Local City-Specific Biz Coupons Through Twitter
Got a press release from Kevin Leu at MerchantCircle today about Merchant Circle now providing coupons via Twitter pages…very interesting.
From the press release/blog:
To further increase local business exposure online, MerchantCircle also announces the first-ever local city coupon Twitter feed. Merchant-built coupons are now automatically fed to city-specific Twitter feeds, so that local consumers can find local coupons and events in real-time. MerchantCircle local business owners create more than 50,000 online coupons and events every month. Merchant-created deals and events are automatically posted to the new Twitter feeds to expose local merchants to even more potential customers.
“I’m thrilled MerchantCircle is always coming up with ways that make it easier for customers to find us,” says Ken Mapel, owner of The Glass Guy in St. Paul, MN. “I can create coupons for free on MerchantCircle and they distribute them across the web. And now with the direct Twitter feed, they’re making it even easier to find more local customers. I currently receive around 80 calls per month from consumers who have found me on MerchantCircle; I’m looking forward to this bringing in even more.”
Are you on Merchant Circle, if you let me know how it is working for you.
Taking Some Time Out
It has been a while since I wrote so I thought I would say “hi” to all. I hope your summer is going well, and business is good. Things are slow on this end and business is behind last year’s pace. Time will tell if this is just dip in the road.
The past few days, I was attending Boy Scout camp with my 2 older sons. I am not a camper but I help run the troop and enjoy spending time with my boys. Must say I had a great time. Very relaxing, though extremely hot.
It was a great time because I was able to just put things down for a while and enjoy the outdoors. Growing up in NY, I never realized how many stars came out at night. LOL! I love looking at the stars.
I recommend everyone take some time out and enjoy life and appreciate all you have. 
I am getting back into the swing of things so I will be posting more soon. Thanks
Why Re-branding can Breathe New Life into Your Business
Today I decided to take a break - we have a guest author, Ben Johnson of Logoinn. They provide custom logo design services and are based in the UK. As a side note, if anyone else is interested in being a guest blogger here at LocalBizBits, just let me know.
Ben was also kind enough to provide all readers a 15% discount on any service ordered at Logoinn.com. All you need to do is enter this code “MKT-01” while placing an order in promotion code section. Thanks Ben for your post today.
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During these challenging economic times it is vital that you think outside of the box if you want your business to survive, let alone thrive. You will need to come up with creative and high-impact solutions in order to keep your business ahead of the pack.
In this regard, you might want to consider the benefits that can be realized through the re-branding process. Through this article you are provided some basic and essential information about re-branding, re-designing your firm logo and breathing new life into your business.
Re-branding: An Overview
If you have a product or service that appears to have stalled on the market, that consumers no longer seem interested in purchasing no matter how much money you are spending on advertising and promotion, the time may have arrived for you to consider re-branding that product or service.
At its heart, re-branding can best be described as a strategy that is designed to reposition a product or service – or the entire business itself – to distance itself from an association with its previous brand identity. Additionally, re-branding sometimes is used to move a product up-market – in a direction that will make it more appealing to consumers who have more money to spend. This type of up-market re-branding is becoming particularly useful during these challenging and difficult economic times.
In many instances (indeed, in nearly every case) the re-branding process is undertaken with a radical alteration of the business’s logo, image, brand name, advertising themes and overall marketing strategy. In the end re-branding is not so much a company or product face lift but entire, comprehensive overhaul.
Re-branding: An Affordable Marketing Solution
Through the re-branding process you will be able to better focus the money that you have available in your budget for marketing and promotion. The fact is that changing the design of logos and making other types of essential and yet not complex changes can effect a transformation of a business or product without the expenditure of significant amounts of money.
Marketing budgets are very tight in this day and age. Therefore, the only prudent course a business really can take to alter its market position is to take the course of re-branding.
The Importance of Logo Design in the Re-Branding Processing
When all is said and done, the logo associated with a business enterprise really is the heart and soul of the identity of that venture. The brand and the logo in some very significant and definitive ways are connected.
Therefore, if you are intended on undertaking a re-branding process, you definitely will have to focus a great deal of your attention on ensuring that the “new” logo will meet your ultimate goals and objectives.
Towards this end you need to understand that not “any old” logo designer will do. Rather, you will need to engage the professional services of a logo design firm that has specific experience on business or product re-branding. You must have a designer that understands how to get from Point A to Point B in the re-branding process. Obviously, you do not want to engage the services of a logo designer that lacks this specific depth of experience. If you did make that mistake, you may end up unsuccessfully re-branding your project in such a manner that your market share will nose dive and you will end up in an irreversible free fall.
Conclusion
Understanding the challenging economic climate in which you are running your business, the time really may have come for you to take a close look at initiating a re-branding process. As has been enumerated in this article, you definitely need to make sure that you have a logo design pro who understands re-branding on your team in order to ensure maximum results.
When all is said and done, through an appropriately facilitated re-branding process (with a talented logo designer on board) you will be able to reposition your business in such a manner so that you will be able to maximize revenues and profits not only in the immediate but in the long term future as well.
Twitter- just a quick observation
A while back, my good friend Gib tweeted ”Has twitter reduced the comments on your blogs? Seems like the conversations happen on twitter instead of the comment sections?” I saved his comments because I wanted to respond but wanted to use more than 140 characters. LOL
Twitter has changed a lot regarding blogging. I find myself reviewing my Twitter account more than my Google Reader. I still do read my blogs but with Twitter you get information/links/comments very close to real time. I find this helps me keep up with what is important to me (local search and sports).
From the blogs I follow, it seems like there has been less postings, but no lack of tweets. In addition, to getting information as it happened, it also appears that Twitter can act as an instant messaging tool. I know I have used it a few times to get a hold of someone so I could call them.
So I agree with Gib that Twitter has effected blogging and commenting on blogs. How long will Twitter be around? Not sure, but right now it is hot and to stay competitive online, you need to make sure you are int the middle of it. My retired father-in-law even asked me if he should get a Twitter account.
So what has your experience been with Twitter? Has it changed how you read, converse online? Are the bloggers you follow on Twitter more than their blogs?
Anyone out there? If no one responds, I will understand.
Thank goodness that my blog post get sent to Twitter also.
Feel free to follow me on Twitter.
Local Search Summit Announced
Got a note late last night from Steve Espinosa, the world’s #1 White Sox fan, about a new conference he has put together: Local Search Summit.
This awesome sounding summit will take place in San Francisco on July 17, 2009. If you want more info, please head over to the website.
From what I have read, it sounds to be an action packed day and has a great headline of speakers/panel members such as:
Andrew Shotland
David Mihm
Greg Sterling
Will Scott
I am looking into going myself but need to check our vacation plans. If you want to learn more about local search, here is a great opportunity.
Local Search Articles
Wanted to bring to your attention some cool articles I have recently read. Remember reading is good for you.
The Definitive List of Local Search Directories You Need To List With from Keith Hagen at eMarketing Matador
Google Local - Out of Date, Riddled with Spam But Absolutely Worth It at SEOMoz
KML and sitemaps for SEO - The definitive guide by Martijn Beijk
Local Search Inclusion with David Mihm on SEOMoz Whiteboard Friday nice video that I found at Understanding Google Maps & Local Search blog by Mike Blumenthal
How To Handle Negative Reviews Of Your Business by David Ingram over at Search Engine Land
All Aboard the Twitter Train by David Mihm over at Search Engine Land
The New fōne book
One reason smartphones were created were to hopefully make some things in life easier and give us access to important information or resources quickly. This week, a new app for the Blackberry Storm, is coming out, the fōne book, from BlindingRain, a small start up company here in the US. This is an app that I have been waiting for - a white pages phone directory which gives you the ability to find people, business and a reverse phone lookup option. Dan Hoff of BlindingRain was kind enough to provide me an advanced copy to take it for a test run.
Overall I like the app for the following reasons:
- easy to use interface
- excellent response time
- none or minimal memory leak
- was built specifically for the Storm
- great price tag
- company stands behind product
For some great screen shots, check out their product website and click on the different components listed.
After testing the app, I sat down with Dan and picked his brain about fōne book.
Q. Dan, one the big things, with Storm users is memory leakage. Did you guys test this?
A . We have designed the fōne book to have a small device footprint and a very low operational memory overhead. With the app on and running in background, our bench-testing has been unable to detect any negligible additional drain on battery life. We have done a significant amount of memory leakage and security testing on the fōne book. In over 100 hours of bench-testing, we have not been able to detect any memory leakage what so ever. Both memory leakage and security have been concerns of ours from the early stages of our development process.
Q. How does fōne book search listings?
A. This comes close to some proprietary information but I can give you a generic answer. We use a couple of logic streams, one for People Search and one for Business Search. However, both use a 35-mile radius logic when either no exact match is found to a specifically named search target, or if you are searching within a general business category. The search system is something that we consider to be a continual work-in-progress for us. Our data partner has been extremely helpful to us and has permitted us a wide range of input into the development of our search system. So this is something that will only get better as time and experience build and user feedback comes in.
Q. Where do you get your data from?
A. While not at liberty to name names at this point. For a typical user of the fone book or for anyone using a search tool of any type, they don’t want “all of the answers to everything – they only want the right answer to their query - now”.
At the present we work with a data aggregation company. This firm draws data from three of the top directory sources in the US for our residential search and two of the top data sources for business search.
Q. Does fōne book use the Storm’s GPS features?
A. No. Using the GPS as part of an upcoming upgrade/enhancement is under consideration, but there are two main reasons that I don’t feel that it is a core to our product. First, GPS as a feature has a number of user experience drawbacks and I don’t feel that it is one of the stronger features of the BlackBerry Storm. When implemented on our test application, it created memory leaks, degraded battery life and inhibited the speed of result delivery to the user. For now, we feel that until the GPS feature is significantly improved, we would just as soon not include it in our app. The second reason we have not included GPS is due to user feedback.
Q. What makes fōne book different?
A. The fōne book does one thing and does it very, very well. But to more clearly articulate what differentiates us from the rest of the din in the market, I would have to say that first and foremost, it is our orientation. This is an app that was literally built by and for Storm users. We have resisted the temptation to build in opulent features, complicated menu trees and multi-step processes.
All that we wanted to do was to build a useful tool for BlackBerry Storm users. We wanted to build something useful to a broad spectrum of users whether they were a business user, a “road warrior”, a soccer mom or just someone who wanted a good phone that did more. It needed to be something that would be used every day and would be as useful and used in 2 years as it would be in the first 30 days.
It is fairly innovative to show all the necessary information in one, single frame for the user. So if you have a contact, you can see the address, the phone number and can see the map of where that contact is located, all without having to page from one view to another. Fast, easy and efficient. Then, within the same view, you can click-to-call or click-to-add to your contacts. All without a lot of complicated intervening screens and menus. To summarize, our main difference is that the fōne book is a small, simple app that does what we say it will do. It does it very, very well and adds to the value of the Storm as an advanced, smart tool to the end user - all for a reasonable price.
Q. Speaking of price, what sort of price tag are we looking at?
A. We are being very aggressive here. The trend in the greater BlackBerry apps eco-system for high price concerned us. We didn’t want to contribute to that trend, so we set $2.99 as our full retail price. Now I want to caution you. That is a lifetime price, not a 6-month service price and includes updates and email support for as long as you own your Storm.
Q. What are future upgrade plans?
A. We have a lot of ideas for future upgrades as well as other products along this same line for the future. First would be to fully integrate the BlackBerry Contacts into the fōne book search UI. That would mean that if I am looking for someone and they exist in my contacts, the would be displayed in the fōne book search results along with the same data display as is now done for search contact details.
Next, we are looking at the possibility of adding reverse search by address, in addition to reverse search by phone number. Then you can find, neighbors and people “near by” from your fōne book. Then there is always working through the issues of GPS and beginning to find a way to bring that functionality into the fōne book and add to the user experience at the same time. The one thing that we intend to do in moving forward though is to listen. We want to hear from our users.
Q. Where do you search mobile search going in the near future?
A. To me mobile search has had a bad rap up until now – and for good reason. To this point, developers and applications have tried to take the desktop computer search experience and replicate it on mobile devices. It hasn’t really worked.
Mobile devices are getting closer to the speed of desk-top computing, but let’s face it is a tinny screen and doesn’t have the computing power, so it just isn’t working. The user experience is not what it should be and the overall performance of the search applications just doesn’t fit in the ‘small box’ environment of mobile devices. Apps like ours – specific or spot solution search tools – seem to fit this mobile environment far better than the search portal concept. The user experience is far superior and the utility and functionality of search as a function becomes far more human tool oriented when this approach is applied. Users benefit, mobile carriers benefit and those app developers who tap into this will benefit. To me, this is the necessary direction of search in the mobile device eco-system.
Congrats to Dan and BlindingRain on great new app for the Storm. As of this writing, the app should be available from Mobihand - more details to follow.
