Most of us consider Twitter a promotional tool, but companies ranging from local burrito shops to Dell are using it to find leads and close business.

Connect with Customers
Instead of just announcing new products or promoting your blog on Twitter, reach out to your customers. Boloco, a local Boston burrito restaurant with 16 locations runs ads in local papers that include a $3 off coupon. The owner decided to take a picture of the coupon and post it on Twitter, he tweeted that they would accept a print out or even just showing the coupon on a phone. The restaurant usually accepts 350 coupons when they run one of these ads, after using Twitter they received 900.

On a larger scale, Dell Outet recently acknowledged that they had made $3 million in sales over two years using Twitter, primarily posting coupon codes. @DellOutlet has over 1,000,000 followers.

Track Mentions & Save Searches
Use Twitter to track what people are saying about your company. Many Twitter applications like Tweetdeck let you track “mentions” which will allow you to see what your followers as well as non-followers are saying about you.

But you will only get notified of a mention if someone uses @yourusername specifically. How do you track what people are saying about you in a simple post? What are they saying about your competitors or specific things relating to your industry? Create a custom search; Simply search for your desired keywords on Twitter and then save your search (see image). Twitter also has an advanced search feature: http://search.twitter.com/advanced. There are many widgets for tracking your search criteria as well as features built in to many of the popular Twitter applications: http://twitter.com/downloads.

Give your company personality, even deal with disgruntled customers
Give your company a human face by interacting when your company is being discussed. Boloco’s owner weighs in with his Twitter followers to encourage them to visit his restaurant when they are pondering where to go eat on a Friday night.

A Denver area Ace Hardware owner, uses monitter to search Twitter for both keywords and locations of tweeters. One day, he flagged a Denver man worrying about insects in his lawn. He was able to tweet to him about the benefits of using lady bugs to manage lawn pests. The man ended up coming in to the store and buying lady bugs.

The same Ace Hardware owner also caught a customer complaining about a broken tool. He reached out to him and informed him that Ace tools had a lifetime guarantee. The man went from angry to extremely impressed.

In conclusion, if you are not using Twitter there is no reason not to give it a try. It is free and it is not time consuming. If you are already using Twitter to promote your company, I’d encourage you to try taking advantage of Twitter in some of these creative ways.

As they should be. The only reason developers have to consider this dinosaur is because of the corporations who are unwilling to make the upgrade. Well, a guerilla campaign has been launched on the web called Hey IT!

The campaign addresses the fact that IE6 is 8 years old and that IT departments should be upgrading to “recent/decent” browsers, which they provide links to. They offer a poster to download and hang around the office, even a template of the poster so you can customize it. Also, a Facebook page has been created for Hey IT!

Hey IT! points the proverbial finger in the right direction, at the IT departments. Sure IT takes orders from executives, but don’t the executives rely on the IT departments for guidance and direction in decision making ? Ultimately it is the IT departments who can end this huge problem. How huge is this problem really? As Jeremy pointed out in an earlier blog; 20% of development time is spent on IE6 issues and IE6 still owns 15% of the browser market share!

All of this was spurred on by Digg announcing (and doing a great job explaining why) they will soon stop supporting IE6 . Followed by You Tube taking it to the next level with a message to all viewing their site in IE6: “We will be phasing out support for your browser soon. Please upgrade one of these more modern browsers (Chrome, IE6, Firefox 3.5)”.

Chances are good that Bottlecap Blog readers are not using IE6, but spread the word about this campaign. If you are a partner or client of Bottlecap know that eliminating IE6 will make us more efficient and free up time to focus on becoming even better developers, if that’s possible.

Evelyn-Anne from Clever Twist and I went down to the Lenox Apple store last Friday for a little guerilla marketing. The iPhone 3GS was being released and we thought it would be a great opportunity to promote the Bottlecap / Clever Twist team by handing out mini iPhone cards with links to free app downloads.

The crowd was extremely receptive, everyone loves free stuff, especially free stuff for their iPhone. People in line gladly accepted the packet of cards, not one person said “no thanks”. The Apple store seemed to have no problem with what we were doing.

We continued to hand out the packets until mall security came and asked us to stop. By this point we had handed out hundreds of packets. When people in line saw that security was addressing us , it definitely peaked their interest. After we got back in line people began approaching us and asking for cards.

For the record the new iPhone is awesome. It may not be worthwhile to get it just for the 3.2 MP and the video capabilities… but the speed is noticeably better and makes it worth the upgrade in my opinion.

The iPhone 3GS has now been announced and everyone is talking, but mostly about AT&T as they have dropped the ball big time. New iPhone hardware is cool but nothing major, there are no design changes to the phone body. The best thing about the new release is OS 3.0, current iPhone users are getting hooked up next Wednesday! 

New iPhone Hardware:
The iPhone is exactly the same except with a 3.2 MP camera with an auto focus lens and awesome controls for auto focus in the camera app. Also video capabilities, and a pretty unbelievable in-phone video editor.

iPhone can now be tethered to a laptop as well.

The new iPhone is also faster in the areas of both memory and graphics.

Also, the storage sizes are now 16G & 32G.

iPhone OS 3.0 Features:

-Cut, Copy & Paste
-Multimedia MMS capabilities
-Spotlight Search
-Voice Memos
-Improved Calendar
-Buy movies & more on  iTunes
-Voice Dialing
-Compass App
-Directional Compass features applied to Map app

The new iPhone 3GS demo is 13 minutes well spent, it does a great job of showing of the new hardware and software.

AT&T …BOO!
AT&T is now getting more bad press than ever. Due to their restrictions and fees, current in-contract users will have to pay full price if they want an upgrade $499 for 16G and $599 for 32G. A two year contract for new users will get an iPhone in their hands for $199 and $299 respectively. Existing 3G’s will be sold for as low as $99, but only to current non iPhone users. Also for whatever reason, AT&T was not ready for the release of the 3GS. Tethering will not be supported for a few weeks. Also, multimedia MMS support is not available,  ATT&T has not given word as to when they will be ready for this feature either.

To end on a lighter note:

Safari 4 is crazy awesome:

http://www.apple.com/safari

Macbook Pro’s are all souped up and they introduced a little one with a 13 inch screen!

http://www.apple.com/macbookpro

Bottlecap has been having a blast lately, we’ve entered the world of iPhone and Facebook application development. We began developing Facebook apps in 2008 but didn’t have the bandwidth to begin learning and working with the iPhone SDK. Lucky for us one of our favorite graphic designers did.

Bottlecap has been supporting graphic designer Jen Gordon since the early days. Upon working with Jen we were immediately impressed by her ability to design for information flow and user experience (skills she sharpened while working for Yahoo!). Because of Jen’s design abilities and skill in creating user interface, it was a natural progression that she begin designing iPhone and iPod apps.

In late 2008 Jen started the company Clever Twist and launched with 2 amazing apps in the iTunes app store and 2 more on the way. The incredibly addictive game Popper! is available now in pro and lite/ free versions, also the hilarious ‘Yo Mama So’ app is also ready for download on the app store.

Bottlecap has been creating Facebook applications inline with Clever Twist’s iPhone apps. We launched the ‘Yo Mama So’ Facebook App last month.  We’d love it if you’d add it to your Facebook profile and become a fan! The Facebook app allows you to send Yo Mama jokes to your friends, choose the art to go with the joke and post jokes to your wall. The iPhone app is extremely robust, it even includes the ability to submit your own yo mama jokes to be included in the app!

The future of the Bottlecap / Clever Twist partnership is exciting. Clever Twist’s design, interface and app development abilities combined with Bottlecap’s web services know how should lead to some amazing and feature-rich apps. We plan on providing this as a service to our clients, as well as developing and releasing our own ideas.

Stay tuned for more on Clever Twist and Bottlecap. I almost forgot, Jen Gordon is also quite the dancer. I caught her getting down at our office just last week, check out the video…

As a former full time musician I am all about artists rights, and believe they should be paid for their music. As someone who loves and works in web technology I believe in utilizing the internet as it changes our culture and economy. Today downloading music without paying for it is illegal, so don’t do it. But I think bands like Radiohead are thinking forward by offering fans a choice as to what to pay for their album.

I believe that record labels and traditional radio are fighting a losing battle. Artists are realizing that the future of music revenue remains where the artists are making their money now: concerts and merch. Releasing albums online will be a way to promote their music and develop a fan base. Internet radio will be how fans discover new music, and radio sites will make money through targeted ad sales. Subscription music is the wild card, it may last or fade away only time will tell.

So why all of the fighting and suing by the record labels, the RIAA and the MPAA? They (record labels and traditional radio) have always been the vessels by which we discover and purchase music. They are industries who are in many cases not evolving with the internet but fighting against the future.

If you told me even 5 years ago that a band could record their own album, put it online themselves and then make it to the stage of Saturday Night Live in just over a year, I would not have believed you. Vampire Weekend did just that thanks to active blogging communities.

Where is this blog coming from? I have been reading how Tech Crunch is in a vicious online battle with Last fm…

Last.fm is a UK-based Internet radio and music community website, that claims over 30 million users. Last.fm builds a profile of each user’s musical taste by recording details of all the songs the user listens to. This information is transferred to Last.fm’s database, the profile data is then displayed on the user’s profile page.

Tech Crunch claimed their sources revealed that Last.fm shared their user base’s personal info with the RIAA. They denied it. Tech Crunch is now proving that CBS (who owns Last.fm) asked Last.fm for their user base info for internal purpouses only and then turned the info over to the RIAA.

Unbelievable. It is time for the corporate music industry to stop this before they alienate all of their clients… I think it’s already too late.

When I heard that the new version of iPhoto (included in iLife 09’) featured facial recognition, it made me want to upgrade.  I’m holding off on the iLife upgrade for now, but I did come across ILovePhotos. ILovePhotos is a free  “Software as a Service” that includes a web app and a desktop app. I downloaded and installed it, it integrated with iPhoto and began scanning my pictures. Within moments it had detected hundreds of faces. All I have to do is tag each face with a name, the software will handle retagging each time this face re-occurs in existing and future photographs. It even integrates with contacts in my Address book!

I believe facial recognition is going to be used more widely in the coming years, as our faces will be tied to our personal information. This could be used in every day life when you recognize a face but can’t remember the name, just sneak a picture with your iPhone and reference the picture on the web.

Of course this has all kinds of Big Brother implications now that video camera’s are being used publicly in metro areas. I was in London last month and they have camera’s set up on most streets and throughout their mass transit system. We are living in very interesting times…

Just search around a bit in Groups on Facebook, you will find pages promoting everything from rock bands to beer to politicians. These same people are also using Twitter, Flickr, YouTube etc. to promote by developing content, driving traffic and holding contests.

One industry you don’t see a lot of in the social media arena is automotive. Many older industry’s have had trouble adjusting their marketing to the web. Finally a motor company is not only utilizing today’s web but making it interesting. The Ford Fiesta has been sold overseas for awhile, they are bringing it to the states in 10’ and marketing by using online content driven by… well, the drivers.

Ford gave 100 Fiestas to people selected from 4,000 applicants. The winners get to use the cars for six months in exchange for completing “missions” with different themes. They’ll share their experiences through YouTube, Flickr, Facebook and Twitter accounts that Ford created for the campaign.

Ford is using this campaign (they are calling it “The Fiesta Movement”) not only to promote the car but to get genuine feedback publicly from the drivers. This is using social media as it was meant to be used. I think Ford is going to get some great results. Good move Ford!

FordFiesta Twitter page

The Fiesta Movement Facebook page

Fiesta Movement Flickr Page

FiestaMovement YouTube account

If you are anything like me, you barely go to the doctor and have probably jumped from doctor to doctor as you have changed health plans throughout the years.  If I need to give a doctor access to my medical records or even gain access myself, where do I start?

Google Health allows you to organize all of your health info into one place, as well as gather your medical records from doctors and pharmacies.  Once you have everything in place you can start securely sharing your info with doctors,  pharmacies and family members who need to know.

Now Google Health and CVS Pharmacies are teaming up. Last week CVS announced that customers will be able to import their prescription records into Google Health , as well as update and manage these records in real time.

Managing health records online is going to make managing personal health so much easier. Imagine taking care of an elderly parent and needing access to health info to help make informed decisions… Google Health is going to be an invaluable tool.

Microsoft is getting in the game as well with HealthVault.

Bottlecap Development is finally on the web! It’s pretty funny that we have been developing websites since June of 2007, yet didn’t have a site ourselves. We actually went through several iterations, but as we developed web sites for our expanding list of clients we began to evolve.

We began as Jeremy, Dan & Dan. 3 guys with full time jobs, developing sites on the side. By the end of the summer of 07’ we were supporting a number of creative’s. We put together the first Bottlecap site with our creative and branding clients in mind. Before we could launch the website we had evolved to the next level, developing big web apps for companies.

Entering January of 2008 we were supporting a lot of incredible graphic designers and creative’s, but now could also boast an impressive list of clients whom we had developed web apps for. We weren’t just developing for our clients, we were helping them think through their business ideas and guiding them through architecture and planning.

Today, we launch our website knowing who we are. We are the web technology guys supporting businesses, the web idea people launching new companies every month, and a  lifeline to creative’s who need a development partner.

We hope that the Bottlecap Blog will serve as a web technology resource for all of our clients, partners and friends. Bottlecap is now 8 people, and our team could not be stronger. Jeremy, Dan and I are extremely proud of our dev team, I think you will find how useful, smart and entertaining they can be as you check out the Bottlecap blog.

We want to thank all of the clients and partners who helped to shape Bottlecap into who we are today, and who help us continue to grow.