Twitter launched in 2006 and on the 21st March 2011 turned five years old.  In a relatively short span of four years has taken the world by storm. You would be hard pressed to find any celebrity or famous brand name that is not taking advantage of this service. While other social networking sites have been busy trying to get everything from chatting to online stores under their roof, Twitter has done the complete opposite.

At first glance the usefulness of Twitter might escape some people. Twitter allows you to broadcast 140 character messages to all the people that want to get your “tweets”. However if used properly those 140 characters can become one of the most powerful marketing tools in your arsenal.

But the big question remains, “How can I use Twitter for maximum effect?” Follow a few basic rules and over time you will find that by simply “tweeting” you can drum up demand or buzz in the market for your company or product.

• Keep a simple name: This is just plain common sense the simpler the name the more likely people are to remember it and in turn follow. Instead of being creative and replacing numbers with digits and using too many underscores differentiate words by using capital letters. So instead of Bobs_Gr3at_and_tasty_seaf00d_palace use BobsSeafoodPalace
• Keep a personal touch instead of developing a corporate identity. People feel more comfortable when they feel a message is coming from a real person and not some entity
• Use the direct message service on Twitter for your customers making them feel special and valued. Direct messages can only be seen by the recipient and can help promote special offers
• Use Twitter as a way to not only generate revenue but as a way to impart knowledge to your client base. “Tweet” about topics that you feel your customers will find interesting. This will help them look at you as a trusted advisor and not just a company. By providing valuable content you increase the chances of your customers “retweeting” what you said to their followers which exposes you to many more potential clients
• Start following your clients or people you know on Twitter. Many people will reciprocate and start to follow you which increases your potential client base.

There are a number of other applications which you can use to increase your effectiveness on Twitter. TweetDeck is an application which can speed up the Tweeting process. It’s a desktop application which allows you to easily manage your followers and tweet right from your desktop. TweetBeep allows you to setup keywords and be alerted when someone tweets about them.

Be warned, get too carried away and Twitter can start to hurt more than help.

• Don’t tweet a hundred times an hour, no one likes to be spammed
• Don’t only talk about your own company or products, show people value or they will feel like your tweets are more like ads and less like valuable pieces of information
• Don’t get stuck in a rut and keep tweeting the same thing.

Keep your content fresh and your followers engaged and you’re sure to find value in this pint-sized service!

While defining our plan for Atlas’ quest for world domination we decided it was time to bite the bullet and become Microsoft Gold Partners.  We love Microsoft, they form the backbone of our business and we enjoy using (most) of their products.  So we set off…

To become a Gold partner it was first necessary to obtain a Certified partner level, so that’s where we began and this is the story.  You would think that as Microsoft profits heavily and relies strongly on the marketing efforts of the partners involved with the Microsoft partnership programme, it would be in Microsoft’s interests to plaster details of how organisations can partner with them all over the Internet.  Alas this is not the case.  Step one of partnership enrolment involves opening the Pandora’s box of evil that is enrolment in the Microsoft Partner portal.  Like all of Microsoft’s portals this of course requires a valid Hotmail account, no OpenID authentication here I’m afraid.  One other point worthy of note, don’t try to use any browser other than Internet Explorer.

That’s right, fire up Internet Explorer, you’ll need it. And the fun doesn’t end there, even using Internet Explorer the Partner Portal is clunky, poorly laid out, crashes if you wave your cursor angrily at it and relies heavily on pop-up windows for navigation. How very nineties Microsoft.

So we got stuck in to the partner portal, and after staring blankly at the computer screen for an hour, the confusion started to lift and I found myself making sense of the process. According to Microsoft points mean prizes, or in this case, a Microsoft Certified Partnership. The programme is based on an elaborate points system. Performing various tasks, such as obtaining customer referrals, testing our bespoke software to ensure compatibility with Windows 7, and putting our employees through Microsoft’s MCTS exams would each earn us points. A customer referral was 3 points, Windows 7 accreditation was 30 points, and so on. 50 points were required to become a certified partner, and a whopping 120 points required for gold.

That’s easy I thought.  I’ll fire off 10 customer reference requests, test one of our Windows form applications for compatibility with Windows 7, and we’ll have 60 points.  I diligently started to fire off customer referral requests to our client base.  I then started the long process for Windows 7 accreditation, a process so boring, backwards and painfully crap that it’s almost worthy of a separate blog post.  Instead I’ll just leave a link to the Windows 7 qualification “portal” here and leave you to your own conclusions – http://winqual.microsoft.com/.  For good measure I put one of our team through an MCTS exam to bump our points well over the amount required.  I chose our CTO Dean for this task as he has the nickname “passmaster” due to his inability to fail exams.  He kept up with his namesake and passed the exam with ease.  Interestingly though, he spotted a chap enter the exam room, and in 10 minutes nail a Microsoft MCTS exam and make a quick exit.  Now Dean is good but even he took 50 minutes.  The reason he needed 50 minutes was due to the lengthly nature of the exam questions, one question can span the length of an A4 page and this takes time to read and digest properly.  After Dean passed his exam the examiner raised the subject of the man who had superhuman reading skills and pointed out rather nonchalantly that people regularly turn up and ace Microsoft exams in 15 minutes.  The exam hosts clearly know that people are cheating by memorising the answers but frankly they’re not paid enough to care.

Anyway I digress, we were finished!  Two weeks on and over 60 points finally notched up.  However our celebrations swiftly came to an end when we spotted something was amiss.  The Microsoft Partner Portal loudly proclaimed it was time for us to sign a Partner agreement and cross Microsoft’s palm with silver.  Unfortunately every time we clicked the Upgrade Now button an error appeared.  A quick call to Microsoft confirmed that we had unwittingly began the process of acquiring our partnership during a transitional phase  where the requirements for a Microsoft partnership were changing.  Not to worry though we were told, a week later the Upgrade Now button would begin working again and we could use our points to upgrade to the all new silver partnership programme.  Unfortunately this was a lie, after the switchover our points were deleted and replaced with a new completely unrelated system.  The certified partner level was now renamed to silver, and we required:

• Two members of staff with an MCP each (we only had one)
• One member of staff having passed the Microsoft Licensing Online Assessment (this was new)
• Three references for each of the Microsoft competencies we wanted to apply for (competencies are sub divisions of the overall silver accreditation and we could reuse what we already had)
• One Windows 7 compatible product

Victory had been snatched from us at the last moment but I was determined to continue given we had already invested so much time and money.  We stuck another one of our elite coding squad through the Microsoft exam (he spotted another person cheating during his exam) and I took the Microsoft Licensing Online Assessment.

Finally we could pay Microsoft the fee, which for those of you not in the know is £1,374 + VAT for silver certification, we still don’t know how much gold certification is but presume it is more.  We waited excitedly for an e-mail to be informed what we could expect to receive in return for our money but once again were left to find out for ourselves.  Hell, we didn’t even know where to obtain our Microsoft partner logo from (the answer in case you’re wondering is http://www.partnerlogobuilder.com/).  All the work we had put in had ended with an anti-climax.

Clearly there are a number of problems with the process, not least of which are:

• Without signing into the partner portal using Internet Explorer it’s simply not possible to locate a simple overview of what is required to become a silver partner.  Equally as important, our customers cannot see and understand what we have been through to become partners
• The pricing for the certification is also a well-kept secret
• Customer references that we have requested are not vetted by Microsoft in any way.  We could easily have created 10 e-mail addresses and falsified our references
• The exams Microsoft request their partners take are clearly being undermined by a number of people and of course the organisations that host the exams
• It is incredibly difficult to find out what it is exactly that Microsoft partners receive for their hard work and cash by signing up to the partner programme
• There is little to no support from Microsoft representatives during the process.  Most front line support reps don’t have the knowledge to assist with the most basic of enquiries.  Tweets and e mails to Microsoft are replied to up to a week later.  They also insist on responding to my Hotmail account even when I e-mail them from my work e-mail account
• Following successful completion of the programme and following payment no information is provided on what we can expect to receive as part of the Microsoft programme.  The benefits are ridiculously difficult to locate and understand

More important than all of the above, not a single one of our customers understands the hoops we have jumped through and what it means for them to be working with a Microsoft Silver partner.  There’s really little to no business value added for them as there’s simply no information on the Internet detailing why organisations should work with Microsoft partners over non-partners.  So I’m left wondering has the process been a waste of time, and the answer is a resounding yes.  All we’ve been given is this logo:

And this rather natty plaque

For now we’ll stick with the silver partner until Microsoft proves to us, and our customers, there’s a good enough reason to jump through more hoops and pay them more money for a gold certification.

So now you’ve watched the video and understand the concept, how do you get started?  Here’s how:

1. Upload your Bio and a photo.  People will not follow you unless you provide a little information about who you are and what you do
2. If you don’t wish to use Twitter to follow a bunch of celebrities.  Use your head, and not a tool to locate people to follow.  Either use the Twitter search to locate people wh0 talk about topics that matter to you, or visit some of your favourite websites to locate twitter profile links
3. Introduce yourself to the people you have followed.  To write a tweet that appears in a Twitter specific users timeline simply reference that user by name.  For example, “Hi @simonswords, great to see you on Twitter!”
4. Check out the people you have followed to see who they follow.  Chances are they will follow people whom you will find of interest
5. Once you begin to build a group of followers engage with them.  Always try to respond to their tweets that are directed at you and post relevant interesting links from time to time.  Do this by re-tweeting (RT for short) or acknowledging somebody using their username with an @ symbol at the start.
6. Last but definitely not least, take time t0 clean up the list of people you currently follow.  If you don’t do this on a regular basis you’ll find your Twitter feed becomes full of useless information

There are also a few basic things you should not do:

1. Don’t steal other people’s tweets and try to pass them off as your own.  Chances are you’ll get found out and blocked
2. Don’t automatically follow people that follow you.  Especially if a user has followed you and their follow to followed ratio is high (i.e. they follow 10,000 people but are only followed 10!)
3. Don’t repeat yourself, which can be broken down into three categories:
   a.  Don’t start each day by positing “Good morning fellow Tweeps!”.
   b.  Commenting on live TV, we can all turn on the TV if we wish to find out what’s happening at Wimbledon for example
   c.  Posting “I’m bored”, “Meh”, or some other useless tweet that adds no value to what I can see in my feed

Twitter is a simple service but it will add value to your business and life if you use it properly.  I look forward to seeing you there!

UPDATE:  In IIS 7.5 it’s now possible to implement nice looking URLs for your WordPress blog with the built in rewrite functionality.  Check here for more details.

One issue we couldn’t find an easy way around was the implementation of pretty Permalinks for our blog.  What’s a pretty Permalink we hear you ask?  By default a WordPress blog post would have the Permalink http://atlascs.co.uk/blog/?p=N.  This is both impossible to understand and not very useful.  Whereas we wanted our Permalinks to be far more readable to the human eye, and include information regarding what the blog post is about.  This is also useful for SEO purposes but that’s an entirely separate discussion.

The usual approach to implement this functionality is the use of a .htaccess file but this is only applicable to Apache. We’re running our website on Windows Server so this isn’t an option.

After hunting around for a simple solution we finally found one by Einar Egilsson.

To implement this solution follow these simple steps:

1. Take this file, and put it in the root of your WordPress site (rename .txt to .php)
2. Set your sites 404 page to point to the wordpress-404.php URL.  Most control panels at web hosts allow you to do this. If you’ve got the option to select between FILE and URL then choose URL.
3. Go to Options -> Permalinks in your WordPress admin page, and choose an appropriate structure for your links.  We chose Custom with this pattern:

   /%year%/%monthnum%/%day%/%postname%/

Simples!  Your WordPress posts will now display with easy to read Permalinks and your site will be much easier to navigate.  We use this solution on a number of our sites including this blog, our Business Rate Relief site and Software Development website.

Enjoy!

On the back of this we purchased www.businessraterelief.co.uk, added a load of information about business rate relief and voila!  The site now receives 5000 visitors per month and is not only a great tool for our business owner friends but makes us a small amount of money using Google Adsense.  It has also raised our profile both locally and nationally.

A few weeks ago we decided to try out a the exact same technique on the slightly tougher search phrase software development london.  We created the website http://www.softwaredevelopmentlondon.com/ and populated it with some brochure information about our company and the services we offer making sure that we didn’t copy/paste text from our existing Atlas website.  We’re still patiently waiting for Google to realise that our new softwaredevelopmentlondon.com website exists, but we’re quietly confident that given time and a little gentle SEOing we should see this website march to the top of the search results for the phrase software development london along with similar phrases.

software development london website

Now we hear what you’re saying.  Atlas is a software development company therefore these things can all be done in house for free.  So let’s apply some commerical costs to this gamble of setting up an entire website:

Design work ~ £1000

Hosting (per annum) – £50

Installation of Word Press – £FREE!

Configuration of Word Press to work with your chosen design – £1000 to £1,500

Tally that up and you’re looking at an investment of roughly £2,500 which in our case will see a minimum of 15 new customers knocking on the Atlas door each month.  Not only that but the phrase we have targetted is so specific the amount of time wasters should be minimal.  Now consider this – how much does your organisation currently pay in order to generate that number of leads each month?  Probably a lot more than a one off payment of £2,500!

We think this is a sound investment, what phrases do you think your organisation could target to generate new customers using this technique?

There are a multitude of tools out there all offering to perform the job but the one we keep coming back to is: http://www.auditmypc.com/xml-sitemap.asp

It uses Java so you’ll need to make sure you have that installed, but it outputs a perfect site map and as an added bonus will highlight any broken links it finds which is very useful indeed.

Have a good weekend everybody.

http://twitter.com/simonswords

In fact it was possibly the most dire attempt at direct marketing we’ve ever witnessed by an organisation with absolutely no excuse to produce something so poorly conceived and implemented. If you’ll permit me I’d like to take you through evidence details up this sorry excuse for marketing.

Exhibit A:  Naff looking brown envelope

If it wasn’t for the fact that it had an IBM stamp in the top left corner and what felt like a CD inside we wouldn’t even have bothered to open what was quite obviously a mailer.  The giveaway is that the letter is addressed to the Chief Technical Officer rather than a person.  Unfortunately it gets worse.

Exhibit B:  A5 letter which looks and reads as though it was written in a school playground somewhere

The letter starts off badly and gets worse.  It’s bad enough that it isn’t addressed to anybody specific (you mean to tell me IBM is unable to afford a high quality mailing list?!).  And so it begins:

“David Norfolk of Bloor Research recently advised ISVs to open their minds to less obvious database technologies.  He specifically recommends Informix Dynmaic Server (IDS).”

Ok who the heck is David Norfolk?  Why would we use database technologies that aren’t obvious, the best ones are out there, tried, tested and accepted?  Why does he recommend IDS?

The letter goes on to say that IDS is hardware efficient compared to the usual commodity databases.  However it fails to provide any real statistics or comparisons with “commodity databases”.  What are commodity databases anyway?  I can only presume they mean Microsoft SQL server.

Next up IBM mention that IDS was a finalist in some award somewhere that nobody cares about.  IDS can be embedded in to an application too, apparently.  Finally the letter signs off by providing a website for us to visit on the assumption that our attention has been grabbed to the extent that we would bother.

Exhibit C:  Tragic looking black and white copy of an article written in IT-director.com in an attempt to back up the contents of the letter

As if this lesson in how not to perform direct marketing could be bettered we’re then treated to a double sided print of a web article about the lesser known IDS database application that software development businesses are missing out on.

The whole experience was very underwhelming.  IBM has got a mammoth task their hands if they think that this kind of half-cocked approach to marketing against the likes of Microsoft, Oracle and Sun Microsystems (to name but a few) is going to achieve any results.

We held a meeting to review our basic requirements which fall in to three primary categories of CRM, sales and support and development project management.

Primarily the system we’re looking for needs to:

• Manage our customers
• Manage our projects
• Manage support tickets
• Provide a chat interface via our website

We didn’t think it would be a big ask but after a lot of searching we’re struggling to find a good solution.

At first glance it seemed Microsoft TFS (Team Foundation Suite) was going to be our answer.  With SharePoint built in as standard this appeared to be the obvious way forward.  The only problem is that the SharePoint and development management (such as source control) elements of TFS are completely segregated rendering the end result useless.

We then investigated Microsoft Dynamics.  An amazing piece of CRM software which we have a great deal of experience implementing and managing for our customers when an off the shelf CRM is suitable for their needs.  Unfortunately the development and ongoing maintenance overhead for a small team such as ours just doesn’t appear to be a worthwhile investment.

This leaves us with two options.  Purchase one of the many CRM or project management applications and try to mould it to meet our specific requirements, or write something ourselves.  Fortunately we have found a CRM/project management tool which is inexpensive and in the meantime we’re going to take that path as we simply don’t have the time to write something here from scratch.

Now if you’ve bothered to read this far in to this post I’m going to give away a small secret.  We’re actually working on some technology here which is going to prevent any business owner from ever having to accept an off the shelf solution ever again!  Most off the shelf packages simply try too hard to cater for a wide range of industries and end up catering for none.

We’re working on something quite special here at Atlas.  Specifically we’re writing software which will allow any business owner in any industry regardless of their technical expertise to use a simple web interface to generate their own web hosted software in a completely automated fashion.  They simply enter their business model objects, set the additional functionality they require (such as a calendar, permissions, audit trail etc.) and voila!  Instant software completely customised to their business needs.

We’re still quite a way off setting release dates for this new application.  As more information becomes available we’ll publish it here.

a) We partner with them and use their technologies to create websites and software applications for our customers.

b) We actually like what Microsoft do.  Okay they get lots of things wrong, but would PCs have infiltrated the world in such a big way if there wasn’t one standard operating system (aka Windows) in use?

However when it comes to marketing Microsoft could seriously do with having a chat with Steve Jobs and Co. over at Apple.  Here’s why: