Blog - Page 98
A collection of 2,509 blog posts
Why did the Mona Lisa become one of the most famous paintings of all time? That’s a question an incredible amount of people have asked themselves in the past. And one possible answer is this: because of her unique smile. The smile is is the “the symbol that was rated with the highest positive emotional content” concludes scientist Andrew Newberg. And for me personally, I’ve been very reluctant before embracing smiling. Only a few years back, when one of my teachers told me: “Why don’t you smile
“You can’t improve what you don’t measure,” goes one of the most famous quotes in business. And this line has also been one of the biggest problems in doing great customer service. “But you can’t measure it!” is the response I receive from a lot of budding entrepreneurs when it comes to chatting about customer support. And to be honest, it is tough to measure it. Yet the reason we place such huge importance on customer support as we develop Buffer’s social media management suite [https://buff
One of the first things I’ve learnt, close to 2 years ago when taking the plunge into Social Media with Buffer, was that things aren’t yet very defined. There guiding metrics and studies are really just in their beginning phase and a lot is still quite vague. To help make things a tiny bit more clear, I thought it might be helpful to collect 10 of the most interesting social media studies and see what we can best learn from them. So without any further ado, let’s dig in and talk about the most
Learning how to say no is one of the most useful skills you can develop I found, especially when it comes to living a more productive and healthy life . Saying no to unnecessary commitments can give you the time you need to recover and rejuvenate. Saying no to daily distractions can give you the space you need to focus on what is important to you. And saying no to temptation can help you stay on track and achieve y
“Manage your energy, not your time.” – Tony Schwartz This is the quote that made Tony Schwartz famous. And it is one, that I believe best represents a truly efficient lifestyle the best. And yet, living in a way where you “manage your energy, not your time” is incredibly hard, at least for me. It probably took me around 1 year just to fully grasp its meaning. Since then, I’ve turned my life upside down and changed my routine dramatically. As we develop tools for better social media management
One of the things I fuss about a lot (especially at Buffer) are words—very simple words, in fact. Should it say “Hi” or “Hey?” Should it be “cheers” or “thanks?” How about “but” or “and?” There are many occasions when Joel and I sit over one line and change it multiple times, until we feel it really sits right. This is partly to improve our metrics for click rate and others. It is also to simply create the right emotion. The one key question we ask ourselves is: “How does this make you feel?”
There is no doubt that you have heard about the uproar on Twitter and the blogosphere: Google Reader is shutting down. As of July 1, 2013 Google will discontinue Google Reader and shut down the site. A lot of people, who have been using Buffer with Google Reader got in touch with us yesterday asking if there is any way to keep reading their RSS feeds whilst sharing their articles with Buffer. And most importantly a Google Reader alternative to be safe after the site shuts down. And fortunately
“I’m not really a creative person”, always struck me as an odd sentence. Could it really be that some of us are born to be more creatively gifted than others? If so, I thought at first, that’s definitely a downer. In school, what was considered “being creative”, like writing or drawing nice pictures was never my strength. It bugged me for a while I have to say. For today, I finally decided to research and read up on the latest studies of creativity and the science behind it. The truth, which I
This is a guest post by Gregory Ciotti, a contributing Buffer Blog columnist. Read more about Greg at the bottom of the post, or read his latest resource, the complete guide to customer service training. Although delighting your customers (like Buffer) is an important part of creating a business people love, the “evangelists” out there always seem to focus on fluff, and rarely address the far less glamorous side of implementation. That’s because it’s easy to talk the talk, but hard to put gre
The following article is a guest post by Daniel Sharkov, an 18 year old student, marketer, blogger and a social media enthusiast. More about him at the bottom of the post. So, you are a business blogger or a marketer, who’d like to make more sales? Or maybe you simply want more people to read what you have to say? If the answer to those questions is yes, then there’s a good chance that you already have a Twitter account, where you share your content and get to know other folks in your niche. A
Recently I sat down with Brendan Baker , one of the smartest people I’ve come across here in Silicon Valley. Clearly his brainpower exceeds mine by far and Brendan started explaining about a few things that I somehow always deemed true, but could never quite back up with great arguments or put my finger on: “Your environment has a huge impact on how productive you are. That means the temperature in your room, the colour of your walls and the noise happening ar
“Customers may forget what you said but they’ll never forget how you made them feel.” ~ Anon Welcome to the first Happiness Report of 2013! Each month we share how we are managing support here at Buffer, as well as take a look at how happy people are when using our product. We walk through what worked well, what perhaps didn’t work so well, as well as mention new things we’re trying as we push to improve how we deliver support and happiness. A look at our numbers in January Digging straight
We’ve been super hard at work here at Buffer over the past few weeks to make one of the most awesome new integrations available today: Buffer and Feedly are teaming up to make discovering and sharing awesome content easier than ever before. Feedly is one of the smartest and most beautifully designed newsreading apps for iOS, Android and web. Intuitively it syncs across all your devices and lets you find and read the best content from across the web. It came as no surprise that so many of you we
This is a guest post by Amar Zagorica from Helpjuice, makers of awesome knowledge base software . More about Amar at the bottom of the post. We respond to 93% of our customer support emails within 5 minutes! Caught your attention, right? That’s one of the beautiful things about knowing and promoting your company’s metrics, they grab attention and draw customers to you. One of the best ways to accelera
The following post is a guestpost by Walter Chen, founder of a unique new project management tool IDoneThis. More about Walter at the bottom of the post. Ever go through a phase where you feel like every day is a Monday? You wake up, you hit snooze. Then you hit snooze again and you just don’t feel it? Yes, I know that negative emotions can eat away at my productivity, creativity, decision-making skills. And yet, I have to admit that sometimes it’s really difficult to reverse the course of a s
“Customers don’t expect you to be perfect. They do expect you to fix things when they go wrong.” ~ Donald Porter, V.P. British Airways Well hello there! January has zipped by super fast but there’s just enough time left to share with you our third Happiness Report and dive into how we managed support during December and also how happy people are when using Buffer. We’ll walk through what worked well for the team here at Buffer, what perhaps didn’t work so well, as well as new things we’re tryin
This month, I was kindly invited to speak at a conference in Las Vegas. In the audience of my panel session were two people, Marc and Angel Chernoff, whom I’ve admired for a long time. When I was lucky enough to be able to get dinner with them afterwards, I told them that I’d have loved to switch roles and be in the audience listening to their advice. Why? Marc and Angel ru
This is a guest post by Gregory Ciotti, a contributing Buffer Blog columnist. Read more about Greg at the bottom of the post, or read his latest article on measuring customer satisfaction. The customer of today is an infovore. Before doing business with you, a majority of customers will now use the information available on the web to learn about your company and your service quality. Transparency is the way the business world works these days, and it’s forced companies to re-examine their sale
Wanting to change yourself and better yourself is a beautiful and inspiring thing, I believe. And it turns out that’s also how most other people think: 50% of all Americans for example set themselves a New Year’s resolution. That’s pretty amazing! What’s not so great is that according to the researcher Richard Wiseman, 88% of all those set resolutions from half of America and probably lots of other people in the world fail. That’s 156 million failed resolutions and disappointed minds each and
2012 is almost over and it’s been an absolutely crazy year here at Buffer. We launched a brand new iPhone app and web app and tons of new app integrations . Amidst developing all these new things, our team has also built in some nifty secret hacks and lesser known ways to use Buffer. To make your sharing even more awesome and to give you an edge over everyone else, here are the top 10 hacks and hidden tricks to ta
“Customer service is not a department, it’s everyone’s job.” ~ Anonymous It’s hard to believe another month has skipped by and it’s already time for our second Happiness Report, where we examine how happy people are when using Buffer . The first one was already super insightful and we made a lot of changes with the learnings from it. Especially with your great comments and suggestions! Before the holidays kick into high gear,
With the brand new web app we are launching today, we’ve got another special gift ready for you, just in time for Christmas. The brand new Buffer iPhone app has hit the app store today. We’ve made tons of improvements and revamped the app to work with some exciting new features. Most importantly, you can do nearly all the things you can already do from the web app in the iPhone app now too. The Buffer iPhone app is
What a crazy few weeks here at Buffer HQ in San Francisco to make everything work out in time for Christmas. The last thing we wanted to happen was for you to not get your shiny new presents. And fortunately, it all worked out. The brand new Buffer is ready today. We’re launching both a brand new web app and iPhone app today. So without, further ado, let’s dig in and have a look around about what’s new: Easily
In 1748, the British politician and aristocrat John Montagu, the 4th Earl of Sandwich, used a lot of his free time for playing cards. One of the problems he had was that he greatly enjoyed eating a snack, whilst still keeping one hand free for the cards. So he came up with the idea to eat beef between slices of toast, which would allow him to finally eat and play cards at the same time. Eating his newly invented “sandwich,” the name for two slices of bread with meat in between, became one of th