Best Practice Guide to Problem Solving

Create coupons on your mobile website

Create coupons on your Telnames mobile website and your customers can save them to Apple Passbook with just one click

We’re pleased to announce that Telnames now includes the option for .tel mobile website visitors to save listed vouchers and coupons to the new Apple Passbook app – in just one click.  This enables customers searching on the move to file promotions from their favourite local merchant s in Apple’s “virtual folder” and access them anytime, anywhere.


Telnames already makes it easy and quick to create and update offers on your .tel website.  Now, these offers can be instantly saved by customers to the new Apple Passbook as a “Pass” – a digital representation of your coupon – which can be scanned and redeemed at the point of purchase.  And whenever the offer is changed, your customers will automatically be “push” notified of the latest deals and promotions.

Apple launched its Passbook app in September 2012 with the release of iOS 6 for iPhones and iPod Touch.   The Passbook is a paper-free “digital wallet” that can store tickets, boarding passes, retail coupons, loyalty cards and much more.  You can add passes to Passbook through specific apps (including those offered by Starbucks, McDonald’s, Eventbrite and Ticketmaster), emails, and websites from participating airlines, cinemas, shops and more.   Now, Telnames offers the ability for customers to convert and save your listed coupon or offer as a Passbook-enabled “Pass” at the click of a button.

“Until now, only large organisations have had the ability to get their coupons and vouchers into the Passbook app, so we’re delighted to make it really simple for small businesses,” explains Khashayar Mahdavi, CEO of Telnames.
He adds: “Now, customers can receive offers from their preferred local merchants in real-time. With this new feature, Telnames is truly putting small businesses in their customers’ pockets as well as giving local directories and voucher sites a fantastic service to white-label to their community.”

The number of retailers getting on board with Apple’s Passbook has grown rapidly since its launch last autumn, and many industry commentators are recognising its potential to transform retail. Now, with your Telnames mobile website, this ticket to mobile marketing success is in your hands.

Mobile Friendy Website (Do-It-Yourself)
Mobile Friendly Website Managed Service

Why predictions are pointless

Don't waste time on the financial forecast or worry about the pension plan. Just get on with it!
Why predictions are pointless

The Bias Against Creatives as Leaders

The Bias Against Creatives as Leaders
Two candidates are being interviewed for a leadership position in your company. Both have strong resumes, but while one seems to be bursting with new and daring ideas, the other comes across as decidedly less creative (though clearly still a smart cookie). Who gets the job?

The answer, unfortunately, is usually the less creative candidate. This fact may or may not surprise you – you yourself may have been the creative candidate who got the shaft. But what you're probably wondering is, why? read on... The Bias Against Creatives as Leaders

Five handy tips for SEO (Search Engine Optimisation)

1. Search engine optimisation and keywords/phrases

   Ensure that target keywords are in the website addresses you use (URLs) and that titles and meta tags (descriptions) are checked for relevance and popularity with searchers. Audit which pages rank for which keywords. Then make sure you use the right keywords to improve content on these pages.

2. Build quality inbound links

   This is all about the relevance and credibility of the inbound link to your website. The link must be of high quality in terms of content and source credibility. By providing fresh and relevant content via blogs, other websites or newsletters, you can create or gain quality links back to your website. Others may want to bookmark or link to it too.

3. Authority

   Score well for Google PageRank (via links) and become a social media authority. Generate well-reviewed content and connect with experts, thought leaders and gurus as they will provide valuable authenticity and implicit endorsement for your website or blog.

4. Experience

   Foster good user experience on your website. This means having low bounce rates, so people don’t leave immediately as it is not the content they wanted or expected. Ensure fast page load speeds by keeping it simple and avoid having too many images. Provide easy navigation so they can find their way around your site. It goes without saying that you should have a well-designed website too (aesthetics).

5. Content

   Create new content and keep the site fresh by regularly updating existing content. An editorial content calendar may be useful here (of course containing the right keywords/phrases). You should submit a sitemap to Google and this should contain internal links to indexed pages. Atomise content across social media, this means identifying places where your content could be included.

Source: adapted from Barack (2011) and Jackson (2007) seachenginewatch.com

Podio collaborative work platform reaches 200,000

Podio Reaches 200,000 Organisations

 
 

Collaborative work platform, Podio, empowers teams to get real work done on any device, from anywhere; New Podio Share feature promotes easier content sharing

Citrix, the new owners of Podio, announced more than 200,000 organisations globally have adopted Podio, a powerful collaboration platform that enables people to work the way they want to, cut down on email and free themselves from content chaos. Podio can be accessed on the web, iPad, iPhone and Android devices, providing organizations with greater flexibility and transparency than ever before.
Podio by the numbers

• Today, more than 2.5 million Podio apps from the podio App Market have been installed in Podio workspaces. Podio workspaces have reached 700,000.
• More than 300,000 Podio apps have been created from scratch or modified by Podio users using the simple Podio App Builder, representing as many unique ways of getting work done.
• Almost 50 percent of Podio workspaces are 'open' instead of 'private', meaning any employee within an organization can participate. The large numbers of open Podio workspaces validates the growing industry trend towards sharing and increasing transparency in the workplace via social technology.
• Podio users have created 80 percent more status messages in workspace activity streams than private messages, and 50 percent more openly shared tasks than private ones. The way Podio users collaborate and communicate using Podio aligns with the workshifting trend of collaborating through social business tools and moving away from traditional communication silos, such as email or privately delegated tasks.

Podio Share

Citrix also announced today an innovative new Podio feature enabling users to share content, app data and tasks from Podio with teammates, partners or customers outside a private Podio workspace. The Podio Share feature also enables sharing of select content with recipients that are not in the Podio environment without compromising content privacy. Podio Share extends the collaborative power of Podio to anyone, but lets teams stay in control of the content they share.

KashFlow Accounting Software Review

Kashflow is an incredibly easy to use financial management product for small business owners. It allows them to create and manage sales invoices and purchase receipts, as well as many other useful features. We give a Delta Recommended *****Five Stars to KashFlow for it's ability/price ratio. A well packed accounts package at low cost. Why not sign up for a free trial yourself if you'd like to see more? Take it for a free test drive. >>

Becoming a Digital Business

An organisation cannot become a social business without first, or at least concurrently, becoming a digital business. Delegating digital roles to untrained, unmotivated or unwilling staff does not make a digital business. This common practice yields an inefficient retrofit rather than the transformation required to compete in today's digital world.

Organisations must review their structure, capabilities and resources allocated to all facets of digital integration across the organisation. This ranges from strategy, to development and production, brand, content, and creative, data, analytics, and CRM, media, mobile and social. Redesigning the organisation structure and processes and the change management associated with shifting the corporate culture to adopt to the connected and empowered consumer is an essential step in the evolution of today's businesses. Look upon it as developing a basic digital operating system for your organisation.

Social Media Behaviour

Social media and social tools are transformational both within and external to an organisation. Developing and nurturing relationships with consumers on social platforms has played a major role in fueling the resurgence of digital brand building and consumer engagement. Likewise, fostering collaboration and knowledge sharing within organisations using "social business platforms" is changing the way we work. However, many businesses have a difficult time changing their culture and workflow and therefore struggle to actualize the benefits of cross-functional involvement in consumer engagement, nor the formal collaboration platforms available today. As companies mature digitally, this will change, and social tools will facilitate effective collaboration and workflow within organisations of all sizes. There is clearly a need for social business tools and processes and this can only increase inline with mobile technology.

The Technical Creative - A new breed?

As a software developer colleague of mine with decades of experience said to me yesterday when I quizzed him about the cost of building an app for a client,
"If you had asked 4 years ago the application may have been a challenge. Now nearly all the pieces of the jigsaw are available easily and mass marketed."
The challenge, today, is to bring together the digital elements and create that seamless cross over between technical and creative. The combination of marketing consultancy and technical consultancy has never been in more demand. Even traditional methods of project management are being challenged as a new breed of specialist evolves in the digital arena. The route to market for any software development now has to embrace the existing channels laid open to it that were never there previously. Only a few years ago, as much consideration would have been given to the development of the infrastructure and hardware to facilitate the solution. Now the high speed communication link and hardware is in the palm of your hand.