CustomScoop Blog

Team Power!

I've always appreciated a Team effort, so it was great to see the Celtics win the NBA Championship last week as a Team.  Okay, I must admit, that being from New England, I might be a bit biased, but the reality is they played as a Team and won as a Team. It was exciting to see everyone contributing on offense and on defense and then win the Championship!

You may ask, so the Celtics won, big deal, what does that have to do with CustomScoop?  Well, it highlights the "Team" concept that has been our minds at CustomScoop for quite a while.  For you see, behind the scenes we have been working very hard and are now excited to introduce our newest level of service, the ClipIQ Team Edition to our product portfolio.

The Team edition is perfect for companies both large and small that have the need for a monitoring and analysis solution that multiple Team Players can use.  ClipIQ Team Edition combines our powerful online news clipping technology with state of the art media measurement tools all wrapped in an easy to use interface.

When you add to the service, our Team of Experts to help with the crafting of the search & filtering criteria, you get a winning Team combination that can't be beat.  I encourage you to Sign Up for a Free Trial of the Team Edition and see for yourself how our Team Edition can help your Team succeed!

Beware of the Buzz

CompUSA learned the hard way.

Last week, Terry Heaton complained on his relatively large blog that the troubled retail chain sold him an empty box for $269. This is just the sort of juicy and strange tidbit bloggers love to buzz about. And sure enough, a day later, an even larger blog picked up the story, which earned the attention of true blog heavyweights like engadget and BoingBoing. Soon MSM took notice, capping off a true PR debacle. (Jackie Huba gives an excellent and detailed blow by blow of the events on her blog, Church of the Customer). In the end, CompUSA admitted defeat and sent along their apologies and a $300 gift certificate, which his step daughter Ashley gleefully cashed in for its intended purpose.

Now, it seems the easiest way to avoid a problem like this would be to not sell empty boxes in the first place. Of course, there is a valuable lesson here that should not be missed. No company can always avoid such mishaps, but they ALL can make sure to keep tabs on the blogosphere and nip this sort of thing in the bud before the resulting buzz leads to a nightmare scenario for company PR.

Just imagine what might have happened if CompUSA (presumably a tech savvy company) devoted a little effort to blog monitoring. Surely things would have been different if this was discovered on day one. It’s possible that more blogs would have picked up on the original post, but the blow would certainly have been cushioned had CompUSA quickly offered a refund and apology based on the initial post.

Does this mean that retailers ought to shell out $300 to every unhappy blogger with a case? Perhaps not, but clearly the cost of keeping tabs on the blogosphere pales in comparison to the cost of the negative PR that resulted in this instance.

5 Ways to Increase Sales Performance with Media Monitoring

Sell! Sell! Sell! - Those words were the mantra of Jesse Devitte, my EVP in a previous life. That was back in the day when CRM was in its infancy and if you knew anything about your customer you would use it to get a leg up on the competition.  Well, fast forward 20 years, and things haven't changed much.  The more you know about your customer, the better your chances are of getting the sale.

That is the background as to why we wrote the White Paper "5 Ways to Increase Sales Performance with Media Monitoring".  Having timely information about customers, prospects, and competitors is a powerful competitive advantage for sales professionals. Having an automated media monitoring solution in place enables sales professionals to focus on using information instead of searching for information. This also keeps the sales person from wasting their time during the Money Hours when they should be selling. 

If you're in sales and want to see if media monitoring could help give you a reason to call a prospect, stay informed about a customer or have an instant alert as to what your competition is up to, check out our white paper. You can also try out the CustomScoop service and see for yourself by signing up for a no obligation free trial. You didn't think I'd post this blog post without a sales pitch did you? Jesse trained me better than that...

Divide and Twitter

In trying to look at how the Twitter phenomenon might translate to business applications, I do think that there is a place for it in informing or tapping the collective wisdom of a team/group of employees. I see it as potentially replacing the ‘all staff’ emails of “there are bagels in the break room” or “Jim is having car trouble and will be late today.” Or, more to the point my example for this post: replacing the email I sent to two employees asking if they remembered where the quote “about the 14 year old and her cat” came from. These emails clutter the inbox but are more efficient than separately IM’ing each member of the team—Twitter logically fits between the two of these.

The one comment I’ve read that really intrigued me was on Brian Alvey's blog. A commenter by the name of Andy Beard posted simply: “Well, maybe the global quality of blog posts will go up because Twitter will take over that part of intercommunication.”

Will Twitter replace blogging for the cadre of MySpace/LiveJournal entries that led an assistant professor of interactive communications to describe in a Washington Post piece as “the average blogger is a 14-year-old-girl, blogging about her cat”?

A personal blog is essentially an online diary, and from my (faint) recollection as a former teenage girl, I can tell you precious few maintain a diary with any discipline or regularity. My guess is that a lot of personal blogs have been abandoned already or will be shortly. Life gets in the way. Twitter might make more sense than blogging for some individuals, as it still provides the connection and sense of community people crave without the long-term maintenance and writing commitment of a blog.

Steve Rubel’s recent post about some readers and bloggers abandoning blogs in favor of Twitter feeds is what compelled me to take a closer look at Twitter. I hope it doesn’t replace blogging for some of my favorite bloggers, as I believe their insights—more than 160 characters worth—hold real value and provide weight and credibility to the blogosphere.

If Twitter becomes the communication device of choice for those who don’t really have the time or interest to maintain a blog, leaving those who do have that discipline, everyone is well-served: the overall quality of blog posts improves, and there’s still a format for the self-expression quality that is sometimes derided.

Defining “Google” (the Verb)

Google’s blog now includes a post on how to properly use their name, or rather, how not to use it when referring to other search engines. (For example, "I googled you in Yahoo.")

While I understand the need to maintain the value and meaning in your brand, Steve Rubel qualifies Google’s post as, “just silly,” and I agree (but perhaps for different reasons). If Google really thinks they’re better than the other search engines, don't tell me... prove it.

Welcome to the CustomScoop Blog

For the past 6 years, CustomScoop has been quietly delivering fast, timely, and accurate online news clippings for customers interested in public relations, marketing, sales, competitive intelligence, government relations, and more.  Our talented team of developers and customer service professionals ensure that our clients get the highest quality service day in and day out.  CustomScoop searches news sites, government web sites, and blogs. 

But until today we haven't had a blog to share in a more public way information about our product developments, company happenings, and news and views about the industry in which we exist.

Today that changes.  I'm proud about everything our team has accomplished since I founded the company, and now I want to make sure we're doing a better job of communicating our successes and challenges.

The CustomScoop blog will be a group effort by Sara Adams, Steve Bracy, and me.  We'll talk about the exciting things we're working on and we'll provide plenty of links to interesting blog posts and news stories about the media monitoring and measurement and PR industries. 

We're excited about the opportunity to communicate more directly with our audience and share our insight and observations.  Let the dialogue begin!