There are many of you reading this that are managers looking to get a better grasp on what an API is and how it can benefit your programmers. API is an acronym for “Application Programming Interface”. Simply put, this interface allows programmers to develop applications that communicate with an existing application or service to automate the flow of data and manual data entry.

The largest benefit of this process to organizations is the significant decrease in internal costs by eliminating the need for their employees to re-enter data that is already captured by an application, site or service. Programmers are provided with a powerful sets of tools that work within the software application. This allows the programmer to greatly extend the capability of the interaction with the product. The most sought after API’s at this time lie in the realm of Social Media and Customer Relationship Management (CRM). A great deal of these API’s are extremely programmer friendly and free. This makes them a win with lower cost to the client, win with ease of use for programmers and a big win for managers by cutting development time and providing increased ability to stay on track for deadlines and budget of deliverables.

Here are the 3 incredible Benefits of an API

1. Develops Consistency for programmers to write applications that automate tasks for the client. This in turn allows for improved user experience.


2. Easy Program Development by providing programmers the assurance that all protocols are addressed, for developing the program. This makes it much easier for the developer to create the program.


3. Greater ROI due to less internal cost needed which frees up the valuable time of you or your programmers.

API’s have been in use for decades. The advent of complex social networking programs has added to the popularity of using them. It is with strong suggestion that if you are either a programmer or manager that you closely follow API technology and the organizations that are utilizing them for outside programmers to interact with their code.

Let us know of any outstanding API’s that you would suggest.

So it may seem like it’s taken longer than any of us Gen X’ers thought it should to finally have a flying car available to us. Hell, Generation Y is already asking why they don’t already have personal spacecraft on the market for them?

At any rate, the flying car is officially here… almost. This vehicle of the future or now is a true engineering marvel and something we felt our readers would find of great interest. And most of all we just thought this is one of the coolest vehicles you can own. Check-it and let us know what you think of being able to pull out of your garage drive down the road, spread your wings and fly over 400 miles in less than 3.5 hours.

Flying Car Video

Off The Wall Media was brought in to work with the Portland Marathon in 2004. The Portland Marathon was looking for new ways to turn decreasing finisher numbers around and Les Smith, Event Director felt that improving their online marketing campaign would greatly increase the event’s reach. We couldn’t have agreed more with Les and together we set out on a mission to bring the Portland Marathon one of the best online marketing campaigns of any Marathon event.

As they say numbers don’t lie and the Portland Marathon has sold out the event for the first time in its 40-year history not once but back to back in 2010 and 2011. After only the first 5 years of the new online campaign, 2012 is not only poised to sellout again, it's set to set a record of how quickly it will sell out. Our team worked to do this by leveraging and integrating 3 simple interactive marketing platforms:

1. Utilize Email Marketing A Majority of The Portland Marathon’s correspondence and important event documentation is sent through email contact. The event treats each correspondence as they would any marketing collateral. They are branded and all deliver a message and call to action. Compilation of daily posts and weekly blogs develop content that is consistent with the conversations created through social media and website posts, over the course of the month.


2. Update Your Website Frequently Les Smith, Event Director, uses the Portland Marathon website to update all aspects of the event. This goes for something as simple as road closures or as complex as the Occupy Portland Movement setting up protests only hours before the event. Les has harnessed the power of using your website as your own broadcasting station.


3. Create Interaction with Social Media The Portland Marathon has over 5,000 followers on their Facebook page and regularly use Twitter, Facebook and several other social media sites to provide their followers with inside information on the event. In addition, there are polls that are created, to draw community interaction and ownership of changes that can be made to the event.

The Portland Marathon’s continued online email marketing campaigns, addition of social media campaigns and website enhancements have been a major contribution to the events success, says Les Smith the Portland Marathon Director. He has attributed the website as one of the largest factors in selling out FOR THE FIRST TIME IN THE EVENT’S 40 YEAR HISTORY. This site has been promoted on all local and regional news networks, it is the 8th largest marathon in the country and the website created by Off The Wall Media provides the portal to millions of dollars in registration revenue.

portlandmarathon.org

In addition, Off The Wall Media’s online distribution methods have significantly cut several costs to the Portland Marathon. Digital distribution has cut annual, print, development of mailers and mailing costs for the Portland Marathon by over $250,000 annually. This was previously one of the heftiest costs to the event. Off The Wall Media worked with the marathon to look at ways that hardcopy correspondence could be streamlined by online delivery. Our discovery was that we could cut mailings to over 15,000 participants, 5,000 volunteers and 25,000 additional past event participants and supporters each month. This was a significant savings to the event and has allowed for the revenue saved to be re-distributed to the incredible non-profit organizations that work so diligently to make the Portland Marathon an even greater success each year.

Let us know if you have additional ideas on how we can use the Internet to go paperless to sustain our environment and save our clients money.

This will update the serials of all of your *.hosts files in the same directory that you executed the "updateserials" command in (aka `pwd`). This only updates serials that begin with the current year. Enjoy!

#!/bin/bash
read −p "Are you sure you want to update `pwd`/*.hosts serial numbers to `date +%Y%m%d%H` (y/n)? "
if [ $REPLY == 'y' ];
then
  serial=`date +%Y%m%d%H`
  for file in $(ls `pwd`/*.hosts);
  do
    if [ −f $file ];
    then
      SEARCHYEAR=`date +%Y`
      OLD=`egrep −ho "$SEARCHYEAR[0−9]*" $file`
      NEW=$(($serial))
      sed −i "s/$OLD/$NEW/g" $file
      echo “fixed $file”
    fi
  done
fi

A great deal was learned, after recently taking inventory of our marketing agency’s own online marketing plan. We were a bit embarrassed to find that we were in fact making many of the mistakes that we so adamantly work to keep our clients from making. I’d like to share a bit of my company’s experience with you and some of the ways that we greatly improved our own online marketing campaign for FREE.

The first major step we took was to update our website’s look, feel, function and usability. Here are the 5 FREE Marketing Necessities that have already started driving our inbound leads:

1. FREE SOCIAL MEDIA PAGES Setup or Enhance your social media pages and set a schedule to update them with industry or details specific to your company. Maintain accounts on at least 3 of the following 5 Social Media Sites: Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+, YouTube, Yelp, Angie’s List or Vimeo.


2. BLOG about your company’s own experience 4 times a month. You can do some in depth pieces but just 1 to 3 paragraphs a week on your experiences and opinions on news in your industry.


3. FREE ENEWSLETTER SERVICES Create and maintain a monthly e-newsletter, utilizing free services like MailChimp.com or ConstantContact.com. Use a compilation of your daily posts and weekly blogs to develop content that is consistent with the conversation you’ve created.


4. SEARCH ENGINE FRIENDLY CONTENT DEVELOPMENT Write your website’s content to be search engine optimized. Create content that emphasizes the exact service or product that your viewer’s search phrase is intended to drive traffic to.


5. FREE GOOGLE ANALYTICS Setup and monitor your FREE Google Analytics account. Monitor this FREE SERVICE and use the statistics to improve your customer’s online experience and funnel to a point of sale.

There are still a number of improvements we are implementing on our own site, but these 5 FREE marketing platforms have already increased our organization’s visibility and inbound sales traffic.

The Internet is an ever-changing business landscape and as with any wild environment you must adapt to your surrounding. Make sure to use all of your resources wisely and always take advantage of any low or no cost marketing solutions. In addition, treat these marketing campaigns like you would a client meeting. Put them on a calendar, plan for them, be on time with execution and follow up. Using these 5 FREE marketing platforms will increase your company’s online marketing success.

Please feel free to comment below and leave suggestions on additional platforms that you think will help create successful online marketing campaigns.

Being initiated into the world of using Social Media for business can often times be a daunting task and generate more questions than answers. It may seem like Social Media has been around forever but the truth is it’s only been in wide use for less than five years and a majority of businesses are still working to integrate Social Media with their traditional marketing mix. So the question becomes, with all of these new Social Media sites, how do you know what will work for your business?

To know which Social Media sites will work for your organization’s intended reach, you need to have a general understanding of the major Social Media outlets and how they work. Over the past five years a group know as the “Big 5” has emerged as the dominant Social Media sites on the planet. They are Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+ and YouTube. The development and use of all of these new Social sites in such a short period of time has left many scratching their head, wondering what to do with these sites. Furthermore, how do they even learn to develop these new marketing tools. Let’s look first at the Social Media sites and what they do.

Facebook 800,000,000 users as of January 1, 2012
Originally designed as a tool for sharing just information between students at Harvard University, it has expanded into an absolute phenomenon and one of the largest social changes in human history. The core concept is simple, share your profile information, likes, exchange text based messages and photos. This is a simple concept but an absolute genius way to collect relevant demographic information and allow for advertisers to know exactly who is seeing their advertisements. Facebook is still used widely for personal connections but recently created a feature for businesses known as “pages”. These pages allow businesses to be attached to a personal Facebook accounts. Other Facebook users are able to “Like” your page, which in turn drives traffic to your branded Facebook Page. With a crafted campaign you can get your customers sharing your information about your organization with their friends and family. It’s the best referral source of all time.

One of the best examples of a Facebook Fan Page is for Coca Cola: http://www.facebook.com/cocacola

LinkedIn 135,000,000 users as of January 1, 2012
LinkedIn is a Professional Network site for businesses and business professionals. This site can be used to recruit new talent to your company, add credibility to your brand and enhance your online reputation. A good example of a company page and a professional page is for Mercedes Benz USA Company http://www.linkedin.com/company/164934?trk=tyah

Professional http://www.linkedin.com/profile/view?id=3836289&authType=OUT_OF_NETWORK&authToken=HNZC&trk=hb_upphoto

Twitter 300,000,000 users as of January 1, 2012
Twitter is what is known as a microblogging service. Users are allowed to send 140 character messages called “tweets” that other users can follow. Twitter users primarily share only text based messages. These messages can be used to make customers aware of information on your company. A great example of a ski resort keeping their guests up-to-date on what trails and lifts are open, Mount Hood Meadows Ski Resort tweets when certain lifts and trails open https://twitter.com/#!/MHMlifts. Twitter can be used to entice your customers to be “Following” your account so that they can have inside information on promotions.

Google+ 63,000,000 users as of January 1, 2012
The youngest of the Social Media sites, only being open to the public since September 20, 2011 Google+ has gained tremendous market share in a very short time. Google+ has many integration tools for other social platforms. Google+ is similar to many of the above Social Media sites and should have some very cool features being released over course of 2012. It is a very user friendly product and is very easy for users to use for both business and personal use. Google+’s page can be accessed at the following link. Lots of good CES info: https://plus.google.com/u/0/116899029375914044550/posts

YouTube Launched in 2005 Used by Millions in 2012
YouTube was once considered just for uploading personal videos but as the medium has evolved, it’s become a great way to promote your company. You can leverage advertisements that have been created for television or presentations your company has given and post them to your YouTube channel. These videos are accessible to anyone on the Internet and can be embedded into your site, to create additional content. YouTube is currently ranked as the 3rd busiest website on the Internet making it a very good idea for your organization to be there as well. One of the more memorable commercials of all time is for Snickers and can be viewed at the following YouTube link http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NEH1omnG77c

The second part of this post has to do with the ease of use in working with these tools. The best part about social sites is that they are made for the masses and a majority of the basic features and setup can be done in only a few hours and there are no setup or monthly fees associated with the services. To create more complex campaigns there may be the need for outside assistance but these tools truly put large media power in the hands of small business.

The question posed, “What Social Media Sites Should I Use For My Business”? The answer is you need to be a part of a majority of these social sites, to provide the most out of your marketing plan. Being a part of these networks will only benefit your organization. Furthermore, trends show that it will become increasingly more important to setup and maintain your Social Media sites, as more people join these networks.

Social Media is one of the most cost effective, targeted and easiest marketing methods that you have available to your business. Embrace it, use it and enjoy the rewards.