The Code Corner

Jaime and Mark Van Wye, owners of dog-training franchise Zoom Room, say they’re running a leaner, more efficient business thanks to tablet technology. Customers in all 10 locations use iPads to check in, while the Van Wyes use apps while on the road to stay in constant touch. In this week’s Smart Entrepreneur, they offer tips about how to incorporate the iPad into your business.

Plus, with the ability to zoom in and out of an object, or increase focal points of a website or most software, the blue tooth technology to utilize a keyboards as well as the tablet’s portability factor, Table technology is great for those with visual or movement impairments across the board.

^{Internet Web Force Press, January 2012}

The online marketing firm Internet Web Force seeks to assist artist Micah Evans in bringing social awareness and change to the public perception of diabetes and the discrimination of disability.

Artist Micah Evans of Micah Evans Music.com is a new artist on the music scene. “Micah is beyond talented“, says business owner Bryan Rohrer, “With his talent to play guitar, bass, keyboards and drums he is a musical virteoso. This is why, with great pride we are helping Micah Evans with beginning his musical career.”

Micah and the owner of Internet Web Force have known each other since they were kids, growing up in the Albany Oregon Area. As teens and early adults, they found a love of music and a kinship with each other that transcends time.

“Through the years, the miles and distance between us was an ever increasing challenge to maintain the friendship beyond the occasional phone call. With work schedules and the process of living life you just loose sight of the important things. But with Micah’s talent and abilities, he should not be in the situation he is in.”

The situation Bryan refers too is Micah’s diabetes. Micah was diagnosed with Brittle Juvenile Diabetes at the age of six. Now thirty-seven, the diabetes and time has taken a major toll on his body. Micah describes it on his blog post, “Ten Ton Stones” :

“…The next month I found myself in the emergency room suffering from a condition called ketoacidosis. My blood sugar at the time of admittance was 1347. A normal blood sugar result is between 70 and 120. I spent a week there getting better. Things finally calmed down well enough for me to go home. But the doctor had one more thing to tell me. One morning he came in, sat down and said… ‘Your kidneys are shot. They are dead.’You’re going on dialysis.’ Again, another complication due to diabetes.

One thing after another. Life has thrown a lot of challenges at me. As you can see though all have been related to my health. However this last event that I am going through has really been a chainsaw to the chest for me. It is the current divorce I am going through right now. I never thought this would happen. A few years ago my wife revealed something to me. Something I would rather not give any detail about. As devastating as it was we tried to work through it. For two years we tried. Unfortunately she made her decision to to pursue another life without me in it.
”

Bryan knows the challenges well, in 1996 he was diagnosed with Reoccurring-Remitting Multiple Sclerosis, and had to start
his own business to get income into the home. With that new business though, I am able to help Micah with what I believe he
was called to do.

“I told him he should pursue a career in music when we were kids, now almost thirty years later, I was right” He torts
then explains their acquaintance meeting:

“I had it all planned out how I was going to surprise him” Bryan remembers as he recounts the inital visit home to see his parents that July of 2010. “I was driving a rented Kia and was going to go to the door and say ‘I am being attacked by these two Hamsters with boom boxes, and I need a shotgun to get rid of them.’ Bryan pauses, gets a large grin and says,”I couldn’t get even two blasted words out. Micah threw his arms around me, recognizing my voice and laughed. From there we talked and I told him to rekindle his talent in music.”

Bryan returned home and registered the domain name, Micah Evans Music, called him on the phone and said, “Welcome to your music business!” With that, and the passage of a few months, The site is
about to go live selling Micah’s music.

“And I personally think he will sell” Bryan says “I have seen others like Tim Hawkins, Dave’s Highway, and others accomplish this soley online. What brings me pride, is I had a hand in this to help a friend.”

^{Here Micah Evans sing his song “Here Me Laugh” in this You Tube Video}

We all take brands many times seriously without even thinking about it. And it is not just the brand of your company or product. You customers don’t buy your product or your company, they buy YOU.

That is why it is so important that you brand yourself, your product and your company or organization with, thats right, YOU

To understand what I am saying, we must first distinguish what a brand it or is not. A brand is not a logo, or an image. What branding defined is the image that is left in your mind that after you have experienced or built a reputation of a good, person, product or service. The ‘swash’ on the Coca-Cola cans and the expectation of taste, flavor and the feeling you get after experiencing the product is Coca-Cola’s brand.

Winning brands constantly develop and sell products and services that beat competition. Customer measures, value relationships versus competition and long-term investments can be sacrificed to quarterly numbers, a global sales target or a power struggle inside the company. Marketplace success is taken for granted while the new measures assume prime importance. When all systems are “go,” profits and stock price look the same as customer satisfaction and future sales even though they are not.

So what is your brand? Not just your company brand, but YOUR brand. Have you developed a personal brand? Do people know by your name what to expect, the integrity they will get in dealing with you, and know they will get dealt with honestly and professionally. Your reputation good and bad will always proceed you.

Second, combine that reputation with a little advertising. Register a domain name using your name your domain name (I am registered and developed the websites www.bryanrohrer.com as well as www.bryankeithrohrer.com that is a redesign of the first site. As a professional website designer, I see people develop a website and start developing a brand, only to have someone come along and misspell or change the domain extension (e.g. .com .net .org) to capitalize on traffic of people that did not have the correct website address. The most famous case of this actually involved the website White House.com as told by Cnet in 1997.

With this being said, protect your brand. Don’t let some unscrupulous person register your name online. If you need help doing this you can contact us and we can assist you in putting up your personally branded website, and then discuss with you tips and tricks on how to monitor that (or any) brand. You can also call us at (317) 804-1761 to discuss with us your personal branding potential.

So you have a website, you optimized, and you get lots of traffic, but not many people respond to your offers and purchase your products and services. Do you engage your clients and prospects on the social networks?

According to the latest data from Google, Yahoo and Aliza Freud of SheSpeaks and SocialSpeaks this engagement will matter more and more as time passes on.

There is no better way to put this then to let Aliza tell you herself.

Measuring your social media will matter also, as you want to be able to make an analysis if your social media endeavors are making a difference. One of the key social networking gurus I follow from the Social Media Examiner, who turned me on to social graphs is Jeff Korhan. He stated in a recent article states the following: “ If you can integrate millions of social graphs that are rich with personal data, you have a Frankenstein’s monster of a database that is infused with social context, and therefore, human-like qualities.

Similar to Frankenstein, the Open Graph is not really human, but it has the possibility to come awfully close as more social data is stitched together. The power of a database that truly emulates human behavior is undeniable. Whatever happens in the future, one thing we’re sure of is that day in April was a game-changer for social marketers. ”

With social graphs you are able to measure both qualitative and quantitative results regarding your impact on your website and social networking endeavors.

As a social media consultant firm, Internet Web Force can walk you through the process of beginning a social media journey to impact the results and the Return On Investment that you are having with social networking.

If you do not have a website, our team of professional design and development specialists can assist you with that also.

Internet Web Force can assist you in engaging your customers socially on the world wide web, bringing you the interaction that is sought from your clients, customers, and prospects. If you are interested in learning more Contact Us Today or you can call (317) 804-1761 to connect to one of our qualified representatives today.

Twitter was the brainchild of a programmers Jack Dorsey(@jack), Evan Williams (@Ev) and Biz Stone (@Biz) who worked at the podcasting company Odeo Inc. in San Francisco. Looking for a way to send text on their cellphones and a way to reinvent a dying company.On March 21, 2006, @Jack sent the first tweet: “just setting up my twttr.” And thus a communications revolution was born, one renown for brevity and bad spelling. Dom Sagolla (@Dom), in tweet 38, typed these prescient words: “Oh, this is going to be addictive.” And more than 200 million twitter users later, they were right.

The dictionary definition of twitter is “a short burst of inconsequential information.”
A perfect name, said @Jack because “that’s exactly what the product was.”

But is Twitter the service we had hoped for, or could it be more?

Competition for twitter has come and gone, and twitter has remained steadfastly the popular favorite, limiting it’s posts to 140 characters, and including a very friendly API to adapt other technologies around it, Twitter has been an industry leader for four years, until something we at Internet Web Force discovered recently called “chime.in“.

While twitter has been very appreciated for our business and has helped us in gaining people “following” our twitter feed (@iwebforce) Twitter has been limiting in the 140 character limit and distributing the message to a broad audience.

Internet Web Force understands why twitter limits, I mean who wants to read a book in what is suppose to be “Glance information distribution”. But when a customer could offer a more targeted, quality announcement, graphical coupons and a bit more of what was intended to be said, chime.in may leave twitter users switching to it’s service for a greater ability to post their message.

I know for Internet Web Force founder Bryan Rohrer, he has expressed both the limiting annoyance of twitter to be too constricting.

“While I can appreciate catching the ‘type-bytes’ of twitter’s format, and it’s ability to express the message in the 140 standard character limit, some times the limit is just plane a pain” he stated in an interview. “I mean you have 140 characters, including your shortened domain link to get the words crammed into the post. You can’t go to 141, or have to resort to the slaughter of the English language word abbreviations, which to some writing professionals might seem unprofessional, I could see if chime.in develops an api for programmers, as well as integration into other social network platforms such as Facebook, Linked In and interfaces such as Tweet Deck and seesmic, then for sure chimed in will give twitter a run for it’s money.

Only time will tell what this social network will bring. Like the Coke vs. Pepsi commercials, a lot of it is going to be a matter of personal taste. And having a major following on twitter already (@iwebforce), persuading a switch of platforms will become a hard sell. Chime.in’s platform offers a prettier, more customizable interface and many other perks that twitter doesn’t, but some people will defer to simplicity.

56 days ago

Google+ versus Facebook – A Second Look

99 days ago

While Facebook does not have much competition within the social networking arena, a new threat from Google has shown its face on the stage to compete with Facebook’s Dominance. Entering stage left, Google+.