Month: February 2012

TBL Networks is proud to present guest blogger Rachel Reynolds, Executive Director at CJSTUF.

Many of you belong to clubs. Some of those clubs were easy to join. You just had to sign up, pay some small annual dues, and enjoy the benefits of membership. Other clubs are more exclusive: the country club, the garden club, fraternal organizations.  All of these clubs carry with them a common cause, a sense of belonging, and a certain set of privileges for membership.

On January 20, 2009, our family joined an exclusive club in which nobody wants membership.  That was the day our daughter Charlotte was diagnosed with cancer. We became one of the many families affected by chronic and life threatening illness.

Each school day, 47 families nationwide join this club when a child is diagnosed with cancer.  Each day, up to 75 children seek treatment on the 7^th floor of Children’s Hospital of Richmond at MCV. Many of these children are frequent flyers, making multiple visits every year and requiring care for illnesses such as cystic fibrosis, sickle cell anemia, tumors, leukemia, other types of cancer, and complications due to HIV.

The dues in this club are steep.  They include draining of emotional energy, sleeplessness, medical bills, financial hardship due to job loss or a leave of absence from work and excessive weight gain (or loss).  Sometimes, you pay the ultimate price: the life of your child.

At CJ’s Thumbs Up Foundation, our primary goal is to help the families who have joined this club.  In a way, we help pay their dues.  In our first two years, we provided over $30,000 in financial assistance to over 60 families.  This year, we are poised to do the same.  Unfortunately, membership in the club continues to grow. CJSTUF currently has a waiting list of families requesting financial assistance and we do not expect this demand to wane.

When individuals and businesses like TBL Networks support CJSTUF with their financial contribution, they help families pay their dues to a club they never wanted to join.  With your contribution, you help Roger and I pay forward the kindness that we received during our darkest hours in 2009.  With your contribution, you can help a family in your own community in their time of need.

If you would like to know more about our organization, visit our website for information on how to get involved.  You can also follow us on Twitter and Facebook or hook into our blog for the latest updates.

On February 10th, TBL Networks brought the thrills of playing TPC Sawgrass, including the legendary 17th hole , right inside our headquarters here in Richmond, Virginia.  With this help of our friends and the power of Nintendo Wii, TBL Networks hosted our 3rd Annual Virtual Open Golf Tournament.

In addition to great climate controlled golf, our tournament featured live demonstrations of TBL’s solutions, including a live leader board powered by Cisco WebEx,  our Cisco TelePresence 1100 rooms, a demonstration of the EMC VNX line and the future of VDI powered by VMware.  In addition, we were able to show the intersection of VMware, Cisco and EMC in the converged infrastructure of VCE’s Vblock.

As we did last year, TBL Networks was privileged to benefit a great organization in CJ’s Thumbs Up Foundation.  CJsTUF mission is to provide financial assistance to families of children with chronic and life-threatening illness.

To learn about CJsTUF, check out their website,  blog, FaceBook and Twitter pages.  Also, TBL Networks Blog Home will have more information about this great organization in coming weeks.

Finally, special thanks to our corporate partners Cisco, VMware, EMC and VCE for helping make our day possible.

Check out more pictures from this event at www.facebook.com/tblnetworks

Social Media applications are not a passing trend. They have quickly grown into a powerful resource for businesses. More than 75% of the Fortune 500 use Facebook, Twitter, YouTube or corporate blogs to communicate with their stakeholders. Forward-thinking companies are using these online communities, social networks and other internet-based, collaborative media to support their customer base and improve the customer experience

Traditional customer service has evolved over the past few years with this growth in social media usage. It is no longer enough for businesses to connect with customers on social media. They are now driven to monitor online conversations about their company then provide responsive and timely support through these channels. In addition to using social media for sales, marketing and business intelligence many companies have updated their customer service strategy to integrate these platforms. According to Gartner, 35% of all customer service centers will have social media capability by 2013.

If implemented correctly social media provide additional data streams for understanding customers’ expectations and needs. According to Technorati’s State of the Blogosphere, 38% of bloggers say they post about brands that they love or hate. And the 2nd most trusted information source for product referrals are Facebook friends. There are plenty of tools out there identifying where these conversations about your brand are occurring. The challenge has been turning the data produced by that monitoring into something actionable.

So how do you keep track of what the 800+ million Facebook users are saying or what is being written about you on the millions of active blogs out there? I think Cisco’s SocialMiner product can help by providing the bridge between social media and your customer support team along with the CRM system you are using.

SocialMiner is a customer care solution that helps companies proactively respond to customers and prospects communicating through public social media networks like Blogs, Facebook, Twitter or other online forums. It provides monitoring, queuing, reporting and workflow to organize internet postings related to your business. Then your customer care team can use this info to provide real-time responses using the same channels your customers are communicating on.

SocialMiner is part of the Unified Contact Center so deployment should be familiar if you are an existing Cisco customer. John Hernandez, General Manager of their Customer Collaboration Business Unit (CCBU), has said that SocialMiner is an engagement product, not a listening product. Check out the full list of features that support his statement and help set SocialMiner apart from traditional social media monitoring tools:

Whether you’ve established a social media presence or not, chances are that people are talking about your business online. SocialMiner is one of those products you may want to consider to help your company start listening to these conversations. Your team will be in a better position to increase customer loyalty, provide responsive service, engage new customers and protect your brand.