“World's Most Complete Neighborpedia”
Explore:   What's happening in your neck of the woods?

Jason LaVanture

QR Codes 101 Training Class

You’ve been seeing them pop up all over the place. Your customers are starting to talk about them but are still confused as to what they really do. They’re popping up on the backs of business cards, listings signs and work vehicles across the country like wild fire.

Are you still scratching your head about how to effectively market with and incorporate QR codes? Are you looking to add QR codes to your regimen of digital marketing tools? If this is not something you’ve thought about recently now is the perfect time to start.

QR codes are growing so fast and getting so popular that Calvin Klein is posting GIANT QR CODES on billboards. Seriously!

http://mashable.com/2010/07/13/calvin-klein-qr-code-billboard/

More and more people know what to do when they see these codes and it’s about time you did too. See you on the 4th! Sign up now for the show in your Tour Management System! This is one you won't want to miss out on!

Yours sincerely,

RTV, Inc
Virtual Tour Software & Digital Marketing Training
http://www.RealTourVision.com
Order a Virtual Tour - 866-947-8687

A Little Photo Trick

I want to continue on a virtual tour blog I did earlier. I spoke about using a telephoto lens, mounting it on your landscape adaptor on your tripod. Making sure it is level, you allow the horizontal lock to be free. From experience, you take the number of stills that will cover the scene you wish to take, being sure to overlap well with each still.

Now you will have to manually stitch these stills. PanaVue Image Assembler Photo Stitching Software came with your virtual tour software package from RTV and is not difficult to use at all. I use three flags to stitch. When you are done, you will have your beautiful scene in telephoto and a pano.

Another trick that I use to gain that professional look is to use Exposure Fusion to enhance the pano. But you need more than one of the scenes that is over/under exposed or both is best. You can create this by using one of your photo shop softwares. Take the original virtual tour pano, enhance it with the ‘brightness’ control saving one as ‘dark’ and one as ‘light’. How much brighter and how much lighter, I will leave that up to you to experiment with. Using Photo studio 6, I simply move the glider all the way to the left for dark and all the way right for lighter. Now you have three for the exposure fusion engine to process. Lastly you will need to size this massive file down to 800 kb. And then add it to your tour by simply using the ADD button and making sure you click the button, full 360 Pano. You will WOW your virtual tour clients with this technique.


I’ve attached the two scenes. Which one do you think has been enfused?

James Hoback
L’oeil L’esprit (Mind’s Eye)
San Antonio Virtual Tours
www.alamoareavirtualtours.com
Order a virtual tour: (210) 325-2675

Engaging Your Customers in a Digital World

"Take Action!" I don’t care what type of business you’re in, what you’re selling, or where you are in your strategic plan, the goal of your marketing message is to motivate your prospects into taking the next step. Today, companies are going to greater lengths to capture their customers' attention and win their loyalty—They are joining social network sites, they’re blogging, they’re building fan pages, they’re finding new places where their brands can be seen—but are they talking with their customers, are they getting to know their customers, are they talking to their staff to get customer insights, are they asking their customers for feedback as to how they might improve their services. One of the most powerful components to engage customers is sometimes the most undervalued: customer service.

Looking for a ways to engage customers with Tours D’ Force, a Lenawee County virtual tour company began a search for other companies that had already established customer service standards to see what their experiences were.

First they searched Google for “small business with customer service standards” and the results were surprising. The first three page results were as follows: there were no small business companies listed in the search results. The majority were informational websites which occupied 99% of the results. The balance a government site (The Dept. of Energy).

So they then searched Google for “virtual tour customer standards” and found only 2 individual virtual tour providers (Real Vision Studio & Nova Scotia Virtual Tours – Hats off …, to you!) had made mention of customer service standards.

Coming from a quality background Hal Holubik, Owner/Operator of Toursdforce expected the search results to be dominated by or at least making reference to virtual tour company customer service standards. But he was completely WRONG.

He really thought that there would be many virtual tour companies out there that had established customer service standards and that they would publish them. WRONG again. Why don’t more virtual tour companies create and publish standards of service for the whole world to see. Wouldn’t you think that if they did that they would have more loyal customers?

Here are some reasons why they should.

Your customer service standards will help your entire operation perform better and keep your practices repeatable. Your customer service standard should define your brand and give customers a reason for doing business with you.

Your customer service standards will tell your customers that you have a system in place and what it is that you’ll do for them, how you will treat them and what they should expect from you. Theres a way to tell the world why your virtual tour company is better than any other company out there. They show your customers how you will do something for them that no other company will.

Standards provide a practical framework for small business owners and employees to examine, review, and continuously improve any area of a business. Investing time in creating customer service standards leads to increased operational efficiency, improved customer services, increased sales, higher returns, and greater profitability.

I hope that you can see that well-crafted followed and publicized customer service standards can be a valuable engagement opportunity for your company. The truth is that service matters to people, especially in an economy where consumers are thinking as much as ever about which companies deserve their hard earned cash.

As a matter of fact, a recent study from RightNow.com that measured how much more people are willing to spend to get better customer service revealed that 85% of people are willing to spend more money to get better service, with 76 percent willing to pay about 5 percent more to be assured that the customer service they receive is good. More than half (55 percent) would pay a 10 percent premium on the product price to be assured of a higher level of service. But a small number (10 percent) would be willing to ante up 25 percent more for better service.

According to the RightNow survey; word of mouth is the one form of advertising that can't be bought. Maybe it can't be bought with hard currency, but it can, apparently, be bought with good service. Their research found that consumers are far more forgiving if a company has earned their trust over time. In fact, almost nine-in-ten consumers are willing to give a company a second chance after a bad experience if they've historically experienced great customer service with that company.

That goes right back to why it's so critical that companies listen to what customers are saying and are responsive to their needs. The insights a company gains by listening closely to its customers will help it deliver better service and create an environment where customers are inclined to stay loyal even when things aren't perfect.And when it comes to showing customers why they should “choose you”—customer service is the best strategy of all.

Don’t you think it’s time to take a look at your customer service policies and procedures?

Ref: Related documentation:

Tours D’ Force Quality Policies and Procedures

• Quality Policy PQ 5.2: Customer Focus
http://www.scribd.com/doc/44410280
• Operational Procedures PP 7.2.3: Customer Feedback and Complaints
http://www.scribd.com/doc/44410608
• Operational Procedures PP 8.2.1: Customer Satisfaction
http://www.scribd.com/doc/44410929


Hal Holubik
Tours D’ Force
Owner/Organizer
Lenawee County Virtual Tours

Order a Virtual Tour: 517-486-4209

Virtual Florida Tours offering New V-Slide Technology

Virtual Florida Tours is happy to announce our new VHD Slide Tour service. For the last years our parent company Real Tour Vision virtual tour software company has been researching this innovative and more customer friendly way of presenting our customers listings.


This new service will allow the realtors to send the photos of their listings to us and we will make a slide show for them. The cost is only $25 per VHD slide show.

These tours have our hit information that can be shown to your customers and prospects. They are automatically placed in a great number of Real Estate websites like home.com at no extra cost for you just as our 360 Virtual Tours. You can upload the tour to multiple social networking sites including Digg. Of course if you have showcase service of Realtor.com the slide show can be uploaded at no extra cost for you or you will need to pay Realtor.com upload fee of $25 per tour.

If you will like our photographers to take the pictures for you the cost is only $69.99 per VHD slide show.

For your entire Internet marketing needs do not hesitate to contact us at 305 331 8960

Happy Holidays!
Gabriel Duque
Florida Virtual Tours
Order a virtual tour : 305 331 8960

Auditing Your Exposure Engine

If you currently offer an Exposure Engine like my Traverse City Virtual Tour Company does, you will see why it is more important than ever to incorporate an audit into your process. Making sure the data you push to hundreds of sites is correct keeps home shoppers coming back knowing your information in trustworthy and up to date. Watch the video above to get some tips and insight as to how you might audit your exposure engine and shape your product. Enjoy! Jason LaVanture BlueLaVaMedia TC Virtual Tours Order a virtual tour today: 231-946-1360 begin_of_the_skype_highlighting 231-946-1360 end_of_the_skype_highlighting