Women ALIVE Ministries

Its no surprise that a high customer service score often coincides with how satisfied online shoppers are with the overall experience. Theres nothing worse (and more frustrating) than a confusing website that offers troubleshooting in the form of an automated How Can I Help You? chat from a robot named Dana.

To try and find a trend in customer service ratings compared to the e-commerce sites performance, 24/7 Wall St. looked at how parent companies of those high-rated sites (based on the ForeSees Holiday E-retail Satisfaction data) have been performing lately.

The data, which was taken between the busy spending time of Thanksgiving through Christmas, showed that the shopping websites with strong customer service ratings often positively correlate with the sales of the parent companys popular brands and items of the moment.

So who faired best? Amazon.com came in first place, with popular items like the Kindle likely helping their sales. Apple.com took second best, which is understandable thanks to their die hard Mac customers, as well as their countless bestsellers. Other winners included VictoriasSecret.com, LLBean.com, QVC.com, JCPenney.com, and Avon.com.

Those who didnt do so well included Gap.com, Sony.com, and Overstock.com — all of which supposedly have been facing financial woes and unstable sales. And guess who also (expectedly) took a spot on the worst-of list… thats right — Target.com. Anyone else remember their Missoni for Target order getting canceled for no appararent reason? Or how about those repeated online crashes on their malfunctioning website? Come on Target, you didnt actually think wed forget about all that did you?

With an all time high of 88 points at Amazon, to an all-time low of 72 points over at Overstock, do these findings affect where you online shoppers will be visiting next?

The market is stuffed with fascinating digital marketing startups doing everything you can think of, and a bunch of things you couldnt even think of. In this midst are a collection of outfits focused on solving your digital marketing problems. Find your problem below and check out the company focused on solving it.

How can I do more mobile advertising without all the creative hassle?
With Celtra you can build amazing mobile rich media units lickety-split. Celtras platform enables creative teams to make ads that do exactly what you want them to, but without the cost and complexity of finding mobile dev experts or versioning for all the various platforms. The platform easily integrates video and other rich formats with the stuff that makes mobile so effective — location, time of day, multiple types of interactivity, and long-term engagement. Ads can run in-app and on the mobile web across top ad networks, premium publishers, and DSPs. A built-in analytics package gives you a broad range of stats across your entire campaign to prove performance and drive more effective optimization.

How can I get my marketing material translated quickly and efficiently?
Cloudwords offers a first-of-its-kind technology platform and community of carefully vetted translators to get you up and in market quickly and efficiently. Brands post a project and receive proposals from translators in the community. You can check out their work, read and post ratings, and choose a vendor that fits the bill for you. Built-in project management capabilities make it easy to collaborate, track, and warehouse the localized content. Vetted translators, competitive bidding, and no more files with names like WebsiteCopy-German-Version27-FinalFinalFinal.doc.

How do I become part of passionate consumer conversations online?
Amplify Social combines social, mobile, and online display in order to create high reach, high engagement brand interactions. Its core offering thus far is the Virtual Fan Network, which places brand messages within the context of sports discussions wherever they occur in digital media. Sports are unique in both the reach and depth of consumer interest that they inspire. The network offers its sports team and player clients a platform through which they can connect with their fans across digital media. Product marketing messages are integrated into and carried along with these highly portable discussions, providing the scale as well as the association benefits of working with sports brands.

How can I encourage more positive social recommendations for my brand?
Zuberance offers a platform that empowers brand fans to more easily rate, comment, and distribute their praise across the web. Zuberance starts with your CRM or other database, and then asks your passionate enthusiasts to tell their stories, make comments, or provide service ratings. From there, Zuberance gives the brand fans the opportunity to place their comments in one or more high-traffic review environments. Zuberance doesnt pay people for positive comments, so they preserve brand credibility as they help your fans spread the word and be an organic part of your brand marketing team.

How can I make my site direct buys more powerful and efficient?
Legolas bills itself as the first audience futures marketplace, using a unique media sales platform to help brands and agencies buy audiences in advance from publishers they like and trust. Most brands buy some inventory site direct to capitalize on great audiences and custom solutions. But for pub direct, you generally had to choose ROS or context. Many brands want the premium association without the waste inherent in ROS or context. Use Legolas to set audience characteristics, frequency, budget, flighting, and a ceiling media price with platform guidance. Legolas estimates the available reach within the marketplace, and the buyer then pushes the specs to publishers. After publisher bidding, Legolas suggests the optimal plan that the buyer can adjust. Brands buy or manage through the platform without meetings, faxing, and unnecessary back and forth. Additionally, you can plan budgets, make adjustments, and review measurement.

How do I get more business from local search listings?
Yext makes a local businesss listings stand out by adding additional pieces of information so that consumers notice one listing over others and are more likely to convert. Using Yext, the business can manage multiple listing presences from a single venue, and even monitor online reputation across social media with email text alerts. With Yext, a business listing can be supplemented with a verified logo, offer promotions, an additional URL, photos, and business hours, and get tracking and reporting across social sites. Additionally, Yext optimizes listings for mobile search.

How do I drive better results from my e-commerce site?
EyePredict is a company that uses predictive attention software based on neuroscience to dynamically arrange items on your pages for maximum results. Whole industries have been created to help physical stores plan layout and display assortment. In the digital front, great strides are being made. The EyePredict solution generates thousands of possible layouts and then selects the one that will maximize results. In contrast to eye tracking evaluations, which have limited scalability and require expert interpretation, EyePredict optimizes layouts automatically and delivers them seamlessly to the consumer while the page loads.

How can I get a great referral program for my brand up and running quickly and easily?
Everyone knows referral programs work, but most of us grimace at the amount of work they can take to implement and track. Extole promises to turn frowns upside-down. One service offering lets you custom brand your program and easily deliver rewards that encourage customers to tell your story to their friends. Extole delivers your message in Facebook, Twitter, email, and on blogs. It manages fulfillment by delivering the rewards of your choice– custom gift cards, PayPal payments, or branded service credits. Extole also offers services to enable turnkey sweepstakes to grow your fanbase.

How do I get real experiential brand impact in social media?
Social advertising not only needs to be compelling but it also needs to fit seamlessly into the flow of the game or any social activity. Why? Because you want your ad to be more than a speed bump on the way to my farm. MediaBrix simplifies the creation, buying, measurement, and refinement of campaigns in social environments across a footprint of more than 500 million users globally — almost 200 million in the US Through the MediaBrix platform, marketers can target an audience, outsource creative development, book a campaign across multiple social venues, receive ongoing creative optimization, view consolidated reports, and gather actionable insights. The MediaBrix Social Flex solution is fully integrated into social experiences and offers compelling, sharable, high-impact experiences designed to create brand advocacy.

How can I simplify the process of planning, placing, and optimizing social network advertising?
Adaptly offers an integrated platform for the purchase of social media advertising across communities like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and StumbleUpon. Instead of using multiple self-service platforms, you use the Adapt.ly offering to make all your purchases across the platforms and ad formats. Whats more, reporting is in real time, and in an integrated interface. No more staring at incongruous graphs and charts wondering what they mean. Optional auto optimization helps improve the effectiveness of your campaigns and extend those learnings across multiple communities.

Jim Nichols is a marketing and strategy contractor.

On Twitter? Follow iMedia Connection at @iMediaTweet.

The January Effect is well known (and well played by traders) in the US stock market. In addition to the numerous trader articles, there are scholarly studies that suggest that the January bounce is particularly pronounced amongst small stocks where the bounce back from tax-loss selling can be more pronounced even with small swings in the trade. If youre a nimble trader, you can play that dead cat bounce, but there is also an opportunity here for the investor to pick up a good stock at a great price. To quote a wise man, Price is what you pay, value is what you get.

Another contrarian philosophy in small-caps is to try to maximize returns by buying stocks with bad technicals and a catalyst on the fundamentals. Note that this is the exact opposite of technical analysis which is obsessed with good technicals and a quick buck, and only somewhat similar to deep value investing where you buy cheap and wait (potentially forever). Highly regarded investment firms such as Standpoint (which is in the 91st percentile in returns and 97th in accuracy for 2011) explicitly state this as their analysis methodology.

Here are my five January Worthies (in order of drum roll power), below. To the earlier point about bad technicals being good, Ive included the well known technician Louis Navelliers freely available stock grading service ratings in Figure 1 below as evidence of the same. As you can see the ratings of four of the five are somewhere between unremarkable and abysmal, and the fifth is too small to count in Louiss 5000-stock database. So whats the evidence of a contrarian view on these five small caps? Well, see below :

• Applied Micro Circuits (AMCC). A high flier surviving a ten year drought is rare. An optical company with insider buying is rare. A small company making a big but credible gamble is rare. And as I wrote here, AMCC is all three. If youre looking for a wild January ride, AMCC is likely to be on the tame side. But it was genuinely oversold, is currently trending positive and has a catalyst in both the next month and the next six in their X-Gene efforts.
• Triquint (TQNT). TQNT traded down from an October $7 value to the current $4 and change, due to its uninspiring earnings on the October quarter. But if you consider the multiple insider buys recently in the $4.25 to $5.25 range, and the bright future of Gallium Nitride technologies (at which TQNT is a veteran) in LEDs, the stock is a viable company at a bargain price.

Figure 1. January Worthies as viewed by Louis Navelliers Portfolio Grader

• NPS Pharmaceuticals (NPSP). NPSP is a biotech that primarily focuses on developing treatments for patients with uncommon gastrointestinal issues, and endocrine disorders. This is a market is largely untapped thus far. The stock has been in a malaise for most of the second half of 2011. But the positive results on their Short Bowel Syndrome SBS drug, and the recent cluster buying of the stock in the $5.50 range that this stock has room to run. The fact that October to April is seasonally strong for Biotechs (given all the analyst conferences and the forward looking excitement therein) is a meaningful plus. You could argue that the run to its current $6.50 price is a bit fast and a bit far, but the number is far below the $10 price target that is prevalent for the stock given the positives on the GATTEX drug for SBS.
• Active Power (ACPW). Active Power, a pioneer of Flywheel technologies, was trading at a low of $0.66 on January 4th, close to its 52-week low of $0.59 and far cry from its high of $3.03. The departure of their CEO to pursue other interests led to a decline from about $1.40 to the current price of $0.70 and change, with little else changing at the company. A large investor (Kinderhook Partners) whos had an equity stake in the company since 2008 just bought a million shares at between $0.59 and $0.80. The inevitable annoucement of a new CEO should be a new catalyst that makes the January 5th rise of 10% on the stock a trend over a one time event.
• Oclaro (OCLR). Why is a stock with a $4.41 book value trading at $3 and change? Answer, Thai floods. The flooding of contract manufacturing sites in Thailand led to an unknown in OCLRs ability to meet customer demand, and Wall Street doesnt like unknowns. But this isnt the customer demand going away. It isnt like were awash in bandwidth, in fact quite the opposite. And as it turns out, the recovery from the Thai floods was quicker than anticipated and OCLR offered some clarity on this issue and upped its 4th quarter guidance. Consider the pent up demand, better guidance and the fact that OCLR was about $4.50 in summer when the floods hit (and summer is a scary time for Technology stocks!), and you can imagine good things happening here. As I write this, OCLR galloped to a 15% gain today, but theres more room to run.

Disclosure: I am long ACPW, OCLR, AMCC.

PlaNet, Actrix and Inspire top internet providers survey
Wednesday, 14 December 2011, 9:48 am
Press Release: Consumer.org

PlaNet, Actrix and Inspire top Consumer NZ internet
providers survey

Internet service providers
PlaNet, Actrix and Inspire have once again topped Consumer
NZs customer service ratings with the three of them rating
96 percent or higher.

At the bottom of the pile were
Slingshot, Woosh and Compass Communications, all of which
scored 60 percent satisfaction against an average 72
percent.

More than 11,000 Consumer members rated their
ISPs on in-home setup, phone help with billing and phone
help with technical questions, and online help. They also
rated reliability – connection and speed.

Actrix and
Inspire have been among the top three in Consumer surveys
since 2006. PlaNet has been there since 2009.

Vodafone at
62 percent customer service satisfaction and Telecom/Xtra at
68 percent, once again fell below the average. Slingshot had
the dubious honour of being the only ISP to score worse than
average across each of the categories. Telstra
Clear/Paradise had a 76 percent rating.

Volatile gas prices and worldwide economic woes make balancing a business or household budget difficult. Rising energy costs are always a concern, but unusual weather around the globe creates even more unpredictability. Estimating energy bills for the purpose of budgeting is harder than ever. Just as Internet insurance quotes allow consumers to find the best insurance deals, online gas price comparison sites help users dramatically cut energy costs.

At a time when businesses and consumers alike are struggling financially, economising by cutting energy costs is especially appealing. While turning down the thermostat, buying high-efficiency appliances and light bulbs and eliminating inefficiencies can help reduce power bills, lowering rates is the most effective way to trim utility bills.

Based on your postal code, view gas price comparison details online. Examine the rates of energy suppliers across the UK and switch to a new company in a matter of minutes. Take advantage of vouchers and other incentives offered by gas and electric companies for maximum savings on your energy bill. You may be surprised at the impressive discounts offered to new customers by electric and gas suppliers in a bid to win your business.

Gas price comparison can save your household or business hundreds of pounds yearly. Combine lower rates and incentives to see a major difference in your monthly bills. Gas price comparison costs nothing; viewing gas and electric rates online is risk-free. In addition to saving money, gas price comparison makes switching suppliers easier. Choose your new power supplier and provide pertinent information, and your part is done.

Although saving money is essential, other factors may be involved in your decision to switch gas and electric suppliers. Dependability is important, so consider service ratings before making your decision. Service ratings are based on complaints registered with consumer watchdog groups, fines paid to energy regulators, call centre hours and other considerations.

Going green is also important to many consumers and business operators. In addition to gas price comparison, you may also wish to decrease your carbon footprint. Compare green tariffs to save money while helping the environment. Additionally, switching to a green tariff and suggesting that others do the same will result in a greater demand for green tariffs. Higher demand for green tariffs brings the UK another step closer to renewable energy.

Whether you want to save money, go green or both, gas price comparison can help. Lower your business or household utility bills, decrease your carbon footprint and gain a sense of control over your money with this helpful financial tool. With food, petrol and other necessary expenses on the rise, take comfort in knowing you can trim at least one area of your budget.

Gas price comparison lets you evaluate the costs, service levels and environmental friendliness of power suppliers across the UK. Once you find a company that suits you and your budget, transfer your service online or by phone. At a time when prices are on the rise and salaries on the decline, gas price comparison helps you take charge of your household or business expenses.

CITY OF INDUSTRY, CA, Dec 28, 2011 (MARKETWIRE via COMTEX) –
Newegg Inc., the second-largest online-only retailer in the United
States, today announced its best-selling computer components and
consumer electronics products this holiday shopping season. Holiday
sales, beginning with Newegg’s launch of Black Friday on November 23
and continuing through the month of December, indicated that laptops,
video game consoles, monitors and hard drives were among the most
popular items on Newegg.com.

The top-selling products on Newegg.com this holiday season by
category were:

— Laptops/Notebooks — ASUS A53E-EH91 15.6″ Notebook
— Televisions — Sceptre 32″ 720p LCD HDTV
— Video Games — Microsoft XBOX 360 250GB Holiday Bundle with Halo Reach
and Fable 3
— Digital Cameras — Panasonic Lumix DMC-FZ47K 12.1 MP Digital Camera
— Software — Microsoft Windows 7 Home Premium SP1 64-bit
— Monitors — Acer G235HAbd 23″ Widescreen LCD Monitor
— CPUs/Processors — Intel Core i5-2500K Sandy Bridge 3.3 GHz Processor
— Motherboards — ASUS P8Z68-V PRO Motherboard
— Hard Drives — Seagate Barracuda ST500DM002 500GB 3.5″ Hard Drive
— Memory — G.SKILL Ripjaws Series F3-12800CL9D-8GBXL 8GB (2 x 4GB)
Memory
— Video Cards — EVGA GeForce GTX 550 Ti Video Card

"This holiday shopping season was very strong with Newegg experiencing
year-over-year growth in both web traffic and sales," said Dr. S.C.
Lee, CEO of Newegg North America. "The increase in spending is a
positive sign that the economy is slowly but surely improving and we
look forward to this trend continuing in 2012. As we head into the
new year, Newegg remains committed to delivering the best selection
of IT and consumer electronics products, as well as a superior
shopping experience for our customers."

About Newegg Inc.
Newegg Inc. is the second-largest online-only
retailer in the United States. It owns and operates Newegg.com
(
www.newegg.com ) which was founded in 2001 and regularly earns
industry-leading customer service ratings. The award-winning website
has more than 16 million registered users and offers customers a
comprehensive selection of the latest consumer electronics, detailed
product descriptions and images, as well as how-to information and
customer reviews. Using the site's online tech community, customers
have the opportunity to interact with other computer, gaming and
consumer electronics enthusiasts. Newegg Inc. is headquartered in
City of Industry, California.

Contacts:

Scott Meaney
DBA Public Relations
(212) 388-1400
Email Contact

SOURCE: Newegg.com

http://www2.marketwire.com/mw/emailprcntct?id=60EF178AED22970B

Copyright 2011 Marketwire, Inc., All rights reserved.

n>(Reuters) – When Bonobos customers logged on to the mens apparel retailers website late on Cyber Monday, all they saw was a photo of feet with a pair of pants drooped around them.

Shoppers were told the site was down and were directed to click on a link to sign up for an alert on when it would be back up.

That would not happen for about three days as the fast-growing e-commerce start-up struggled to salvage sales from the busiest online shopping day on record.

We fell short of the high standard that we set for ourselves in terms of service delivered to customers, said Sameer Gandhi of Accel Partners, a venture capital firm that is one of the main investors in Bonobos. We failed in the trust they put in us, and we take that very seriously.

This is the latest example of the retail industrys struggles to handle technological demands created by an explosion in online shopping.

Only six of the largest 25 US retailers got top marks for online customer service, including website performance, between this years November 25 Black Friday and the following Cyber Monday, according to STELLAService, an independent provider of customer service ratings online.

The rest are underperforming in at least one area of the online customer experience, said Jordy Leiser, chief executive officer of STELLAService.

Target Corps (TGT.N) website crashed twice in recent months, while some Wal-Mart Stores Inc (WMT.N) shoppers had trouble checking out online when the companys site went down briefly after midnight on Black Friday.

Unlike those giant retailers, which have thousands of physical stores, Bonobos only sells online, so it is crucial for its website to run smoothly.

Bonobos has grown quickly since its inception in 2007, and the company knew it had to upgrade its technology to keep up. Unique monthly visitors to its website have almost doubled in the past year, according to comScore Inc (SCOR.O).

Bonobos hired Michael Hart, a former Netflix (NFLX.O) engineering director, as chief technology officer in November.

He immediately identified that we had a lot of work to do, said Chief Executive Officer Andy Dunn.

CLOUD SWITCH

Bonobos used dedicated computer servers from Rackspace Hosting (RAX.N) to handle website traffic and process orders. It decided to switch to a Rackspace system of cloud-based servers, which could handle spikes in online activity more efficiently, Dunn said.

Bonobos was close to finishing the transition, but on the weekend after Thanksgiving, the company hit problems and had to shut its website down briefly. When the site came back up, customers struggled to check out, creating a backlog of orders.

By the evening of Cyber Monday, the order backlog was so big that Bonobos shut the website down again. This time, the company told shoppers the site would be down for some time and advised them to come back later.

SIX TIMES

Bonobos was offering 60 percent off on Cyber Monday and expected the day to be its busiest of the year. However, online traffic to the companys website was six times higher that day than a year earlier, according to Accels Gandhi.

That was a lot more than expected and overwhelmed the technology, just as the company was switching to a new server system.

When companies grow so fast, it takes time for their infrastructure to catch up, Gandhi said.

Bonobos did not get the website fully back up until Friday, December 2, when it ran its 60 percent off Cyber Monday sale again. About a week later, it started running other holiday promotions that were supposed to be offered earlier in the season.

We thought we had left a lot of business on the floor and wouldnt be able to pick it up, Dunn said. However, he added that most customers have been patient, and many returned once the website was back up.

He declined to disclose sales numbers. The company lowered its expectations when the website went down on Cyber Monday, but it is now ahead of those more-conservative forecasts, Dunn said.

SILICON VALLEY OFFICE

Most e-commerce companies do not update computer infrastructure during the crucial fourth quarter, according to Accels Gandhi. But he said Bonobos had little choice because Hart could not join the company from Netflix any earlier.

The company may have been worse off if it hadnt gone ahead with the upgrade, Dunn said.

To avoid similar trouble in the future, New York-based Bonobos is opening an office in Palo Alto, California, in the heart of Silicon Valley, that Hart will run.

Dunn plans to spend up to half his time at the new location, and the company hopes to hire talented engineers and developers from the area.

Our core objective is to build a fantastic engineering team, Dunn said, and, if not get ahead of our growth, get side by side with it.

(Reporting by Alistair Barr in San Francisco; Editing by Lisa Von Ahn)

Which Cell Service Carrier Rates Best In Seattle?

David Hyde
12/21/2011 at 12:00 pm

Budget Signing Sparks Brief Debate Over Future Of Sex Predator LockUp:
Washington Governor Chris Gregoire has signed into law nearly $500 million in budget reductions. Tuesdays bill signing also stirred up a brief debate over whether to move the states island lockup for sexual predators to the mainland. Olympia correspondent Austin Jenkins reports.

Consumer Reports Unveils Cell Service Ratings:
Consumer Reports has just come out with their yearly cell phone service ratings. In Seattle, Verizon tops the list among those polled, but Sprint and TMobile are right near the top as well. ATamp;T comes in a distant fourth. Joining us to talk a little more about the ratings is Mike Gikas. Gikas is senior editor of electronics at Consumer Reports.

New Research Shows Hatchery Fish Adapting To Life In Captivity In One Generation:
Every year, more than 6 billion juvenile salmon are released from hatcheries into the rivers of the Northwest. Hatchery fish are used to supplement wild populations, many of which are in decline. Research shows that fish that are raised in hatcheries dont do as well as wild fish once theyre released. New research published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences suggests that hatchery fish may actually be adapting to captivity making them less equipped to take on life in the wild. Ashley Ahearn reports.

Initial Ocean Zoning Maps Hem In Wave Energy Developers:
Youve heard of neighborhood zoning. Now theres a move afoot to zone the ocean. Oregon, Washington state and the federal government all have fledgling plans to coordinate competing ocean uses. But wave energy developers say Oregons initial draft leaves them in a watery ghetto. Oregon is the first to produce detailed ocean maps. Correspondent Tom Banse was one of the first reporters to get a look and has this report.

In the past few days, Verizon and GoDaddy.com have both reversed courses, pushed to change policies and proclamations by a groundswell of customer dissatisfaction. After thousands of customers switched away from GoDaddy.com domains, prompted to do so by a social media campaign headed by Reddit users, the company reversed its approval of the SOPA Internet-censorship bill. Verizon’s ill-conceived $2 fee for one-time online payments couldn’t even survive 24 hours, immediately targeted by vocal web users. Both companies are just the latest examples of an age-old expression given a modern twist: The active social media customer is always right.

It started last year, when Gap proposed a new logo that was universally derided on Twitter, Tumblr and more. Gap’s new logo, which featured a white background and a small blue square, was mocked and parodied on all forms of social media, prompting campaigns to restore the original logo. Within a week of introducing the new logo design, the company had returned to its traditional blue and white square. It set the tone for a 2011 full of company reversals, spurred by vocal online backlash.

Perhaps the company that faced the most online backlash in 2011 was Netflix, which heard the clamoring hordes after CEO Reed Hastings announced Netflix would be splitting its DVD and streaming packages into separate services and charging more for each. The social media cries were nearly deafening, as Twitter timelines filled with cancelation threats. The company attempted to jog left by announcing a complete separation of streaming and DVD services – and the creation of DVD-by-mail service called Qwikster – but that change, too, was met with protest. Although some of the pricing plan change stuck, Netflix abandoned Qwikster a few short weeks later. Still, Netflix’s customer service ratings suffered as a result of its mixed message, even though the company eventually reversed course.

HP also announced a change in its business model, only to turn back (and change leadership) after hearing support for its personal computers on Twitter and other social media networks. In August, CEO-at-the-time Leo Apotheker announced that HP would be ditching its personal computer business, in favor of other markets. He was quickly removed from his position as HP CEO and replaced by Meg Whitman. Whitman announced that the company would continue to produce personal computers, although it will not make any more TouchPad tablets.

Verizon wasn’t the only company to change its mind about charging customers fees after customers took to social media to protest the change. After growing backlash – and public promises from competitors not to follow suit – Bank of America was forced to retract its announced $5/month debit card fees at the end of October. “We have listened to our customers very closely over the last few weeks and recognize their concern with our proposed debit usage fee,” said David Darnell, co-chief operating officer at Bank of America. “As a result, we are not currently charging the fee and will not be moving forward with any additional plans to do so.”

Social media has changed the way companies and customers interact, and often David ends up taking Goliath down. 2011 was a year of companies igniting social media firestorms and then putting them out by changing their tone – will 2012 continue the trend?