Archive for August, 2007
Aug
20
What do people find when they look for you? You would hope that they find you. Heck, you would hope that they find you even when they don’t know they’re looking for you… that you match their needs. You would be surprised how often, and how badly this can be out of whack.
I met a with a company just last week… and of course, before the meeting I do a little homework on them. The matches I find? I found a company that had its assets frozen due to illegal activities. The company was a different company entirely. But at first blush it wasn’t clear.
That’s why I am so excited to be able to announce the following (for the full details on our SEO/SEM expansion in Utah click here):
Salt Lake City, Utah (August 20, 2007) Twelve Horses is actively expanding its search engine optimization (SEO) and search engine marketing (SEM) division. The most recent addition is veteran search engine marketing expert, Eric Morgan who has more than eight years of web experience accelerating businesses’ search engine rankings and website traffic.
Posted in Company News
Aug
17
One of the most important aspects of marketing for a business is building your brand. Making sure that when people think about your products or services, that the appropriate mental, and even emotional tie-ins pop into their minds.
When discussing branding however, it is important to also recognize the value of “personal branding” and how closely tied it is to corporate branding. So much of business is based on relationships. How many of the companies that you deal with deal with you because of who you are, not just because of who your company is?
In building your personal brand, Social tools, social networking sites, social marketing, and the like can be of huge value. But if you’re not careful they can also be a huge waste of time. Twitter may be great for the types of relationships you maintain, or it could just be a nuisance. The same can be said of MySpace, Facebook (although with the API for Facebook now we should be seeing some really interesting things develop), and a plethora of others (heck, there are even applications now that let you drag and drop components to create your own social networking applications in just minutes.)
A couple of social applications that have gain a lot of traction with business professionals, but are just lacking in too many features for the more aggressive social networker are Plaxo and Linked-In. Linked in is great for finding people, and leveraging personal networks to find skill-sets and ask some questions. Plaxo is nice for keeping my address book up to date. But these ponies are going to have to learn some new tricks to stay relevant in comparison to the newer, cooler tools out there.
Enter Plaxo Pulse. I read a wonderful, very detailed writeup today about Pulse. It looks like Plaxo has made some real strides forward:
- Â Allows you to store information about the contacts, rather than just what they provide (unlike linked-in)
- Categories (Family, Friends, Co-workers, People to keep track of so I can avoid them, etc)
- Can sync with your linked in data
- Ability to comment on other people’s updates “congrats on the promotion,” etc.
And lots, lots more. Go read the full post by Dan Sweet to see even more exciting features, as well as a few short comings you should be aware of.
Posted in Advertising, Marketing
Aug
15
Twitter is a great medium for sending free SMS (mobile text) messages. For those reading this not involved in the mobile industry, SMS is expensive, both in terms of cost, and time to set up.
We here at TwelveHorses.com consult to businesses about mobile messaging, Twitter, and how to integrate with these technologies. Here are some ideas that we’ve seen, and some that we’ve pitched to clients.
In your Restaurant, you have a “For coupons and info, send Follow MyRestaurant to 40404 from your cell phone” Then on Tuesday evenings about 5:30, when things are slow around dinner time, you Tweet “Free desert with dinner tonight if you mention this coupon.” In this respect, you hit all your interested customers, right at the dinner hour, wherever they are.
You’re a ski resort. You want to inform your skiers at the time they specify when fresh powder has reached x inches deep. To facilitate this, you build an application to send mobile messages to your interested skiers when snow reaches a certain depth. They sign up to follow your ski resort’s twitter with their phone, and you use the Twitter API to send them direct messages at the time they specify when the fresh snow is the depth they want.
You’re an online auction company, and you want to send out tweets for items that are undervalued 30 minutes before the auction ends to drive up prices. You integrate the Twitter API with your application to send those alerts out as public tweets, and invite people to join that twitter for killer deals.
You’re an airline. You have flights that have known empty seats. You integrate with the Twitter API to send out tweets 4 hours before a flight with empty seats and the heavily discounted price you’re willing to sell those seats for.
You’re a stock broker. You want to very quickly inform your clients about great stock deals. You have them sign up to follow your tweet, and as deals come through that you think they need to know about, you tweet them, and your clients receive the results.
You want to generate buzz about a new TV show on network XYZ. You announce prior to the show how to sign up for the show’s Twitter, and during the show, you have the director tweet the inside scoop on what’s really happening, almost like a directors commentary, but live with the broadcast of the show.
Really, the possibilities like this are endless, and can be tuned to your specific business model.
With Twitter, your message gets to the customer wherever they are, and with information that they want to know.
Clint Goudie-Nice
Architect / Senior Software Engineer
Posted in Advertising, Marketing, Twitter
Aug
7
There has been a titanic amount of buzz around Facebook and it’s new API. Some people love it, others pshaw it; but one thing is true… everyone is watching what becomes of it.
Phil Burns is hosting Utah Facebook Developers Garage, and we here at Twelve Horses are exited to be Sponsors for this upcoming event!
The location will be Noah’s, 644 N. 2000 W. Lindon, on Thursday, Aug 9th at 6:00 pm. Here’s a map to the location.
From Phil:
If you’re interested in meeting with other Utah people interested in exploring programming and business opportunities in Facebook,
please join our group on Facebook. Also, if you’re planning on coming to this Thursday’s meeting, please
RSVP on Facebook here.
The only admission for Thursday is to bring a bag of snacks or soda for the open-food table for all to share. Hope to see you there!
Posted in Events
