Alberta Business Marketing

Last Tuesday when I skipped out of the HTG meeting with Aaron Booker to see our good buddy Jeremy Epstein speak at the Microsoft Dallas office and didn’t realize what a great reminder I was about to receive on the power of raving fans.

Jeremy Epstein is a marketing guru from Washington, DC. This guy has everything screwed on tight and I am very fortunate to have him as a friend and colleague.  Beside being a friend of Mrs. Epstein’s son Jeremy, I am a raving fan of this guy and when I have an opportunity I toot the Epstein horn.  I stop at getting his face tattooed on my butt, that would be disgusting but let’s look at tattoos for a second and raving fans.

What is the world most popular motorcycle? I bet you will say Harley Davidson.  People spend thousands on Harley’s shirts, wallets with chains and much more.  What other bike manufacturer has 4o year old accountants who dress up on the weekends as bad-ass motorcycle dudes and have Harley tattoos on their body.

Does your business have fans like this?  Hmmm, I don’t think so.  But wouldn’t be nice!

Are there people out there who can’t stop talking about you?  No, maybe you need to look in the mirror then.  If you said yes then way to go. I believe having raving fans in your business starts with applying some of the Go-Giver principles.  Then treating people of respect and wowing the heck out of them so they can’t stop talking about you.  They speak about your business every chance they can, they blog about you, the mention your stuff in their Facebook statuses and they will bend over backwards to help.  I am a raving fan for many of my colleagues in and around Calgary.  From Information Technology firms, bookkeepers, leasing agents…and many more.

A true Raving Fan will be there with you through your darkest hours…hey, I am a raving Leaf fan…I know this!

Ulistic also has our raving fans as well…and thank you to those who share our name out there, sometimes 24 hours a day.

What are you doing to create raving fans in your business?

Remember this…on the extra mile, there are no traffic jams!

Tags: Aaron Booker, Calgary, Facebook, Human Interest, Jeremy Epstein, microsoft, raving fans, Stuart's ramblings, Washington DC
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My good buddy and long time friend, plus creator of the Stuart Crawford look Richard Tubb in Birmingham, England is involved in a Microsoft scheme and needs our help.  Well at least feedback!

What are those devilish software giants in Redmond up too these days?

It looks like they are continue the scare tactics, now with UK IT services providers.  The focus remains zeroed in on the Microsoft BPOS offering and some IT partners are running scared into the vast UK wilderness.  Hey guys they did that on this side of the Atlantic as well.  Microsoft BPOS solution is a great offering for the small businesses, not only in the UK but also here in Canada.  It is ideal for the small business who doesn’t need anything complex and wants to save a small fortune in server costs plus monthly maintenance fees from their local IT provider.

Ulistic is a Microsoft BPOS partner providing Hosted Exchange, SharePoint and the rest of the suite.  Although we run Google internally we still have clients running the Microsoft hosted suite of products and we never have to support them, it just runs and runs great.

Richard is looking for some feedback on this latest Redmond driven scheme.  Read the Tubblog article here and jump in with some comments.

Tags: Birmingham, Business/Finance, canada, Computing, devilish software giants, Google Inc., microsoft, Microsoft Corporation, Richard Tubb, Technology/Internet, United Kingdom
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Got this email from Google today.  Do we still have people using Internet Explorer 6 out there?  If so, why? Dear Google Apps admin, In order to continue to improve our products and deliver more sophisticated features and performance, we are harnessing some of the latest improvements in web browser technology.  This includes faster JavaScript processing and [...]

Tags: California, Cloud applications, cloud computing, collaboration products, Computing, Cross-platform software, Gmail, google, google chrome, Google Docs, Google Inc., Google Sites editor, internet explorer, microsoft, Mountain View, Mozilla Firefox, Online Solutions, small business technology, Technology/Internet, web 2.0, Web applications, World Wide Web
Posted in Alberta Business | | Comments Off

Microsoft search engine Bing inked a deal with Twitter that includes tweets in search results.  Microsoft announced the deal onstage at the Web 2.0 Summit today.  The non-exclusive deal made it easy for Google to piggyback on the Bing announcement with their own announcement of a commitment to feature Tweets in search results.

Significance of the Bing / Google Twitter Announcements for Travel:

Tweets aren’t just for your followers on Twitter any more. Travel regions and tourism businesses will need to post relevant tweets and links to benefit from higher visibility among search users whether or not they are users of Twitter. Tweets will show up in Search results.

The upshot: Get tourism businesses in your region tweeting!

Twitter on Bing

Using http://bing.com/twitter will reveal relevant real time Twitter search results.  Microsoft also announced that soon Facebook status updates will also be featured on the search engine.  What is interesting is that Bing sample results page features the tweeted link title and sample tweets featuring the avatar (photo) and text of the tweet!

Twitter on Google

Surely the enlightenment of embedding Twitter in search results on Google was overdue.

In May this year I reported how Google was not invited to the Twitter Party, and that Twitter search was indeed a critical piece of the search puzzle for Web 3.0 – the Here and Now Web.

It appears now, Google and Twitter have come to a financial agreement  that will result in tweets being featured in Google search results.

News on the Twitter deal from the Google Blog

“Given this new type of information and its value to search, we are very excited to announce that we have reached an agreement with Twitter to include their updates in our search results. We believe that our search results and user experience will greatly benefit from the inclusion of this up-to-the-minute data, and we look forward to having a product that showcases how tweets can make search better in the coming months.”

What will Tweets in Search Results look like?  We don’t know yet.

Some users of Firefox have been using a Greasemonkey script which embeds Twitter search results at the top of any Google search result as shown below.

Google itself highlighted the importance of travel regions and tourism operators making effective use of the Twitter platform on its blog post:

“The next time you search for something that can be aided by a real-time observation, say, snow conditions at your favorite ski resort, you’ll find tweets from other users who are there and sharing the latest and greatest information.”

Impact of these Twitter announcements from Google and Microsoft:

• The Here and Now Web (Web 3.0) is here.  Real time search results and location relevant search results will take on greater importance.
• Twitter will Grow in adoption as tweets get greater visibility beyond the Twitterverse.
• A new era of search engine innovation will come about as engineers figure out how to identify relevant tweets from spam.
• With access to Twitter search results, Google and Microsoft will need to rethink their search result algorithyms and determine how much relative importance to give to tweets.

Share your thoughts?

Tweet This

Tags: bing, google, google news, microsoft, real time search, research / trends, Twitter, Web 3.0
Posted in Alberta Business | | Comments Off

Microsoft search engine Bing inked a deal with Twitter that includes tweets in search results. Microsoft announced the deal onstage at the Web 2.0 Summit today. The non-exclusive deal made it easy for Google to piggyback on the Bing announcement with their own announcement of a commitment to feature Tweets in search results.

Significance of the Bing / Google Twitter Announcements for Travel:

Tweets aren’t just for your followers on Twitter any more. Travel regions and tourism businesses will need to post relevant tweets and links to benefit from higher visibility among search users whether or not they are users of Twitter. Tweets will show up in Search results.

The upshot: Get tourism businesses in your region tweeting!

Twitter on Bing

Using http://bing.com/twitter will reveal relevant real time Twitter search results. Microsoft also announced that soon Facebook status updates will also be featured on the search engine. What is interesting is that Bing sample results page features the tweeted link title and sample tweets featuring the avatar (photo) and text of the tweet!

Twitter on Google

Marissa Mayer announces Google deal with Twitter at Web 2.0 Summit (youtube)

Surely the enlightenment of embedding Twitter in search results on Google was overdue.

In May this year I reported how Google was not invited to the Twitter Party, and that Twitter search was indeed a critical piece of the search puzzle for Web 3.0 – the Here and Now Web.

It appears now, Google and Twitter have come to a financial agreement that will result in tweets being featured in Google search results.

News on the Twitter deal from the Google Blog

“Given this new type of information and its value to search, we are very excited to announce that we have reached an agreement with Twitter to include their updates in our search results. We believe that our search results and user experience will greatly benefit from the inclusion of this up-to-the-minute data, and we look forward to having a product that showcases how tweets can make search better in the coming months.”

What will Tweets in Search Results look like? We don’t know yet.

Some users of Firefox have been using a Greasemonkey script which embeds Twitter search results at the top of any Google search result as shown below.

Google itself highlighted the importance of travel regions and tourism operators making effective use of the Twitter platform on its blog post:

“The next time you search for something that can be aided by a real-time observation, say, snow conditions at your favorite ski resort, you’ll find tweets from other users who are there and sharing the latest and greatest information.”

Impact of these Twitter announcements from Google and Microsoft:

• The Here and Now Web (Web 3.0) is here. Real time search results and location relevant search results will take on greater importance.
• Twitter will Grow in adoption as tweets get greater visibility beyond the Twitterverse.
• A new era of search engine innovation will come about as engineers figure out how to identify relevant tweets from spam.
• With access to Twitter search results, Google and Microsoft will need to rethink their search result algorithyms and determine how much relative importance to give to tweets.

Share your thoughts?

Tweet This

Tags: bing, google, google news, microsoft, real time search, research / trends, Twitter, Web 3.0
Posted in Alberta Business | | Comments Off