We are looking for a combination of artistic and scientific skills – an experienced web development engineer with top-notch software design and coding skills, ideally with intimate knowledge of jQuery. Our stack includes Ruby, Rails, Javascript/jQuery, and mySQL and we prefer generalists who have lots of successes at every layer of the stack.

If you or anyone you know might be a fit for this opportunity, we’d love to talk to you. Check out the job post here.

What Is Branding? — Getting Started

To make decisions about the various pieces that form a polished, business brand, you will need to know some basic information about graphic design and typography. This doesn’t mean that you have to become an expert or a graphic artist. Most of what you need can be found through some careful research and observation.

Once you have gotten past the first steps of establishing your business, deciding on the legalities and name,   you will want to sow the seeds of your brand—in marketing materials called a business identity—in every facet of your business life. How you display your company’s brand to the world and connect to your buyers is a critically important step , because the clearer and more consistent your business identity is, the more likely you are to succeed.

What Is Branding? —Finding Your Voice

Your voice conveys the way you want to be perceived, and the way you want people to feel about your business. You might want to sound very dignified and sedate, or irreverent, or flirty—depending on your products. You might want to sound conversational and approachable, or edgy and smart. Whatever voice you choose, carry it into all your messaging, marketing materials, and web presence. Your words position your company in your market niche, and anything you write about your company should do at least one of these three things:

• Differentiate you from others in your niche
• Offer a value prop/benefit
• Reinforce your brand

What Is Branding? — The Tangible Parts

Every single interaction that goes out should carry your brand stylistically and visually. Here are some examples of other kinds of issues that need the mark of your business identity:

• email (including a signature/logo)
• snail mail (stationery)
• business cards
• product tags
• avatars/portraits
• banners
• enclosure cards
• packaging materials
• mailing labels
• newsletters
• handouts for in-person events
• ads
• blog badges

Learn from some examples:

50 Extremely Original and Creative Business Cards

12 Lovely Letterhead Examples

Make Your Own Blog Badge

What Is Branding?  — Logo and Portraits

Experience in our own daily lives attests to the power of the logo. We all have powerful associations with the magic of logos like the Coca-Cola ribbon or Mr. Peanut.  In an instant, you must capture the attention and imagination of the viewer, and cement the perception of your business in their mind’s eye. Portraits and avatars have come to assume some of the same role as logos for online sellers and social media postings. Make sure yours coordinate well and consistently with your logo and color palette. Today’s online sellers operate over multiple venues. Having consistent visuals on all your online venues will help customers remember you and cement your brand. There are plenty of books and online resources available for researching logos. Just looking at the best examples can jumpstart your imagination.

Learn from some examples:

10 Examples of Simple, Effective Logos

Examples of Corporate Logos and Famous Trademarks

Corporate Logos: 50 Stylish Examples

What Is Branding? —The Colors of Success

Different colors convey different moods. Blue can mean steadiness and confidence; red, excitement and edginess. A vintage, nostalgic feeling can be represented by soft reds, blues, and yellows, like the shades of a 1930′s apron. Those same colors could also signal the jubilance of childhood. Bright, clear colors generally signal energy; more subtle or “minor chord” colors indicate a complexity and depth. Since you will not want to change colors, logos, or typefaces once you begin putting your brand into the e-commerce stream, choose carefully. Give yourself time to settle on colors you love and can live with for a long time.

According to brand identity designer Erin Ferree, there are five things that your color palette should achieve:

1. Telling your brand’s story through color psychology

2. Laying the color palette foundation for your “visual vocabulary”

3. Giving your logo elements light and dark contrast

4. Having enough colors to be interesting but not so many that printing is too expensive

5. Complementing each other and creating visual appeal

More Resources:

What Colors Convey

Choosing the Right Color Palette for Your Corporate Identity

Choosing a Corporate Color Palette

Color Wheel Color Calculator

What Is Branding? — Typefaces

Luckily there is very good advice available about how (and why) to choose one typeface and font over another. Depending on the choice, your business can appear modern, masculine, feminine, traditional, funky, or carefree. You can make great progress towards a decision just by going to look at other companies and find the ones that appeal to you and have a look you admire.

Here are some resources to get you started:

Top 10 Free Fonts to Create the Perfect Logo

10 Inspirational Logos: Choose the Best Font for Your Logo

Logo Design: Choosing the Right Font

Choosing and Using Type

15 Tips to Choosing a Good Text Type

13 Ways of Looking at a Typeface

The Non-Typographer’s Guide to Practical Typefaces

There’s Help Out There!

So, what is branding? It’s a major marketing task, for sure. There is a lot of information about branding available on the Web. Here are a few of the most helpful resources:

Some helpful books about branding:

How To Create a Rock-Solid Tagline that Works

5 Tips for Branding Your Small Business

How To Build Your Personal Brand on YouTube

Creating Your Personal Brand 101

Creating Your Personal Brand 102

(A series) What Is Your Brand?

Art of Branding by Guy Kawasaki

You Are the Brand

Coming Soon! Part II: What Is Branding? The Social Side

Try Desk.com and Get Your First Agent FREE

Be yourself. Don’t try to be someone else or use their words. What works for another customer service agent may not work for you. Oh yeah, don’t have a meltdown.

Show some humility. Be someone that your customer can relate to. They may show you empathy and actually understand that you’re only trying to help them.

Work together. Using teamwork to solve the customer’s problem is very important. After all, if you’re not part of the customer’s solution, you’re part of his problem.

Listen to your customer. “You’ve got two ears and one mouth. They should be used in this ratio.”

Deliver on your promise. Nothing is more important than delivering what you promised to your customer.

Following these tips should help you with your customer service engagement. Remember, in today’s world of social media, bad customer service will be more memorable to your customer than any Tommy Boy clip.

Also, it doesn’t hurt to have the right tools to amplify your efforts. Take a look at a social help desk software. It could make a big difference!

What are some of your favorite customer service scenes from TV/movies?

Salesforce Desk.com was named a Finalist today in the New Product or Service of the Year – Consumer Products category in The 2012 American Business Awards^SM, and will ultimately be a Gold, Silver, or Bronze Stevie Award winner in the program. The 10^th Annual Stevie® Awards will be presented at two events (June 18 in New York City, and September 17 in San Francisco).

More than 3,000 nominations from organizations of all sizes and in virtually every industry were submitted this year for consideration. Finalists were chosen by more than 140 business professionals nationwide during preliminary judging in April and May. Desk.com had high average scores during more than five weeks of preliminary judging.

We are also very happy to see that Desk.com customer, Bonobos, is a Finalist in the category of Social Customer Service Transformation. Bonobos has seen a dramatic increase in customer satisfaction, engagement, and revenues as a result of their emphasis on social customer support using Desk.com.

The American Business Awards are the nation’s premier business awards program. All organizations operating in the U.S.A. are eligible to submit nominations – public and private, for-profit and non-profit, large and small.

This is a significant achievement. Independent judges agreed that these nominations are worthy of national recognition, and that the nominations will be recognized as Gold, Silver, or Bronze Stevie Award winners.  Stevie Award placements will be determined in the final judging that begins next week. More than 150 members of 10 specialized judging committees will determine Stevie Award placements from among the Finalists during final judging.

Please join us in celebrating this great news!

Desk.com, The Social Help Desk

Because different organizations work in different ways, we wanted to provide you with more flexibility in Case Routing, so that you can optimize it for your team. We’ve just added two features that let you fine-tune the behavior of Case Routing:

• Passive Screenpop: Not everybody wants big, bold notifications of new cases. The Passive Screenpop option makes the case routing notifications (“screenpops”) less intrusive for Agents. With Passive Screenpop turned on, notifications appear in a small box at the top of the page instead of a larger box overlaying most of the page, and the Agent can choose to accept or ignore the notification.
• Single Case Routing: Some teams prefer to be notified of only one new case at a time. Use this option to restrict the way new cases get routed to your Agents. With Single Case Routing turned on, Agents will never receive a routed case while they have another case open.

Background: What Is Case Routing?

As new cases come into Desk.com from email, live chat, Twitter, and Facebook you can immediately route them to agents based on priority and Agent availability. Case routing notifies your team of new cases as they come in, and also routes those cases to specific Agents that are in the best position to respond immediately.

Say you have five Agents working, but two have fewer open cases than the others. With Case Routing turned on, those two Agents would be assigned the next new cases that come in. Case Routing helps your team work efficiently and helps your customers get the fastest response.

To enable Case Routing from the Admin Panel Case Management Tab: Agents>Case Routing.

When Case Routing is enabled, Agents receive a screenpop (dialog box) to alert them to work on the next case or a more important case. The screenpop is visible for a set period of time determined by the “Screenpop Timeout” configuration. Agents can also choose their preferred alert sound from Agent Desktop Settings.

You can customize Case Routing to meet your needs. Some teams prefer to have screenpops be more passive (where they appear, but can be ignored) or to only have one case routed to an agent at a time. This is why we’ve added these two new features that let you fine-tune the case routing.

New Feature #1: Passive Screenpop

Now Admins can choose a less intrusive approach by enabling “Passive Screenpop”:

Once enabled from the Admin Panel via Case Management > Agents > Passive Screenpop, a notification arrives in a collapsed mode screenpop, which is less distracting and allows Agents to continue with their work until they are ready to begin working on the newly routed case.

Agents can choose to expand the view to see the full array of routing information:

To enable Passive Screenpop: From the Admin Panel Case Management Tab>Agents>Passive Screenpop.

New Feature #2: Single Case Routing

The second (and complementary) feature we have added is Single Case Routing. Currently, if an Agent is working on a case and another comes in with a higher priority, a screenpop will appear. This could happen several times in a row and the screenpop will continue to appear after each case is accepted, again potentially disrupting an Agent’s work.

With Single Case Routing, Agents will never receive a routed case while they have a case open. As soon as the case is closed, routing will resume. This enables an Agent to continue to receive routing notifications–but only when they’re not actively working on a case. Think of it as “Do Not Disturb” mode for routing.

To enable Single Case Routing: From the Admin Panel Case Management Tab>Agents>Route One Case at a Time

Small Improvements. Happier Agents.

Seemingly small or subtle improvements like Passive Screenpop and Single Case Routing often make the biggest difference to productivity and job satisfaction for our customers, so please reach out to us with your thoughts. We’ve got a few more plans to make this feature even better and more useful. Stay tuned!

Note: For those customers who have not yet used Desk.com’s Case Routing capabilities but are intrigued, read up on it here and here.

Desk.com is The Social Help Desk

Martin Zwilling

If you have a unique creation or invention, and you are not selling it around the world on the Internet, now is the time to start. The cost of entry has never been lower. Anyone can be an entrepreneur today, without a huge investment, bank loans, venture capitalists, or Angels.

In the early days (20 years ago), most new e-commerce sites cost a million dollars to set up. Now the price is closer to $100, if you are willing to do the work yourself. Here are the key steps for a personal home-based business website selling a few products (as an alternative to Ebay):

1. Go online to reserve a website domain name. Be sure it matches your business, and get a hosting agreement from one of the popular providers like GoDaddy. The cost for the domain name is maybe $10/year, and the hosting starts around $50/year. Start simple.
2. Download free website tools. Many hosting services offer free tools, or will build a default website for you. Other popular tools are available at low cost, with built-in e-commerce capabilities (pay via PayPal or credit card), including FrontPage in the Microsoft Office Suite, and DreamWeaver by Adobe.
3. Open an account with PayPal. This costs nothing, and allows you to safely collect money from customers all around the world. If you want to also accept all the popular credit cards, that will require a merchant services account for a low monthly fee.
4. Personalize a simple web site. Customize your website using one of the tools above, selecting one of the standard templates for design and layout. You probably want at least a home page, product page, order page, and contact page. The menu should include a link to your blog, separately set up on Blogger, WordPress, or TypePad, again free.
5. Publish the site and now you are in business. But don’t be fooled into expecting people to flock to your site after you tell a few friends. Now the real work begins — promotion, marketing, blogging, and all types of search engine marketing. But even these can be done for almost no cost, if you are willing to learn and do the work yourself.

Obviously, commercial e-commerce sites handling thousands of products and back-office functions are more expensive, and usually require professional help to do the custom programming and special site navigation features. All this may cost a few thousand dollars, but don’t get talked into an Amazon.com replacement just yet.

The next step in complexity is building a software product that you can offer as a service to your customers. A simple example might be mortgage calculator to add to your real estate sales site. Any credible software developer should be willing to tackle this kind of tool for a couple of thousand dollars.

Then there are full-featured software sites like Facebook. The logic behind all these features is millions of lines of code, and cost millions of dollars to develop and maintain. Don’t expect that you can create a new social networking site in your garage, and steal all the users away from Facebook. Facebook is making money today, but only after a $150 million investment.

But even Facebook started simple, and then developed more and more robust iterations as user interest caught on. I give this advice all the time “launch fast and iterate.” You can’t get it all right the first time, and the market will be gone if you try to include every feature in the first version.

The net is that if I see a website business plan today with a projected development cost greater than $200K, I suspect the founder must be including some fancy perks, or they don’t understand the market dynamics of e-commerce today.

Budding entrepreneurs and home-based businesses should be writing business plans before they start, so they understand and can manage the tasks ahead, but no outside investor need ever see the plan. Fund it yourself (bootstrapping) and do-it-yourself entrepreneurs are the best kind, because they can focus on the business, rather than fund raising, and have full control of their destiny. Life is more fun that way. Grab your shopping basket.

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Take charge of your customer service with Assistly. Your first agent is FREE.

In February, Desk.com’s SVP of Marketing Matt Trifiro gave a talk at the inaugural of Social Biz Atlanta, created by social CRM thought leader and analyst Brent Leary. Matt spoke about The Velocity of Customer Service in the Social Age.

Matt illustrated his presentation with some intriguing customer stories that have lessons for all businesses, especially small businesses. Two of Desk.com’s customers–Bonobos (an online retailer) and Bolocos (a chain of burrito restaurants near Boston) have made customer service on social channels an integral part of their business strategy.

Bonobos initiated a strong presence on social channels about a year ago, and has seen customer request numbers go up by 20%, with 30% of all requests are coming in via social channels. Engagement is way up, and satisfaction with the brand is, too.

Boloco, a very forward-thinking burrito company with 19 restaurants in the Northeast, has a strong goal to provide exceptional customer experiences. But it’s what happened when a customer double-parked to claim her free burrito in a co-sponsored Desk.com/Boloco promotion that so clearly demonstrates the power social can have over a brand. What Boloco did with the news that their double-parked patron had gotten a $55 parking ticket is a lesson for every small business. And the good publicity that came as a result is …. priceless! Watch the video to see what happened.

Bottom line: the new customer is adopting new technology and has high expectations for companies who want their business. There’s a good case for over-servicing them on every channel. Matt’s message is cautionary and entertaining: it’s all about velocity.

Get your Free Agent with Desk.com, The Social Help Desk, and take control of your customer service.

No need to dread the blank screen! My solution for this challenge is to use blog ideas that have their roots in the work of other people—half the work is done when you focus on reporting rather than starting from scratch.

Some potential blog ideas to spark your creativity:

Upcoming events in your industry.

I never seem to have my finger on the pulse of interesting conferences, or special designated “weeks” like National Chocolate Week. You know how tragic it is when you miss National Chocolate week! Save people from this disaster. Do some research; inform  your readers. A pertinent illustration, and you have a useful post. Even people who don’t attend conferences regularly will enjoy tuning in on the activity on Twitter or Facebook. This year’s SXSW conference, for instance. I watched a lot of the videos, and kept up on Twitter. I learned a lot, and celebrated vicariously with the attendees and friends who were there in person.

The Tutorial du Jour

The “how to” is always an option. Tutorials about your own products or services are particularly good. You probably have an idea about what customers are interested in (or confused about!) and could write up a 1-2-3 tutorial that they can refer to again and again. If you use software like Desk.com, you can check your incoming issue labels or other Business Insights and address “moments of truth” where your customer is encountering barriers or friction. If writing doesn’t come too easily to you, you’ll find it much easier to write factually about your own product or service. Who knows more about it than you?

Interview someone interesting.

As blog ideas go, this is a no-brainer. An interview is a great way to get some fresh ideas out to your readership, while at the same time minimizing the sweaty-palm feeling of a blank screen with a blinking cursor. Just lead the interviewee into a discussion that makes sense for your brand. Then write it up in a question and answer piece . An introductory bio and a closing of thanks is all you need to tie it up. If you use www.freeconferencecall.com, you can record the whole thing and concentrate on the interview rather than taking notes.

Collections

Get a reputation as an aggregator of “best of” lists. I can say that some of my favorite blog posts are these kind of lists of resources, which I keep close on my bookmarks and refer to again and again.

Customer story or a case study.

Kill two birds with one stone. Make a customer happy by featuring them on your blog, and pass valuable information about using your product/service along to your readers.

Blog Ideas: Change it up.

Include a post that’s a bit out of your comfort zone. Take a stand on something. Write in a different tone or to a specific age group. See what happens—maybe you’ll find your sweet spot and writing won’t seem so intimidating. When I do this, during drafting I pretend that it will never be published. Then I have freedom to write what I want, and often it comes out as worthwhile.

Infographics

Infographics are not exactly “writing,” but they are universally appealing. Infographics in particular can have a long life on the Internet. Make them fresh and relevant—as evergreen as possible—and you may see them bringing you mentions for years.

Don’t forget . . .

• Be sure to use all your social channels to put posts in front of readers who will be interested. Use hashtags that pertain to your industry to augment the push.
• Ask other sites to include a link to your blog on their blogroll, or to link to a specific post that may be relevant to their readership. This  takes a bit of time and patience, but it can pay off in more inbound links, which pushes your posts higher in search ranking.
• Ask for contributors—and not just for written content. A great illustration, photo, or cartoon can really add to a post. Once in awhile, spend some time delving into the art world to find something out of the ordinary. Just don’t forget to ask permission and/or purchase the right to use in editorial content.

There, just a few blog ideas for the non-writer! It’s actually easier than you’d think. You don’t have to be a professional writer to publish popular, memorable blog posts.

Make your customers happy with Desk.com. Get your free Agent today!

Interact with your customers more efficiently with Desk.com the social help desk! 

What’s the worst customer service quote you’ve experienced? (If you’re like us, you’ve heard more than one). Share your best ones in the comments.