Graphics.ms Blog

We Need Beta Testers

For the past year, my partner (and developer) and I have been studying social networking, and finding better ways to provide our clients with the tools to use it effectively. Although I cannot reveal much about it right now, it is a social networking profile system that works on the domain of the company using it.

We’ve done our estimates and have found that there will be an estimated annual page-view count of several billion. Each page of the application will contain a “Powered By: Software-name” link, which will point to the application’s parent website. On the parent website, we will display a list of Case Studies. For your participation in assisting with Beta Testing the software, you will be listed in this section with a link to your website. It will also include the feedback and experience that you had with the software.

For your help, we’ll allow you to have a complimentary license of the software, and the rights to use it for your business. Also, with the estimated page-view of the application itself, it will be driving a large amount of traffic to the parent website (as well as your Case-Study). This should in return increase views of your website, and also increase your SEO rankings through a back-link.

Eligibility:

1. Since the software is geared more towards sales teams and employee use, I would prefer candidates to have upwards of 5-10 employees (with a sales team).

2. There will be a small list of questions that we will send to you every week as a followup. This will help us analyze and improve the efficiency of the application. These are required as part of the Beta Testing agreement. It is because of this that we are willing to offer complimentary licensing.

3. We will not consider companies that are considered a conflict of interest. These include Web Design, Branding, and Graphic Design companies. All others are eligible.

For a full disclosure of the software, and consideration for Beta Testing, please email me (Michael Sim) at solutions@graphics.ms

Graphics.ms Website Demo

Greetings!,
It’s a new year, and for myself and many people out there, it’s time to turn over a new leaf. In business terms, this means a new approach to making high-quality website design and development affordable for everyone. Being a Chicagoan, I’ve learned one very important rule in doing business: Get Straight to The Point, and Show Me How You Can Affect My Bottom Line.

Getting to the point: I would like to earn your business by creating a website that will blow away your competition for free.

Here’s the plan:

1. You and I will talk by phone, and I’ll get a better understanding of your company. We’ll discuss your brand, your website, and all of the different marketing features that are currently in use.
2. I will then walk you through our Website Demo. The demo itself contains working examples of a majority of the advanced features that we offer our clients. From the demo, I will be able to get a better understanding of which tools best fit your company.
3. After our discussion, I will put together an estimate for your consideration.
4. After the estimate/proposal is ready, I will present it to you personally for your review.
5. If accepted, I will do the following (at no cost):
a. Install a Content Management System (Joomla) on my website testing server.
b. I will design and configure the site to reflect your company’s brand identity.
c. I will present the website URL to you for review.
6. If the website meets your approval, we’ll discuss payment arrangements. If it’s not quite there yet, we’ll work with you directly to prepare it to your exact specifications.
7. With a down-payment on the project, we’ll be able to take your website Live.

There aren’t many companies out there willing to do a custom “try before you buy” website design package. Doing “free” work without any promise of payment is something that most companies try to avoid. That’s why I prefer to talk first, learn about your company, and then create a list of objectives. I can work with any budget, and I have plenty of samples on my portfolio that demonstrates my (and my team’s) capabilities.

We’re a small team (3) with a small overhead. Our pricing is not only competitive, but for the value and personal attention that we put into each project, working with us is well worth the investment.

Here is our portfolio for your consideration: http://graphics.ms/portfolio/web

If you feel that we would be a good match for your company, let’s kick things off with a quick phone call. Prior to our call I will send you a link to our website demo, and we can go over it together personally.

Have a great 2010 everyone, and I hope to have the opportunity to work with (and for) you and your company!

Best Regards,

Michael Sim
708-539-7344
@chicagodesign
@graphicsms
www.Graphics.ms

Twitter Lists as a CRM

If you haven’t already tried using Twitter lists to enhance your usage of Twitter as a marketing tool, then you’re missing out. At the end of this article, there are 3 links that will be of value to you in order to do so. My most recent “ta-da!” moment came when I realized that I could create a private list full of my contacts/clients/prospects, etc. Not only could I still monitor and/or participate in the discussions of my valued clients, but it became very easy to see which client is online and tweeting. Since the lists you follow display tweets in a chronological order, some tweets may be hours, minutes, or even seconds old. It’s great for jumping in on questions that pertain to my expertise, sharing a funny link, or even RT a news flash. By communicating and participating in Twitter along with my clients and prospects, it helps take a lot of the “Suit and Tie” out of the equation. In doing so, it makes doing honest and friendly business much easier.

The Process:
I went to my profile (while signed on), and created a new Twitter list. I called it Clients & Prospects, and then selected the box (Make Private).

I then went through my tweets, and put all of the people who I had recently been consulting with into the list. I then created a second list of people who I might like to help out (Target Market), or possibly start talking to in order to create a buzzword and recognition of my services.

One of the most valuable features about a private list is that it does not publicly broadcast your intentions for marketing. Those on the list are not alerted in any way, nor can they see or view the list on your profile page. It is also unavailable to the public, which allows you to remain completely discreet about your categorization of targeted people. Keep in mind now, if you start grouping people together and mass marketing to them with the hopes that you’re going to get a positive response, it simply won’t happen. That’s not what Twitter’s about. It’s about being a professional, and being recognized for your abilities to do quality work. People tend to forget that earning recognition rather than demanding it will also spread faster than any other form of marketing.

With two Private lists in hand 1. Clients & Prospects and 2. Target Market, I have a focused system that allows me to easily interact with my personal community. When I use Twitter, now I can jump into my new private lists and monitor conversations for opportunities to interact. Every now and then, I may ReTweet one of the tweets from those lists. I may also answer specific questions, share my advise, or refer my associates. By referring people to one another, those I help to connect will most likely remember that gesture and refer others to me in the future.

ReTweeting demonstrates that you agree with, approve of, like, and/or want to share the information of someone else’s Tweet. Keep in mind again, ReTweeting for the sake of putting out an RT doesn’t really carry much value. ReTweeting something of value shares that value with your community, making your Tweets more influential. The ideal Tweet is one that gets ReTweeted 2+ times. Although rare, they can and will happen more often when you ReTweet valuable content.

The days of the public timeline are coming to a close as people slowly but surely build their followings higher and higher. If you’re using Twitter, and you have more than 500-1000 followers, using the Public Timeline is an information overload. There are 1000 different topics, 100’s of random conversations, spammers, all coming in by the handful every minute. However, as much as the topic is debated, I truly believe that you are only able to maximize the value of what Twitter can be if you are connected to as many people as possible. Twitter lists are the remedy to that situation. Now, you not only have the ability to categorize all of your followers into specific public lists, but you can use lists as a CRM to better manage your customers and clients.

Important Links

Twitter Lists Feature: Including Techniques
New techniques on how to use Twitter’s new List feature to increase marketing efficiency.

Graphics.ms’s Twitter Lists
A list of founder @Chicagodesign’s Twitter Lists

Twittro.com
Custom Twitter Background Designs for Businesses and Professionals

My thoughts about Twitter’s new “Lists” feature

I’ve been actively using Twitter since about February of 2009, and since then, I’ve noticed a large variety of different techniques to build followers, and methods to network and market to targeted viewers. Since my Twitter inception, Twitter itself has been more of a “social experiment” than anything. I wanted to test my boundaries, see what it could do, learn it, and translate it into a process that I could then share with my colleagues and clients. So I did just that. I tried out a bunch of different techniques, accumulated 23,000 followers, and all along the way took note of a few things: What does or does not work, the value of marketing it has for the user, and a great deal of insight into the necessity for social networking in the business environment.

With Twitter’s new “List” feature, I was apprehensive at first to really get my feet wet, and see what it was really about. It did seem straightforward, categorize your friends into different types of list. Great! That’s going to take forever. However, once I noticed that you could build a following BASED on those lists, I immediately saw the value in it for my purposes. So here’s the process I came up with.

1. use www.locafollow.com to search out a keyword and city. For the purposes of demonstration, I’ll use “Attorney” and “Chicago”.
2. Then, I Ctrl + Click each person’s picture icon to launch their twitter profile in a new tab. (using FireFox)
3. Go through each of the 8 pages of results and keep doing this.
4. Go through each tab, follow the person, and add them to a list.

Tips: For the names of the lists, I found that it is best if you cross reference people instead of creating highly targeted lists. For example, when I first started, I tried creating groups for Chicago Attorney, Chicago Consultants, Chicago Designers, etc… but I found it best if you consolidate your local interested to a list called “Chicago”, and then create specific topics by themselves “Attorneys”, “Consultants”, “CEO’s”, etc. Then, when you go an follow someone, add them to the “Chicago” list, if it applies, and then any other category that they fall under. It is not unusual to categorize someone 3-4 times, based on their versatility. The great part is, each time you categorize someone into a list, you get a permanent listing in the members “Lists” section. Another great feature is that there is a “Lists” link right on the homepage next to the Follower and Following count… Maximum Exposure Potential! Categorize someone 3 times, and you have 3 instances of your listing inside that person’s list page.

Obviously, this shouldn’t be abused for the fact that this could easily become a spammer’s paradise. So, for most purposes, categorize someone 1 or 2 times, and call it a day.

Now, once you’ve spent some time building your lists from people you found in LocaFollow.com, we’ll move on to the second approach.

Next, I want you to open up www.wefollow.com. (First, add yourself if you haven’t already. If you did, do it again!) Now, search the most relevant keyword in your industry. Ctrl + Click people that show up in the listings that have the look of a real user, with a real picture. Go through a few pages repeating that process.

First, you do want to follow and categorize this new group of people. Then go to each one and click on their “Lists” link (next to Follower & Following #’s). Next, take note of the different categories that other people have listed this user in. Sometimes they are listed in other relevant categories that you might be interested in. Other times, people list them in categories like “my friends”, or “great twitter people”. Those are less relevant obviously, and the type we’re looking for is the similar category. When you’ve identified those who would be relevant, CTRL + Click a few of the lists that they are on.

For example, if I notice that on a user’s Lists Page, that they were listed by someone else in a category called “Chicago Business”, it’s a fairly safe bet that there will be a handful of relevant people ready to be followed and Listed. In this case, the group would have a list of people who were in “Chicago Business”. Now, when I Ctrl + Click the list “Chicago Business”, I’m presented with a timeline of posts from people in that list. When I go to the top right of that list, and click “Following”, I am able to see a full list of people who are listed on it.

Now, I simply CTRL + Click each profile that seems worthy, follow them, and add them to my own list.

OK! So now that you’ve got a big bunch of new lists to boast, and you feel proud of having categorized everyone into a micro community, let’s dive in and see how we can use it.

If you go to my profile, and click on my lists tab and click on “Chicago”, that there is a timeline of tweets for the people on that list. Since you know that you listed and categorized reputable people from the websites that I mentioned earlier, you know that you won’t be seeing a lot of spam-filled messages. If there are people who are spamming, you can later remove that person from your list. What happens now is the ability to interact with Twitter users in a much simpler format. Before, it used to take me 10 minutes to find even 1 post worthy of a ReTweet. Now, I can just browse through my lists every now and then, and find plenty of posts worthy of ReTweeting. I can also jump in on conversations that seem relevant, answer people’s questions in the lists that are most relevant to my profession, and so on.

Basically, this solves the crisis that many people face when asked the question “Is it better to have a large list of followers over a small and more focused list of followers?”. Most people would say “The smaller list is better, because I interact with most of my community. Whereas someone who has many thousands of followers, may only interact with a handful.” Up until now, I was the latter of those two types of users. Now, I’m able to filter out all the noise, and focus in on the people who are most relevant to my purpose on Twitter. Also, the freebie of adding people to lists is a permanent listing in their Lists section. You can’t go wrong! Also, if you wish to get listed, it’s very important to create a detailed bio about your profession, interests, and so on. Otherwise from what I’ve noticed, those people just get skipped over (even though they may be a superstar Twitter user).

List me today on @chicagodesign and @graphicsms under “Chicago” and “Web Designers”