Andy Vota, vice president of Union Street Media
In case any of you missed it, our very own Andy Vota was interviewed on WPTZ channel 5 here at Union Street Media. Burlington Vermont has recently begun the application process to Google’s fiber network pilot program. This network would be ultra high speed, providing bandwidth of up to 1GB/second to homes and businesses.
Andy is quoted as saying “We want to be on the cutting edge of technology in Burlington, and this would be a great opportunity to do that. We want to be associated with a great brand like Google that’s known worldwide as a leader in technology.”
Watch the segment and Andy’s interview here
Go for Bronze!
Yahoo, Bing, AOL, MSN, ASK?
None of the above. It’s YouTube.
Ten years ago today, after a long lunch at a cafe in SOHO with my then business partners, I called The Company Corporation in Delaware and officially incorporated a start-up that had launched out of my Middlebury College dorm room the previous fall.
The spring of 2000 were heady times. Everyone was full of optimism. The NASDAQ was less then a month away from it’s all time high. 
Twenty-somethings like me were becoming multi-millionaires overnight on The-Emperor-Has-No-Clothes business models and we were going to be the next ones. A Doonsbury Cartoon from that spring summed up the times, as one character said to the other “Just finished the business plan. I’m off to get a Mercedes. Want one?”
Ten years later, the story didn’t play out that way for CollegeXTRA.com, Inc., but that’s just fine with me. As a celebration of our tenth birthday, I’d like share a few things I’ve learned along the way, but first, a little history on how I got here. If you want to fast forward through the “how we got here” part, my next post covers some of the things I’ve learned over the past ten years.
The business you start is not the one you end up in. So how did we go from creating “for students, by students” web sites at college campuses to developing web sites for REALTORS?
On the 11th of February at 11am Spencer Taylor, will be giving a talk at the CEDO Winter Business Fair on how to effectively utilize social media for small businesses. The talk will be focused more on strategy then on the actual functionality of various social media outlets. Taylor will focus on how to use Facebook, Twitter and Blogging in concert to gain visibility in the online marketplace and new customers. He will also touch on other business-specific social media platforms such as Yelp and Urban Spoon as well as the hyper-local Front Porch Forum service. Participants will be encouraged to ask questions and interact to discuss their experiences for the group to draw on. We hope to see you there!
Sounds like an odd thing to say but the reality is in the consumer-to-consumer marketplace, the truth surfaces about products, services, ideas, and companies. For instance, when looking at reviews for bed and breakfast options recently, some friends of mine showed up with a very bad review from a disgruntled customer. I wondered, how could this be? This place is gorgeous and the hosts warm and courteous. I wanted to find out from them what happened so I asked them. They had no idea about this review but had noticed a dip in their bookings and when they looked at the review, they quickly knew what was going on and told me the other side of the story.
The reviewer in question had failed to book through the proper reservation system and assumed they would hold a room for him for the same time each year that he had been visiting during leaf-peeping season in Vermont. As the hosts were not aware of a booking they of course gave the room out to another party who had booked properly. He was furious and called them to complain. A few days later, some deeply unpleasant reviews began to surface on Trip Adviser and their bookings dropped during their most important season. Once they had sourced these reviews back, they went on the offensive and reached out to other long term guests asking them to provide some fair and balanced feedback on Trip Advisor. They came flooding and started to push the bad reviews down becoming clear to others that there was a malicious hijacker at work rather than a bona fide review(s).
The lesson from this is that you will get bad reviews from time to time – it’s the nature of people’s sensibilities. It’s healthy in fact as it allows you as a business to learn from your customers to make your business better, much like test marketing. However you must keep a close eye on any muckraking and manage your reputation as best possible. Unless people break codes of conduct, then it is hard to have conversations removed from your digital footprint, but you can contribute to the conversations and provide more of the type of content that you want associated with your brand. Encouraging customers to do the same is key, as people love user generated content in a trust based community as the web is.
How can you monitor your brand?
Since the last site launch post, Union Street Media has been busy with a variety of exciting projects:
New Hampshire real estate agency Prudential Spencer Hughes is a long time client of Union Street Media. They went for a redesign to update the look of their website. They’re also continuing with our Report Recommend Revise Internet Marketing services to ensure the site’s high level of performance.
Search Engine Optimization
