Online Backup Knowledge Base

This week we read the latest white paper from Michael Stelzner called “A Social Media Marketing Report – How Marketers are Using Social Media to Grow Their Business.” The report provides key insights into how we use social media for marketing, and is based on a survey of 880 participants, found primarily through (what else?) social media sites. What emerged is an interesting portrait of today’s social media marketer.

If you actively participate in social media marketing, we ask you, does this sound familiar?

• You are a business-owner, most likely a sole-proprietor.
• You are between 30 and 39 years of age.
• You average 5+ hours of social media each week.
• We can find you on Twitter, blogs, LinkedIn and Facebook.
• You have only been using social media for a few months.
• In that amount of time, you believe that social media has increased exposure for your business.
• You have already generated quality leads through social media.
• By using social media, you have reduced your overall marketing expenses.

Also revealed in the white paper is the correlation between how experienced the social media marketer is with how much time they allocate to its practice. Now this surprised us. According to the survey results, if you have been an active social media marketer for at least a couple of years, you are now spending over 20 hours per week at it. Wow! For this particular group, the results are making the time and energy investment worth it, which, in turn, makes a strong case for the brand-building power of social media.

And so a lively debate has ensued in the blogosphere that finds some marketers choosing sides. While we all tweet, post, blog, and debate the benefits of social media, ask yourself this: are you a marketer who requires immediate, measurable results to justify a commitment to social media, or are you a marketer that believes the time and energy spent will pay off eventually?

Food for thought.

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Data leakage and data loss is at an all time high. USBs, or memory sticks, which are now used to download and transport large amounts of sensitive data, may be largely to blame. A recent survey by Texas-based data security experts Credant Technologies found that, in the last year, 9,000 USB sticks have been forgotten in pockets when people take their clothes to the local dry cleaners.

The survey was carried out in the United Kingdom (UK) to gauge the frequency and ease with which mobile devices such as USB and memory sticks are lost or forgotten in strange places such as dry cleaners. The survey was also designed as a warning to be vigilant when downloading information, as it does frequently get lost.

A similar survey was conducted by Credant Technologies recently amongst taxi drivers in London and New York and showed that over 12,500 handheld devices such as laptops, iPods, and memory sticks are forgotten at the back of taxis every six months.

Michael Callahan, senior vice president and chief marketing officer at Credant Technologies, stated, “Although we conducted this survey in the UK, the idea was to show people everywhere how easy it is to lose data — even in their local dry cleaners — and that none of us are infallible. We’re convinced if we were to do the same survey in the US we’d get very similar results. If the data is sensitive or valuable then people should protect this information with encryption so no one can access the data at any point, as it could easily end up in the wrong hands.”

According to the survey, many mobile devices now have the capacity to store as much as 10,000 documents, 11,000 pictures, 500,000 contact details, or 1.1 million emails, making them an obvious target for identity theft criminals…

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It’s no surprise customer service in America has declined substantially over the past decade. We’ve all experienced it. More and more we have been greeted with automated phone systems, customer reps from another country, indifference to poor customer experience, and so on. For these reasons and others, we have been left with that nagging feeling that the person we’re giving our money too, is not really all that appreciative or grateful for the business.

Is that changing?

We think it is. Sales are harder to come by and companies are beginning to understand that brand loyalty and customer retention are important…no, CRITICAL…to their survival. If nothing else, maybe that is one of the good things that can come from these challenging times–a customer service comeback.

We call to all sales, service, and marketing teams everywhere. Use this time to focus on your customer.

Here’s some articles we think can help:

• Go-To-Market Strategies’ recent articles 3 Sales Tips for a Tough Economy and Tracking Customer Satisfaction, Loyalty, and Testimonials!

• The Seven Habits Of Successful Customer-Based Firms By Don Peppers and Martha Rogers, Ph.D.

• 60 Customer Service Tips for Entrepreneurs from The Toilet Paper Entrepreneur.

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Call me old fashioned or out of touch, but shouldn’t customers of online backup services expect that when they send data to their service provider, it will not be used by anyone, including the online backup provider? So, I’m disturbed that Spare Backup has announced an “Advertising/Data Mining Division” whose job it is to “search for patterns of usage and general data” to build a commercial “intelligent user profile” for each customer.

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Remote Backup Systems, developer of the RBackup and Mercury OEM Online Backup platforms, today announced that it has added Continuous Data Protection (CDP) to its Mercury OEM Online Backup platform, and developed an AMI to run Mercury in the Amazon Cloud.

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