Some of you may know that I have a couple apps in the App Store focused on mobile music creation. Since this is a hobby for me, I don’t have a big budget for advertising (maybe one or two hundred dollars a month), so I tend to rely on as much free word of mouth as possible. I have a facebook page, and a twitter account. I do things like blogging about new features or running sales and contests to generate news posts on websites that cater to my target audience. These activities have a fairly measurable effect on the day’s sales, and I can track the extra traffic thanks to Google Analytics. I also try to make sure that my presence in the app store is positive, since a good number of people find my app there first (rather than on the web or in a magazine). Aside from text and screenshots, the thing that influences purchases the most is reviews. One interesting thing I’ve noticed about reviews is that when you give your app away for free, you end up with a lot more critical reviews which may hurt in the long run. I have a paid version of my app and a ‘lite’ version which serves as a demo. The ‘lite’ version has considerably more negative reviews, mostly by people who don’t understand the app or who were just looking for something different. People who are going to plunk down money usually do a bit more research before making a download, and are a little more committed to getting something they will enjoy. At 10$, my app isn’t an impulse buy either.

Anyway, getting to the point of this article – I recently decided that I didn’t like the 1 star review sitting at the top of my list of reviews. My reviews are mostly in the 4 and 5 star range with very few exceptions. So I decided I would offer free copies for anyone willing to write a review (no strings attached), and I posted about it on my website and on twitter. The post got picked up on another, larger site and within a few hours my in-box was filled with 25 people offering to write reviews. I decided I would honor all the people who had written in with free copies, but closed up the offer to anyone else. Apple only gives developers 50 free copies for each version of their app, and I wanted to have some left over to give to magazines and other websites, should someone request a copy. I was a little worried that giving away so many free copies would hurt my sales for the day. For reference, I don’t think I’ve sold 25 copies in a day since the app first launched.  In addition, the people that responded are exactly the kind of people who would probably have paid money for the app. Now that a week has passed, I can honestly say that my fears were totally unjustified. The day I offered to give away free copies, sales were up 38% from their average levels and I finished out the week 20% higher than my weekly average. Plus I have almost a dozen additional 4 and 5 star reviews in my portfolio. Even though 25 people got free copies, there were probably 5 times as many people who took a look at my application for the first time and maybe decided to buy it later. The moral of the story? Nothing generates interest like giving away free stuff, and for a small time software developer like myself, there are lots of opportunities for free advertising.

1- Don’t wait until there is a fire to map out an exit plan
have a plan, and more importantly share it with the front lines so everyone knows what to do when the fire occurs. What should the initial response be? Who should be notified?

2- Practice escaping from every room in the house
Social media fires can start anywhere and involve any department. Make sure everyone has some idea on what to say or not. Test the escalation steps to make sure that people can actually reach the right person (and that the contact information is still correct!)

3- Security Bars Require Special Precautions
Many corporations restrict access to social networks, except for a select few, usually in the marketing group. This can make responses by others in and around the company difficult. At the critical moment, a social media fire can cause a lot of hysteria in the office. For those who can’t witness it first hand, they immediately think the worst and map out irrational responses.

4- Immediately leave the home
Get the conversation out of the public view. When Southwest had it’s dust up with Kevin Smith, the first response was “hey Kevin! I’m so sorry for your experience tonight! Hopefully we can make things right, please follow so we may DM!”

Expect that the conversation will end up public, especially if it doesn’t go well for you, but taking the conversation out of the public eye allows you to deal with one person instead of the world and hopefully gives the person a chance to calm down.

5- Never open doors that are hot to the touch
Don’t get personal in the attack. Stay focused on the putting out he fire at hand. As much as you might like to say ‘look you are 300 pounds and our chair is only rated for 225. Hit the salad bar and then we will talk’, don’t open that door. Mashable reported on how Ann Taylor’s LOFT did this in their response to people claiming that LOFT clothes only look good on stick figures. Rather than send the people Farmville carrots, LOFT responded with pics of employees of all different body types wearing the clothes.

6- Designate a meeting place outside and take attendance
Make sure you have an easy to organize communication path when fires occur. Nobody likes to hear about a fire second hand related to something she was responsible for. Keep everybody up to date. Make it clear who is leading the conversation with the person.

7- Once out, stay out.
Once the fire is under control, or at least being managed, move on. Don’t pepper the person with additional exchanges to see how things are going, or to make sure the person is happy. The person may never be happy, just placated. Don’t give the person another chance for a flare up.

Read the rest of this post on EngageBlog.com, the site for the exciting new book on social marketing – Engage Your Brand.

The Philadelphia Phillies centerfielder and his wife, Melissa, created the foundation this spring and pledged $900,000 to help restore the aging facility for the Boys & Girls Clubs of Philadelphia in the city’s Nicetown neighborhood. The Victorinos have also been supportive of other charities, and they look to support Boys & Girls Clubs projects in Shane’s native Hawaii over the next few years.

In early summer, the foundation approached The Archer Group, the Wilmington-based interactive marketing agency, requesting help with the new website.

The site, launched in early August, includes informational pages on the foundation and its mission, upcoming fundraising events, news releases and a convenient form for making secure donations online through PayPal. The Archer Group also assisted in the development of the foundation’s social media efforts, including Facebook.

The Archer Group incorporated an easy-to-use content management system into the site so the foundation’s team will be able to add fresh information about the foundation’s efforts without the need of outside assistance.

“Our experience with The Archer Group has been outstanding. From the beginning, we presented them with a nearly insurmountable task – building a site from scratch under a very tight time constraint. However, they exceeded our expectations and delivered an end product that superbly promoted the foundation’s mission.” said Kari Uyehara, the foundation’s executive director.

“We feel extremely grateful to have worked with The Archer Group. Their team has created a website that will help our foundation gain awareness and support for our efforts to provide opportunities to children in need. We appreciate their generous donation and look forward to working with them again in the future,” Victorino said.

“We enjoyed having the opportunity to help the winning team at the Shane Victorino Foundation get off to a running start,” said Lee Mikles, Archer Group founder and CEO.

About The Archer Group
The Archer Group (archer-group.com) is the Delaware Valley’s fastest growing full-service digital agency, offering regional brands a single integrated partner for digital marketing solutions. The unique integration of creative, technical, and user experience professionals enables Archer to create a wide range of offerings that includes: website development, mobile application creation, online advertising, and social media solutions.

Founded in 2003, the Archer Group has received numerous regional and international awards for interactive marketing excellence. It was featured in the 2009 “Philadelphia 100” list of the region’s fastest growing companies and Inc. magazine’s 2008 list of the nation’s fastest growing companies. The company is based in Wilmington, Delaware’s Lower Market Design District (LOMA).

There are no gimmicks, scoreboards, games, Mayors, Lords or made up names to go along with this new feature.  Current location based services like Gowalla, Foursquare, Yelp and a few others will be able to push their check-ins through Places from the start.  It has been widely noted that Foursquare didn’t seem thrilled at the announcement of Places.

Another critical element of Places is the ability for friends to tag you as being present at venues just like as in photos.  There is also a “Here Now” feature that will show up once you check-in somewhere.  As you can imagine, Places comes with a slew of new privacy settings to control who sees what and who can tag you at venues.  Privacy groups began voicing their concerns only hours after Facebook made the announcement.

While there is plenty of coverage on the specific features and privacy controls, I want to discuss the way Facebook went about announcing Places and some potential ramifications for users and businesses.

Privacy Settings and Notification

First, for such a major addition to the platform, I would expect more information to be available for users right from the start.  On previous occasions when new features have been announced, users are greeted with a big box at the top of the page when they login explaining what’s new.   I would venture to say the average Facebook user wouldn’t come across coverage of Places today, even with decent amounts of mainstream coverage.

My initial thought was the majority of Facebook users, especially the older demographic, will be completely freaked out over the idea of telling people where they are.  On top of that, add in the fact you can tag friends at locations without them explicitly giving permission and this sounds like another huge privacy snafu.  I know all of this can be taken care of with the privacy settings but that leads me to the next issue.

Why wouldn’t Facebook make a video that explains everything? They could have walked people through exactly how Places works and the new privacy settings for these features, including a walk through of the settings page. They could have even gone over the considerations users should have when setting them up.

When I went to look at my privacy settings this morning, I saw no call out for these new options I had to consider. Has Facebook learned nothing from what happened when they rolled out the Open Graph?  It seems like they are content with letting users fend for themselves when dealing with privacy settings.  I guess the negative press doesn’t scare them one bit, and maybe it shouldn’t considering the average person spends over 7 hours on their site a month.

Initial Availability

I was also a little disappointed when I updated my iPhone app this morning and was shown a graphic that said Places wasn’t available in my region yet.  I understand the idea of a soft launch to make sure their servers can handle everything, but I didn’t get that feeling watching and reading everything last night.  They should have announced Places yesterday, done a few days of PR and education and then rolled it out to a bigger user base.

It also seems that large businesses with multiple locations (the Starbucks of the world) won’t be able to merge all their Places pages with their main business page yet.  I think that is a mistake on the business side of things because you want the big brands to be able to integrate new features quickly to spread the word about them and get users on board.   A great example of this is when they rolled out the Open Graph functionality with Pandora and its over 50 million users.

Final Thoughts

I do, at the end of the day, like this new feature and I think it is a great addition to the platform.  I have been a big fan of Foursquare and it will be interesting to see how existing location base services can quickly integrate with Places and build better experiences on top of the platform.  Or, if they try to go at it alone, they may simply cease to exist once Places can start offering rewards.

Facebook is exactly what was needed to bring location services to the masses.  There is no doubt local advertising will get a huge boost from Places and hopefully users will be able to reap the benefits as well.   I have to say the biggest initial winner is the small business that can now merge their Places page with the business page for deeper engagements with users.

I give a thumbs up for Facebook Places but a thumbs down for how Facebook is handling the rollout.   Maybe this time they will finally learn how to announce a new feature, but probably not.  In the end, Facebook is one more step closer to their goal of global domination.  Or at least occupying all of a user’s time online.

And so, over the first half of this year, I found myself trading viewpoints on the best possible experience for a customer using a new product we are designing along with another party to the project. We were discussing ways to organize a product selection process, and while I was certain my approach was more appropriate and sensible for the audience (and the business) John*, my collaborator, kept pushing his own viewpoint as to the best possible customer experience. It was not the first time I had thought, to myself, how odd it seemed that someone in his position (a project manager, I had thought at the time) was so interested and informed as to usability best practices.

And then, several months later, I noticed in his email signature a title something like, “Customer Experience Lead.” And as I thought about the points he’d made over the months, suddenly they seemed more credible.

This is exactly as ridiculous and shallow as it seems; what does a person’s title have to do with the validity of their advice?

User Experience folks typically endeavor to represent the Voice of the Customer, a responsibility made considerably more difficult when those customers are not your own, but those of your client. How difficult it can be to make the case – passionately, if delicately – that your client’s customers are in fact not likely to be terribly interested in the new service being offered, or unconvinced of the life-enhancing benefits espoused by marketing. But we take it upon ourselves to argue on behalf of the end user, who typically isn’t sitting at the conference room table where decisions about the experience are often made. There is no Hippocratic Oath for Customer Experience practitioners (would it read, in part: “I will forever forsake the ‘blink’ tag, nor shall I allow radio buttons to be used where checkboxes are called for, nor shall I permit the use of lengthy instructions as a substitute for intuitive, usable design principles?”) Even if there were, it would offer no exclusive claim to understanding customers’ needs.

Simply, it is everyone’s responsibility to speak for the customer. This goes beyond customer advocacy on the part of usability specialists, or user-centered design, or goal-oriented design principles. There are very few businesses whose product or service is so unique, so unreproducible, that there aren’t a dozen substitutes a short Google search away. In such an environment, placing the customer at the center of everything decision isn’t just a best practice: it’s a means of survival.

The Archer Group also received special recognition for providing opportunities for employees to learn and grow.

The newspaper saluted the Archer Group for developing a creative, supportive environment that attracts exceptional employees and encourages them to do their best.

“We are honored to receive this recognition because it shows that, in addition to doing outstanding work for our clients, our employees love what they do and thrive in this environment,” said Lee Mikles, Archer Group founder and CEO.

The Archer Group, founded in 2003, has more than doubled in size in the last three years and now has 50 employees. It recently took advantage of the state’s new LIFT (Limited Investment for Financial Traction) program to secure an interest-free loan to facilitate its expansion.

“The Archer Group is an exceptional business, one that has truly put Delaware on the map in the world of interactive marketing,” Delaware Gov. Jack Markell said. “They are an outstanding example of the creativity we encourage in Delaware and of the opportunities the state provides to help businesses grow.”

The News Journal commissioned Workplace Dynamics of Exton, Pa., to conduct its Top Workplaces survey. Ratings were based on the results of questionnaires completed by the businesses and their employees. The Archer Group was evaluated in the small business category, for companies with 30 to 99 employees. Among large employers (400 or more employees) WSFS Bank was named Delaware’s Top Workplace; Compassionate Care Hospice topped the rankings of mid-size employers (100-399 employees).

“I call it the mini-Google of the East Coast,” Ian Lebbern, the Archer Group’s lead tech in software development, told The News Journal. “We work hard, we play hard, basically. And the management here are very supportive — there’s no pressure in terms of somebody standing over your shoulder.”

About The Archer Group
The Archer Group (archer-group.com) is the Delaware Valley’s fastest growing full-service digital agency, offering regional brands a single integrated partner for digital marketing solutions. The unique integration of creative, technical, and user experience professionals enables Archer to create a wide range of offerings that includes: website development, mobile application creation, online advertising, and social media solutions.

Founded in 2003, the Archer Group has received numerous regional and international awards for interactive marketing excellence. It was featured in the 2009 “Philadelphia 100” list of the region’s fastest growing companies and Inc. magazine’s 2008 list of the nation’s fastest growing companies. The company is based in Wilmington, Delaware’s Lower Market Design District (LOMA).

Read the rest of this post over at EngageBlog

Look no further for an example than Craigslist. It’s no secret that Craigslist is perhaps the most popular eyesore on the internet (see KISSMetric’s 4 “Ugly” Sites that Make Millions (and What We Can Learn from Them)). But like the plain looking dude who inexplicably attracts scores of hot girls might tell you, it’s what’s inside that counts. Craigslist “personality” is entirely comprised of user-generated content – listings hawking everything from jobs and apartments to “enchanted encounters” and the junk that’s sitting in your garage. Aside from the laissez-faire approach to content moderation, Craigslist’s main responsibility is to provide the infrastructure upon which users heap their listings onto. The burden of content strategy is on the users, a.k.a. the business transactors.

Your Goals vs. Your Audience’s Goals

Consider the case of apartment rental listings as listed by brokers. From a listing agent’s perspective, Craigslist is not just a virtual garage sale; it’s the vehicle that drives their commission-based salaries. The residential rental industry is cutthroat. It’s not uncommon for apartments to be listed in duplicate – not just by the same agent day-to-day to ensure the listing appears at the top of a search, but also by multiple agents from different brokerages competing against one another to rent out the same unit.

The typical apartment-hunter will sift through the listings and wonder: “Is this listing for real?” “How accurate is this description?” “Is this apartment the same one that I saw a few listings back for $100 less?” “Can I trust this listing agent?” The listing agent must anticipate and address all these concerns. Yet, listings that should look reputable and appealing end up looking less-than-professional and, well, kind of shady.

A popular tactic among listing agents is using an ill-fitting template or, worse, a screenshot from their brokerage’s website and slapping it on Craigslist. With the brokerage’s logo boldly taking up half the screen as the rest of the listing slowly loads, apartment-hunters surely aren’t going to forget that “Brokerage A” is the one to trust – totally legit. And how did the listing agent entice the prospective renter to click on this listing? By using ALL-CAPS and exclamation points in the subject line, of course!!!

Ultimately, the goal of the listing really boils down to a single question: will the apartment-hunter pick up the phone and schedule a showing? Despite all this, the answer is usually, “yes”. However, he will likely show up at the appointment with his guard up, waiting for the listing agent to give him any reason to dismiss this find.

So what do listing agents need to consider when posting ads on Craigslist?

1. Your content should have meaning, and your strategy should help your audience understand it

Think not just about what the apartment-hunter is looking for in an apartment (e.x. families with toddlers will probably avoid walk-ups, but would love buildings near parks), but also think about how best to present that. On Craigslist, brokerages tend to avoid plain-text listings, opting instead for listings that allot plenty of screen real-estate for branding. But there’s a lot to be said for stripping design elements away and leaving behind bare-bones formatting (not unlike Craigslist itself) to allow for the content to speak for itself. The focus should be on the apartment’s description and how it could be the apartment-hunter’s next home, not how adept the brokerage is at using WordArt.

2. Your content should have goals, and your strategy should help your audience achieve it

Too frequently, the photos used in apartment listings look generic and indecipherable, and are slapped on the listing without much context. Photos should serve to legitimize the listing by not only providing proof that the unit exists (the bar is, unfortunately, that low for Craigslist listings), but by also proving that descriptions provided are accurate and that the listing agent is reputable. Apartment photos should be clear and of reasonable quality (not too high-res or the load time will become an impediment), and should come included with contextual descriptions that allow the apartment-hunter to place this in their imaginations as they try to envision themselves in their new home.

3. Your content follows your business beyond the digital space, and your strategy should be to refine it wherever it goes

The listing agent could also use their appointments with the apartment-hunters as an opportunity for face-to-face user research. He could collect feedback for the listing by asking questions like: “What stood out to you from my listing?” “Was there anything on my listing that you found confusing?” “How does the unit compare to how it was described in my listing?” Not only does the listing agent walk away with a set of findings to apply when composing future listings, but he would also come across as the agent who cares about the needs of his clients. In the end, the apartment-hunter may decide that this particular unit is not a good fit, but he will most definitely check in with the listing agent later to see if other apartments have opened up.

So how might this scenario apply to brands in general, outside the Craigslist-sphere?

A broad-spectrum application of these solutions are difficult to assign, with different business goals (conversion! engagement!) and different mediums (Twitter! Facebook!) to consider. However, one takeaway is clear: a good content strategy should not just live on your brand’s website. Wherever your brand appears, your content strategy should follow and mold to whatever mediums you might find your brand in.

In the real world, good corporations deal with customer’s professionally. The best companies arm their front lines with well informed people who are empowered to make decisions and do the right thing. But what if the customer is simply being an arrogant ass or taking unwarranted shots at employees. Again, great companies stand behind their employees, shutting down the customer, remaining professional, and letting the customer have a temper tantrum. When this happens on the phone, a couple people may hear it. When this happens in an airport, a few hundred people may see it (unless its posted to youtube) But when this happens on Twitter, millions can see the exchange.

Read the rest of the story at EngageBlog.com, the site for Lee and Patrick’s new book ‘Engage Your Brand’