Emerge Inc. Blog

Today marks the end of an era in Emerge’s history. We have canceled the company’s first ever telephone number (440) 233-5999.

When Mike and I started the company in (can you believe this) October 1996, we worked out of my house in Sheffield Township. To demonstrate our legitimacy (and because we just knew it would be ringing off the hook) we had a telephone line, a dedicated Internet line and a fax line installed. If I remember correctly, these 3 lines cost over $200 a month.

A year later, we moved to Elyria. Even though the move was just 5 miles South, we had to switch telephone companies. Back then, there was no number portability, so we had to get a new telephone number (440) 284-4949. There was also very little telecommunication competition and limited cell phone options.

For the past 12 years, we held onto the old number (but canceled the Internet and fax line) because it ensured we were listed in the Lorain telephone book. For anyone not from Lorain County, even though the County is less than 300,000 residents, there are 3 major telephone carriers serving different parts of the County. Prior to the Internet, if you wanted people to find your business, you had to be in all 3 telephone books.

With the popularity of the Internet, we have decided that it isn’t important to be in the telephone book. I’m sure there are still some people who will look for us there, but I expect anyone who is serious about reaching us will go to Google or LorainCounty.com or our website for contact information.

TwitterCounter.com is a interesting site that follows twitter statistics and creates a list of the twitter users, ordered by the number of followers they have. On February 22, 2009, I happened to take a few screen captures of TwitterCounter.com and save them to my Evernote (a fantastic application that I highly recommend and will have to blog about soon).

Things have certainly changed in the twitter world (twitterverse?) in a mere 4 months.

On February 22, @ESPN was the 100 most followed twitter account with 37,067 followers. @ESPN currently has 123,070 followers, almost 3.5 times as many as before, but is now the 274th most followed. To make it into the top 100 now, it takes 595,534 followers, a 1,700% increase from just 4 months ago.

Number 200 belonged to @williamshatner on February 22 with 18,605 followers. Captain Kirk is currently in 343rd place with 82,798 followers. To reach number 200 today takes 263,310 followers.

The interactive, film, and music festivals @sxsw was number 300 on February 22 with 13,959 followers. With 37,446 followers, @sxsw has fallen to 712th place. It now takes 96,366 followers to reach the top 300.

On a personal note, on February 22 my account @edskimin was ranked 316th with 13,573 followers. In the past 4 months, I have picked up over 10,000 followers for a total of 24,246, but my ranking has fallen to 1,235.

While there is plenty of talk on the Internet of Twitter’s growth slowing (also here, here and here), it is hard to argue with the phenomenal growth of the past 4 months. Now, how will twitter monetize this popularity?

Let me end by apologizing for the title. I got caught up in the mad rush to add “tw” to everything that relates to twitter.

On Saturday, Mike and I attended Podcamp Ohio on the campus of The Ohio State University. Podcamp is a gathering of people who desire to share and learn about new media in an open environment.

Following are just some of the take aways from the sessions I attended:

Creating a Website that Actually Looks Good – Daniel Lewis
7 Cs of good design – Contrast, Consistency, Cleanliness, Complementariness, Catchiness, Calling, Conscious recognition

5 Best Tips for LinkedIn – Lewis Howes & Chris Brogan
This was an exceptional discussion on building up your personal networks by providing value. Or, as Chris Brogan, who joined the session via skype, puts it in his upcoming book, “Using the web to building influence, improve reputation and earn trust.”

Building a Strong Brand – Krista Neher
A strong brand must connect logically (they actually deliver what they promise) and emotionally. To determine your brand identity 1) Assess the landscape; 2) Determine who you are trying to reach and why;3) Define your brand; 4) Bring your brand to life

Usability & Utility: Improving the User Experience – Carol Smith and Joshua Smith
User experience combines 4 areas – 1) Functional (able to get something done); 2) Sensorial (visual, auditory); 3) Emotional (influenced by feelings rather than rational thinking); 4) Social (interactions with people). Happy users spend money; unhappy users leave.

What everybody missed during the digital revolution – David Esrati
To create value on the Internet, content and advertising must be relevant. Rather than broadcasting messages, advertisers should/will demand to speak specifically to customers who are interested and/or have a need for their product or service.

SEO Lightning Session – Bill Condo
Session provided an overview of search engine optimization. Due to the rapidly evolving algorithms used by major search engines (I mean Google) I provide a link to seomoz.org rather than highlight what might become outdated.

You can review a few of my ‘real-time’ thoughts on Twitter.

Of course, some of the most valuable time was spent between sessions in conversation with some of the thought leaders in new media.

As always, if you would like to discuss any of these in additional details, please contact me.

The 2009 Ohio Growth Summit opened on Tuesday evening with a tweet-up, an opportunity for Twitter users to meet in person.

Near the beginning, an announcement was made that Chris Brogan, one of the biggest draws of the event, would be a little late because his plane was delayed. Of course, almost everyone in the room already knew this due to @ChrisBrogan Twitter posts. This provided an immediate demonstration of the decentralization that occurs with this technology. No longer do the organizers of an event control the distribution of information.

Tonight’s speaker was Mike Figliuolo of thoughtLEADERS, LLC. Mike gave an exceptional presentation focused on four holistic aspects of leadership:

• Leading Yourself
• Leading the Thinking
• Leading Your People
• Leading a Balanced Life

Some notes from the presentation:

LEADING YOURSELF – Write down – what motivates you?; What are you willing to sacrifice?; What are your non-negotiables?; How do you hold yourself accountable?; When you fall, what picks you back up?

LEADING THE THINKING – Define – what you stand for; the rules of the game; the performance standards; the end state; what we should do; why we should do it; why we should be excited about doing it

LEADING YOUR PEOPLE – Consider each person as an individual; What motivates each member of the team?; deliver feedback in a fact based way; surveys show employees are motivated by personal growth (31%) and challenging work (27%) more so than compensation

LEADING A BALANCED LIFE – Only you can protect your time; Losing perspective causes stress; Stress decreases productivity

On Saturday, May 9, 2009, Emerge team members Sam Green, Ed Skimin and Nyree Skimin attended the 11th Annual Promise Ball, a fundraiser for the Mid-Ohio Chapter of the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation (JDRF). Emerge works with JDRF on the event website, which includes a database of auction items and a content management system that helps to keep costs down by enabling volunteers to update the website.

What did we bid on you might ask? We had our eyes on a number of items, including Lunch with Archie Griffin and a vacation in a 12,000-square-foot Mediterranean-style home in beautiful Manzanillo, Mexico. But alas, we were outbid or to be more accurate the opening bids were more than we had budgeted for the night.

We were fortunate enough to be the winning bidder for a 4-person Columbus 10TV studio tour, viewing of a Noon newscast and lunch with Anchor Angela An and Meteorologist Carlos Gonzales. I’ll be sure to write a blog after the tour, which has yet to be scheduled.

The JDRF Promise Ball is one of the nicest events we attend each year and supports an important cause.

I’m excited to announce that Nick Mezlak and Jessie Markley have joined Emerge as full-time team members.

Neither Nick nor Jessie is new to Emerge. Nick has worked with Emerge in a part-time capacity for almost 4 years. Jessie has worked with Emerge each summer for the past 5 years as she completed high school and college.

Nick and Jessie are creating a new business unit within Emerge that we are tentatively calling Emerge Local. The new business unit is focused on working with local businesses with a goal of improving their business through the use of Internet technology.

We are defining local businesses as for-profit entities where the onsite owner/manager is the primary decision maker and where the customers mostly come from the same geographic area as the business.

Emerge Local offers website development, hosting, consulting and interactive marketing services.

Oberlin Heritage Center has launched a new website developed with Emerge. The new site enables internal staff to update and maintain the entire website through a content management system.

Loaded with information about visiting, exploring, learning and connecting, the website also provides website visitors to quickly and easily search the site for information they are seeking. Additionally, website visitors can sign up to register for programs, tours, purchase items from the Museum Shop, purchase a brick, membership or make a donation online.

To view the website and learn more about Oberlin Heritage, visit their website at www.OberlinHeritage.org.

With Mother’s day just around the corner, Spa West in Westlake, Ohio wanted a better way to offer gift certificates over the Internet. Their previous system enabled people to buy the gift certificate online, but it had to be mailed out, something that wouldn’t work for last minute shoppers.

Additionally, they wanted to be sure the experience buying the gift certificate online matched the extraordinary experience they provide in their spa.

Emerge worked with Spa West to develop a gift certificate system that enables customers to buy gift certificates for a dollar amount or for selected services. The customer can print the gift certificate immediately from the website or they can email it to the recipient to print.

To ensure gift certificates are only used once, a unique identification code is added to each gift certificate. Spa West can look up the ID number to ensure it is active.

If your business is interested in offering instant gift certificates online, please let us know.

Emerge reached an important milestone on Monday, April 20, 2009. Avon Lake, Ohio, launched their online reservation system, becoming the first city to use the EmergeParks Reservation platform.

Emerge originally developed the Park Reservation Platform as a custom project with the Lorain County Metro Parks. Over the next few years, Emerge worked with 10 Counties to implement online reservations. These were mostly with large County Metro Parks (Columbus, Lake, Geauga, Toledo).

Based on this experience, we became interested in tapping into a potential new market, City Parks and Recreation departments. We believe in the value of building software with clients versus building it in the bubble of our office and hoping it fits clients needs.

Working with the great people at Avon Lake provide us with good insight into the differences between City and County parks. We are in the process now of planning the best next phase for the EmergeParks division of Emerge.

During the first week in April, I attended the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco. As always, these conferences are exciting, eye-opening and thought provoking.

As one might expect, attendance was down a little from previous years, but still a very good showing. The theme of this year’s conference was ‘The Power of Less’ and focused on identifying the essentials and eliminating the unnecessary. In keeping with that theme, here is just a small sample of the thoughts, ideas, learning, etc. that I came away with:

• Mobile and location are coming fast. For example, point a mobile phone’s camera towards an historic building and it can pull up the wikipedia entry
• Companies that use the web as the platform are the ones that thrive, even in downturns
• If you learn from your users, then increased usage will increase performance. For example, Google’s speech recognition learns from each user.
• The amount of Data on the Internet continues to increase, discovering the hidden meanings is part of the future of the Internet
• Data isn’t only coming from people typing on a keyboard. Data sensors are adding intelligence.
• Build a simple system and let it evolve
• Create more value than you capture

As always, if anyone is interested in a deeper discussion, email, call or tweet me.