How to avoid unwanted alerts in iOS 5

Avoid embarrassing interruptions from unexpected iPhone alerts by following this guide to configuring iOS 5’s notification settings.

Mobile phone alerts have been interrupting public performances since, well, since mobile phones were invented. Rather than mere rudeness though, some recent incidents seem to be the result of confusion about how modern smartphones work — or at least that was the excuse given by the iPhone owner who stopped a performance of Mahler’s Symphony No. 9 by the New York Philharmonic in the middle of January.

In fact there is some genuine confusion about how the iPhone in particular handles alarms and audible alerts, not least since Apple’s recent iOS 5 update added a new layer of complexity in the form of the Notification Centre.

So, with Apple iDevices making increasing inroads into enterprise, we thought this would be a good time to explain how to configure iOS 5 to keep unwanted interruptions to a minimum.

1. The iPhone mute switch It’s important to note that the iPhone’s side-mounted mute switch only affects ring tone, text message, email and other app alerts — it does not affect alarms set in the Clock app.

This is by design, the reason being that iPhone owners who do not want to be disturbed by a phone call or other alert when they’re sleeping may still want to be woken up by its alarm.

An iPhone set to mute will still vibrate when alert is triggered, but if even this is too much of a distraction, it can be disabled in Settings > Sounds. Just set the Vibrate option to Off under the Silent section.

2. What the volume buttons do The ringer volume can also be set here, as can the option for the iPhone to vibrate even when not in mute mode, which can be a useful way to avoid missing a call if the ringer volume is at its lowest setting or muffled by a pocket.

Otherwise, ringer volume is controlled using Up/Down buttons on the side of the iPhone, but these only take effect when music or video isn’t playing, or an app that has audio feedback (such as a game) isn’t running. Otherwise, the buttons control the volume of the app in question.

It’s also worth noting that the volume buttons also only adjust ringer volume when the iPhone is unlocked and they have no effect if the lock screen is still visible, or the screen is off.

3. Silencing alerts for certain contacts Although the iPhone mute switch doesn’t affect its alarms, some people still prefer to leave it switched on when they’re sleeping for emergency contact purposes.

The problem, of course, is what constitutes an emergency and a text message balance update update sent by a bank at 6.30am on a Monday morning probably doesn’t qualify.

Fortunately, iOS 5 offers a way to silence audible alerts for certain contacts to prevent exactly this sort of thing from happening. This is done by editing the contact’s details via Phone > Contacts > -select contact- > Edit, then changing the ringtone and/or text tone to “None”.

4. Understanding the Notification Centre iOS alerts used to consist of a single pop-up message in the middle of the screen that was supplanted when another alert was received. iOS 5 remedies this by not only offering different ways to stack multiple ‘notifications’ (as they’re now called) on-screen as they’re received, but also by saving all recent alerts on a pull-down window called the Notification Centre.

When an app that can generate a notification (be it a pop-up message, app icon badge or sound) is installed, it should request approval before configuring itself to do so, but this is easily overlooked.

So, it’s a good idea to check notification settings every once in a while in case an app has snuck through, and also to properly configure any wanted app notifications to minimise their potential disruption,

When opened via Settings > Notifications, a list of apps that use notifications appears. This is split into two groups: apps that are actively using notifications and those that can, but have been disabled.

5. Notification Setting settings There’s also the option here to sort notifications in the Notification Centre either by the time they’re received or in a manually chosen app order, with the latter option edited using the Edit button at the top-right of this screen.

Tap any app entry in the list and its notification settings appear. Some apps will simply offer an On/Off toggle, but most have more granular settings. Most of these are self-explanatory, but the one to pay attention to is “Sounds” and this is worth setting to “Off” if you don’t want audible notification of your turn in Words with Friends, for example.

6. Improving alert security The “View in Lock Screen” setting is also worth checking, particularly for iOS devices that are used for personally or commercially sensitive communication. When set to On for the Mail or Messages apps, for example, new emails and text messages will be partially visible to anyone on the iOS Lock screen, even if the iDevice is protected with a password.

So, once properly configured, there should be little chance of an iOS 5 from causing unwanted interruptions, but we can’t say the same for mobile phones from other manufacturers…

Windows 8: Making it work in the enterprise

Industry watchers have repeatedly questioned how business users will take to Windows' radical new look, but will its new security and BYOD friendly features be enough to make it a hit in the enterprise?

Windows 8, the latest incarnation of Microsoft’s flagship operating system, is set to drop tomorrow, but debate over how diehard Windows users will take to the revamped OS continues to rage.

Much has been made of Microsoft’s radical overhaul of the operating system’s look and feel, which has seen the firm replace the Start Menu with a new tile-centric Start Screen and introduce a new gesture-based navigation style.

Market watcher Gartner said Microsoft was taking a “big gamble” with the launch of Windows 8 back in September, claiming the new look OS could struggle to win favour with risk-adverse CIOs.

Meanwhile, Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen recently admitted to finding aspects of Windows 8 “confusing,” taking issue with the software’s tendency to flip between desktop and tablet mode (a feature known as Bimodal View) when users access apps and documents.

A new Start

The new user interface is designed to appeal to both tablet and desktop users, but Clive Longbottom, service director at IT analyst house Quocirca, expressed concerns to IT Pro about how he thinks business users will react to the changes.

“The lack of Start [Menu] makes starting an application so much harder and the multiple different ways of doing things [in tablet and desktop mode] just make this too much for an organisation to consider,” said Longbottom.

A Microsoft insider, who has worked closely with the Windows development team, admitted to IT Pro that Windows 8 is a “complicated beast” and a “bit of a headscratcher” when you first start using it.

The source, who asked not to be named because of his close professional ties to Microsoft, has been using Windows 8 for 10 months and said, at the moment, he would not recommend it to anyone that is not particularly tech-literate.

“It is, essentially, two operating systems bolted together, linked by the Start Screen, and – if I was a typical end user and not as well-versed as I am in Microsoft’s products – I would consider it to be a very complicated beast,” he said.

Businesses that have already adopted Windows 7 have no need to upgrade to its successor, added Longbottom, but companies that are still sweating it out on decade-old Windows XP should at least consider it.

“XP is going to be unsupported soon [as it is set to enter end of life in 2014] and companies that are still on that ancient operating system will soon find themselves [at increased risk from] new security attacks and [will hear their staff] bleat ever louder that they are finding the system impossible to use,” he warned.

“Moving to Windows 7 will not be easy as Windows 8 will be the de facto offer made by systems integrators and PC manufacturers when it comes to upgrade.”

Despite this, our Microsoft insider cast doubts on the suitability Windows 8 for enterprise users.

“[Microsoft] has not really designed it with the enterprise in mind, but they have ticked most of the boxes they needed to [make it fit], but they haven’t really gone out of their way to make it an enterprise product,” said our source. “But, then again, neither did Apple.”

What’s up with IE10?
According to a Microsoft insider, who has extensively bug-tested Windows 8 for 10 months, some enterprise users might encounter problems with Internet Explorer 10 to start with.


“The problem is that large areas of the internet don’t seem to be ready for it yet, as some of the web pages you visit in it look weird, and I’ve experienced problems uploading documents to Sharepoint and posting comments on forums,” said our source.

“Once Windows 8 launches, the internet should catch up and those problems should be solved.”

Even so, companies that do decide to take the plunge with Windows 8 will need to make sure their IT departments know how to support it, and train their staff in how to use it.

This is a view shared by a Microsoft supply chain source who works at a prominent B2B reseller of Microsoft products. He agreed to speak to IT Pro on condition of anonymity.

“With Windows XP, Windows Vista and Windows 7, you could give someone a brand new PC and they would instantly know how it works, but that’s not the case with Windows 8,” he said.

“A customer is not going to pay for brand new PCs and for their staff to be trained in how to use them when they’ve never had to do that before,” our source added.

However, Richard Gibbons, software manager at Microsoft reseller Bechtle Direct, said, in his experience, it does not take long for users to get to grips with Windows 8.

“Because it’s visually different [to other versions of Windows], I think a lot of people assume it will be difficult to use and not worth the hassle,” Gibbons suggested.

Wiltshire-based Bechtle recently hosted a Windows 8 event to show businesses and IT buyers how to use its main features.

“We were able to run through the basics of Windows 8, and the people who attended were able to jump in and feel more confident using it,” said Gibbons.

“Within 48 hours we were getting feedback from customers who had gone home, downloaded the preview, and had linked up their mail client to Office 365 or were managing VMware through this connector on a Windows 8 machine, for example.”

Despite what people say, Gibbons said there tends to be some form of learning curve for users when all new versions of Windows drop. And, where supposedly problematic features like Bimodal View are concerned, the IT department can usually offer a fix.

“A lot of users won’t be doing much when it comes to settings on their local machines [because that will be] taken care of centrally by the IT department through group policy and Active Directory,” he said.

An example of this is the Start Menu, which our Microsoft channel source said IT pros can easily reinstate by pre-installing Stardock’s Start8 software on every Windows 8 PC they rollout across their business.

The $4.99 product, our source predicts, will go on to become the “best selling Windows 8 add-on.”

“For many IT pros, it is only after installing Start8 that Window 8 makes any sense to them,” said our source, before taking aim at the operating system’s reliance on keyboard shortcuts.

“You have to remember keyboard shortcuts to do things quickly, but some of my customers can’t even remember their passwords to log in, so that’s going to be fun,” he added.

Windows of opportunity

Aside from companies that need to make the break from XP, there could still be a place for Windows 8 in companies that have already upgraded to Windows 7, thanks to the Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) trend.

“Windows 8 is a great tablet operating system and I expect to see quite a few execs expensing a Windows 8 tablet, slate or hybrid laptop and telling their IT departments to just ‘make it work’,” said Quocirca’s Longbottom.

To accommodate this, IT departments will need to get up to speed with Windows 8, but can do so at a more relaxed pace than if a company-wide rollout were taking place.

“Once [the IT staff] are retrained, then the users who make the most noise about wanting Windows 8 can be given it as the support infrastructure is already in place,” he said.

Bechtle’s Gibbons said he is already seeing evidence of companies that are planning to keep their desktop devices running on Windows 7, but introduce tablet devices that feature its successor.

“Microsoft has done a lot of work to ensure the two operating systems integrate with each other, meaning everything that runs on Windows 7 runs on Windows 8,” said Gibbons.

“Some firms would probably prefer not to run two operating systems side-by-side, but it is really not a hard thing to do.”

This multi-device approach is something Microsoft seems to be encouraging, if the introduction of its Companion Subscription License (CSL) programme is anything to go by.

Only firms that have Windows 8 with software assurance can qualify for a CSL, but it allows users to access their corporate desktop from up to four “personally” or “corporate non-x86 devices.”

What’s Windows To Go?
This feature of the Enterprise edition of Windows 8 lets users securely boot up a copy of their desktop using a USB or external hard drive.

In the past, end users that wanted to access their Windows 7 desktop from other devices would have to purchase a separate license for each one, explained Gibbons.

“Even if they never planned to use that device again, they would still need to buy one, just to be correctly licensed,” he said.

He calculates that the introduction of CSL means organisations can now embrace BYOD for around a “quarter of the price” that they could with Windows 7.

“Not many people really get into it [licensing] so the CSL doesn’t always get as much attention as it should do, but I certainly think – for the bigger organisations – this could be a deciding factor in their adoption of Windows 8,” he added.

Making its debut on the Enterprise edition of Windows 8 is Windows To Go, which Gibbons said should also encourage adoption of the OS across multiple devices.

This feature allows end users to securely boot and run their business desktop from a USB drive or external hard disk on their home PC, explained Gibbons.

“Everyone, users and techies, said Microsoft should move towards a more user-centric model across all their products, and [Windows To Go and CSL] are going a long way towards that,” he said.

Another new feature that might persuade end users to upgrade is the inclusion of Microsoft BitLocker hard drive encryption in Windows 8 Professional.

“When Windows 7 came out, this was only available in the Enterprise edition and everybody said it should be included in the Professional version because every company needs encryption,” said Gibbons.

“Microsoft have listened to that feedback and, if you’re on XP, I’d say that alone is worth moving to Windows 8 for.”

IT Pro approached Microsoft for comment on this feature, but was told that no-one from the Windows team would be available to interview.

Why Your Business Should Be on Facebook

The fact that something is popular doesn't mean your business has to useit. However, Facebook is moving from "popular" to "ubiquitous"; depending on where your business is and who your customers are, Facebook is part of daily life for many, or even the majority, of your customers.

There's also a competitive element to this. Eventually, most businesses are going to be on Facebook. In general, the longer you wait to get on Facebook, the more "out of it" your business will seem to heavy Facebook users. And if your competitors make a showing on Facebook before you do, they'll get the early "buzz" among Facebook users and gain momentum that you'll be hard pressed to catch up with.

Consider a local bookstore. Every local bookstore competes with Amazon.com, and Amazon has more than 500,000 Facebook fans at this point (that is, people who've clicked the Like button on Amazon's Facebook Page, as shown in Figure 1.3).

FIGURE 1.3 Amazon has a huge reach on Facebook, but you can beat them locally.

Half a million is a huge number of people, but it's only one out of 1,000 Facebook users in the area that Amazon serves - most of the world. To match Amazon's penetration of its target market, a local bookstore just has to get one out of 1,000 Facebook users in the area it serves.

The area I live in, the Rockridge area of Oakland, has about 20,000 people. So getting just 20 Facebook fans would be a good start for a local bookstore - and might just beat Amazon within that neighborhood. The first local bookstore to "beat Amazon" in this way would get strong momentum with local Facebook users and might go on to get hundreds of Facebook fans. Among local bookstores, they'll be known as "the one on Facebook." Bookstores that try the same thing later will probably find it harder to get traction.

NOTE:

Start Your Website with a Facebook Page What if you don't have a website yet? To start out, you probably should. The Web as a whole has many more users than Facebook, and not being on the Web makes it hard for some of your customers to consider you fully. So should you drop this book and go create a website? Not at all. Creating a Facebook fan page for your business, or even a Places page, is easier than creating a standalone web page. So start on Facebook first and then create a website, using what you learn on Facebook. You'll save time and money.

In fact, Facebook might be more valuable to a local bookstore than it is to Amazon. That's because a local bookstore can take advantage of its local knowledge. Amazon's fan page has to be somewhat generic, addressing the whole world. A local bookstore can use its knowledge of local concerns, local issues, and local events to reach its customers and their Facebook friends.

This ties into two advantages of Facebook: hypertargeting, and connections to social networks. You can target your Facebook presence to reach very specific audiences. And you can reach into people's networks of friends, family members, and co-workers. Once you get a couple of key influencers in a group of friends to, say, come to an event that you're sponsoring, the rest may well follow.

Here's a brief, targeted list of the key reasons you and your business should be on Facebook:

• To reach people. Your Facebook fan page can reach many of your customers, particularly those 30 and under. Simply having them see your business on Facebook will help you stay connected with them.
• To make money. You can use Facebook Places and Deals to actually bring people into your physical location, call you, order online - however you do business. It's easy to measure the results of these efforts and to justify just the effort you put in.
• To not be left out. Every time someone looks for your business on Facebook and can't find it, that's a negative for you. If they then look for a competitor and do find them instead, it's a bigger negative for you.
• For positive "buzz." Just the fact that people know you're on Facebook is a positive, even if they're not fans (that is, they haven't "Liked" your fan page). There's so much positive momentum around Facebook in the press and among ordinary people that simply associating yourself with Facebook is a plus. If you can get your Facebook presence mentioned in online comments and even the print press, as many businesses have, all the better.

A word of caution, though - some of this impact can be measured, but not all of it can. Just as you probably don't have precise numbers for how many people know about your business or what people think of it, you

won't be able to precisely measure all of the impact of being (or not being) on Facebook.

However, because Facebook has gotten so big, it's an easy call - you need to join in! Then you can use measurable efforts such as Facebook Deals to help determine just how hard you work at developing and using your Facebook presence.

Your Edge Over Your Competition Using Inbound Marketing

The fact is today's consumers expect to find your business online. Consumers research your company, your products, your services and past clients experiences with your company using search engines like Google, Bing, and Yahoo, in addition to using Facebook, Twitter and a variety of other sources like discussion forums.

When your company is difficult to find, your potential clients will find a company that fulfills their needs or might find information about your company's products or services elsewhere (like a site that provides reviews written by the site's visitors). Your company's marketing efforts actually begin long before your potential clients think of your business: they begin when your potential clients realize they have a problem and want to know whether there's a solution. An even better place to start is to identify a problem that a consumer isn't currently aware of - in either case, this is where your inbound marketing campaign begins.

Inbound marketing is a variation of more traditional marketing, also known as outbound marketing. The focus of an outbound marketing campaign is on finding customers through brand awareness: your advertisements make consumers aware of your brand, featuring it prominently as the solution to their problem. There are two problems with outbound marketing: there's a lot of it and consumer's perception of products available on the market.

As you travel through most urban environments, chances are that you're surrounded by advertising: billboards, signs, print ads in newspapers and magazines, commercials on TV and radio. This is the first problems with outbound marketing: advertisements have become so prevalent that many people incorporate them into forms of art, meaning, that many have resigned themselves to the annoyance of ads just about everywhere. Consumers have become good at ignoring ads, yet they pay attention often enough and long enough to make costly and long-running campaigns successful (assuming you measure the success of a campaign by sheer volume of inquiries or contacts by prospective clients - there are other, far more important measures that affect the outcome of a marketing campaign). While you can control your advertisements and their delivery channel, you cannot control the second problem with outbound marketing: consumer perception.

Consumer perception has changed a great deal during the past 10 years. A trait of a successful campaign - one that boosts sales - was based on scarcity. your potential clients would go to great lengths to find you and throw money in your direction as long as your ads' messaging was that your business was the only one of its kind (or perhaps one of a few) that could solve a consumer's problem. For example, if you think of a battery for your wireless mouse, chances are very high that you'll think of a particular brand. You're probably thinking of the brand because there really are just a few companies that manufacture batteries that work for longer than a day or two - this is scarcity at work. The problem is that consumers perception of the market is shifting from a unique product and services market to a market made up of parity products and services.

Parity products are a group of products or services in a particular category that are functionally equivalent as far as the consumer is concerned. A good example is in groceries - something like a tomato. Generally speaking, most people's dinner plans are not affected when a particular grocery store runs out of tomatoes - most people will go down the street to another store for their tomatoes, or perhaps ask a neighbour for a few. The tomato is the same regardless of where it originates or where the consumer buys it from. Consumers perceive the overall market as a parity market, as a result, it doesn't really make a difference how the consumer gets a product or service, nor does the product or service itself really factor into the consumer's decision making process, as long as it meets the consumer's need.

Both factors, consumers saturated with ads and consumers that essentially perceive almost all products and services as equivalent, contribute to making on-going outbound marketing difficult for smaller organizations, or when you want to, or perhaps need to, affect the market faster and reach more people.

Inbound marketing changes the focus of your marketing efforts from finding consumers to having consumers find you. Inbound marketing essentially reverses the trend that parity introduces - inbound marketing makes it easier for consumer to solve their problem by finding your company when searching for a solution. With the volumes of fast and free information available online, having your products or services, or even just your brand be a part of the information a consumer uses to make a purchase decision offers a variety of opportunities to market your brand long before consumers even think of contacting your company.

Many organizations base their internet marketing on simple, in-house strategies that are not proven and not measurable. A lot of organizations are misguided into believing that a web site is enough to attract thousands of visitors to provide a source of new business from online consumers. With consumers' perception shifting towards a parity market, how can you distinguish your brand, products and services from other companies' offerings?

5 Rules You Should Eliminate Now

The dirty little secret of business today: there really are no agreed-upon ways of doing business anymore. Every company does everything differently, and you can’t really compare them because there are no controlled experiments. So it isn’t a science.

But here are five very old rules that I see successful companies breaking all the time. I thought they’d give you some food for thought - unless you’re already breaking all of these– which I very much doubt.

1. Set working hours

Forget 9 - 5. Try to get rid of face time. All your team should have goals they’re accountable for but when and where they’re achieved really doesn’t matter. Some people work well at night, some early morning, some don’t get up til noon. I’ve always told my employees that, as long as they didn’t mess their co-workers around, I didn’t care what hours they worked. No one let me down.

2. Limit vacation time

The communications firm Global Tolerance doesn’t give employees vacation allowances. They just trust people to manage their time on and their time off in such a way that co-workers and clients aren’t disappointed. With a 40% per year growth rate for the last 4 years, this does not appear to have hurt them. To the contrary, it’s one of the things that has provoked high levels of commitment.

3. Agonize over maternity leave

Everywhere I go, business owners tell me that, sure, they want to hire women - but especially in small companies, losing a key employee for weeks or months on end, due to maternity, isn’t feasible. In Europe, where there’s statutory maternity leave (actually there is everywhere in the world except Lesotho, Papua New Guinea, Swaziland and the U.S.), being required to give women time off enrages many men. Every woman I’ve ever employed wanted to come back to work and wanted not to lose touch. With each one, I reached a different agreement about how we’d manage the time off - and in no case was I disappointed. Some did a day a week all through their leave; some wanted to come back early and take time off later. All these formations worked.

By the way, individuals may choose whether or not to have kids but they can’t choose whether or not to have parents. So think about maternity leave as your rehearsal for the day when most of your workforce have elderly parents they need to attend to.

4. Fire slowly

Everyone makes mistakes hiring, whether they are quick and instinctive or slow and methodical. And usually that mistake is obvious in the first 6 months. Do not think you can turn this around. It’s distracting, time-consuming and you will fail. If you goofed, ‘fess up and move on.

5. Skimp on severance

This comes via Jonathan Kaplan, CEO of Pure Digital. “We gave our workers four to six months’ severance, even if they’d worked only four months. You might think that’s crazy. But it was our mistake to hire that person. And it’s not that much money, really.” Of course those employees left the company feeling pretty good about it - and spreading the word that it was a good place to work. Cheaper than headhunters!

Are there any old rules that you’re breaking? Would you try breaking these five? Why or why not?

How to Bring Harry Potter-like Popularity to Your Business

The final Harry Potter film has opened and everyone’s very tearful. I’m sure that Warner Brothers have been worrying for years about what to do now the cash cow has grown up and left home. They’re no doubt scouring the world for Potter-esque clones.

And while I’d be the last person to undervalue the books and performances which made the series so winning, plenty of other kids’ movies started with beloved best sellers and star-studded casts that just couldn’t be sustained.

So how did the Harry Potter series manage to maintain its quality and the commitment of its audience? I’ve visited the set several times and come to the conclusion: They broke most of the rules of movie-making. And many of the Potter rules of success could be used in others’ business.

1. Improve collegiality

The whole series had one over-arching producer, David Heyman, who worked with four directors - all of whom shared their knowledge and insights with each other. “Chris spent time with Alfonso,” Heyman reflected. “Alfonso spent time with Mike and Mike spent time with David, showing him an early cut of the film, talking through what it means to be a director and how they went about it and any sort of titbits that they can pass on. And it’s a really collegial and supportive environment between directors.”

2. Keep a good team together

Of course, many of the actors remained the same. But they were also long-time colleagues, many of them graduates of RADA (Royal Academy of Dramatic Art.) So the fantastic training and experience of the cast set a standard. Moreover, they didn’t just turn up for the day but were well known to one another, having worked together on different projects for years. Mutual trust matters; it means you can start on a basis of trust and share a language you don’t need the time to develop.

3. Favor permanence

This isn’t a word you hear very often, either in the film industry or any other industry these days. But many of the designers, sculptors, painters and runners spent years working together on these films. When I visited the set on several occasions, they all commented on how much they appreciated not just continuous employment but long-term commitment to a project that didn’t change or collapse after a few months. It inspired ever higher levels of perfectionism in their work. “It’s not,” one sculptor told me, “just because it’s the first time I ever got to work indoors! I’m psyched that I’m surrounded by people who do great work and I won’t want to let them down.” You don’t get this when everyone can be cast out tomorrow.

4. Respect and honor the customer

Another remarkable comment I heard often concerned the audience. “You know how much these stories mean to kids. That means you have a lot to live up to.” What made this remarkable is that it is rare in the movie business for anyone to think about viewers - with respect. But on this movie, most contributors had, or knew, kids for whom these stories were magical. They were proud of their association and wanted to be able to show their work with pride.

What’s intriguing and ironic is that, for the last 20 years, the movie industry has regularly been cited as an example of how quickly, effectively and cheaply teams can be assembled and abandoned. But the Harry Potter series has gone from strength to strength because that is not the way that it worked. Instead, like-minded people were brought together for years, instilled with pride in their work and long term commitment to each other.

Could that model of work ever catch on?

Does Every Business Really Need Twitter?

How necessary is a Twitter account for good customer service? The conventional wisdom is that you can’t have one without the other.

A new survey from InboxQ supports that assumption. It found nearly 60 percent of Twitter users said they would be more likely to follow a brand that answered them, and 64 percent said they would be more likely to make a purchase from that brand.

The poll also showed that customers go to Twitter with service-related questions. The top queries:

1. Product recommendations and advice

2. Tech support

3. Local suggestions

4. Entertainment

5. Sports

6. Health

7. Travel

8. Music

9. Careers

10. Fashion

The number one, two and possibly the number-three question on Twitter has customer-service implications.

“Your business will earn more followers and increase sales by answering questions on Twitter,” the InboxQ research concludes.

Uh, not so fast.

When Being on Twitter Hurts Business

While it’s undoubtedly true that many brands can benefit from having a Twitter account and answering questions from their customers, I’m not convinced that every company needs to be engaged in microblogging.

First, it’s not being on Twitter that matters – it’s answering queries in a timely way.

One of the case studies frequently cited is Delta Air Lines, with its @DeltaAssist account. I’ve spoken with passengers who have asked a question through @DeltaAssist and received a quick answer. They’re usually happy.

But what tends to get glossed over in citing Delta’s social-media success is that this isn’t the airline’s first foray into Twitterland. A previous Twitter account was monitored intermittently, and customers couldn’t always rely on it.

Fact is, there are other airlines out there – and they know who they are – that don’t pay much attention to their accounts. Instead of integrating Twitter into their customer service operations, they make it the responsibility of their public relations staff, which is already stretched to the limit. Questions aren’t always answered in a timely way – or at all.

Those companies are probably better off deleting their Twitter accounts. After all, the foundation of this social networking tool is real-time interaction. If they can’t follow the rules, they shouldn’t bother.

The other area of concern is one I raised in a panel discussion at a recent social media conference. I asked the impertinent question, “Does every business need to be on Twitter?”

I mean, I can see how a cruise line needs a Twitter account, but what about a yacht builder? An airline, yes – but what about a charter jet company that deals with large corporate customers?

Wouldn’t a Twitter account be a distraction, if not a drain on a company’s resources? And could you automatically assume that in the absence of a Twitter account, that it doesn’t care about customer service?

(My comments were met with silence. Now I know what the other Chris Elliott feels like when his jokes bomb.)

I’m not at all convinced that Twitter is necessary to provide good customer service, or that not having a Twitter account means you don’t care.

Are you?