The Utah Social Media Developers Garage will be tonight, December 11, at 7pm at our office in Draper, Utah. Jesse Stay has lined up Jeff Barr, evangelist for Amazon Web Services, who will speak on how Amazon AWS is being used in Social environments. After Jeff’s talk, there will be a round-table discussion with topics such as Google’s OpenSocial, Facebook, and other Social Media.

We would like to thank Jesse and his consulting company SNAPlic8 for putting this event together, and Bungee Labs for providing the food.

We hope to see you there!

Okay, so you’re going to have to forgive me for tooting my own horn here, but I am awfully excited.  As many of you who know me well know, although we are increasingly involved in the community here in Utah, we also are extremely active in Nevada as well.  So the fact that yesterday the Technology Business Alliance of Nevada announced Twelve Horses as the “2007 Technology Company of the Year” had me pretty jazzed.

Other exciting news: We are moving at the end of this month out to Draper.  Our office size space will be roughly doubling, which should be nice.  We’ll be sure to have you all out for an “office warming” party.

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:

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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!

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I Just HAD to pass along this tidbit from the main Twelve Horses Blog:

This hilarious parody, entitled “The Couple”, pokes fun at the disconnect that currently exists between traditional advertising and today’s consumers.

There is definitely a need for change within the industry as advertisers continue to view their audience as a statistic or dollar opportunity instead of forging meaningful relationships that will benefit all those involved.

“You’re saying you love me but you’re not behaving like you love me. It’s not genuine.”

The world needs more genuine advertising.

So I just got back from vacation in Norway for two weeks (wonderful experience BTW), and was completely slammed with stuff that needed to be done. Once I spent a week mowing through the backlog, I am now three weeks out from when I last wrote anything for this blog. It got me to thinking…

Have you ever noticed that the things that are never really a fire, never really urgent, seem to be the ones that sneak up later and bite you in the butt? Things like exercise, spending time with you kids, telling your spouse how much they mean to you.

I think marketing can often fall into this same trap. Sure, you market when you have a new product release, or some new flashy doodad that you want to make sure everyone knows about. But if you have not laid a consistent groundwork, you can find yourself stepping out onto your balcony to cry your exciting news out to…
no one… no one is there, because no one knows or cares who you are.

As I’m sure you can tell from my blog, I tend to think a fair amount about communicating.  But really, communication is a means to an end, and then end is: relationships.  I really think that our relationships are what ground us.

In this vein, a dear friend of mine is taking an opportunity at another company at the end of this week.  Though I’m very sad for myself, I wish him this best of luck, and know that it will be a wonderful growing experience for him.

It has really made me reflect back however, on situations like this.  Wherever I have worked, there have always been times when either through my moving on, or through other changes, that I have had to part ways with talented people.  Almost always however, this has brought new color, and new life to the friendship.  As they and I both continue to learn more, we continue to interact, and bring even broader insight to each other.

There have also been many situations like this with customer.  I cannot tell you how many times we have panicked to find out that a key point of contact is leaving one of our customers.  There is often some initial pain, as new people have filled those roles, and have either needed to be brought up to speed, or sometimes have initially questioned the relationship between the two companies (it seems that many people like to be seen as decisive, and change making as soon as they are put into a position.)  But fast forward a year down the road, and almost without fail we have found ourselves working very closely and happily with these new people, and converting them from skeptics to advocates.  Additionally, we very often find that the previous advocate who has moved on is calling us from a new capacity in their new employer, and wanting to leverage us again.

It seems like so much of business is this way.  It is so often the biggest challenges that truly make us rise to the occasion.

Never burn a bridge, and don’t despair… there is no such thing as an end… just changes and new beginnings.

The forest that never suffers fire becomes weak and old.   Capitalize on the change.

I was listening to NPR on my way home last night, and they were talking about the new logo that had been chosen for the upcoming Olympics. Apparently there is something of an uproar about it. It got me thinking a bit about marketing.

It seems that way too often marketing can be vanilla… attempt to appeal to everyone, or at least not alienate anyone, and then win customers through simple repetition. For those who have an unlimited marketing budget that may be fine. But for those who need to get results with every dollar, repetition of mediocre messaging may not be an option.

The hardest part then, is making the right decision, and coming to grips with who you are not going to appeal to. It’s like the eagle… once it hones in on a rabbit, it does not lament the other rabbit, which it has chosen not to chase. Make sure you are willing, and able to make similar choices with your marketing. If you choose a “hip” new logo and campaign, make sure that the “hip” market you are after is big enough, and make sure you are comfortable with the “non-hip” market that you now might appeal less to. Choose your target wisely, do your homework, and then make part of the discussions around the campaign be identifying who might react poorly, and make sure everyone is on board with the choice.

  You know, it always seems to be the case that those who work in any given industry tend to do the worst at living it themselves… It’s the old story of the cobbler’s children going barefoot because he is so busy making shoes for other people.  Likewise, I know a person who does incredible lanscaping work for people.  But his yard looks like crap.

So this brings us to the topic of blogs, and specifically Technorati.  What are blogs all about?  Well, there are lots of answers to that, but one of the most common might be something along the lines of “Candid, timely, information snippets.”  Not to mention that search engines like Google love them.  Blog on a topic that is happening, and you are very likely to show up on Google’s front page. 

In the world of Blogging, there is a key tool: Technorati.  Bloggers use technorati extensively to see how certain aspects of their blogs are doing. 

Well, technorati has been down most of the day today.  Go ahead and search for a reason why.  Know what you’ll find? Nothing.  I made it a personal goal to really dig into this one, and I found absolutely nothing.  I find it odd that a company so integral, and tied into blogging, and its power, doesn’t have a blog that is still up when they are down, that is telling me what is happening.  I guess the cobbler is busy making shoes for other kids.

As I have stated before on this blog, you cannot choose not to market.  That which you do not conciously do becomes marketing by accident.  Unfortunately for Technorati, they have enforced an aspect of their brand today.

  For those of you who were not able to attend, there was a wonderful event at the Salt Palace last week.  Seth Godin, Marketing Guru, and general simplifier of complex concepts, spoke to a crowd of roughly 400 people to promote his new book, “The Dip” (Which, even as a gold level sponsor of the event, I am still waiting to get my copies of )

You can find  a more detailed writeup of the event at the Utah Tech Spotlight.

But I also wanted to take this chance to tease you a bit about another upcoming event we are involved in in Utah:  On June 28th there will be a New Media conference including all sorts of exciting names and personalities from the worlds of Blogging, Podcasts, video marketing, social marketing, and every other kind of new way to communicate that you could possibly shake a stick (or even a bunch of sticks) at.

More details to follow. We hope to see you there.

This morning, as a stream of Twitters went flying through my IM client, I noticed that Phil801 had mentioned a live video feed. I saw a few of the SLC Twitter crew comment on the quality, so I clicked through to check it out. Apparently, Phil801 had helped setup a Politic 2.0 and was broadcasting a live video feed conversation with Congressman Chris Cannon. Immediately upon viewing, I recognized the shape of a bald head sitting front and center:

I continued watching to confirm my suspicion when I caught this:

Yup. It was none other than our own Steve Spencer, President of Twelve Horses. Weird how Twitter led me to Steve. I’m not sure if this is the power of online social networking or just working to make the world even smaller.