Is Podcasting the Hot New Media Trend?

Podcasting was cool when I started blogging four years ago, but as social media became fashionable, Facebook and Twitter made podcasting look a tad obsolescent and dowdy. So why is podcasting having a resurrection? It is due to two key factors.
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Taking the Friction Out of Online Purchases

Internet retailers strive to reduce any “friction” associated with an online purchase, and small businesses should heed this with their incoming phone leads. In an industry rife with poor quality of service and antiquated technology, new virtual answering service companies, built on top of VOIP network with systems based in the cloud, are giving the smallest businesses high quality answering service and lead capturing capability—at prices not much higher than “virtual phone systems.”
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Building an App? 5 Questions to Ask Your Mobile Developer

Many companies are jumping into the world of mobile digital applications in an effort to attract more customers, and to build better relationships with the ones they already have. In most cases, that means hiring a mobile development company to design and build the app.
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Five Steps to Managing Complaints on Social Media

Social media is a customer service tool that has great potential beyond what most companies are currently using. Outlets such as Facebook and Twitter offer the opportunity for companies to enhance the customer service experience by posting value-added content. Often, however, their only involvement is to monitor what customers are saying about them on social media.
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The Most Web-Savvy Cities in the U.S.

Which city do the most web-savvy small businesses call home? With the Radius database as officiator, we compared the small businesses in all major U.S. cities based on a number of web savvy behaviors, including social media activity, website presence, daily deal offerings, and more.
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Benefits of Automating Time and Attendance

If you are using a manual time and attendance system, consider replacing it with an automated system and using an experienced and reputable outside payroll service. An automated time and attendance system eliminates the time clock and instead uses a bar code scanner, pin number pad, or an even more technologically advanced system such as a biometric scanner.
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8 Ways to Increase Security While You Work

Data security is a top concern for companies of all sizes, in all industries. Every business has data that needs to be secured—whether it’s a client’s personally identifiable information, financial records, or confidential business related documentation. Security is the responsibility of each and every one of us—and the actions we take every day in the course of our normal activities can have a huge impact on the overall security of our companies.
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Building a Brand: How Three Successful Sites Did It

At the beginning of the year, AG Beat released a very cool list of 60 brands to watch during 2012. Not all of their predictions were correct—KeepSum, which many thought would be the Groupon of real estate, has been offline for a few months now—but many of them were spot on. Three in particular—OpenCongress, Klout, and Pinterest—did so well during 2012 that they have now become household names. But what did they do differently than the other 57 brands, and how did they do it? What stars aligned to bring these three to the limelight?
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