Looking back into a career spanning close to a decade and a half, the key elements that have helped vSplash out-execute other players in the space are:

• Fully integrated and automated tools for managing fulfillment, review, reporting and communication.
• Simplified processes with minimal time and steps in order life-cycle, and maximal comfort for stakeholders.
• Flexibility in managing inconsistent volumes with capacity for spike periods.
• Substantially low costs enabled by economies of scale and elimination of waste.
• Enhanced customer experience through fully manned customer call center facility for post-sales consultation and post-fulfillment support.
• Adaptability to changes in technology and market requirements.
• Agility in responsiveness to new market opportunities leveraged for mutual value-add in partner relations.
• A commitment to continuous improvement of people, processes and tools.

vSplash continues to serve major directory publishers, telecom and hosting companies primarily in North America and largely around the world, delivering improved quality, cycle time, overall customer experience and substantial cost savings.

As we strive to be the leader in price, quality and convenience, we are always discovering ways to cut overhead costs, to minimize steps in fulfillment and to optimize our processes across functional and organizational boundaries.

What makes life simpler for the consumer while converting clicks to qualified leads for SMBs??
BUSINESS SOLUTIONS……Business solutions such as applications which not only serve as a repository of details of, for instance, stores, but also have search options for users to find the store by city, street, area, or distance. Or find doctors by city, specialization, reviews and insurance. In addition to these, an appointment scheduling option would take the user experience to an altogether different level. The scheduling feature enables the user to actually avail the service by contacting a particular doctor – straight from their mobile phone in case they are on the move with no access to a computer. That is actually converting leads into sales. How effortless is that?

These applications are valid for other service categories as stores, restaurants, florists, plumbers, electricians, spa, attorneys and so forth. For example, customers can look for a restaurant by preference, location, and reviews. The joy of sending flowers to a loved one with a single click on the phone through automated business solutions is incredible.

Thus emerge opportunities for directory publishers and SMB aggregators in the largely unexploited realm of business solutions – web/mobile applications in finding stores/restaurants, appointment scheduling, shopping carts, payment gateways, staff management, reporting, business analytics and inventory management that can add value to SMBs.

Capitalizing on these opportunities, search giants Google, Yahoo and Bing have been racing to e-business solutions. If Facebook stores, Google Checkout and Yahoo e-commerce solutions are anything to go by this market will continue to grow rapidly in the next 3-6 months. While many SMB aggregators continue to focus on search, the market is driving to business solutions that convert clicks and calls to qualified leads.

Add-ons as these can drive in increased revenues to any SMB aggregator or directory publisher who already has a size-able advertiser base across several verticals. Along with website development/maintenance or directory listings, a subscription for add-ons on an annual basis can boost revenues. You can do that without increasing your organization fat, i.e., by partnering with white-label solution providers with economies of scale and wherewithal at disposal already. Say there are 50,000 advertisers that need an e-business add-on, a margin on 40% at $1000 per advertiser means $20,000,000 more in annual revenues.

All you need to do is get your sales force into action selling away the idea to your existing SMB clientele. Just take it, a large percent of SMB advertisers are not internet savvy, much less e-business aware. The first steps, therefore, should be spreading awareness of the benefits of e-business solutions and how these can help their business make strides.

Small samples such as 300 to 1500 SMBs that most research is usually based on may not be completely representative. Using BuzzBoard technology and proprietary algorithms developed over the years, vSplash researched over half-a-million live SMB websites from over ten countries around the world, more than half of the sample from the US alone.

Some of the key observations:

• Only 13 percent of SMBs have a local phone number on home page.
• Only 24 percent have an email address on the website.
• 36 percent of websites are only a single page in length.

Speaking at ILM West, Steve Marshall, Director of Research and Consulting, BIA/Kelsey, said, “A key takeaway here is that there is a lot of online activity, but a big gap remains between top-level activity and the robustness of follow-through at a granular level.”

Pinpointing your best digital revenue opportunities just got easier with BuzzBoard, from vSplash. We’ll be unveiling the new BuzzBoard peformance and presence intelligence platform at ILM West.

Stop by booth 103-104 to learn how you can:

• Help your SMB customers track, measure and report on performance of digital presence initiatives, analyze underlying causes for low-performing assets, identify opportunities for improvement, and manage all social media channels from a single dashboard.
• Analyze a prospect’s online status and generate opportunities for online presence and performance-based packages.
• Open new sales opportunities by identifying areas for improvement in an SMB’s marketing mix.
• Reduce churn and enhance advertiser retention.

We look forward to seeing all ILM West attendees!

In addition to agility, service providers must execute superbly in order to remain competitive and profitable, while also weathering economic challenges and enabling growth and cost savings to its partners.

Implementational readiness or executional excellence is thus what constitutes operational excellence in Internet marketing. There are companies that perished in the aftermath of the dot.com burst.   It’s fair to say that many of these companies were caught up in the exuberance of the times and failed to adequately prepare for inevitable changes in economic conditions.  By contrast, vSplash experienced firm establishment and steady growth during those turbulent times. As cost cutting became a priority, aggregators worldwide turned to us for our ability to execute and deliver at costs phenomenally less than in-house operations or other vendors.

vSplash is equipped for implementational readiness, by virtue of:

• Long-standing experience in Internet operations that witnessed the growth of the Internet marketing industry from directory listings through the present social, local and mobile trends, while overseeing the delivery of 100,000-plus websites and other Internet marketing products and services.
• Foresight derived from constant observation and research of market trends.
• A commitment to take measures to adapt to changing trends.

In Internet operations, vSplash takes its experience and preparation to the level of executional excellence with:

• Multi-disciplinary capacities ranging from pre-sales research through post-sales business analysis; fulfillment through post-fulfillment customer support.
• Continuous sourcing, training and development of intellectual assets.
• Continuous development and enhancement of custom-integrated project management tools.
• Flexibility in delivering high to low volumes without compromising on quality or upping costs.

Excecutional excellence is what has helped vSplash emerge as the partner of choice for large and small volume aggregators around the world, and it’s what enables vSplash to continue to expand into new markets.

Success in mass-marketed web services relies heavily on operational excellence – simply put, the ability to deliver what your customers need, when they need it. More specifically, it involves a holistic outcome of a carefully crafted combination of experienced leadership, expert human resources, leading-edge technology and state-of-the-art infrastructure.

For instance, a hosting provider with 50,000 monthly subscriptions has plenty of monetizing opportunity even if a fraction of them – say two percent – need or demand additional products and services. If it lacks the operational excellence to execute those 1,000 orders, the hosting company may back away from the opportunity. The cost and monthly overhead involved in setting up a plant and employing manpower alone could deter a hosting company. Add to that the challenge of acquiring the excellence itself, something that is cultivated over long experience in project management for mass order fulfillment, and the revenue opportunity from value added services becomes unattainable.

The challenges in mass-production are predominantly centered on quality, scalability, flexibility and cost. Generally speaking, aggregators do not have the ability to scale in the event that sales rise phenomenally. Or if scale goes up, quality comes down. Clearly, it is also difficult to maintain flexibility in keeping with fluctuating sales. A part of capacity is unutilized when sales are low resulting in wasted investment; on the other hand, inadequate capacity when sales are high result in longer cycle times, increased costs, reduced quality, unhappy customers and subsequently, decreased renewals.

The key to success lies in keeping quality high and cost low, which can only be achieved through operational excellence. Who can vouch for this better than vSplash, a proven white-label provider of fulfillment solutions for Internet marketing companies worldwide? vSplash derives its excellence from more than a decade of experience in mass-order fulfillment, in conjunction with economies of scale, customized order management tools, deployment and continuous training of global talent. With multiple partners, sales fluctuations are no challenge, as human resources are always engaged for one partner or another. Scales are not daunting as there is always an additional capacity from downtime with one or another partner.

Operational excellence is what enables us to deliver quality at a significantly lower cost than in-house operations. It also allows our customers to capitalize on the rich revenue opportunities that the marketplace currently presents.

What is Plagiarism?

Merriam-Webster Online defines plagiarism as:

• to steal and pass off (the ideas or words of another) as one’s own
• to use (another’s production) without crediting the source
• to present as new and original an idea or product derived from an existing source

What Constitutes Plagiarism in Online Marketing?

• Pulling general content or ideas from third-party sources – print or online.
• Using data from another individual’s or organization’s research without acknowledging the source.
• Using exact words of others without quotation marks.
• Paraphrasing others’ words and not citing the source.
• Self-plagiarism, i.e., copying from your own writing (you can’t sell the same content to more than one customer).

Preventing Plagiarism in Digital Media and Interactive Operations

Writers must take care to write original content.

Acknowledge the sources of information, images, videos, etc., used on websites, blog posts, tweets or other interactive operations. Cite sources, give credit or provide links to the third-party sites when you borrow ideas. People will feel flattered and also welcome back-links to their websites.

Developing and adhering to internal policies around the publication of online content—for websites, blog or social media—is essential to avoiding the pitfalls for plagiarism. vSplash uses a combination of strong plagiarism policies, experienced writing resources with proven expertise, continuous training and plagiarism detection technology to monitor plagiarism in content developed for its customers. Writers/proofers must go through an intensive training before they start working on live projects and scan each and every document in plagiarism detection tools before publishing it. Furthermore, advertiser provided content is also checked for plagiarism and substituted with original content as necessary.

Recommended Reading:

http://www.plagiarism.org/plag_article_plagiarism_faq.html

— Anthony Bratti

What do directory publishers want from their performance-based digital presence partner? How about quality, flexibility, scalability and cost efficiency? It all adds up to E2 {Excellence + Execution}.

This week, at BIA/Kelsey’s DMS ’11 conference in Denver, vSplash is showcasing its white-label performance-based marketing and business solutions for directory publishers. Among the products vSplash is featuring at DMS ’11 are:

* PresencePro encompasses customer engagement, content collection, design and proofing services for a cohesive digital presence—websites, mobile sites and social media pages.

* PerformanceHub offers specialized knowledge and resources for driving traffic via blog posts, tweets, image tagging and more. Features a sophisticated dashboard for monitoring and optimizing digital presence performance.

* MobiPresence extends a simple web presence beyond the desktop to mobile platforms. Hyperlocal mobile apps, optimized for 25 core verticals, strengthen the impact and availability of a directory publisher’s client sites.

DMS ’11 attendees are invited to stop by the vSplash booth to learn more.

With the advent of tablets and smartphones, it has become inevitable for businesses to extend their web presence beyond desktop to mobile. At vSplash, we not only took steps to include mobile websites in our portfolio of services, but in keeping with such demands of new age internet marketing, we ourselves were driven to launch a new website. You can now access vSplash website (www.vsplash.com) through a wider range of devices.

This is how the new website scrolls on ipad screens.

And this is how it scrolls on smartphone screens.

Take a look around the website either on your desktop or your tablet/smartphone to know more about the vSplash offerings namely PresencePro, Performance Hub and MobiPresence. Specifically, MobiPresence helps to extends a simple web presence beyond the desktop to mobile platforms.

vSplash today announced a suite of performance-based presence offerings designed to help hosting companies profit from delivering web, mobile and customer fulfillment services. The company will be showcasing its white-label, turnkey solutions in booth 128 at HostingCon 2011, Aug. 8-10 in San Diego.

“Our web and mobile presence solutions allow hosting companies to deliver a broader array of cutting edge products designed to strengthen their customer relationships and ultimately grow the bottom line,” said Anthony Bratti, senior vice president, business development, vSplash.

Among the products vSplash will showcase at HostingCon are:

* PresencePro encompasses customer engagement, content collection, design and proofing services for a cohesive digital presence—websites, mobile sites and social media pages.

* PerformanceHub offers specialized knowledge and resources for driving traffic via blog posts, tweets, image tagging and more. Features a sophisticated dashboard for monitoring and optimizing digital presence performance.

* MobiPresence extends a simple web presence beyond the desktop to mobile platforms. Hyperlocal mobile apps, optimized for 25 core verticals, strengthen the impact and availability of a hosting company’s client sites.

vSplash is extending an exclusive offer to HostingCon attendees—up to $5,000 worth of free vSplash services for companies that sign up with vSplash during the show. Visit vSplash in booth 128 for details.