Automatic Followup Marketing via the Cloud

We have all felt the pressure as the United States continues sinking into more debt. It is important that we learn from past mistakes, and as small businesses, avoid following in the footsteps that lead to a downward trend.

The way we do business today has changed drastically from the way we did business back in the 70’s, 80’s and 90’s. Since the boom of the internet has placed information at our fingertips, small businesses have many exciting opportunities to grow their client base, and significantly increase their revenue.

Doug Masi of Geotechnix, LLC has embraced this new technology and directed his focus on assisting other companies and non-profit organizations as they harness that online power. What is that power, you may ask? It is the ability to incorporate a complete marketing solution for small to mid-sized businesses. Building a small or mid-sized business is not unlike building a racecar. We start with the engine and work our way out to the body. Think of the engine as a 24 hour system that is running and processing new business, capturing and following up on leads, offering instant acquisition of necessary resources, and providing a client data base. Now, think of the body of the racecar as your business image; both the incoming and outgoing marketing. Each business should have a website with a lead capture that enables prospects to visit 24 hours a day. We recommend having a personal video and video overview of your services or products. It is our purpose to assist clients in the race to drive traffic into their lead capturing sites by utilizing AFM (Automatic Follow-up Marketing).

Once this powerful AFM marketing solution system (racecar) is developed, it completely takes over. Before, a business owner would have to hire additional staff to handle leads, follow-up, do accounting, write letters, enter new information into a database and complete a variety of other support tasks. All of this creates tremendous overhead for the small business owner. With our new system, small business owners can grow their business from the sales out. New staff may be hired once a business has reached its monthly sales goals rather than the alternative of struggling to reach sales goals in order to support new staff. New staff members can therefore feel more confident in their job security.

The more productive our businesses are, the more secure our work force will be. Properly implemented, AFM systems can handle the workload of at least 3 to 5 people. Just think of the thousands of dollars that could save every month!

The economy will always be cyclical. Small to mid-size businesses that are positioned to take advantage of the time savings, and the sales leveraging power of AFM, are far more likely to succeed in challenging times like this.

With our compliments, we would like everyone who has taken the time to review this report to get a free report on Getting the Edge. Just visit http://GetTheEdge.onlineemercial.com

Cloud Computing and GIS

The world of GIS and Cloud Computing are going to take hold. The blog below is a great overview and clarification of what the “Clouds” can bring. Article by Ben R

Cloud computing has been the hot topic in many GIS circle for the last year or so, largely for the same reason it is building steam more recently in most IT circles in general – datacenters and bandwidth speeds are nearing the point where the promise of mass cloud computing is feasible for corporate users (which is where the money is).

For anyone previously not versed in this topic, cloud computing is basically the movement of applications, services, and data from local storage to massive datacenters run by people like Google, Yahoo, Amazon, and Microsoft. You probably use it already – say if you use GMail rather than a local application like Outlook or Windows Mail.

Maps have obviously moved there too. If you own a computer you probably use some kind of online map for directions. It doesn’t necessarily need to be in a browser either – Google Earth and NASA’s WorldWind might be local applications, but all of the data and services are running off of datacenters somewhere else.

It is believed this somewhat slow progression is going to accelerate as activities typically preformed by local IT departments for small and medium-sized businesses are increasingly replaced by cloud apps offered for basically free by the above organizations. It might seem foolish to marry yourself to a particular platform or business in this fashion but (1) a lot of these things are built on open standards like LAMP anyway and can be transferred around and (2) companies marry themselves to a vendor all the time (see SAP).

Traditional desktop software vendors are shifting to do their stuff at least partially as a service (and thus online). Windows 7 isn’t going to have a mail program, it is going to fill that functionality with Live Mail. ESRI, the biggest GIS software vendor, has made it a point to make it extremely easy to put online data services into map documents just as you would add in layers on a local computer.

A great number of GIS data providers, largely governmental, are not by and large going to venture into the cloud all that soon, not without intervention by legislators. Why?

Liability, tradition, data sensitivity.

What data public exists is often of variable quality, especially when overlaid with other information from other sources. Throw some bad data out there, even if you include metadata that includes a hefty disclaimer, morons will still use it to hike into a blizzard and and sue you for having to eat their children.

Even with good data, there is the problem of interpretation. Take a parcel layer from any given city/county government in the United States and throw it on Google Earth. GE does a pretty good job, but I would wager good money the satellite imagery isn’t accurate to a quarter of an inch. The parcel layer is, by law. The number of people who will go on to Google Earth and stir up property disputes without this knowledge is probably substantial enough to be a factor in deciding to release it.

And of course there is the security issue. Knowing what substation can black out a particular city block, what water main is feeding that block, communication lines, emergency vehicle GPS locations – this stuff could

The Direction of Cloud Computing

Great artical on the direction of cloud computing.   Check out this overall summary of some of the advancements with mobile devices and cloud applications.

Cloud Computing as a Service

Cloud computing is in simple terms software as a service (SAAS). Remember back when the first spreadsheet Lotus 123 came out. We rec’d a disc, loaded it on our computer and simply did a basic spreadsheet. Then came Windows and services such as MS WORD and Excel, which is ran on our own hard-drive, but offers the spreadsheet services at a much higher level, along with word processing.

Cloud computing for software is going to be what windows was to the screen of your desktop. Some argue that computing with cloud services is not going to be that big. I like Tim O’Reilly’s article, which makes reference to Larry Ellison’s of (Oracle) comments regarding the companies offering (SAAS).

Cloud computing is here to stay? As this topic grows, I hope others will assist in making that point.

How to create a Killer Marketing Campaign with Video on a low budget

The moment I saw video on the internet, I just had to jump on that train. I personally used it to promote a large rock event, by using the videos to add interesting content to our landing pages. We targeted ticket holders in the SW region of the country, to promote this event in 2008

Here are just a few of the fun videos which I did.
(See videos below)
Tracii Guns (LA Guns) Co-Founder of Guns-N-Roses.
Bret Michaels (VH1 Rock of Love)

These are just a few video which we added links to our landing pages. The added interest which then allow the views to push our landing pages to their friend. This was done through my marketing company GeoTechnix LLC.

I have a passion for marketing and cutting edge IT solutions. Cloud Computing is now on my horizon.

Keep on marketing! Doug

Video Email Marketing

I am a true believer that reaching out (via online) to customers or prospects with video, is a very powerful way to win their business.  The use of a simple flip video has done wonders for me.  I use a platform called TalkFusion which allows a user to upload their video messages and wrap it in a custom business template.  It was so successful I landed a marketing account for a rock event.  They like my video messages so much they even had me do video interviews with several of the artist.  Guess what I used, my flip video and TalkFusion