SRPI

Salesforce.com has recently rolled out the Service Cloud, a customer service application that basically tries to capture the crowdsourced pools of knowledge floating across the internet from sites like Google, Facebook and Amazon, and then uses this information to better equip commercial customer service operations with useful knowledge.

The the good news is, Salesforce has already connected Twitter to the Service Cloud, allowing customer service reps using the SaaS to access tweets from more than 8 million Twitter users.

Salesforce’s CRM for Twitter basically allows enterprises to search for tweets about their companies, products and their brands. Here’s how it works. First, Salesforce CRM searches within the Service Cloud for any tweets that are relevant to a company. Then, the company can capture and monitor the conversation, creating a database in the Service Cloud that keeps track of all subsequent conversations about the company. The Service Cloud also allows enterprises to tap into company-wide online communities, creates connections to existing social networks and the blogosphere, provides SEO tools, shares the social network knowledge with business partners, and integrates customer service operations into the cloud.

The Service Cloud looks like a very useful tool to capture and then sort conversations about a particular enterprise. But what’s fascinating is how businesses want to tap into the dialogue of what’s happening on social networks, like Facebook and Twitter. Salesforce has consistently managed to provide innovative, desirable technology platforms for enterprises to merge their business operation with the web 2.0 world.

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Tweets Cloud

TinkOmatic is a new web service that allows deal-hunting consumers to search and track classifieds or auction sites for multiple items at once, all in one location. Tracking classifieds on Craigslist or deals on Ebay can be overwhelming and tedious to consumers and TinkOmatic is hoping to provide an easier way to view these listings.

The cool search aggregator application allows users to find items on Oodle, Kijiji, Ebay and Craigslist. It also allows its users to add RSS feeds from Trulia, Google Base and others to track items, jobs, apartments and cars. The results from each site are displayed in separate panes, a.ka. TinkBoxes, within the page. The user can access the site-specific searches (on Ebay or Craigslist) by clicking on the corresponding TinkBox. Searches can be limited by both location (TinkOmatic offers over 20 geographic locations) and by type of item. All searches can be saved and refreshed whenever the user accesses TinkOmatic. The site also enables people to create advanced search filters within their RSS readers and TinkOmatic searches featured on the site.

Here’s a instructional video about the site:

One economy-relevant feature is the ability to hunt for jobs, track listings and have the job searches updated each time a user logs in to the site. And of course, it’s a useful tool to organize updated multiple classified and auction searches in one area. In theory, it’s sort of similar to Trackle, NotifyMe and Yotify, except devoted to a concentrated area. On the downside, TinkOmatic’s interface is fairly basic and could be spruced up to offer more features like email alerts. But it’s certainly a good start.

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Online Job Search

After many steamy rumors, Google Health has finally decided to store our medical records in a secure way that is more accessible, easier to understand, and useful than traditional paper records.

Since the last announcement, we actually haven’t heard too much about the service, which isn’t particularly surprising given the sensitive nature of the information involved. Recently Google has announced that it has launched a significant new feature, giving users the ability to share their medical records with designated family or close friends.

The general idea behind the feature is that in many times specially during emergencies close-family members may not know the details of your medical history, like medical allergies. Such information can be lifesaving, but sharing extremely personal medical information is not something that should be taken lightly. Google is taking lengthy measures to ensure the security of the data, associating invite links to specific Email addresses and allowing users to track who has viewed their records. All shared records are also read-only.

For those users who are less tech-savvy, Google is also launching a new feature that makes it easy to print out wallet-sized snapshots of your medical profile, which you can distribute to close family or perhaps just keep in your own wallet. The site is also launching a new graphing feature, allowing users to visualize the progress of health-related metrics like their blood pressure or cholesterol.

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Share Medical History

Embedr is a very new service which is completely free that lets you build custom video playlists from a variety of online clip sources and gives you the opportunity to aggregate the entire playlist into a good-looking widget which you can easily share on your blog or website.

It’s an elegant solution for those times you want to embed multiple videos in a blog post or on any web page without cluttering your site and forcing visitors to scroll down in order to watch all the clips you’re sharing. Creating widgets is ridicously simple, but we should note Embedr doesn’t host videos and can only pull videos from third-party services like YouTube, MySpace Video, DailyMotion, MetaCafe, Veoh, Vimeo, Blip.tv and more. The maximum number of videos you can add to one playlist is 100.

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Share Video Playlist

If you are spending a lot of time in Twitter anyway, you might as well train your mind while you’re at it. Here are two simple games that make use of the microsharing service’s functionalities and keep your brains busy while tweeting:

TwitBrain

You can Follow @TwitBrain and get served calculations on a regular basis (like 3 per hour). If you can become the first person to reply with the correct answer, you’ll earn one point and hopefully make your way to their top 10 lists.

BeatMyTweet

Simply follow @BeatMyTweet and do the exact same thing, but this time with word scrambles. Warning: it’s ridiculously easy so be fast if you want to be one of the first 10 to reply with the correct answer. Leaderboards here.

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Twitter Games

Beginning of this year, Google released a cool offline version of Gmail based on Google Gears. Last month, Google has started to offer an offline version of Google Calendar to enterprise app customers. But today, The Google Calendar Offline has been rolled out to every account.

Once you click on the “Offline” link at the top of the page, the application will ask you once to enable Google Gears for the Calendar. Just follow the screen and once you do that, it allows you to read your calendar when you are not connected to the Internet. A simple Google Calendar icon appears on your desktop. When you click on it, your browser opens up to show your recent schedule (it only goes back up to 1 month). For the most part, the offline version is read-only. You cannot edit existing entries until are back online. However, you can add new entries in your calender.

There are obviously some syncing issues going on here, but it seems that Google should be able to figure out how to let you edit your calendar and then sync once you are connected. Without that ability, it is a hampered product. But it is still better than no offline access whatsoever.

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Google Calendar Offline

Ranking well for a popular keyword phrase is getting harder and harder these days. But did you know that about 10 million times a day someone misspells a keyword in their search? Normally to those poor saps I would say, “Hey, good luck with that!” But the truth is, more and more online companies are taking advantage of the misspelled keywords.

For example, if your website is selling office calendars, the average monthly search for “office calendars” is about 40,500. The term “office calenders” is searched about 1,300 times per month. What does this mean for you? Well, even though the misspelled term searches are significantly less (only 3% of the correctly spelled term’s search volume) you will not need to fight as hard to get to the top of this search, thus bringing in some extra traffic from those bad spellors that u may knot hav otherwize bin kounting on.

So what is the best way to optimize for these misspelled keywords? The first trick is to know what your options are for the possible misspellings. A great tool to use for this is the Seobook.com Typo Generator—although, in the 146 possibilities this tool gives for the word “Calendar,” they don’t even mention “Calender.” So, you will want to check out more than one source. Another source is checking the “100 Most Often Misspelled Words in English” from yourdictionary.com or other dictionary sites. Make sure to check the misspelled word’s estimated search traffic to see if it is worth optimizing for.

Next you’ll need to optimize for the misspelled term on your page. There are several ways of accomplishing this, but I believe one of the classiest methods is to simply post an article or blog post on your site that mentions different common misspellings of the desired term. You can’t base your entire SEO strategy on optimizing for misspellings. Google often times helps out poor spelling patrons showing the “Did you mean…” option above the search results.

Well, there you have it—a new arrow in your quiver. Just make sure to take some time to do a little research (Google AdWords keyword tool) before spending energy on the optimization. Often times, it’s hit or miss with these misspellings—so, good luck with that!

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Misspelled Keywords – Good Luck with That!

Niche marketing is one of the best ways to sell a product or service. By catering to a niche market you are able to find your target group easily and you can focus in on selling to them. You are able to avoid the hassles of marketing efforts that never pay off.

Finding a niche market, however, may not be as simple as sounds. Sometimes narrowing down your target group of customers to a single niche market can be hard. Here are five tips for finding your niche market:

1. Make a list of people who could buy your product or service. By making a list you can begin to see a pattern in the types of people who would be likely to buy your product and thus you may discover your niche market.

2. Research where the demand is for your product or service. Find out who needs your product and why. This could point you towards your niche market.

3. Look at your competition and see who they are advertising to. This is one of the best ways to find your niche market.

4. Go online and do keyword research. Try to think of some main keywords that a person would use to search for the service or product you are selling. Enter these in a search engine and see what types of businesses or websites come up. You should see some type of pattern that will point towards a good niche market.

5. Go with what feels right. Above all else if you see a specific niche market that your service or product will serve then go with it. Do not try to complicate things. If you have an obvious niche market, then use it and don’t overwork yourself by trying to find a different, less obvious niche market.

These five tips should help you find a niche market where your product or service will fit right in. Your niche market will make targeted advertising easier which will in turn help you get buying customers attracted to your business.

There is one thing on which every online marketer agrees: the key to success is traffic. No matter how appealing your product or service may be, you will fail without traffic.

Many webmasters spend a lot of money on advertising. They purchase large email campaigns, advertise on Google and Yahoo, and even buy radio and TV time. But, fortunately, you do not have to make expenditures of that magnitude.

Instead, try the following.

1. Article distribution is my favorite marketing activity because it has paid such great dividends for the websites with which I am associated. At last count, my article writing has netted those sites more than 30,000 links. The process is pretty simple. Just write articles that will be interesting and/or helpful, and use one of the many available software tools to submit them to article distribution sites. Include an author’s box, like the one at the end of this article, with links to your website(s). As Webmasters looking for content find and use your articles on their sites, you will pick up links; often lots of them.

2. Exchange links with the webmasters of other sites. While a link on any decent site will help you, links on sites with content related to yours and links on sites with relatively good Google PR are particularly valuable in influencing your search engine rankings.

3. One way linking. If your content is good enough or if you have something to offer other webmasters (a widget, an ebook, etc.), try for one way links. The search engines value them far more highly than reciprocal links.

4. Set up a blog. Put a link to your website on it. Try to come up with an interesting post at least once a month. Weekly is better.

5. Just as website owners need content, so do bloggers. Offer to write guest blogs (followed by an author’s box with a description of and link to your site).

6. This may surprise you, but press releases can get you hundreds of links (and lots of publicity). There are agencies and software tools which will help you distribute your releases. Neither are expensive: you’ll be pleasantly surprised.

If you do not have confidence in your writing skills, you can purchase private label rights (PLR) articles very inexpensively and/or hire a writer. If you do a little searching you can find writers who will produce blog posts for as little as $5 and articles for just $10. You will have to do some screening to find capable authors and the fees you pay may wind up being well above the aforementioned minimums. But, the investment is very small for the potential return. In fact, the strategies we have discussed can lead to relatively quick, significant search engine ranking boosts for your website.

Viral marketing has unlimited possibilities and ways to achieve your overall goals. However, just like everything else, preplanning and the right setup to create success are the things you will need to make it work for you and your e-business.

You will need to be extra careful so you don’t get over-zealous. The one thing you need to avoid at all costs is spamming. Spamming is still used widely, but with the government establishing more restrictions and fines you dont want this to be a problem for you. The professional image of your site will also suffer if you send mail blatantly.

Spamming requires a database that contains a huge list of e-mail addresses set up so that the message can be delivered with one click. The problem with it (aside from the governmental restrictions) is that it irritates the recipients and kills the validity of your campaign, which in turn kills the factors that would motivate someone to refer your site.

You need to personalize by making your website have personal appeal. You must see to it that your website makes your customers feel safe, secure and cared for. E-mail is important, because it is going to be one of the most affordable ways to keep in touch with your customers.

The proper way to handle email permission is to first let your customer know that you will not transmit their e-mail addresses to third party companies. The next thing to do is to attach the need for their e-mail addresses to benefits they can receive.

For example: Coupons or discounts that are only available to members who receive e-mail notifications. With each e-mail you send the viral marketing effect takes place.