Thursday, October 27, 2011

Want to stand ahead of the crowd?

I'm into the third week of my Certified Social Media Strategist class and am relishing in the potential out there to stand ahead of the crowd. What I'm finding is that there is a lot of work to be done to get it right on the social web. Most of us just have the tip of our big toe in the water.

This week, we did a Four Quadrant Assessment assignment examining a company's brand, competition, customers and partners. My classmate and I tackled the customer assessment, and what we found is although Company X had a well-rounded social presence, they weren't very sociable--there was very little interaction going on between them and their followers.

Most of us don't like to be criticized, but if you look at criticism as constructive, you will find many opportunities to not only improve your products and services but also your relationship with your customers. Don't be one of those companies who ignore customer complaints on the social web; use this golden opportunity to listen to what your users want and engage with them. That's what social networking is about!!

Read Jay Baer's blog post: 70% of Companies Ignore Customer Complaints on Twitter.

Wednesday, October 12, 2011

The Importance of Backing Up Your Joomla Site

Something weird happened over the weekend -- one of my client's websites was hacked. To make matters worse, all of the files on the web server were erased. In my 11 years of developing websites, that has never happened... It was a new site, so we had a pretty recent backup of our own, but just imagine...

On Friday, I spent about an hour and a half making updates to the website, so I know for a fact before the weekend, everything was good. Like I usually do, I made a backup of the site with Akeeba Backup, but I didn't download the file to my hard drive, because I felt confident it was safe on the web server.

Big mistake!!!

In the past several days, I have exchanged a number of emails with the hosting company who didn't take responsibility for their server being hacked -- instead, they pointed fingers at us for not choosing good passwords...

So why am I sharing this very embarrassing, hard lesson with you? To warn you to be proactive, make regular backups, and download backup files to your own server (e.g., computer). You need to protect yourself from evil hackers looking to do your business harm.

Tuesday, October 11, 2011

New Site Launched: Mast-O-Card

I am pleased to announce the launch of Jamal Robinson's new website. The site was developed in Joomla 1.5 and features a business directory of vendors offering discounts to students attending Indiana University-Purdue University in Fort Wayne.

Thank you, Gloria Brumley, for your help with the development of this project.

www.mastocard.com