Blogsessive.com has just published a guest post written by yours truly on how to make your blog and twitter account work better at promoting each other. And the solution is simple: notice what they have in common, notice the differences, and if it’s a team you want, then create one!

I’d love to hear your thoughts and your own tips on how to create a dream team out of your blog and Twitter feed, so head over to Blogsessive to read the article and share your insight

What I think you shouldn’t have missed last week…

Our weekly roundup has been MIA for quite a while now. But we’re back with 5 great articles I stumbled across last week. I’ll make it short and sweet and as always invite you to add to the list!

A great way to learn is to find out what you should never ever do, no matter who does it and thinks it’s cool. Darren Rowse of Problogger came up with a top of the worlds’ 10 worst strategies to promote your blog.

When you send an invitation to a party, people expect to show up and join the fun. Not to first submit a form and then get a second approval to attend the party. Karen Swim perfectly explained how this situation applies to social media in general and Twitter in particular.

There are some words or phrases that we hear on a daily (or should I say hourly?) basis. We’re so used to them, that we sometime believe just hearing them is enough to know what they mean. Open source is one of those phrases. Before starting to use it and other related terms, read this list of definitions published by Seth Godin.

Readers’ attention is hard to get and even harder to mentain. We are in a rush, a little bored and sometimes lazy. So grab words, as explained by Alex Cristache of Blogsessive, are always a great way to make sure we read a piece you’ve wrote.

Bloggers are a growing force when it comes to PR and Marketing. That is why a lot of companies and agencies what them to cover their stories. But bad pitches are common, so here’s another article on how to pitch bloggers from the VallyPRBlog.

Hope you like this week’s articles! Till next week, feel free to share your own findings

When you think of marketing a product or a service, you have to consider what kind of issues it will help your customer with. But just telling them what problems you’re solving might not be very convincing. You need to also show how it all works. So what can you do: talk to your current customers and start writing a few case studies. Then move along to publishing a few testimonials on your site.

But when you’re new, there aren’t hordes of customers to show off. And even when there are, they might not be cool enough to draw that much attention. So what can you do then? Well, it’s easy: scan the papers, magazines, portals and blogs for news on a problem you could solve popping up in the life of someone important. A star, a state department, some sort of royalty, there are dozens of possibilities.

Use the case to educate your potential customers. Try an article on your site, a blog post or a press release. What ever you choose, make sure you don’t let the effects of your cool idea slip through your fingers because of poor or completely lacking promotion. Your famous partner’s name will help, but it might not magically do the trick for you.

And here’s a great example: security firm generates some buzz around its name by telling people how to protect their privacy on Facebook. Nothing extraordinary, except they used the case of Bono and some teenagers partying and then spreading photos on Facebook as an example. Instant popularity! The Register, which usually picks up extremely relevant security news, published it.

Of course, if your customers don’t back up the problem solving story afterwards, you won’t close too many deals. But if you can jumpstart your business and hold your promise to help out with a set of issues, you’ll later support your fictional stories with real case studies. But more importantly, you’ll be able to rely on your happy customers, and we all know how important their recommendation is to getting new business.

We all love to play games. It’s probably our mind’s way to stay connected with the inner child we keep nurturing. But we like playing, most of us love challenges and when it comes to prizes, we’re all in!

I’ve recently had my eye caught by a contest and a nice little game that I’ve become addicted to. And I am referring to the SecondBrain contest and the Stay.com trivia game. Both had an interesting idea, different approaches and cool prizes.

Two Successful Recipes

In case you don’t remember, SecondBrain decided to reward great content added by their SecondBrainiacs. They offered a MacBook Air, game consoles and loads of other prizes. Users needed to add content of great quality, use collections to better organize it and make it all sound really, really interesting.

When they officially launched the 2.0 Beta, ten great profiles were chosen and they were brought in front of the community. SecondBrain chose 10 winners, letting the public decide what each of them should win. So they have combined the search for quality with the need of popularity and of involving the entire community.

Stay.com has a different approach. They mix beautiful travel photos with a count down timer. The show you photos of a city and you have to guess it. Then, based on your score, you get a chance to win. As they are not a community builder per se, they also award points when you send out the game to your friends.

Now, the Stay.com game is fast! It’s catchy and plain addictive. And it comes with a weeklong stay at a nice little hotel somewhere in a big city. Who wouldn’t fall for that? I know I did and kept playing each day, several times a day for about a week. I’d still play, but I forbid myself.

I do hope on July 15, when the gaming contest ends, they will release the names of every city they used. I would like to know where to plan my next trips, as the photos were truly amazing.

What Have We Learned From These Recipes?

These are quite successful contests with people letting their friends know and inviting them to join the fun. But we all came across about dull contests that no one was interested in and which failed in their mission. The aim of such a game or contest is simple: get traffic, awareness and eventually sales. So what should we do so that we don’t stray from our path to success?

1. Select the Prizes According to Your Target

The prizes of both contests make me believe SecondBrain and Stay know their audiences. SecondBrain chose a cool laptop, game consoles and some gadgets. What else would someone who’s online enough to have content spread everywhere need? Stay took what’s supposed to be common knowledge for a passionate traveler and turned it into a game. Then chose to reward it with hotel stays in touristic cities around the world. What better way to capitalize on a passion for travel and promote your great services at the same time?

2. Spread the Word

You might have the greatest contest ever, if no one knows about it, there’s no real point in trying. Start by promoting it on your website, on your corporate blog, through friends and loyal customers, send out details in your newsletters and then pitch the mainstream and social media. Mainstream can definitely help and social media can make it all go viral.

3. Find a Way to Get More People Involved

There is a limited number of winners in any contest. But you still need a lot of players and cheerers to get the best out of your contest. So get more involved through awarding points for referrals or through a voting system. One caveat however: stay away from popularity only contest. Pageants are great, but the after-feeling in most is not that nice.

4. Don’t Keep Players or the Audience in the Dark

If there are more stages to your game, let those involved know. You might not cont all the media for each step of the contest, but you can let players and those close to the competition know how things are going. Again, your blog, your site, newsletters, anything you want can broadcast your message.

In the end, like everything marketing or public relations related, nothing can guaranty a victory. You also need some luck, to a good moment (which gets extremely difficult to predict if your targeted audience is from around the world, not a specific region) and some influential evangelists. That is why you should plan and perform everything on your side as good as you can, so that the factors you can’t control play a less important role in the overall result.

All companies developing commercial software products offer support services. Even open source solutions benefit from this advantage. Be it promoted as free (included in the license price) or as subscription-based service, the technical assistance seems more of a must than an additional benefit.

However, the types of support services and their quality play an important role in buying decisions, both for end-users and savvy IT personnel. For end users, it’s a question of abilities and knowledge they lack. They buy software products to make their lives easier, not to spend hours and hours trying to debug them (unless that’s their hobby). For IT professionals, it’s a question of time and resource management. If you need to invest in a certain solution, why not save crucial time and resources by acquiring one with technical assistance included. If you’d like to know more on why it’s recommended to call support instead of toying with a product yourself, I recommend this article I wrote a while ago.

Given the high importance potential customers place on tech assistance, support services need to be designed so as to represent a strong competitive advantage. And there are a few aspects you can think of to sketch a strategy to tune what you offer your customers.

• Availability – the longer support services are available the better. Non-stop is what you aim for, given that more companies provide such services, part of them free of charge. Nine to five is not that hot, given that software issues have this bad habit of not waiting for it to be a business day to happen. They also show no preference to business hours.
• Diversity – Email, chat, phone, forum, blog, the more channels you open, the better your reputation will be. Besides, email and live chat are not always available. Especially if the problem affects your customer’s internet connection
• Language barriers – do you sell your soft worldwide? Sometimes through local partners to people who are not that good with your mother tongue? Then you should work hard on assisting them in their own language. You can either hire techies that are also fluent in a second language. Or establish a basic level support center through your local partner. Besides helping you build a great relationship with customers and to keep them coming back, it might also be compulsory (at least partially) in certain countries. For example, in Romania you must provide user manuals and quick guides in Romanian for all software products you sell.
• Outstanding quality – the professionalism, expertise and ability to reach their customers is essential for your support staff. Also, the time it takes them to respond is crucial, as customers get impatient extremely fast and never have days to waste on waiting for a reply or a solution. Therefore you should first make sure you have enough employees to guarantee a response time of maximum 24 hours and then make sure you develop more then their technical skills. You might look into providing some “soft skills” training sessions for them. This will teach them empathy, efficiency in conversations and not to take any incident personally.
• Adaptability – Some customers are really open to providing feedback after interacting with a support representative. They provide extremely useful input on both the product and the service. Such feedback needs to then be the base of all service enhancements you might plan for the future. Otherwise it is just a waste.

Software development, just as any other IT-related field, is a highly competitive market. Turning every little aspect of your portfolio into a competitive advantage is a smart move. Features, prices, support services, everything you do can be turned in your favor.