Posts Tagged ‘Tags’

What Were They Thinking?

May 19 2009

Our use of Basecamp and Highrise borders on religion. Seriously, we use Basecamp not only to manage our clients’ projects, but to administer the entire company. Marketing plan, in there. Accounting, in there. Brand guidelines, in there. It goes on and on. We leverage the Highrise CRM for all relationships with vendors, friends, customers, prospects and each other. Highrise tasks keep us running like a well-oiled machine, which is why today’s announcement boggles the mind.

37signals appears to have sold out with today’s release of Twitter integration with Highrise. Now all 10 of my clients that Tweet can have their daily routine captured in Highrise. This introduces noise, a cancer, into our CRM with little benefit. So Jason Fried and the gang don’t have time to add a long-requested feature allowing API users to tag customers and prospects, but instead jumped on the bandwagon. For a company that prides itself on being a leader, this feels a lot like a follow.
Followers
Why we care. We recently started to amp up our use of Highrise by integrating through the API to our online marketing campaigns. It’s great. We send targets to a personalized microsite, they click buttons, roll over rollovers and opt-in for goodies and information. All of this activity can now be pushed into Highrise, building a really solid customer/prospect profile for later marketing and sales touches. Awesome!

For example, we run this cool Hotel-themed campaign. If recipients opt-in we add them to Highrise, but because we can’t tag them we run the risk of sending the same campaign to the same person twice. Today’s API forces us to play Twister to extract the data. It’s so cumbersome that we keep a spreadsheet offline to make sure we don’t have campaign dups. If we were running only one campaign that might be acceptable, but when you run 5 or more campaigns simultaneously it’s overwhelming.

We think the guys and gal at 37signals are usually on their game, but what were they thinking? Nobody’s perfect. I know we aren’t, but we expect more from the inventors of Basecamp and Highrise.

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Advanced Twitter, Part III

March 4 2009

Yesterday we promised more information on how to use #hashtags to leverage Twitter. You might use # to track bugs with your software or complaints from users. On the other hand you could use # to announce and track tweets about a new product or service. Some have used # at trade shows to create a real-time conversation between and among attendees right on the show floor.

You’ll find stories #hashtag communities tracking a presidential address, or the wildfires in California. The possibilities are seemingly limitless, but are likely most effective when creating short-term crowds that gather and disperse quickly.

If you don’t define yourself on Twitter others will. Creating a #hashtag is just the first step. Once you have one in place it is a good idea to define yourself on Tagal.us. Doing so will not only gives you (us) the ability to track your tag. It’s not a perfect science, but it holds promise for those looking to take their tweets beyond 140 characters.

If you’d like to provide us a little feedback about this blog just add #vlg to your tweet.

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Advanced Twitter, Part II

March 3 2009

Now that you are tweeting and following with your brand new Twitter account you might be looking for a way to sift through the minutia. Highly relevant content flying around on Twitter never makes it to you. You see only what you follow.

What if you want to follow what you don’t see? That’s where the hash (number sign) comes in. The good folks that created Hastags.org thought it might be a good idea to build real-time news communities. Here’s an example.

At VLG we are always looking for feedback about us, our website, our philosophy, or the marketing campaigns we build for our clients. Lots of us have Twitter accounts, including one “corporate” account. If I post a tweet about any of the above it might look something like this:

@mosimmons what did you think of about our new homepage? #wefightboredom.com

If others at VLG make the same request of their Twitter followers, we’ll be able to track that specific #hastag to see results for all tweets that include #wefightboredom. Run out to Hashtags.org, search for your tag to capture aggregate results. What you’ll find is a clunky UI that spits back raw, but useful data.

Tomorrow we’ll show you how to leverage #hashtags, clean up that data, and tweet with confidence.

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