Blogs

Recently I wanted to link our VMT Facebook Fan Page to our company blog.  By extension, I thought it would probably not be a bad idea to link my personal blog postings to my personal page.  However, figuring out how to do this, especially after Facebook revamped its look again, was deceptively difficult.  So I thought I would share this process with everybody.

We'll be at the first Maryland Tech Crawl event at the ETC on December 16th to present VCOMP, our social marketing automation tool. We are excited to participate in the technology "show and tell" and believe that we've created something unique in the marketplace.

If you're looking to upgrade your static website to a content management system, you need to ask yourself a few critical questions as you evaluate your choices. For organizations with limited budgets, we recommend you look at your open source options such as Drupal, WordPress and DotNetNuke. In doing your due diligence, you want to make sure the source code is freely available and that there is a large developer community supporting the software.

I've written up a brief howto on setting up a persistent Django environment using a base Ubuntu AMI for Amazon's EC2 service.

I've been giving some talks recently about how to leverage social networks to market your business, and the question came up regarding whether or not you could use Facebook for Business-to-Business marketing.  This is an interesting question with no clear answer at this point.  There are those who feel that B2B companies can skip social marketing, but I personally feel that there is merit in leveraging social networks, including Facebook

We have been quietly at work developing our most recent product offering, which is a managed services platform designed to help businesses with generating leads and opportunities.  Our solution, dubbed VCOMP for "VMT's Digital Communications Platform" leverages the technology that we have been using combined with social marketing, search engine optimization and marketing, ongoing content generation, and analytics and reporting to provide demonstrable results in the form of new business and increased sales.

We recently had a few clients who were the unfortunate targets of negative articles in the area papers.  Every company goes through its ups and downs, but bad situations are made even worse when the media gets involved.  Bad publicity makes it even harder for businesses to recover or deal with whatever matters they are going through.

VMT recently signed up as a Google Apps Authorized Reseller. Google Apps allows businesses to implement powerful communication and collaboration tools cost-effectively, including the following services:

• Gmail
• Google Talk
• Google Calendar
• Google Docs
• Google Sites
• Google Video

Many of our customers use Gmail for personal use, and are surprised when they find out that the same service can be tied to their domain name in a way that is totally transparent.

Are you Tweeting, blogging, LinkedIn and friending on Facebook? If not, you should be. We are probably only 3 degrees removed from Kevin Bacon and he just might buy what we are hawking in the new world if a friend of a friend recommends us to him. You see people buy from people they trust and respect and that is where businesses can leverage the networks of their employees, suppliers, and customers.

From DrupalCon DC, "The Practical Semantic Web and Why You Should Care".  RDFa, the WC3 standard for presenting semantic data within XML for search engines to have some semantic capabilities.  The presentation talks about what the semantic web is, what RDFa is, and what is being introduced into Drupal.  View the video here