Here’s what he found:

The data here isn’t 100% accurate (Dan admits Twitter’s geotagging technology isn’t great yet), but none-the-less, it’s still pretty interesting.

From a quick glance, there seem to be a lot of ‘anxiety’ dots compared to the dots on the other maps. Can anyone who’s been to Boston confirm this — are Bostoners more anxious than they are happy, sad, or sexual? (Err, maybe keep that answer to yourself…).

Joking aside, it seems to say a lot about what people are talking about via social media.

As a reputation management company, we (VendAsta) help SMBs monitor what their customers are saying about them online. Sometimes small businesses don’t believe us when we tell them that people are talking about them on the internet, or that a negative tweet/review/blog post can have a crippling effect on their online reputation. But with so many people tweeting now – and, evidently, tweeting mostly about the things that make them anxious/nervous/uneasy – even SMBs need to think about what they’re doing to monitor and improve their online image.

You’ve heard it before: in the real world, a customer who has a good experience with a company tells three people, and a customer who has a bad experience tells ten (depending on which stat you’re going by). This seems to hold up in the online world, too, where more negative reviews are posted than positive ones.

But maybe, just maybe, that gap isn’t as big as it used to be. There are a lot of dots on Dan’s happiness map, too – almost as many as the anxiety map – and perhaps social media is evening the playing field when it comes to sharing positive and negative thoughts.

Now there’s no way of telling how many dots on these maps were related to a business experience, but it’s not unreasonable to assume that the distribution of causes across the emotions was pretty similar. Even within sexuality people could have been talking about companies – someone might have tweeted about how much they “love McDonalds/Wendys/KFC/etc.” and got caught in the wrong category (unless, of course, they actually do have forbidden intimate feelings for Ronald/Wendy/The Colonel/etc.). Sentiment engines aren’t perfect yet, but they’re getting there; the day computers understand sarcasm, exaggeration, and other high-level human emotions, by the way, is the day Siri takes over the world.

I digress.

At the end of the day, this experiment is an interesting look at our current Zeitgeist. It’s safe to assume that we’ll be seeing more and more research like this in the future. In the mean time, start considering how your company is handling its online reputation and what you’re doing to increase your customers’ happiness and reduce their anxiety.

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VendAsta is the market leader in online reputation management. With a full suite of white label technology solutions, we bring social media excellence to digital marketing providers including online yellow pages, newspapers, broadcasters, SEO services, Certified Marketing Representatives, and interactive agencies. For more information, visit http://www.vendasta.com.

Frisco, TX (PRWEB) April 22, 2012

Social Media content and technology, in a single easy to deploy offering, is the promise of a new partnership between VendAsta Technologies and Media Distribution Solutions. The partnership offers digital marketing companies the ability to source everything they need to enhance their product offering including reputation management, a customer portal, video, social media content, and more.

Under the terms of the Letter Of Intent, VendAsta will have the right to package the BetterSocial™ and BetterVideo™ content offering from Media Distribution Solutions into their technology, creating a full-featured solution. Media Distribution Solutions will have the right to license VendAsta technology. Together the companies are offering a complete package that serves the social media needs of businesses with a full range of technology features and content.

“We are very excited about the opportunity to include video and social media content as part of our solution. Media Distribution Solutions and their BetterSocial and BetterVideo services make the ideal partner to help us enhance our leadership position in the industry,” says VendAsta CEOBrendan King.

The partnership brings together two best-in-class products that offer businesses the ease of a single source supplier coupled with an expansive feature set designed to drive social media success. The VendAsta technical solution offers a single sign on customer portal from which they can manage all of their social media activities. This, coupled with reputation management tools, applications, and a multi-presence auto-posting engine, create an easy to use tool that maximizes the effectiveness of new media. The BetterVideo and BetterSocial solutions offer the quality content a social media platform needs to drive success. Montage videos, custom videos, and a library of social media posts, articles, and photos bring a rich content solution that drives user engagement and builds strong relationships with consumers. Content is organized and available by business category, key words, type, geo-coding, seasonality, proximity-coding, and other important characteristics to create a powerful tool for getting the most out of social media. Posts by businesses, with links to articles and video, provide consumers with topical information that they have previously stated are of interest to them. By simply following a business, consumers can receive content that informs, entertains, and improves their quality of life. Businesses benefit by providing a meaningful service to their customers and building stronger relationships with them through social media.

“VendAsta is a leader in the social media platform space and we are very pleased to be working with them to deliver social media excellence to the market,” says Mike Shell, CEO of Media Distribution Solutions, the company behind BetterSocial and BetterVideo.

The partnership solutions will be available as white label services designed to enhance the service offerings of digital providers with high quality technology and content. Together, the companies make it easy to bring a complete solution to the market.

VendAsta Technologies is a Canadian based firm that builds white label software platforms to help small to mid-sized businesses connect with their customers online. With a full suite of technology solutions, the company brings social media excellence to digital marketing providers including online yellow pages, newspapers, broadcasters, SEO services, Certified Marketing Representatives, web hosting providers, and interactive agencies. Reputation management, customer portals, posting engines, and social media analysis tools from VendAsta have been bringing value to global companies since 2008. For more information, go tohttp://www.vendasta.com.

Media Distribution Solutions (MDS) offers the BetterVideo and BetterSocial solutions allowing digital marketing providers the ability to quickly and easily add high quality video and rich social media content to their product offering. The MDS team has been supplying industry leading, highly scalable, cost effective digital marketing solutions to SMB service providers for over 15 years. From creating business profile videos to managing advanced social media campaigns, MDS solutions have the features advertisers want and the tools service providers need to deliver results. MDS has produced and delivered over 50,000 videos using our BetterVideo service, allowing small and midsize businesses to leverage the power of video content in their digital marketing strategy. BetterSocial allows users to create, manage, and power all of their presences with content from an extensive multi-media library that is tagged and purposed for social media deployment. The company’s video and social media solutions enable service providers to offer high quality solutions that meet the market need in a digital marketing world. For more information, go to http://www.mediadistributionsolutions.com.

In a nutshell, Instagram uses filters to make your smartphone’s pictures look “artsy”. Here’s an example of a typical before and after shot:

The idea is that anyone with a smartphone can snap a photo, add a cool filter, and share it with their friends across their social networks. No expensive lenses, no Photoshop skills required. But even if these pictures have relatively little artistic merit, the increasing amount of photo sharing that’s going on means that businesses’ reputations are going to be spreading much more visually in the future. Since a picture is worth a thousand tweets, here are three tips that SMBs can follow to utilize Instagram effectively.

Tip 1:  Encourage people to take/share Instagram images

If it’s between a regular picture and an Instagram picture, most businesses would probably prefer to have customers documenting products with the latter. Consider the millions of food and drink shots that restaurant-goers are constantly snapping. These days, those pictures aren’t just going into albums that no one will ever see again; they’re being uploaded and shared immediately. A business wants their products looking top notch, and Instagram pictures can help with that — take these examples:

This is why fashion and food companies love Instagram — they have extremely visual products that they want to show off as best as possible. Of course, this isn’t a magical solution for subpar photography, but at least these filters offer easy, user-friendly options that are much better than nothing.

So try a few things out: maybe get customers to send you their Instagrams (like CNN does), or start a photo contest, or add the Instagram logo to your signage and advertisements. Better yet, add it beside things that you actually want customers taking pictures of (menu specials, mannequins, home and garden displays, etc.). In any case, keep thinking of creative ways to encourage customers to share better photos to enhance your image and overall reputation.

Tip 2: Use filters to match branding

Instagram’s filters can be useful for branding purposes. Although options are limited, it is possible to use filters to bring out colors and adjust the picture’s mood. Consider some Redbull examples:

Notice how the images are adjusted to enhance the blue and red tones? The look coincides with Redbull’s colors perfectly and gives the photos a better feel that fits with the brand’s image. Test out a few different looks and feels yourself — retro brands will benefit the most, but there might be something that fits your business too.

Tip 3: Geotag photos for location convenience

Geotagging is a huge advantage for businesses because it makes it easier for people to find their front door. By default this setting is off, but when it’s activated the shared image will appear with a map that shows where the picture was taken (you can even geotag a photo if you’re no longer at the location). So tag your own images and encourage your customers to do the same; the more consistent and visible your location listings are online, the better your SEO results and the less customer confusion.

We can only expect to hear more about Instagram as the Facebook transition takes place, but while that’s happening SMBs should be keen to consider all the online reputation opportunities and challenges that are out there. As people begin to share more and more photos via Instagram, Twitter, Pinterest, etc., there will be more ways that your business will be seen. Make sure your customers are getting the best possible snapshot.

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VendAsta Technologies provides white label platforms to newspaper groups and interactive agencies. We’ve developed a suite of tools around reputation management including roll-up reports for larger brands, sales and support tools, and mobile websites.

Images credits: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-17667891, https://twitter.com/#!/redbullIG, http://www.onesocialmedia.com/why-you-should-be-using-instagram-for-business/,

The advent of every new form of media always brings about predictions of the end of its predecessors. But the truth is, one type of media has never – in a one for one fashion – completely replaced another type of media. We still have the newspaper; we still have radio; we still have television. True, the internet has blurred the lines between mediums, but for the most part people can still pick up a paper, flip on an FM frequency, and tune in to their idiot box.

For the first time in history, however, that is about to change (at least, we think so). We’re going to go out on a limb here and say something that might shock you. Ready? Brace yourselves…

The print Yellow Pages’ days are numbered.

In fact, Brendan King, VendAsta’s CEO, predicts that the beginning of the end for the print Yellow Pages will be 2016.

Now hear us out. We’re not talking about the online Yellow Pages – no, we’re talking about the bulky five hundred pound book that takes up too much space and strains too many muscles. If you don’t believe us, consider the old oil lamp story. Before electricity, people used oil lamps to light the rooms in their homes. Since most families could only afford to have one lamp, however, they had to bring this one lamp with them wherever they went. When electricity finally came along, light was suddenly available in every room at the same time, and those old oil lamps went from store shelves to museum cases.

The oil lamp story illustrates something called space shifting (also known as place shifting). Since we are usually connected to electricity – the internet in this thinly veiled metaphor – via smartphones, laptops, and tablets, there’s really no reason for us to cart one thing around from place to place anymore. Think about the other kinds of shifting that already take place. There’s time shifting – the process where people record and play back radio and TV shows at different times – and even format shifting, where media files are converted into different formats to be consumed in more convenient situations. Space shifting might not be the only reason the print Yellow Pages won’t be around in ten years, but it might very well be the head horseman of the apocalypse.

So will anyone mourn the print Yellow Pages when they’re gone? The short answer is no. Why? Because the void is already being filled by the likes of Google, Yelp, Citysearch, TripAdvisor, Urbanspoon, etc.. Newspapers are a good example of a print industry that has already seen the writing on the Facebook wall and are trying to survive by going digital. They realize that the value they really offer is the news, not the physical newspaper itself, and so they have lowered costs, produced digital editions, built new digital products, and begun to support new methods of interactive journalism. If the Yellow Pages want to exist in the digital space, they will need to reinvent themselves, too. And not just by tossing their listings online, but by coming up with unique offerings, changing their business model, and building their own digital products.

So what do you think? What will the media landscape look like in five, ten, twenty years? And if it includes the Yellow Pages, what did they have to do to remain relevant?

This is a pretty big deal. Primedia is a colossus, the premier rental listing company in North America, with 61 million visitors to Apartment Guide, Rentals.com, and affiliated sites last year. They also have a print arm which is the largest distributor of free publications in the USA.

Their position as market leader gives Primedia leeway to innovate. No-one has attempted to market reputation management specifically to rental property owners before. Primedia chose to add the “Reputation Monitor” feature to their gold, diamond, and platinum-level digital packages for advertisers. It’s only been about a month but they’re already reporting a great response.

Here’s where VendAsta was a good fit. Having the flexibility to turn off different features and sources for different partners, we tweaked our platform to highlight industry-relevant data for Apartment Guide subscribers. They’ll see results from apartment review sites alongside results from non-industry-specific sources like Google, Yahoo Local, and Yelp.

It’s becoming clear that there are tons of opportunities to provide reputation management to advertisers within particular industries. We expect to make more deals like this in the coming months.

Meanwhile, kudos to Primedia for the hard work they’ve put in on the marketing side. They made this nifty video that outlines the benefits of Reputation Management for rental property owners – and, by extension, for all SMBs.

The first is called the MyRep Reputation Intelligence Tool. Built using VendAsta’s Reputation Management platform, MyRep (to quote DirectWest’s Georgina Syrgiannis) “tells you who is talking about your business, what they are saying, where they are saying it and who they are saying it to. The information is captured and then displayed in a simple and meaningful way.”

DirectWest is VendAsta’s first reputation management partner in our home market of Saskatchewan. Most of our big customers are based in the States, so we’re excited about this opportunity to increase our visibility at home. Thanks to DirectWest, thousands of local businesses will be exposed to our products for the first time.

The other new release, built exclusively for DirectWest, is called My Business Centre. It’s a secure portal where customers can log in and view all their DirectWest products and services from a single console. Advertisers can see analytics for their ads on mysask411.com, take part in free webinars, and (of course) access their MyRep Reputation Intelligence results.

DirectWest produced this video that gives an overview of both new products:

Just so people don’t think we’ve been completely slacking off, I thought I’d share some metrics that show just how well we’re doing…without identifying any specific partners.

VendAsta is partnered with 4 of the top 10, and 7 of the top 20, newspaper publishing companies (by revenue) in the US and Canada.
Okay, there’s some flexibility in one’s definition of “newspaper publishing company” (what about companies that own newspapers, but get the bulk of their revenues from something altogether different?), and we’ve had to compare revenues across currencies and across different years. But however you slice it, this stat seems to hold up.

Through our partners, VendAsta’s reputation platforms have a sales presence in 20 of the 25 largest metro areas in the US and Canada.
(Measuring population by the alternative definition of “urban agglomeration”, it’s 19 of the top 25.) Okay, anyone can say they have a “sales presence” somewhere, meaning some guy in a stained undershirt who works out of his mom’s basement. But consider the quality of our salesforce…

In 11 of those 20 cities, our partner is the largest-circulation daily newspaper publisher.
Additionally, in 4 of those metro areas our partner is the largest publisher of community newspapers. In the remaining markets, we’re partnered with nationally-affiliated radio stations and TV stations, or the second-largest newspaper publisher.

All the above helps to explain why VendAsta continues to grow. Right now we’re at, um, I think 32 employees? With more set to join in coming weeks. Our most recent arrivals are:

Hang on, mate, shouldn't that barbie have some shrimp on it?

Awesome but aerodynamically unstable, like its creator.

This condor has a 10 foot wingspan, making Dan 20 feet tall.

1. For mobile users, mobile websites are way less frustrating to use than conventional sites squeezed down to fit a smartphone screen;
2. It’s worthwhile taking pains to please mobile customers, because they’re precisely the kind of customers a business wants.

Hmm…I guess we could have got the same message across in two bullet points. But it’s more fun this way:

As it happens, VendAsta’s Mobile Site Platform makes it painless to deploy search-engine optimized, mobile-friendly sites for your SMB customers.

–

Thanks to hand actress Liz Syrnick, photographer and clapperboard operator Marie-Louise de la Harpe, director of photography Jason W. Arnold, and actress/model Maygen Kardash (who doesn’t have a website, so I’ll link to her band Violent Kin).

As a proof of concept, we built the logcollector application that combines the Logs Reader API and Fantasm to send email alerts in the event of user specified log level (eg. CRITICAL) messages.

The sample code can easily be extended for your own purposes.

Downloading and Installing

Python code for logcollector can be downloaded from Fantasm’s SVN Google code repository:

> svn export https://fantasm.googlecode.com/svn/trunk fantasm
> cd fantasm/application/logcollector

To use logcollector, simply deploy the application as a separate version into your App Engine application.

> head -n 2 app.yaml
application: myapp
version: logcollector
> appcfg.py update .

Running

logcollector can be used to monitor the logs of any deployed version by hitting the following URL:

http://logcollector.myapp.appspot.com/logcollector/

…and filling out the form shown in Figure 1. Version must be a valid deployed version of myapp, Sender must be a valid admin email address, and To can be any email address you want to send the alert email to. Choosing a Minimum Log Level that is too low may result in a very full inbox!

Figure 1. Interface to start a LogCollector.

Currently the Log Reader API can only query logs from one version at a time. You can monitor several versions simultaneously by submitting the form for each version.

Over on his personal blog, VendAsta CEO Brendan King has just concluded a one-year experiment in non-blogging. He spent 2011 learning the ropes on Twitter, and after twelve months seems to have concluded that pith, concision, and haphazard abbreviation aren’t really his style. (Mine either.) Brendan told me he’s going to try and get back to blogging regularly in 2012. He even tasked Liz with updating his blog banner for the first time since the MyFrontSteps days.

What's MyFrontSteps again?

Meanwhile, enjoy Brendan’s recap of VendAsta’s most successful year yet.

Job openings!

I’ve been with this company almost from the start, and as far as I can recall, our website has never advertised fewer than two job openings. We’re always looking for qualified people. Lack of man- and womanpower is our main obstacle to unfettered growth. We’re forever just a couple programmers away from world conquest.

Over the holidays I helped Allan update the Careers page. We’ve got five positions open right now. I know you’re out there somewhere…

• A Front-End Developer who knows Ajax, JavaScript, and CSS, and has experience in interface design.
• A Software Engineer in Testing with excellent coding skills and a familiarity with internet technologies, who’ll help us improve the performance of our products.
• A Web Designer who combines Photoshop and Illustrator expertise with an understanding of web usability principles.
• An Account Manager with marketing and client-relations acumen to help keep our partners happy.
• And – as always – qualified Software Developers.

You can apply for all the above jobs on the VendAsta Careers page.