A Big Wave in the Social Pool

It's been two weeks since we announced plans to give away an 8-Gig iPod Touch to one lucky member of our online social circle.

The results have been huge! Our social network has grown over 2000% percent since we announced the sweepstakes. This is far beyond what most of us expected in much less time than we thought it would take.

This has led me to develop a few hypotheses about the new "social revolution" and about what users expect and value from a company's social presence.

Regarding social content, and people's expectations of a company's social presence:

• Most of our customers seem to value coupons above all else
• Social media can be a good channel to ask questions and leave feedback
• More coupons please!
• People don't like to be overburdened with posts by trigger-happy social marketers

Regarding this last point, consider this comment left by one of our fans:

"What I really like about DocuCopies is that you don't overload on your postings. People don't like to see a company post every hour - you do a good job at keeping it fresh!"

This was in response to us asking our fans exactly what they would like to see from us on our page. Did we mention they also really seem to like coupons?

If you have any ideas for how Docucopies should use the social landscape to engage our fans and customers, please let us know!

And if you really like us, please Like our website on Facebook, and +1 us on Google!

You CAN Get the Exact Price Without Signing Up

A quick background before I get to the point here --

Those of you who found us by searching for "color copies" on Google may also have come upon another site in the top results. It's a blog entry by a man named Tim Heuer. The entry itself is terribly outdated -- I'm talking 2005 -- yet it has remained near the top of the search results for quite a while. This is due to a few factors, not the least of which is that thousands of people read and link to his blog every day. I'll spare the technicalities of how search engines rank (since it's all voodoo anyway), but suffice to say that this entry is basically about how Kinko's is a rip off. That in itself probably would not have stayed on top of the rankings forever. But when others in our general market saw how high his post ranked for such a major search term, they [we] all started posting to it, each of us telling him that there are cheaper solutions and that our company is the best, each of us trying to draw more traffic with our posts.

Then came the avalanche, because everyone started trying to outdo the last guy. Now there's a constant influx of people in our industry posting their links, trying to squeeze a few web surfing customers out of the techy blog's readership. The irony is that all these new posts just keep his entry fresher, guaranteeing it a spot at the top of the search results! Good for him; the shortsightedness of others in our market who don't really know SEO is actually helping him and hurting them. That's one sweet business model.

But I digress. Most recently there was a post from a woman named Marcia. She was disappointed with the posts because according to her, all of the companies which quoted prices in their posts wanted her to sign up for an account before showing the actual cost, including shipping, surcharges, etc.

This is a response to her. I hope she gets it, because she left no email and her website is listed as under construction.

Marcia -- not sure if you looked at our company's site (we did give a quote on Tim's blog), but we definitely do not make you register to find out our prices. All you have to do is go to the order form. As you fill in information, the price calculator will update in real time. Once all your job information is in you can click "calculate shipping cost and time" to get the price of shipping. And of course shipping on all orders over $150 is free at Docucopies.com. The only other charge is a standard $7 setup fee. There are no hidden charges, and no taxes because it's done over the Internet -- the world's last unregulated market.

I hope you see this, as I have taken a stand to stop posting on the aforementioned blog. Next time you need a copy job done cheap, fast, and with great quality, check us out at Docucopies.com.