be how to create a traditional movie using Microsoft Movie Maker or any of the other Movie Making software that is available these days. Instead, we are going to utilize one of the hottest Internet services around and use it with a business slant. 

The service is called "Animoto" and basically it is a movie creation service that uses pictures you upload and a music selection (or one you upload) to automatically create a movie with your pictures to the music.   Thus, if you select faster or slower music the picture animations will be faster or slower. Animoto is free to create short videos and longer ones can be created for only $3.  All you have to do is upload all the pictures you want in the video and then using the images interface shown above simply drag and drop the order of your pictures.  For business use you will probably want to intermix words as well as images.  To do this you will have to make your words images.. this is as simple as taking a screen shot of the words and saving them as .JPG images.  Finally, make sure you "spotlight" certain images.  This is suppose to tell Animoto to emphasize those images.

Once you complete the three simple steps the service takes a couple minutes to produce the video.  Once it is complete you can view it immediately, email it to friends or embed it in a blog or web site.  There is also a quick way to post the video to YouTube which is useful if your hosting your other videos there.

Check out the end result - this took me literally 20 minutes or so to cut out all the images upload and remix a couple times until I got a video I liked.

Every business faces the challenge of describing their products or service offerings to potential customers.  There are many ways to do this and primarily for businesses that are online their web sites contain the product(s) they are selling or describes the services that can be offered.  All businesses these days no matter how small or the industry should have a web site with product and service information. 

However, in this series of two posts I want to help you explore some alternative ways to display that content on your web site that will set you apart from your competitors and at the same time provide a more vibrant presentation to your perspective customers.

So lets learn how to "Use the Machine" to first make a compelling flash style presentation for a service company.  In the follow-up post, I will cover creating an online video for the same company. Both of these examples are not meant to replace the content on your web site but instead supplement.

In the first example, let's create a online presentation describing and showcasing the services offered from a fictional landscaping company. Lets call our landscaping company "Paradise Landscaping". Most landscaping companies have a basic web site that describes their services, provides a portfolio of pictures and maybe some customer testimonials.

So we are going to create a presentation, in a tool called sliderocket.  I am not going to go into detail as to how to use the tool.  It is similar to many other presentation tools like Microsoft PowerPoint. The key thing to understand is what is possible with such a tool.  For example, animation and pictures.. also sound (music) although my example below has no sound but there is no reason why it couldn't.

There are several of these type of presentation tools on the Internet most of them allow for you to Import Microsoft PowerPoint files and they each have various degrees of flexibility when it comes to the animations, transitions and audio support.  So I would recommend trying them out the next time you have a compelling story to tell or need additional media like audio or animation to help sell your product.

Below is a list of similar services and a brief description.

sliderocket - currently in "preview" but I believe they are handing out accounts so try signing up, free for now.

ZOHOShow - another of the excellent ZOHO tools that are free.  Also has import capabilities.

Google Docs - Google Docs has a "presentation" document, this tool is a little more limited than the the other presentation tools but still is an excellent choice especially if your a Google fan, it is also free.

slideshare - site primarily used to upload existing PowerPoint presentations so you can share on a web site, also free.

Here's a quick tip...Do your customers need to find you ? Well if they do and you do not have an embedded Google Map on your web site it is quick and easy to add one.

Simply go to Google Maps and search for you business and then click the Link to this page link in the top right hand corner of the map.  Basically, what you see is what you will get when you embed the map.  You can always also customize and preview the map before you embed it to ensure it looks exactly as you expect.

Here is a screen cast of the entire process for the embedded map below to a restaurant in my home town.

Notice the Directions as well as the Web Site reference.
View Larger Map