Advertise with tagga.com

Having just joined Tagga as the new Sales Manager and being new to mobile marketing, I am amazed at the multitude of creative ways you can cost effectively and strategically use Tagga Mobile advertising. In comparison to conventional advertising, Tagga’s mobile marketing costs virtually peanuts and is far more effective and targeted.

All this last week we have been busy talking to companies that understand the importance of adding a mobile marketing strategy to their mix. They get it that campaign setup is simple, quick, affordable (cheap) and measurable.

When you think about it, SMS based advertising offers some distinct advantages over other web and traditional forms. For starters, people have their phones with them 24-7. We all feel naked when we accidentally go somewhere without it. What’s more is that they are always on - ready to receive messages. Secondly, less than 15% of mobile phone users use the Internet on their phone. That means that the ROI for WAP based advertising is currently limited. Of course, we have little doubt that that will change over time. Lastly, SMS doesn’t require you to download any apps to your phone. You just use it when you want to communicate or get information. It’s fun, simple and direct.

If you are interested in learning about tagga and any or our advertising options, don’t hesitate to contact me. (sales[at]tagga[dot][com]).

Cheers,

Trevi

Google Webmaster Tools - Sitemaps

I have recently been playing around with Google Webmaster Tools and learning a lot about what they can do.  One great feature they offer is the ability to upload sitemaps of pages for indexing that their bots might not otherwise find.  At tagga, every tagg has its own URL, for example my personal tagg has the URL chris.tagga.com.  Google might not find all of our taggs by crawling our site, so I’ve written a function that creates an XML sitemap entry for every tagg.  I made our sitemap publicly available, told the google bots where to find it, and added a crontab entry to regenerate our sitemap every night.  By doing this, I’m hoping that more of our taggs show up in google search results, leading to more traffic at tagga.com.

Chris Richardson
tagga.com developer

Blogathon Vancouver 2008 Wrapup

Three weeks ago tagga participated in Vancouver’s 2008 Blogathon for charity, which involved a blog post every half hour for 24 hours.  It kept me up all night, but we got through it and have so far raised $650 for the Lochmaddy Foundation, a worthy cause.  Today is the last day of our fund raising effort via Dreambank, so please feel free to donate at the last minute to help us reach our $1000 goal.  Did I mention it was for a good cause?  Check out the tagga dream.

If you are interested in reading all 49 of my blogathon posts, and you probably are, the first one is here.

Chris Richardson
tagga.com developer

Internet Explorer 6 not supported, try Firefox

We at tagga decided not to support Internet Explorer 6 because of the headache it would have caused us to customize our code (namely css and JavaScript) specifically for it.  We had enough trouble with IE7 as it was…  Indeed, there are a great deal of CSS bugs related specifically to the internet explorer family.

Many websites are starting to pull support for IE6, which remains a controversial decision seeing as estimates show a quarter of the internet are still using it.  It wasn’t a hard decision for us though, the troubles supporting IE6 would have caused were just not worth it.  You might call us lazy, but we think we are doing our users a favor by recommending Firefox3:)  Also, not many early adopters use IE6, preferring the latest technology.

I apologize to any IE6 users who have come across tagga and had difficulties.  To you I recommend Firefox3, which I think you will enjoy.

Chris Richardson
tagga.com developer

Create SMS Campaigns - Standard Carrier Rates Apply

Last week we advertised on our front page that users could “Create FREE SMS Campaigns” using tagga.  It turns out we were mistaken and we would like to thank AT&T for pointing this out.  Even though tagga is completely free to the creator of an SMS campaign, we wouldn’t want users to think “they will receive something of value without a requirement of compensation”.  That being said, if you were to create an SMS Campaign using tagga, you wouldn’t have to pay for it.  We just can’t say that doing so would be “free”, “no charge”, “complimentary”, “without charge”, or “zero cost”.

We really should warn you that even though tagga does not charge for sending or receiving tagga SMS (some would call that free), all text messages are subject to standard carrier rates (definitely not free).  This means that one text message to/from tagga counts as one text message through your carrier and will be billed as per your contract with your wireless service provider.  It also means that your carrier doesn’t want to take flack for billing you whatever potentially extortionate per message rate they are currently getting away with.  Me personally, I am charged $0.15 per SMS I send over and above my one hundred free text messages, on a plan that already costs me $60 a month.  Weird, I pay $40 a month to Shaw for broadband internet and they don’t charge me per instant message sent with Adium.  Maybe Rogers should talk to them?

Chris Richardson
tagga.com developer

SPORTS TEAMS, ROCK GIGS, POLITICIAN VOTES AND MORE!

It’s been an exciting week at tagga. We launched, we got press, we got heavy traffic, and we went down and came back up - - - with amazing results too.

Within just two days of tagga’s beta launch, we are already seeing a kind of community develop. People are creating taggs from all over the world and for all kinds of different uses. Publishers and Advertisers are signing up as well.

Some examples are:
• Updating your sports’ team of practice times and tournament schedules
• Telling your fans when/where your next gig is playing or new song that is out
• Advertising a house for sale
• Delivering a personal message to someone in a unique way
• Drumming up support for your favorite politician
• Joke taggs

The list goes on…

Not surprisingly, there were a few (cough) four-letter word taggs that we had to take down. And, we are seeing some keyword squatting as well. Basically, here’s the deal with the latter. We don’t care if you want to take up taggs. However, if you don’t use them, or use them inappropriately (trademark infringements), then we will take them away and give them to someone else who will do a better job. No hard feelings.

We will be unveiling a host of new features and tools over the course of our beta, so stay tuned.

Cheers,
Amielle
CEO