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

Blogathon Vancouver 2008 over!

This is the 49th post and it’s been a blast.  Blogathon Vancouver 2008 is now over, for me at least.  It doesn’t actually end until tomorrow night, so keep reading if you can.  Thanks to all who paid attention and/or donated.

Cheers,

Chris Richardson
tagga developer

tagga launch

It’s an exciting week for us here at tagga, we plan on launching late next week.  If you haven’t already guessed, our service has to do with SMS.  We are creating a means for marketers to setup mobile advertising campaigns for free, if they so choose.  We are also creating a site for consumers to view and mobilize web content.  We are pretty excited about it.  If you are a marketer looking to start a mobile advertising campaign or a web content publisher looking to get your content out there (and make some money), be sure to check out tagga near the end of the week.  We hope you’ll like what you find!

Chris Richardson
tagga developer

S-E-Oh no he didn’t

I’m surprised at how little most tech marketers know about SEO.  It’s definitely becoming more mainstream, especially considering that catering your site to Google is the best way to get free traffic.  I saw a report once that showed 75% of clicks on a google search page go to the first three non ad results.  If your site isn’t in the top three, you are going to have to pay for your traffic.  If you want to see how well your site is doing with SEO, check out WebsiteGrader.  It’s free and they’ll email you a report on how your site is doing.

Chris Richardson
tagga developer

Email Newsletters

Personally, I hate email newsletters.  I rarely ever read them.  I usually find them smarmy and overly marketingish.  In fact, they mostly make me angry.  I consider them SPAM whether I’ve signed up for them or not.  What I really want to know about is something great, not that nothing really happened this month but you want to market to me anyway.

Sadly, I don’t think email newsletters are going away anytime soon.  They are a staple of internet marketing. That being said, you might as well do them right.  Check out this article on Creating an Effective Email Newsletter.

Chris Richardson
tagga developer

Customer Evangelist Manifesto

At a past job, one of my roles was as Customer Evangelist.  It’s a stupid title, but it was an interesting role.  Customer interaction for a business is not as simple as support and marketing, there is also listening.  As a customer evangelist I was able to go beyond customer support to engage the user.  I got to hear about what they liked, didn’t like, and what they wanted to see.  I also got to reach out to customers when we had something new cooking.  It put me in a really great position to share with the rest of the team. It also gave me a lot of influence because I had the customers opinions backing me up.  I recommend that anyone in customer support or marketing act as an evangelist for their company.  When I was starting out with evangelism, I found the Customer Evangelist Manifesto very helpful.

Chris Richardson
tagga developer

I don’t like Facebooks apps

Okay, I like Superpoke, but only for defenestrating people.  I think most Facebook users are growing tired of apps too.  One look at the Adonomics leaderboard shows that active user rates are dropping.  Not many new apps are showing up and going viral either.  App developers have had a lot of their means of going viral taken away too, not that Facebook users are very receptive to app invites anymore anyway.  Last weeks F8 conference didn’t receive as much fanfare as the previous years launch of Facebook platform did, but I think there were some interesting developments nonetheless.  What excites me most is a payment system.  I would use an app that I could use to buy stuff that my friends have recommended.  I’m surprised that doesn’t really exist yet.  I’m also hoping that Facebook will release some new killer apps via the preferred apps program.  I’m hoping that app quality will go up with Facebook itself more involved.

Chris Richardson
tagga developer

Lolcat

How did this get so popular?  I find lolcat quite funny, but I still can’t understand how icanhascheezburger is one of the most popular blogs in the world.  I would like someone to write a Tipping Point style book on where lolcat came from and how it got to be so popular.  There is even a lolcat translation project for the bible.  Maybe Catholicism should seize this opportunity to reach out to the youth of America?

Chris Richardson
tagga developer

Working with Frenchies

At tagga, our development team of four features a Parisian and a French Canadian, both really good guys.  It’s been really fun working with them.  I must say that I really enjoy the accents, which are both very different, and the jokes.  Canadian French is much different from France French.  In Canada, we put the em-PHA-sees on the wrong sy-LA-boules, a la Jean Chretien.  I guess what I’m really saying is that “Going to war without France is like going deer hunting without your accordion.” —Norman Schwartzkopf

Chris Richardson
tagga developer

Public Drinking

I’m going to try to make it to the fireworks tonight where it would be nice to have a beer on the beach.  Sadly, I can’t do that because its illegal.  I recently visited England where I was shocked and delighted to see people ordering drinks from the pub and taking them outside onto the street where there was more space.  In France, I was able to order a bottle of fantastic wine for a measly four euros from a corner store, where the clerk then opened the bottle for us and gave us glasses.  If I suggested we allow public drinking here, many people would be appalled.  Understandably so, drunken youth do tend to cause a lot of trouble at the fireworks and elsewhere.  Europeans however, don’t seem to have the same problems.  I believe that their attitude towards drinking, being much more relaxed, leads to more casual enjoyment and less fisticuffs.  I’d like to see Vancouver adopt a European attitude to public alcohol consumption, for my casual enjoyment.

Chris Richardson
tagga developer