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Rising above the Dark Knight tragedy

July 20, 2012/4 Comments/in AM:PM PR /by ampmpr

by Jake Ten Pas

The scene of the shooting, which claimed 12 lives so far and resulted in the injury of more than 70.

As a kid, I wore a shirt that read, “I prefer to be called Batman.” I don’t remember all the things that made Bob Kane’s character resonate with me so completely at that age, but as I’ve grown older, it’s been the duality of the character that’s kept me immersed in his saga.

Batman is a wounded character, a man marred by violence in youth, who spends the rest of his life trying to come to terms with what he’s lost, what he’s become and what he wants his world to be. He commits acts of violence in defense of a society he sees as salvageable against others whose violent streaks have turned them against that society. He eschews guns and avoids killing whenever possible.

After midnight today in Colorado, a pathetic real-life example of that darkness turned sour, senseless and violent, walked into a theater and killed 12 people and injured more than 70. Watching the news this morning, I struggled to keep it together. Was it because my wife and I were sitting in a local theater at exactly that time last night, and could just have easily have been in Aurora, Colo.? Was it because I think movies are one of the great cultural products of our society, and to see something that can bring so much joy and meaning to people’s lives turned to sorrow and fear is a philosophical tragedy? Was it because a story of positive transformation was itself turned back to horror?

I’ve been watching CNN since I woke up, and it was incredibly moving to hear the last Tweets of Jessica Ghawi, a 24-year-old aspiring journalist, read aloud. The last was sent just moments before the shooting began. The shooter was the same age as Ghawi.

Batman has been my favorite comic character since I was a child. This wasn’t the shirt that read, “I prefer to be called Batman,” but these Underoos-style pajamas show my love for the Dark Knight just as well.

Even now, reactions to this madness are spreading throughout social media. Some folks are trying to make sense of it in real time, while others are striking out at the media. Some are using it as an excuse to make political or religious points, and others are exploiting it to sell clothes. Fear, sadness, greed, anger, apathy and so many other human traits are flowing through the arteries of Twitter, Facebook and the other channels we use to communicate with each other right now.

The term “going viral” gets tossed around a lot. Usually, it’s to describe a video of a cute cat or a drunk guy falling over or something else that brings us joy or at least a cynical-yet-harmless laugh. But an act of brutal violence has the potential to truly go viral, spreading like a disease that paralyzes us into paranoia, inaction and depression.

A friend just called me out on Facebook for delivering Christopher Nolan’s talking points when I posted this status update: “Don’t let this madman change your weekend plans one bit. Feels gross to use the phrase ‘letting the terrorists win,’ but this was an act of terror, aimed right at the heart of what we do for entertainment as a culture. If you want to go to the movies, buy that ticket and don’t think for a second of one anomalous scumbag who used the only pathetic, overcompensating weapon in his arsenal – blind fear.”

Perhaps I should have voiced sympathy or compassion before anger and defiance. Perhaps it was me being a stereotypical man that drove me to transmute my feelings of sadness and helplessness to tough talk. There are bigger things at stake here than the movies, after all.

But if the movies represent for others what they represent for me – a mythology in which we can turn real-life pain and misery into something hopeful and worth living for, then maybe the movies aren’t such a small thing after all. While Nolan’s Batman films have certainly been theme park rides of action and visual dazzle, they also made up a story of redemption and personal transformation, of fighting to make the world a better place.

Batman squares off against villain Bane in “The Dark Knight Rises.” Reports have the gunman dressed similarly to Bane, wearing some sort of gas mask and body armor.

Another friend posted, “Batman could have stopped him. Ironic.” His sister responded, “Too. Soon.” Maybe so, but maybe he was trying to turn the tragedy, something he couldn’t control, into something he could control through clever language. In a deeper way, the ideas behind Batman, that we can change, that we can do something useful with the hurt we hold inside, just might be able to stop the waves of fear and uncertainty radiating out from Aurora right now across every means of communication we use.

Whatever you decide to do this weekend, whoever you decide to do it with and however you choose to communicate about it, remember that it’s up to each and all of us how this story turns out.

Hate to sound trite, but my heart really does go out to every person in Colorado who lost somebody today. Nobody should have their childlike joy at sharing a movie with a theater full of fellow fans turned into a nightmare of lost hope. I’m going out tonight to be with my friends and watch live music in a crowded space, and I’m not going to worry that some sick, cowardly bastard might try to ruin that. Is that solidarity, revenge or just escapism?

I don’t know, but I prefer to be called Batman.

Curation key to a quieter internet

April 17, 2012/in AM:PM PR /by ampmpr

by Cam Clark

In 1990, when Sir Tim Burners Lee created the first ever web page, he imagined the web being a worldwide tool. I doubt, however, he ever could have imagined that in 2012 there would be more than a trillion web pages on the net. In fact, the Internet has become so large that one of Tim’s latest jobs has been to figure out a way to measure just how big the Internet really is, in both size and impact.

So far, the ways invented to deal with this growing glut of web pages have come in the form of lists, directories, search engines and wikis. Even with all of that, the internet has become nothing more than semi-organized noise. All of these technologies are helpful but, with Internet users worldwide spending a collective 35 billion hours of time online every month, if you don’t know exactly what you are looking for, navigating the internet can be a huge waste of time. How can we use that time more efficiently and find stories that are interesting, timely and relevant even if we don’t know they exist?

Currently this is accomplished in one of three ways:

1. Professional Curation – This is what we normally think of as news. For example, CNN.com. An editor there decides what information is important for you to see. This is good for world and national news. Websites linked to TV stations and newspapers are often the most trusted, but they may be poor at targeting your personal interests. They’re not extremely timely by today’s Internet standards, where a story that is 15 minutes old is considered stale, and they tend to lean toward the sensational.

2. Social Curation – This is the information that your friends share on places such as Facebook.com. It’s great for finding information that is of personal interest, obscure or local, but generally poor at finding the types of items a professional curator would choose.

3. Trending Curation – This is the opinion of the masses, as found on sites such as Google Trends or trending on twitter. These work well to keep you informed of up-to-the-minute breaking stories or the latest cute cat video, but information can be misleading if it turns out to be based on rumor.

If we are to stay sane and on top of what is happening in the world, we need to bring the concept of web curation to the next level. All the pieces are in place. It just comes down to combining them correctly. Easier said then done.

What will this information source look like? How could these sources be combined to use each one’s strengths to limit their weaknesses? That is the part I haven’t fully figured out – yet. Maybe it will be some sort of dashboard that has a column of the most immediate trending information along with top stories from news organizations all vetted for truth and tailored to your specific tastes, geolocation and what your friends are posting about.

With Google Plus’ recent update to include trending information, I believe they are getting very close. The problem is, they don’t, at this time, have the same strength of social graph that Facebook has. Facebook also could attempt this, but it does not have the strength of search that Google has. Even if Facebook partnered with Bing or bought Yahoo!, both have less than 5% of the search market, so it’d still be a stretch.

What do you think the future of Sir Tim Burners Lee’s creation looks like? What would be the most useful combination of these three types of content for you to keep up with your friends and the world at large?

I heart George Takei

February 15, 2012/in AM:PM PR /by Allison McCormick

Let’s Do The Timeline Again

January 4, 2012/3 Comments/in AM:PM PR /by ampmpr

– by Jake Ten Pas

Alexis Dane loves cats. Cam Clark pumps out the party jams. Family is of utmost importance to Pat McCormick, and his daughter, Allison didn’t fall far from the tree.

These are the things the new Facebook Timeline profile format tells me, and perhaps in the bigger scheme of things, these are the most important things for me to know about each person. I sure hope so, because I’m not going to glean much else from the image-heavy, text-poor space “above the fold.”

If the phrase “above the fold” means nothing to you, then chances are you love the new profile format. You didn’t grow up reading newspapers, and it could be that your interest in words goes no further than the often unpunctuated, under (or OVER) capitalized, fact-check-free asides that pass for communication these days.

Just in case your curiosity runs deeper, “above the fold” refers to the space above the crease in a newspaper. It’s the real estate that peeps through the window in the newspaper box you might still occasionally see on the sidewalk downtown. It’s where the most important, or at least most eye-catching, stories and photos run. In my former life as a copy editor/page designer, I was often committed to getting as many stories as I could above the fold.

Facebook used to be committed to this idea, as well. If not stories, it at least prioritized interactivity and the sharing of information. At the top of my page were (are, depending on whether you read this before or after my transition to the new format) my vital stats: My name, birthday, where I live, where I went to school, marital status, etc. There were a number of photos, often a status update and some recent activity. In other words, there were numerous ways to engage.

Now, when I go to the page of one of my coworkers listed above, I’m slapped in the face with one gigantic photo. This slap is followed by quick jab in the eye with another smaller photo and, eventually, actual info about the person and ways to interact with her or him. Granted, I often work on a small laptop, and I can see twice as much information on Pat’s gigantic monitor, but the message remains the same. Image has superseded the written or typed word as the communicator of choice as far as Facebook is concerned.

Whether or not this is another step toward global illiteracy remains to be seen, but it is, at the very least, sad. Considering that more people now check Facebook on a daily basis than read a newspaper, I don’t think I’m being unreasonable in drawing these kinds of comparisons.

Photos are more universally accessible. I get that. Anybody can grab a camera or digital phone and snap a picture. It takes practice to put words together in an order that makes sense and transmits an idea, information or feelings to others. People can take just about anything away from an image. Maybe that means that images allow the consumer more freedom of interpretation, and words direct us to specific conclusions. I don’t necessarily agree with that, but there’s certainly an argument to be made.

Personally, I like to communicate more with words than images. I love words, and I feel as comfortable working with them as an artist might with paint or Photoshop. As a movie lover, I understand the power of the image, and I understand the skill it takes to produce an image that is truly powerful. A great photo can tell a story as well as any combination of words. Just not in my hands.

This isn’t about that. It’s about Facebook tipping the scales of word-image equality. From my perspective, the social media behemoth is simply holding the mirror up to society. Most people seem less concerned with speaking or writing in either a proper or effective manner than they once were. People would rather speak with images, and Facebook is only too happy to enable that inclination. Also enabled are the rest of us, who’ve convinced ourselves that we don’t have time to read, but only to glance at a photo, and preferably one unburdened by caption.

Facebook devoured MySpace for a number of reasons, but one that’s always struck me was its streamlined, easy-to-read format. By not allowing an overabundance of customization, they created a user experience that was clean and consistent. Whether folks wanted to share with words or images, their profile and, more recently, the news feed, maintained an uncluttered flow.

Now, not only has written communication been devalued, but by allowing increased customization of the profile space, Facebook has allowed user profiles to look almost as messy and impenetrable as MySpace pages once looked. Granted, there are no fit-inducing flashing widgets yet, but I’m keeping my fingers crossed. In this online version of scrapbooking, some new visual corollary to the triple exclamation mark must re-emerge.

It’s not that I don’t get the Timeline metaphor. It’s that Facebook’s execution of this metaphor is shoddy at best. It looks less like a timeline than a dreamboard in a teenager’s bedroom.

Every time Facebook unleashes a new iteration on its users, there is backlash, and I’ve no doubt that some of you with the attention span to read this far are accusing me of simply contributing to the most recent wave. Could be. I simply ask that you consider that this new format represents a bigger change than most, and what that change says about how Facebook, and those of us who use it, view the shape of communication to come.

Meanwhile, I’ll be contemplating how to fit all these ideas into a single image that can be rapidly consumed by those who don’t have time or inclination to read below the fold.

Credit unions need to keep it real to woo Gen Y from banks

November 17, 2011/in AM:PM PR, Cultivation, Influence, Tips /by Allison McCormick

The Northwest Credit Union Association (NWCUA) recently invited me to present tips on reaching Gen Y. Like most organizations, they want to know how to attract the largest consumer group in history. With Occupy Wall Street and Bank Transfer Day leading the news, there’s never been a better time for credit unions to be heard.

The first step in building relationships with this generation is knowing everything about who Gen Y’ers are and what drives them.

Meet the Gen Y’ers:

Believe they can be and do anything.
Believe miracles are possible.
Want to live first and work second.
Care about servicing their community.
Don’t like to be told what to do or what’s cool.
Want to experience the world for themselves to develop their own judgement.
Don’t want to be marketed to.

Gen Y respects authenticity. If you want to be listened to, be real. This generation can see through B.S.

Where are they? On their phones. They are more than half of mobile users in the US. Also nicknamed the Connecteds and Net Generation, they’re almost all socially networked. They do everything online, including research before buying.

When purchasing a product or service they look for:

Low cost
Good quality
Fast service
An “experience”

Living in an era when information is everywhere and everyone is constantly connected, how can NWCUA members and your organization reach Millennials? Relate to what’s important. Know that they listen to their friends. They care about their community and they care about living life well.

Give them what they want and:

Differentiate credit unions from banks. Seize the 99%.
Offer tools for living well that Gen Y will want to use. Financial literacy hasn’t been taught to them in schools. Make money management “an experience” with an app that helps them manage their money and reach their goals of buying a house or traveling the world.
Communicate credit unions’ community involvement. Offer an online program teaching financial literacy and curriculum for teachers.
Engage them on social networks. Let them lead on Facebook, and be a real resource for them on Twitter.

As evidenced by the 690,000 people who dumped their banks in a single month around Bank Transfer Day, Gen Y will like what credit unions offer. Be easy to find, easy to use and make their decision to switch easy.

As for any other organization? Anticipate what members of Gen Y will want from you and what they’ll look for on your website. Don’t add fluff. Make sure to give them something that they can recommend to their friends without sacrificing their authenticity.

Facebook Profile changes to Timeline

September 26, 2011/1 Comment/in AM:PM PR /by ampmpr

by Cam Clark

This Wednesday, Facebook will release the new “Timeline” to the masses to what will, more than likely, be mixed reactions.

I am a bit of an oddball in that I enjoy change. Not many people do. The ratio is 5 to1 against change, according to a poll by Poll Position. Whether it’s Apple releasing a new gadget or Facebook pumping out yet another change to its format, I usually embrace it. It’s almost like a game to me. On your mark, get set, figure this new thing out.

I had a chance today to try out “Timeline”, witch will be replacing your current profile and have some mixed feelings myself.

1. It feels very busy. The new layout with the altered sidebar released last week, chat and advertising in the middle essentially equates to four columns of data. Much like America’s waist line, it’s busting at the seams. Seems like a lot of info to look at all at once.

2. It feels exposed. I’m not usually one to shy away from parts of my life being public. Especially since I have posted all this info myself. But I have posts going back to 2004, and something feels different about having it all condensed in one place. It feels a little drafty seeing it all all hanging out in the breeze like that.

3. I like strolling memory lane. It is fun to look back at the things that were happening a few years back. To be able to easily peruse pictures and posts that were significant is a good thing. It’s like scrapbooking without the work.

Overall, I am happy Facebook is trying new things. Unlike others. Especially in this industry, you either innovate or fail.

Timeline releases this Wednesday to the public. I hope you have fun exploring all the new options.

https://www.facebook.com/about/timeline

Building the Perfect Spokesthing

August 25, 2011/in AM:PM PR /by ampmpr

The “magical, pan-sexual spokesthing” Pit-Pat is introduced by David Cross’ character on “Mr. Show With Bob And David.” While the sketch lampooned business and marketing alike, it’s proven to be a great influence in the creation of several social media characters by yours truly.

By Jake Ten Pas

I don’t know who first coined the term spokesthing, but I initially heard it on a “Mr. Show With Bob And David” sketch about a decade ago. Being the irreverent sorts they are, Odenkirk and Cross used it to poke fun at marketing/advertising types, and they hit the nail on the head. I won’t link to the sketch in question here because it is full to bursting with foul language, but if you desire to seek it out, I certainly won’t try to stop you.Regardless, I just like the word spokesthing. It’s funny and gender-neutral and hints at the meta nature that marketing achieves at its most clever.

When I made the jump from journalism to public relations, one of my first tasks was managing the social media presence for Tillamook Cheese. One day, I thought it would be funny to tweet at people as if I WAS the Baby Loaf of Tillamook Cheese, and when a follower responded, “Is @Tillamook Cheese tweeting in first person? Brilliant!,” the character of Loafy was born.

Yes, that’s me dressed as Loafy. No, Tillamook didn’t let me keep the costume.

Notice I didn’t say that the character was born when I thought of him. The character was born when one of Tillamook’s fans responded to him. That’s the way social media works. People don’t want to be marketed to anymore. They want you to have a conversation WITH them. When I realized this was a concept with resonance, I set about fleshing out the character of Loafy, and an entire mythology of my new spokesthing was born.

Recently, when AM:PM PR was hired by The Original WOW! Burger, a new gourmet burger joint soon to be debuting in the Portland market, I again started thinking about what makes for a great spokesthing. Creating a good character that will resonate with your fans is important, but as Pat likes to say, we were born with two ears and one mouth for a reason. You can be the cleverest boy in all the land, but if you don’t listen to what your customers are saying and respond to them genuinely, it’s all for naught.

The one and only Dean Winters plays Mayhem, Allstate’s imaginary reason to buy more insurance. Not sure if the Facebook account is written by the same folks that write the ad copy, but both are pretty choice.

One of my favorite spokesthings is Allstate’s Mayhem persona, who is played on TV by the killer character actor Dean Winters of “Oz,” “30 Rock,” “Rescue Me” and “Terminator: The Sarah Conner Chronicles” fame. The commercials are short and humorous, and the Facebook posts carry that over well. Not sure why Allstate hasn’t brought this character to Twitter, where it would fit in well. My only complaint is the imbalance between the number of posts “likers” of Mayhem are leaving on the page and the number of responses Mayhem is offering. Clearly, the account is doing a great job of generating interest, but as a listening tool, it’s somewhat less effective.

Back when I was still managing the Tillamook account, I quite enjoyed posts by the Quiznos Toaster, more conceptually than consistently in practice. For some reason, I’m drawn to the notion of inanimate objects talking to me, which could explain part of my love for Tom Robbins’ “Skinny Legs and All.” Unfortunately, the Toaster got increasingly lewd as time went on, and it appears that Quiznos has now pulled the plug on him. I like to imagine a Hal 9000-esque scene playing out at the end there. The Kool-Aid Man had a funny Twitter account for a while, too, although whether it was ever connected to the brand remains a mystery to me. It no longer exists, which makes me doubtful.

Elsewhere, a slew of companies continue to try to convert their advertising spokesthings into social media spokesthings. From Bob’s Big Boy to Cheetos’ Chester Cheetah to M&M’s to the unholy insurance onslaught of Progressive, Aflac, Geico, etc., they achieve their objectives to varying degrees. The true measure of a spokesthing’s success in my eyes isn’t to transition the same old marketing messages over to social media. It’s to capture the imaginations of fans and inspire in them the desire to essentially create short bursts of fan fiction about you.

Even more, the goal of any spokesthing should be to disarm fans and followers and make them feel comfortable engaging in a conversation with you. If you can do that, and turn off your clever little marketer brain long enough to listen to what they have to say, then you’ve accomplished two invaluable goals at once – learning and creating. You’ve learned what your customers want and created a whole new legion of brand ambassadors in the process.

The (millennial) Kids Aren’t Al(ways)right

August 2, 2011/7 Comments/in AM:PM PR /by ampmpr

by Jake Ten Pas

If you’ve been reading the blogs of my boss, Pat McCormick, then you know he’s an optimist who views the younger millennial generation’s contributions to evolving communication trends with open-minded anticipation. He bucks the stereotype of the technophobic member of the silent generation, and it’s this spirit of enthusiasm and youthful energy that made me instantly like him when first we met.

On the other hand, he’s wrong. Not about kids and their communications habits pointing the way toward the future. No, that’s happening, and we’re powerless to stop it. What Pat’s mistaken about is that this is a good thing.

Clearly, texting on a miniature keyboard is the best way to communicate. Why make all of your fingers work when your thumbs can carry the burden for the rest of them.

When Mark Zuckerberg announced earlier this year that he was changing the way Facebook’s messaging platform functions because some of his younger relatives told him that email is too slow, I rolled my eyes so hard that my spirit animal briefly changed from a badger to a pug.

How to put this delicately? If email is too slow of a format for you, then there’s something wrong with you, not email. If email is too slow for you, you should automatically get a prescription for Ritalin in the mail. If email is too slow for you, you should stop trying to write in sentences and just resort to a series of grunts and exaggerated hand gestures. This is technology as regression, not progress. It’s using new communication opportunities as a chance to unleash your inner caveman.

You know what isn’t hard? Typing a subject line. In fact, it might actually help you assemble your thoughts into something coherent, as opposed to the absolutely pointless, unfocused ejaculations that seem to pass for conversation these days.

Perhaps I’m picking up Pat’s slack by reinforcing the stereotype of the grumpy old man, but I find it hard to be inspired by the communications trends of generations Y and Z.

Seriously, would you listen to anything somebody with this haircut told you? No? Then why take your communication cues from Gen Y?

Texting is your go-to communication method? Seriously? What is it that you find so scary about the human voice? And don’t even say that you’re too busy to talk on the phone. If you have time to watch “Jersey Shore” and listen to Justin Bieber, you’ve got time to talk on the phone or send a proper email.

Texting has a place. It’s for quick, pertinent exchanges of information. It isn’t for discussing the fate of your relationship or other important conversations in which the likelihood of misunderstanding increases exponentially.

Which reminds me, why would you take advice from a generation of kids that thinks low-rider skinny jeans are cool? Why listen to people who can’t discern between music made by artists in a studio and music that’s made with an iPhone app? Why listen to individuals who pay money, over and over again, to watch vampire movies in which the vampires are about as threatening as male models on a hunger strike and the female protagonist’s only goal is to court one of these anemic mope-heads?

If you think the Twilight movies are good – and I mean seriously good, not just good fun to laugh at because of how terrible they are – then the medium by which you communicate is probably irrelevant.

So what if they grew up with the technology and are immersed in it in a way that my generation and older can’t understand. That just sounds like a lack of context and perspective to me. Because I remember a time before people conversed only by text, I can speak in complete sentences and occasionally put a paragraph together. I can make use of new technology without ever thinking that it’s the end-all-be-all of communication. I see a Tweet as a means to an end, and not an end in and of itself.

Sure, I’m stereotyping here. There are many young people today who are turning to vinyl as a reaction to my generation’s obsession with tiny technology. There are young people who are reading actual books and watching quality movies and listening to music that wasn’t popularized on YouTube. To you, I offer my unbridled respect. Being cool at your age takes even more hard work than it did when I was a teenager, and we thought Starter Jackets were stylish and Stone Temple Pilots was a good band.

This is an important point to make. There’s nothing inherently wrong with generations Y and Z. We all like stupid stuff when we’re kids. I liked Hammer pants, the movie “Ace Ventura: Pet Detective” and professional wrestling when I was younger. Fortunately, nobody was turning to me for advice at that age. The mistake we’re making as a culture is thinking that young people should be steering us. That’s what they call the tail wagging the dog.

Perhaps technology will eventually facilitate conversation that isn’t as brief and vapid as what most people say via text and tweet. Perhaps it will usher in a new era of democratized, personalized exchanges, as Pat suggests. Until then, we seem to have mistaken technological advancement for its own sake with true progress. While this willy-nilly dive down the rabbit hole might be shaping the brave new world one nano-second at a time, that doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s going to be a world any of us take pride in populating.

The upside, of course, is that introspection will by then have been bred out of the gene pool, and people will judge their quality of life by the richness of their tan and their ability to afford a variety of flavors of Axe Nutrient Spray, which will replace both food and deodorant by 2050.

Meanwhile, I’ll be keeping up with the technology so that, A) I don’t lose all touch with where we’re headed as a society, B) nobody can say that I fear it because I don’t understand it, and C) I can keep an eye on you lunatics so I don’t have to scream and gnash my teeth after the fact like Charlton Heston in “Planet of the Apes.”

Don’t worry. That reference can’t be lost on somebody who doesn’t have the attention span to read past the first paragraph. Put that in your phone and text it.

Facebook wakes Google’s sleeping beast – Google+

June 29, 2011/in AM:PM PR /by ampmpr

I just finished reading a great article by Steven Levey over at Wired on the back story of Google’s most recent push into social networking, Google+. It’s a lengthy piece, but I would definitely recommend the read.

Sprouting awareness of your social presence

March 24, 2011/2 Comments/in AM:PM PR /by Alexis Dane

Have you ever wondered where you stand with regards to your – or perhaps your business’ – social media presence? Let’s just pretend you answered yes.

If you ever do find yourself longing to find an answer to such a question, I have found a solution: Sprout Social.

Sprout Social is a great new web-based application that links to Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Foursquare, etc. It offers a slew of services, including management and organization of social contacts, search capabilities, analytics and reporting. I like that it’s a one-stop shop for an exhaustive list of all social platforms one might be involved with. Making if even more attractive, the user interface is intuitive and super easy to use. From the first time I signed up and logged in to the “dashboard,” I felt like I already knew what to click on first.

One of my favorite features is the application’s monitoring capabilities. Anything that’s being said about your business anywhere on the web is logged and sent to an “inbox.” Anything from tweets to news and blog mentions are recorded and organized. It’s an invaluable tool in that it takes the hard work out of staying current on your company’s web presence.

Have I convinced you yet to check this thing out? I recommend at least signing up for the 30-day free trial. There is no better way to get to know something and decide if it’s right for you or your business than just getting in there and clicking around. Ready, set, go!

Posts

by Jake Ten Pas

by Cam Clark

Meet the Gen Y’ers:

When purchasing a product or service they look for:

Give them what they want and:

by Cam Clark

by Jake Ten Pas