October 14th, 2008 / No Comments » / by Liz Jamieson
As an online business, you can use email support as one way of responding to customer queries and complaints.
Now you can also use (if you’re brave enough) social media support tool, Get Satisfaction.
Users of your products or services cans report problems, ask questions or share ideas.
The Get Saisfaction service certainly provides a very current interface for you and your customers.
True all your customer service failures will be aired, alongside all the successes. But publicity of all kinds is good publicity – right?
Posted in: Social Media, Support, Web 2.0
Tags: customer support
October 13th, 2008 / No Comments » / by Liz Jamieson
I love Twitter. But some people still don’t get it. I guess the only way to get into Twitter is to start using it.
But true sceptics will not even take that step.
Maybe this’ll help: Here’s a blog post that lists 50 Ways to Use Twitter in Business.
Posted in: Social Media, Web 2.0
Tags: Add new tag
October 10th, 2008 / 1 Comment » / by Liz Jamieson
Competant use of a graphics package is part of becoming a more self-sufficient webmaster.
I bit the bullet years ago and bought the full version of Adobe Photoshop then set about trying to learn the basics.
Photoshop V6.0 was about £400+VAT when I first bought it back then. Of course, the upgrades have not been cheap in the meantime – but now I can at least do everything I ever need to do graphically. And of course Photoshop is a GREAT program – the industry standard and reassuring to have in my toolkit.
Learning Photoshop won’t of course turn you into a graphic designer. That’s another problem.
An Alternative to Photoshop?
If Photoshop is beyond your means, you may want to look at the subscription services that are starting to look like they might one day rival Adobe’s offering.
I like the look of Aviary. It costs between $7.99 and $14.99 peronth, depending on the applications you choose to include in your package, and is an online image editing service. You edit photos and create original images online. There is no software to download.
Interestingly, and probably obviously, your creations can be held online for other people to use. You will always own the rights to your image, but other people will own the rights to any images they create out of yours. This is very inspiring. Surely as this service grows there will be more and more creations available to use as jumping boards from which to roll your own.
That is truly collaborative.
Sign up – at the time of writing the Aviary people are trusting us, the public to trial the product until we are confortable, and only start paying when satisfied the product is right. I hope people do not abuse this approach to trialing.
Start with the FAQ.
Posted in: Graphics, Web 2.0
Tags: Aviary, Graphics, photoshop
October 8th, 2008 / No Comments » / by Liz Jamieson
A reference of all the different MySQL datatypes available in table format, is useful when you’re designing a MySQL database. I use this type of reference frequently. Here is one that you can add to your bookmarks – it tries to get all the information on one page.
Posted in: MySQL
