I came across this great “infographic” showing the affect text messaging, or SMS, is having on the world.
Some of the ones I thought were really interesting were:
A few weeks ago I was involved in organising Demobar Galway. It was an informal event where 15 start-up companies who are making great web-based or mobile apps (BeautyBoss included!) gave a demo of their products and had a chat and a beer or two with the big crowd that came along.
The folks from NewTech Post came along on the evening to interview some of the people that were attending – check out the video below. By the way, I’m the guy being interviewed at the start of the video – it’s always strange hearing yourself back on video!
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As part of our mission to make your life easier, and to simplify your marketing, you can now update your Twitter account from within the Marketing section of BeautyBoss.
Visit the Marketing section of your account, and click on Twitter on the left side. When you click on the Sign in with Twitter button, you’ll be asked for your Twitter username & password (don’t worry, it’s Twitter asking for these, we never ask for them). Once you click to Allow BeautyBoss to post to your account, you’ll be able to send messages to your Twitter followers from within BeautyBoss. Easy!
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Check out Avon’s talking billboard that was set up as part of an outdoor advertising campaign in Slovakia.
A great idea, given that everyone loves getting compliments! There was a great response from passers by being told how wonderful they looked. It also gave Avon the chance to interact directly with their potential customers.
Well, do you really need anything? Apart from clothes and food and shelter and that basic needs of life stuff? Twitter, you’ll be extremely pleased to find out, is amazing in lots of ways. Not everybody ‘gets’ new things straight away, which is totally fine, because it took us ages to figure out how to use the toaster we bought at IKEA last month. So it’s understandable that new techy-stuff like Twitter might not be obvious straight away.
Like everything, it takes time; you need to play with it, stalk it and break it several times before you start to feel like an old Twitter-pro (fortunately you won’t have to pay for it if you break it, because it’s worth about a billion dollars). Read More
A great way to wow people when they land on your Facebook page is to spend some time creating a beautifully designed landing tab. Of course, design is just half the battle – you need to also need to create a page that encourages people to connect & interact with you.
I spent some time looking at Facebook landing pages created by some of the world’s biggest fashion & luxury brands – here are six of the best that caught my eye. They’re both beautiful to look at, and try to encourage their users to do something – be it subscribe to their newsletter, “Like” their page, or visit their site.
Probably beyond the marketing ambitions of small businesses, but you never know! Here are two examples of companies using interactive billboards (mixed with a Facebook app in one case) to generate interest in their brand, and get people interacting with them.
A nice example by Mini of mixing their real-world marketing with a Facebook campaign to promote their brand, and to get people interacting with them. Read More
In a series of posts, we’ll be looking at some ways outside the more traditional marketing activities that you can increase the number of people coming to your beauty business. First up, we’ll be looking at using text message marketing.
Text messages are effective because they are near instantaneous; they often cause people to stop what they’re doing and look at their phone. This makes them great for getting useful information out, but if you abuse them, you will annoy your clients. And annoying your clients isn’t the way to guarantee you get more business.
Rules differ between countries on what you can do with direct marketing. The best way to ensure you stay on the right side of the law, and on your client’s good side, is to ask them when they first come in if they’d like to receive occasional updates when you’ve got promotions that will interest them on.
A fantastic example of a promotional video for a town (Grand Rapids) to promote its community spirit.
“The Grand Rapids LipDub Video was filmed May 22nd, with 5,000 people, and involved a major shutdown of downtown Grand Rapids, which was filled with marching bands, parades, weddings, motorcades, bridges on fire, and helicopter take offs. It is the largest and longest LipDub video, to date.
It’s a really nice example of some innovative marketing, that had the added benefit of getting a massive amount of coverage: 671,756 YouTube views, and counting…, 103,704 Facebook link-shares, 10,692 YouTube “likes,” and counting…)
So, we’re slowly lifting the invitation-only barrier on registration to let all you lovely people try out Beautyboss for yourselves - you can go and register now.
As we haven’t fully launched, the free-trial period registration is up to 30 days and we will be extending it some more for early users. This is instead of the the normal free 15 day trial that everyone will get before signing up. We’d love to get feedback from all new users about what works for you and what doesn’t (and especially what doesn’t!!).
Really, it just means that we still have some work to do on the system, so it hasn’t fully launched. The preview will last until we’re happy everything is running smoothly. We also have some more features on our list that we’d like to add before the preview phase finishes. While we hope you won’t run into any small bugs during this time, it would be great to hear if you do.