First thing’s first

Twitter’s a micro-blogging site. Which means that instead of maintaining a full blog as I’m doing at the moment, with full articles, posts with detailed content or unedited ramblings, you’re limited to a scant 140 characters to express yourself. If the stuff you tweet (which is what we call these 140 char posts) is interesting or fun, people will follow you to keep on reading what it is you have to say. Similarly you may follow other people who interest you and read whatever it is they have to say. Pretty simple concept, and not too impressive when described so plainly, but it’s become a veritable force of nature.

Why it’s cool

The recent hype has revolved around celebrities twittering their every move basically skipping over the paparazzi and letting the public scrutinize their lives straight from the horse’s mouth. If you’re into celebrity gossip well that’s pretty much where twitter begins and ends for you. For those of us looking for something more, the involvement needs to go a bit deeper. See, the one thing newbies don’t get about twitter is that if you don’t tweet and don’t follow anyone, you have a site full of nothing. So if following celebs isn’t your thing it might be a bit harder to find good people to follow, but once you do you will have opened a door into the collective hive mind: Developers with new techniques, advertisers sharing research, industry experts talking about their “secrets”, and in general excellent people putting up amazing content that most of us would have probably not found otherwise.
It’s also the absolute best place to get breaking news. Michael Jackson’s death might be the most recent example, wherein those of us on twitter had gotten the news about 2 hours earlier than everywhere else, but it can be much more practical.
Since I’m followed by a lot of locals, and most people with a smart phone and a twitter account use a mobile app to tweet from the road, I’ve found myself asking my followers for traffic reports, for the state of a line at the movies, for reviews on all sorts of things, and many times I’ve gotten an answer, sometimes with pictures, seldom with live video.
Further it’s a fantastic place to meet like minded individuals. I follow clients, suppliers, competition, friends, and people I don’t know and will probably never meet. It’s been a particularly useful tool for organizing the local web industry. What started as a bunch of tweets amongst a group of pros very impressed with each other, is now coalescing into the Web Professionals Group of Puerto Rico, including various development, design, and e-marketing firms in the island.

Who should I follow?

First forget about hoarding followers. Too many businesses and individuals come to twitter with a half-baked idea involving a million followers and some harebrained advertising scheme. The best way to get eyes is by generating good content. This is truer on twitter than it is anywhere on the internet as most of the time you’ll be expected to converse casually with both your followers and those you follow. Also a lot people will follow you for following them as a common courtesy.  If you or your company (or your client) is looking to become a productive member of the twitter community instead of looking for followers (they’ll come in time) focus on following good interesting people. A good place to start might be twitter’s own search. Write in a word or phrase and you’ll instantly find hundreds (if not thousands) of individuals tackling that particular topic. Find a couple of twitterers who say something interesting about said topic and follow them, odds are they’ll keep saying interesting stuff. You can also follow people you actually know, just ask around and you’ll find out a couple of your friends or contacts tweet as well. Once you have a decent base you can look at the people they’re following and cherry-pick those you like best. Finally, every Friday is Follow Friday. This fun little trend started a long while back and has become a staple of the Twitter community. Every friday people send out recommendations on who to follow from the list of people they themselves follow. Just look for the #followfriday  tag and you’ll find a lot of good ones as well as some bad ones but you can always unfollow if someone gets too annoying.

Final tips

Congrats! You should now be a productive twitterer. If you’ve no idea what to write about just take a sec to think about what you’re doing and write about that, odds are someone somewhere will find it interesting. Also there’s some lingo you’ll need to know to fit in here’s a decent primer straight from twitter. You’ll probably also want to use a good url shortener. Since you only have 140 characters to write your thoughts you don’t want to waste most of them on a long dynamically generated URL. So if for example you wanted to link to a beautiful 3 bedroom home on ClasificadosMejores.com, the best classifieds site on the web, you’d be better off using this URL:http://bit.ly/2m6R3A than this URL: http://www.clasificadosmejores.com/bienes-raices-clasificados-470.html.
My favorite shortener is http://bit.ly as it’s the least amount of characters allowed for a domain and it’s really easy to type and remember.
Also there’s ways to tweet without going to twitter.com, tweetdeck is my favorite solution for the desktop with tiny twitter on my phone for keeping everyone up to date from the road.
Finally here’s a list of great twitterers to follow so you can get started:
@pabloiv, @torlanco, @alantaveras, @robetoell, @albizu, @gcollazo, @jpadilla_, @fritzo, @redod, @mercedesnegron, @kolapse, @dhowell, @garyvee, @jasoncalacanis, @wiltonv, @lbenitez

If you already twitter and would like to leave some suggestions put them right there in the comments.

Today’s demographics are way more diverse and extended than the usual; gender, age and economic status. Our market is full of different niches, which divide into sub niches, groups and cliques. Most people  see this as a problem while others see it as an opportunity, which translate into different ways of advertising products and the creation of new products.

I once heard a celebrated ad-teacher say, the creative process of an agency stops when the rules and regulations of the FCC start. Lets face it, this isn’t Europe, where creative is a no-boundaries department that can use a topless woman to sell milk or create a whole interactive veggie-city, like the case of burger king’s ad agency in Amsterdam, to take the whopper experience out of the restaurants.  We live in a conservative society, with conservative values and conservative regulations. We are accustomed to dull ads that rarely over-pass the “noise” that is created by all the media surrounding us. Even when your product or ad campaign can be better represented with that great idea that is not so “conservative”, you have to be satisfied with what the mass media lets you communicate to your client.  Let’s take ZUJI’s, an online travel agent from Australia,  help a friend take a break campaign as a perfect example on how a company can interact, in a humorous non conservative way, with its clients through the internet to pursue their “take a break” concept. We don’t have to go to the farthest corners on earth to find some innovative and risky ads, Samsung’s London based agency just caused buzz all over the web with its, YouTube streamed, HD camera trick challenge which couldn’t be aired on any other medium due to its long running time,  and other media’s lack of interactivity. Samsung caught viewer’s attention span for more than one minute and half paying only for production.

Even locally the Internet has been able to generate excellent traffic results with relatively minimal effort. During this year’s Fiestas de la Calle San Sebastian, Open Mobile hired us and our sister company WiFiwyg, to stream live from the festivities. We set up cameras around San Sebastian street capturing all 4 days, real time, day and night, and transmitted it through fiestasdelacallesansebastian.com, which directed to a SanSe themed version of Open’s website with the Live streams running on it. By streaming live, straight from the street without censors or delays, Open ran the risk of capturing all sorts of non-PG content from the revelers down below, but through the combined efforts of a premiere domain, compelling content, and a little risk-taking, Open received over 20,000 unique visitors during the weekend (orders of magnitude above their regular weekend traffic) which resulted in a considerable spike of phone calls and conversions.

Instead   of kneeling down and cutting short the creative process, agencies should try different solutions and methods to get the clients’ message out. We should start following high end marketer’s trends like Nike and Sony’s Europe web methods.

The internet is our savior, with channels like YouTube, networks like twitter and thousands of sites with advertising space our imagination can go wild without leaving out the strategy.

Its time to start selling creative solutions here in Puerto Rico. Where there’s a will, the internet is the way.

Here in just a week, I learned of all the possibilities that the internet has to offer. This is the most dynamic medium out there without a doubt. In its never-ending evolution, the web offers marketing and ad executives measurable, innovative and relatively cheap solutions for this modern and volatile market.  From reaching and knowing your target market; with networks like Facebook and Twitter, to literally doing whole campaigns and making your product move out of the shelf, the perfect example being, the controversially creepy Burger King “King”, which was so successful that it became it’s main campaign after running online. The world wide web is replacing ratings and CPM with CPC’s and Cost per leads, which are more inexpensive due the need of user interaction before a client has to put up a single dime.

In conclusion, there is much change to be made. Nowadays people are spending less time in front a television set and buying newspapers because all past media now are all mixed and mashed together in this thing we spend most of our time surfing. The Internet.

Wow, first blog post ever in my life. Lets make this happen.

At first it seemed to me like a very elaborate joke, I bet similar thoughts came to their minds initially. But they have developed and designed it to a point of exquisite interaction and fun factor.

Some of the things you can do with the app are shake “maracas”, scratch “Güiros”, slap “panderetas” and hit two “palitos”. If that doesn’t seem like a blast, you can tag along other parranderos (virtual ones) and have them yell:

• ¡Asalto!
• Weeepa
• Trucuta trucuta
• ¡Felicidades!

…amongst other favorites. The app is having great acceptance in the Apple Store with clients from all over the world including Japan, India, Spain, and France. You can reach it via this link.

I hope this will be the beginning of new exciting apps for the iPhone from Puerto Rican developers.

Here’s a look at the actual app:

1. Being too confident (not susceptible to change)

We are all about confidence; if we wouldn’t be, everything would be different. However, being too confident is the opposite of having self-doubt and doubting… well healthy doubting is one of the thought processes that help you reevaluate things. And start-ups are all about reevaluation; In fact, the most exciting thing of start-ups is being on your toes all the time, no security, just action and risk.

This got ingrained in my mind while watching Start-Up Junkies a TV series of entrepeneurs on the excitement of working on new ventures. Part of the thrill is having the power to sit back and take new decisions. So, if your confidence takes you to the point where change is not an option, you’ve just maneuvered into your first pothole.

2. Not deciphering the system and where you stand in it

When we started out we had very few contacts and a vague impression of how things worked. It was very hard to do business because we didn’t know where we stood,  who anyone was, and where we needed to be. Through the years we’ve found answers to all those questions and have thrived because of it. Those answers differ by industry, by company and even by individual, but it is very important to have them.

Essentially it’s like finding out which game you’re playing, what your cards are, what your goals are, and who the other players are. If as a company you’re in the dark about any of those it is very hard to do anything right.

In our case we originally thought that ad agencies were our direct competition, enemies to be avoided. It wasn’t until later that it became evident that it was they who could benefit the most from our services, by outsourcing their web development projects to a company who’s payment depended on quality and a strict schedule. This although evident now, was a game changer for us, and our relationships with various advertising companies are what drives a large chunk of our business.

3. Giving competitors the wrong treatment or non at all

One of our partners owns a lot of bars in Old San Juan, I remember him telling me about a mistake new bar owners often make: treating competitors as enemies. The #1 reason it is a mistake in his industry is that people simply like bar-hopping. Being part of a strip of bars, it is very important for him and his competitors to maintain the hype on the area. So often, as another partner does in his restaurants, they would rather advertise the area instead of just the single business. Emilio hosts the SOFO culinary festival and Pablo the Candela Arts and Music Festival; the whole street celebrates the cultural Fiestas de la Calle San Sebastian every year.

So, although you wont give all your secrets to your competitors; it is very healthy to stay current with your industry and keeping a healthy relationship with the people that will compete with you for years to come will, at least, do just that.

4. Creating a solution where there is no problem

This is Javier’s (partner) mantra. Always asking yourself if your new solution solves a problem will save you a lot of headaches. I remember launching Puerto Rico’s first social community site: Qoodos.com, it was great, we hosted awesome parties where people could simply come and have a good time for free. The cost of the parties was payed for by companies who would ask questions to the party goers (their demographic) through online forms; that was our business model.

The mistakes started when we decided to change the site’s experience to something similar to MySpace (we didnt know MySpace would eventually flop then). More mistakes followed, such as hosting user uploaded videos, giving blogs to users, and we were even planning on giving them their own marketplace. None of the new things followed our business model and eventually the site’s users dwindled to the point were we decided to close it. The reason: they already had social community sites, youtube, blogger and ebay. There was no need to expand the community to that point, our solutions didn’t solve a problem and that leads me to the next pothole.

5. Consistency vs Innovation

It is the nature of start-ups to be innovative, usually we try to do something better, faster and cheaper or make a new thing altogether. But it is very easy to have an idea and build on it to the point that it becomes some intangable monster with stuff falling off its back. As any restaurateur will tell you, consistency is one of the most important aspects of a business. So once you decide to start a startup try to simplify the idea to a point were potential clients will understand and stick to it, stepping off the innovation wagon until you’re sure the idea sells.

1. The Internetz!
2. Brother’s contacts (change ‘brother’ for partners)
3. Get out there!
4. Start a Blog or Newsletter
5. Answer/Send Emails
6. Traditional

The Internetz!
My first option, as a web developer is most obviously going to be the internet. Hey! sorry for the push but really… Yes, this is the largest service market in the world! Need proof? check out Liveperson, a site that is looong overdue in latin markets; It even includes a desktop installer. My experience with freelance sites however is a mix bag, normally the job will go overseas but Puerto Rico is ‘overseas’ to many people so that’s the table turned. To my amazement, the most visited area in that site is the ‘Spirituality’ section, who knew? With millions of gods maybe that’s why many outsource to India.

Brother’s Contacts
At some point I realized that having partners is the single-most important aspect of making your business grow. I have different partners in diff.. actually its almost always the same industry or similar, well I have many partners and for this post’s purpose believe-you-me that most business comes from us (the team) and our contacts. Even in cases like mine where socials skills can be compared with those of a goat. However, in most cases a partner could mean double the contacts or at least half the work!

Get out there!
My brother and I agreed that we would go out at least 3 evenings during the week just to have people see us. Do this and it will greatly improve your social life and not affect your wallet that much if you do it right. Invite a couple of business related friends for some drinks and be sure to be back home before 11pm; leave the partying for weekends. Doing this gives us at least one new otherwise lost client per week and helps us stay current with related industries.

Start a Blog or Newsletter
Having so many projects all at once has put me in the situation where people sometimes don’t know what I’m talking about or which project I’m referring to. People go about their lives with their own stuff in their head so reminding them what you do every 2 weeks in a newsletter will help them tune into you when they need to. Furthermore, keeping a blog and maintaining a healthy post frequency will let potential clients know where you’re coming from.

Answer/Send Emails
Oh I’d like to stress on this more, I’m not talking about sending email campaigns. Just send an email. You see a product you like? Send an email, tell them you like it. Countless relationships have grown from a simple email. Don’t go about saying “Hey I like your product. By the way, I make web pages”. Let your signature do the talking. You distribute food and receive an email from your site asking for recipes? Write them back and show you care for clients; maybe they have a cousin with a supermarket chain.

Traditional
If you’re not into “getting out there” for drinks there are more traditional ways of reaching people like, jogging… Did you think it’s a coincidence that many business people run marathons every year? Any topic, any hobby will help you connect with other people. Not into hobbies? Join a country club, easy as that.

So far, from the looks of the logo and presentation; there is something very “web 2.0″ and modern about the project. We are very eager to see this company develop into something grand and are certain that Hector’s expertize in the field will “drive” them towards this goal.

So, as part of that which is web, we welcome the Kranios Marketing Think Tank.

Kranios Marketing Think Tank

1. This American Life
This was originally a radio show from Chicago Public Radio which finally found it’s real audience on the Internet. Each week they take a topic and tell one to four stories based on that topic. The stories are always real life anecdotes usually told by the people involved. I realize the premise doesn’t sound particularly exciting, but skillful storytelling and an astonishing musical selection, grab a hold of the listener every single time.

2. digg.com
Digg is a social news site; people submit stories and the rest of the users vote on them, the ones with most votes appear on the site’s front page. This site was completely dominated with pro-Obama, anti-McCain articles, but since the election ended the discussion has returned to science and tech news. It’s a great place to find out about what’s going on in the bleeding edge and with geek culture.

3. The Battle for Gobwin Knob
It looks childish and it’s a comic book, but that’s where the throw-away online comic stops and this fantastic piece of literature begins. This first volume of the Erfworld saga follows the attack on Gobwin Knob by the unified forces of Erfworld under the Command of Prince Ansom of Jetstone, against Stanley the Tool. If it sounds cheesy it’s completely intentional. Under a very colorful candy coating, of overly cutesy characters, pop culture references and visual puns, lies an epic story played out in a multi dimensional dynamic world that is somehow believable. Very highly recommended.

4. Wired
Wired magazines has been one of my favorite publications for years. It finally brought geek culture out into the post-modern cyberpunk world all of us imagined ourselves to be living in to begin with. If geek is now somehow chic, Wired had a huge hand in making that happen, bringing our little club of misfits out into the mainstream while somehow staying relevant and on the edge, even after all these years.

5.TWiT, Diggnation, ELR
All 3 of these are tech industry and geek culture podcasts. I mention them together for their similar subject matter, talk show format, and availability through the iTunes store for free. ELR(or Extra Life Radio for long) is a weekly discussion of all things geek hosted by web comic artists Scott Johnson, Brian Dunaway, and Obsidian(our client), whose webcomic commissionedcomic.com is hosted by us in this very same server. This Week in Tech(TWiT) is a discussion panel led by Leo Laporte, of Radio and TechTV fame, on the tech industry. The show is focused on the business side of things and through Leo’s cred in the community is frequented by real high level insiders. Finally Diggnation is web wunderkind Kevin Rose and his sidekick Alex Albrecht sitting on a couch drinking beer going though the top stories on digg.com, it is frequently hillarious, often nonsensical, and sometimes just plain weird.

6. Pandora
If you like music, and I know you do, Pandora could easily become the best tool you will ever find. Based off of the findings of the Music Genome Project, this online app will create a playlist of music from many different artists based on the tendencies of one particular song, album or artist. As you listen to the songs it offers, you can tell it if you liked a song or not and it will in turn learn from those preferences. I can not stop raving about Pandora, I will reccomend it to anyone and everyone, seriously, go there now.

I guess that’s it for now. All of those are very impressive time wasters but most of them will teach you a thing or two about what the internet is all about. Feel free to add your own favorites in the comments.

We know stuff you don’t.

That might sound blunt but it’s true. Like any other professional, we do this for a living, every day, as part of a larger industry. We involve ourselves with other people of similar talents and maintain an ongoing conversation with the larger global industry. We read trade magazines and blogs, we beta test programs that haven’t come out yet, and we do this enough times that we know how to do it right, quickly, while avoiding the pitfalls most newcomers hit head-on.

The main problem with the perception that anyone can do web has a lot to do with how easy it is to generate a basic product. With basic computer knowledge and a bit of good taste almost anyone can churn out a couple of decent looking HTML pages which will run in a browser. The problem is that those pages won’t enjoy the benefits of well made CSS, won’t be SEO optimized, won’t be coded elegantly (which will in turn raise the file size), won’t be able to interact with a database, etc. I could keep going for literally 7 or 8 paragraphs, but I think you get the point. Developing a web site is much more than amassing a series of HTML pages. There needs to be consideration for the client’s needs in almost every aspect of the site from the navigation, to the presentation, to the code. Every single part of the project needs to be thought out with a larger goal in mind.

So, that’s why all our clients decided to go pro. They realized they had a need that had to be fulfilled appropriately. They had to show their company and provide their products and services through the only truly international medium for the entire world to see. That’s not the kind of thing you’d want to leave to amateurs.

Everybody who has ever owned their own company is probably getting back on their chair after falling out from laughing so hard. As I mentioned before these expectations were completely unrealistic and oddly enough that fact didn’t quite dawn on us until after months of being in business with few clients. We now have a much clearer understanding of what real business is, we’ve molded ourselves, our strategies, and our interactions with our clients to our best understanding of how things really work and what our place is within that machine.

We are not bitter, we’ve managed to build a respected company, that turns a profit, during a recession, while providing our client’s a quality product that generates frequent referrals. We are very far from bitter. What I meant to preamble is that on quiet sunday evenings we sit looking back at the things we used to think and laugh at our naivete, wondering what we think now that in 3 years we will find absolutely absurd.

With this I’m going to start a series of posts. Through these last couple of years we’ve developed great rapport with other successful business people, some are clients, some are suppliers and some have become our partners in other projects. I’ll be inviting them to write on the topic of the things they thought they knew and what they’ve learned since. I expect these following posts to be very varied and to have a lot to say. I’ll be kicking them off later in the week with my own, probably followed by my brother’s and then whoever else wants in.