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Update 4/25: Forgot to mention, you’re welcome to follow me on Twitter - my screen name is WordpressHacker.

Twitter’s becoming more and more popular these days as marketers flood to the online mini-blog at the behest of people like Jeremy Shoemaker. It’s an interesting concept that I, admittedly, didn’t see a benefit in until recently.

A lot of marketing a website, whether it be your small business site or a personal one that you’d like to grow, involves convincing a prospect to give you permission to contact him or her. Sure, you can buy email marketing lists, and you may have some success with them, but that’s not a long-term strategy. Long-term, you need to build a list of prospects who have chosen to give you their permission to contact them with offers. Before I go on, you should think about the importance of this; people are putting enough trust in you and what you have to offer that they’re freely giving you their email addresses, phone numbers, whatever, and requesting that you keep them updated. In a world bombarded by spam, permission marketing is a powerful thing.

Additionally, when it comes to marketing through relationship building, just getting your company’s name out there is important; you can’t exactly sell a product or service if nobody knows you exist. The first place to start is with people in your own industry.

Now maybe I couldn’t see it at first, but Twitter offers just that. “Social media” is growing in popularity and doesn’t show any sign of slowing, but for those who don’t want to hassle of maintaining a blog, it’s been tough to really take advantage of it…until now.

What is Twitter?

Twitter has been around for a while now, at least long enough that I should have been on there a while ago. Anyway, the best way to describe it is a blog with a limit of 160 characters per post. 160 characters is not a lot; it’s so small in fact that it’s hard to compress your thoughts into such a small space. But the benefit it brings is that it allows you to get your ideas out there and talk to people without spending hours writing blog articles everyday. People can choose to “follow” you, or keep track of what you’re writing about, so it’s permission marketing at it’s best. Twitter’s been running like a freight train lately, and if it keeps up, it could become a powerful way to market yourself and get your name out there.

Don’t Wait

That said, make a choice to either get started on Twitter now, or not at all because, like I’ve said a million times, by the time everyone’s talking about a marketing strategy, it’s already past it’s prime. It’s such a small commitment in both money (free) and time (160 characters = about 20 seconds) that there’s little reason not to give it a shot.

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If you run Windows and have quicktime installed, you may or may not have noticed, during your last automatic update, that there was an extra line in the Quicktime update queue this time around…it was Safari, Apple’s flagship web browser, formerly only found on the Mac.

Safari for Windows

Apple released Safari for Windows, beta, back on June 11, 2007, and has since brought it out of beta testing and decided, why not sneak it onto your computer? Hell, you don’t have a clue what goes on your own computer and most computer users won’t even notice, right? Well, that’s what Apple’s betting on whether they admit it or not.

To be honest, I’m sure it’s effective…the users who do notice won’t think a whole lot of it because it’s so normal these days (although less so than in the past) for software companies to sneak software onto your machine and it’s just another company pulling one over on computer users. The users who don’t notice, well, won’t notice; at least not until they happen to stumble upon the browser and think, “Hmm, what’s this?” Maybe they’ll even click to find out and Apple’s betting on them liking the slick interface (although as a web designer, can someone please tell me why Safari renders font bolder than any bold I’ve ever seen?).

What’s Interesting About This Form of Business Marketing?

The interesting thing about this is what I alluded to in the section above. The people who do notice this sneaky trick are so familiar with companies doing this it they won’t raise any fuss…hell, it’s nothing new, right? And the people who don’t notice surely won’t complain about something they don’t even know happened right under their noses. And who knows, maybe they’ll stumble upon Safari lying dormant on their cluttered desktop one day, click, and fall madly in love with it. The interesting thing about this type of marketing/promotion is that, under different circumstances it would be considered totally dishonest and sleezy, but Apple’s a big name company, and these kind of underhanded tactics are almost expected these days by computer users, so the trick quietly retreats without much more than a whisper raised in objection, and suddenly Apple snags so many million new Safari users, practically overnight…all the while nobody has any idea about the enormous leap forward in market share the company made.

It reminds me of Aaron Wall’s post yesterday over at SEOBook.com about Google’s dominance of everything they touch simply because they have access to all the statistics they need, and can shift things about to promote their own growth and prevent the growth of competitors. The whole time, the average Google user has no idea about the power Google holds at it’s fingertips…they just think Google’s finds what they’re looking for most of the time.

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I just picked up a copy of Adobe Contribute on the recommendation of a friend of mine and, I have to say, it’s pretty incredible. I’m writing this post on my desktop, visually, in Adobe Contribute, and it’s showing up as I type exactly how it will be displayed when published…well, close enough anyway.

So far I’ve been able to edit posts and write new ones, but I haven’t figured out how to edit Wordpress pages yet…not sure if that’s possible, but I’ll keep you in the loop.

If you’re interested in taking a look at this time-saving piece of software, you can get a free 30-day trial from Adobe here.

I’m a huge fan of Adobe’s software. I’ve used almost all of their aplpications at some point in time, some more than others, and I’ve found everything to be so intuitive. For example, when I was installing Adobe Contribute, I had to add my server information so contribute could access this blog. At one point it asked for my blog’s access point. Now, I’ve been blogging for a while and designing blogs for just as long and I’ve never once heard the term “Access Point” in reference to a Wordpress blog. So I thought to myself, “What’s an access point?” No sooner had I thought that than I looked up and there in a little help bubble was the explanation of exactly what an access point was and how to find it.

That’s just a small example, but little things like that, when taken over the life of the software, save you so much time, headache, and money because you canfocus on the important tasks instead of searching endlessly online to figure out what a Wordpress “access point” is. That’s also why I’m zealously against Microsoft products. Even though I use Windows and Excel extensively, I avoid the rest like the plague because they are so unintuitive andbuggy I end up spending just as much debuggin and troubleshooting as I do creating whatever it is I’m creating.

I’ll write more about Contribute later, but I’ve been using it for about 20 minutes now and I’m so impressed I can’t believe it took me this long to start using it.

Tags: software,blogging software,adobe,contribute

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