Almost all providers include a gallery of images for use on your website when you decide to offer live chat.  Many of these images are quite nice.  The one to the left is from our gallery and I like it a lot.

We have over 25 button styles, 4 text options, 8 color options, and 2 background choices which means there are over 1,600 combinations.  Wow, that’s a bunch of buttons.  But, here’s the thing; none of these might be right for your website.  Luckily, most systems like BoldChat and BoldCCM enable you to customize the button.  Here are 4 situations that definitely warrant a custom chat button:

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We’ve recently made some changes to our corporate branding, product naming, and available features that we’d like to share with both our existing and prospective customers.  Before we jump in to the individual changes, it will be helpful to explain why we made them in the first place.  There are several reasons, though two come to the fore.

First, despite the economy that surrounds us, we’re growing.  And, as we continue to grow, continue to win business from large preeminent brands, and continue to be relied on by media and analysts as experts in our field, we needed to establish a corporate presence beyond the brand names of the products we sell. Though many know us as “BoldChat”, that is simply one of the brands we manage.

Secondly, our growth has been fueled by two types of customers – small to mid-sized entrepreneurial businesses and significant enterprise engagements.  As such, the feature sets each of these customers require has changed over time.  We needed to react and build offerings appropriate for each.

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Are you on Twitter?

Oprah is. President Barack Obama is. Martha Stewart is. Same with Shaquille O’Neal and John Mayer. Zappos.com CEO, Tony Hseih, entrepreneur Mark Cuban and AOL co-founder, Steve Case are all tweeting away too… and that’s barely scratching the surface of the popular microblogging service’s users.

But Twitter isn’t just for the rich, famous and successful. There are 6 million users currently signed up with the service and, according to predictions by eMarketer, that number could double by the end of 2009.

Twitter is also not just for individuals. More and more businesses are tweeting, to varying degrees of success. Should your business jump on the Twitter bandwagon? Signing up for an account may seem simple enough (it’s easy and free), but the question I often hear is “then what?”

Here are a few tips for navigating the Twitter landscape as a business:

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I’m currently reading The Origin of Brands by Al and Laura Ries. I’m only on page 95, but already I’ve noticed that the Ries family continues in the same way they began with The 22 Immutable Laws of Branding:

• The father/daughter team isn’t afraid to take a contrarian position – they pretty much claim that ‘technology convergence’ is a wide-eyed dream without a prayer of living up to expectations.
• They explore the ridiculous outcomes inherent in the blind pursuit of such dreams. They discuss interactive gas pumps, interactive pianos, interactive clothing, interactive paper, and even, interactive toilets.
• Inside their fully warranted railings against such marketing-stupidity, are gems of knowledge.

One example is the simplistic, yet powerful idea that “[t]he primary objective of a branding program is always the mind of the prospect. The mind comes first, the market follows where the mind leads.”

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