Friday Five: 5 Social Media Tips for Entrepreneurs

Maureen Jackson, the controller for Applebee's franchisor Gator Apple, was having a tough time reconciling all the phone bills she received each month. Gator Apple operates 41 Applebee's restaurants in Georgia and Florida, and it had a unique phone system at each location. That meant 41 different phone bills, in different amounts, with due dates at different times of the month. With that kind of complexity, it's little wonder Maureen and Gator Apple decided to investigate other options. Their quest for phone-system simplicity led them to hosted VoIP services, which deliver a single, unified phone solution that runs in the cloud. RingCentral quickly became the front-runner in Gator Apple's search. What swayed the company

You've most likely heard, or even used, at least one of the five buzzwords in today’s Friday Five post. But, what do these five words really mean and how can knowing them benefit your business? Here’s our breakdown of the five most popular social media buzzwords: 1) Viral: In a nutshell, content reaches viral status when it has been shared by a large number of people in a short period of time. Every business hopes their content will go viral. In fact, reaching viral status is considered the “Holy Grail” of social media. Most people think of the Old Spice YouTube campaign or trending hashtags when the

As the below chart illustrates, sales of the iPad have exploded over the past two years. The tablet's uptake has even outpaced that of the iPhone - itself a sales blockbuster for Apple since its release. To be sure, many iPads have been sold to consumers. But the device is growing increasingly popular in the business world, too. Many small retailers use iPads to replace point-of-sale systems (a.k.a. cash registers), while corporations are adopting them to enhance the customer experience (a la J.C. Penney, which plans to install iPads in its stores as part of a brand overhaul)