#retrofire

Happy New Year Alliance!

  We are excited to release our first single of 2015!  "Retrofire." 

Thank you all so much for your dedicated support in 2014!

Warm thanks to our favorite mixer Will Brierre at The Ballroom Studio in Los Angeles, CA and to Steve Hall at Future Disc for being a jedi master-er.

Here it is...

Click to listen and download (free or pay what you want) the new single "Retrofire"

Thank you for listening and supporting!  Stay tuned for more music and shows coming in 2015...

Stay Loud, xxxxxxx

Katie and Tom

Very few businesses realize there is a difference between creating a personal page for your business and creating a business specific fan page, but this difference could be the reason your clients aren't finding you on Facebook

#1

Spam

Facebook marks personal pages used for business as spam! That’s right if they see your business page using a personal page they will eventually remove it from their system. This means all of the friends you have built up will be lost and your credibility may be tarnished.

#2

Identity

A business page allows you to be an entity and an individual. You now have an ability to be John Doe, while also being Company 123. This allows you to talk to customers under the name of your company, as well as talk amongst your Facebook friends and family and separate your business and personal life.

#3

Professionalism

When your perspective client comes to your page would you like them to be greeted with photos from last weekends cookout, or content designed strictly for your business? Business content needs to be easily identified; with the overwhelming push of brands to be involved in all aspects of your life your content must be captivating and relative in order to keep your client from losing interest.

#4

Ads

Facebook Ads have become an exceedingly powerful tool for businesses. They allow you to create ads targeted to a niche audience of people and direct those people to your content source. If you are using a personal page however to operate your business you cannot create ads to drive people back to it. This creates a disconnect between the content you are creating and the ads that can be driving you business.

I stopped in my favorite pho restaurant, Pho #1, on Sunday as I always do Sunday afternoons, and I was pleasantly surprised to see these "Find us on Yelp" signs scattered about the restaurant. However as I happily reached for my iPhone and checked in I realized there was nothing more for their Yelp to offer me, but the gratification of showing all my friends and followers where I was eating today.

While that is all well and good and is helpful in allowing many others to see the name of your restaurant show up in their feed, it’s not what we would call very “yelpful”. Yelp offers a lot of capability, the majority of which businesses are unaware of and therefore are underutilized.

Offers:

Last fall Yelp began offering a service that allows businesses to create offers which are kind of like coupons that people can only activate while being in your place of business. Brilliant marketing.

The first time I experienced this I was in Sports Authority with no intention of buying anything, when I checked in and saw the offer for $10 off my purchase I instantly picked up a shirt and spent $25. Their deal took me from a no sale to an upsale.

While Yelp’s bread and butter is user reviews and check ins, there are a great deal of other services it provides. People are spending less and less time looking around scanning the horizon for where to shop or where to eat, and a lot more time looking down at their smartphone to see what’s close by and what others opinions are about that business. Do you need some Yelp? The answer is absolutely.