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ProBlogger: How to Master Visual Customer Service in the Social Age

ProBlogger: How to Master Visual Customer Service in the Social Age

Link to @ProBlogger

How to Master Visual Customer Service in the Social Age

Posted: 12 Nov 2014 07:51 AM PST

This is a guest contribution from Jennifer Landry.

There’s a reason why the saying, “A picture is worth a thousand words,” is still used today: 90 percent of information your brain absorbs is visual and you tend to retain 80 percent of what you see, versus the 20 percent of what you read. Marketers have already jumped on the visual content bandwagon, but ads and content aren’t the only places where you can take advantage of visuals. Forward thinking organizations have also incorporated visuals and social media with customer service.

Visual customer service might be difficult to envision, but there are plenty of ways you can incorporate it into your own strategy. Take a look at your current customer service process and see how you can improve upon it. Do your customers have a lot of questions on how to use a product or put it together? Create a video tutorial. Not only does this improve customer engagement, it can save you a lot of time answering questions. If you think outside-the-box, you can better understand how to deliver a customer service experience that engages and helps your customers. You should also research what your competitors are doing and see what will work for you and what won’t.

The infographic below provides examples of how brands are engaging customers through visual customer service and seven tips on how you can do the same.

VisualCustomerService

Jennifer Landry is a writer/journalist living in Malibu, California. 

Originally at: Blog Tips at ProBlogger
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How to Master Visual Customer Service in the Social Age

SSL Is A Ranking Factor Now. Are You Using It? - DailyBlogTips

SSL Is A Ranking Factor Now. Are You Using It? - DailyBlogTips


SSL Is A Ranking Factor Now. Are You Using It?

Posted: 11 Nov 2014 08:16 PM PST

SSL stands for Secure Sockets Layer. It’s basically a protocol to cryptograph data sent over the Web (e.g., over the HTTP protocol), making it more secure.

Until a couple of years ago only large websites and online stores used SSL, especially on the payment processing pages.

This picture has been changing quite fast. In fact most established websites and companies today use SSL, not only for payment processing but also for user login, authentication and so on.

Google is a big proponent of SSL, and a couple of months ago it announced that it will start using SSL as a search ranking factor. Here’s a quotation from the official announcement:

Beyond our own stuff, we're also working to make the Internet safer more broadly. A big part of that is making sure that websites people access from Google are secure. For instance, we have created resources to help webmasters prevent and fix security breaches on their sites.

We want to go even further. At Google I/O a few months ago, we called for "HTTPS everywhere" on the web.

We've also seen more and more webmasters adopting HTTPS (also known as HTTP over TLS, or Transport Layer Security), on their website, which is encouraging.

For these reasons, over the past few months we've been running tests taking into account whether sites use secure, encrypted connections as a signal in our search ranking algorithms. We’ve seen positive results, so we’re starting to use HTTPS as a ranking signal. For now it’s only a very lightweight signal — affecting fewer than 1% of global queries, and carrying less weight than other signals such as high-quality content — while we give webmasters time to switch to HTTPS. But over time, we may decide to strengthen it, because we'd like to encourage all website owners to switch from HTTP to HTTPS to keep everyone safe on the web.

Bottom line: if you care about your search rankings and still don’t use an SSL certificate you should probably start planning to get one. I am.

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