Here I’d like to pose a question–is your idea of privacy how limited or exposed your social profiles are? Between Foursquare, Facebook, Twitter, mobile advertising, and Google collecting all of our logistical information to pour into demographic reports…if we do have privacy, does it have the same connotation as it did before the Facebook privacy issues, before adding your location to Tweets, before checking in with Foursquare? And what does this movement towards less privacy mean for marketers?

Good news, my friends! The possibilities are now endless (not that they weren’t before, but location opens up a lot of opportunities). Companies can now collect actionable data for marketing. We can determine consumer behavior based on things like Foursquare check-ins, Tweets, Facebook “likes,” and we can use that information to shape our strategy to target specific audiences.

We can use things like check-ins to draw consumers into stores, bars, restaurants, etc. For example, just yesterday I was on my way to a meeting with our CEO and Foursquare aficionado when he discovered, upon checking in, that there was a free pint nearby with your first check-in to that particular restaurant. Needless to say they gained a customer!

Thinking back to the days where Facebook didn’t have fan pages, before Twitter, let alone before location check-ins I realized how far we have come and how great our ability now is to really zero in on conversations surrounding the brands for which we market. The fact that we have tools to monitor the dialogue and sentiment around any given topic is pure gold for not only customer service but also determining how to approach an audience.

Have you joined the conversation yet? Email us at askjar@thejargroup.com to find out how we can help!

1. Keyword-rich URLs – Include keywords within the URL structure. Not only can this help with rankings, but also allows
potential visitors to see the exact page they’re about to land on from the search result listing.

Example: http://www.domain.com/keyword-rich

2. Make your sites shallow and keep your URLs short – I know you’re asking, “What do you mean shallow?” The concept is basically this, when you construct a site, ask yourself, “how many clicks does it take for me to get to this page, from the homepage?” More than likely, your home page is viewed by the search engines as the most important page. Spiders crawl the site, and generally will regard sites closer to the home page as more important than sites more distant from the homepage. Generally two or three clicks away from the home page is about as deep as you want your site to go. If pages are too deep, you run the risk of search engines not even indexing them. A shallow site has the added benefit of making your site easy to use. Deep sites leak users. Shallow sites encourage browsing. Hand-in-hand with keeping your site shallow, are short URLs. Keep your URLs as shallow as possible as well. Don’t bury them deep in directories if you can help it.

Almost always, it is better to have a URL that looks like: http://www.domain.com/keyword-rich than it is for a URL to look like: http://www.domain.com/keyword/keyword/keyword/keyword/. Keeping URLs short offers easier to copy & paste, read over the phone, write on a business card, etc, all of which offer usability and increased branding. From a search perspective, shorter URLs displaying in search results also creates an accurate expectation from users of what they’re about to see on the page. A URL should contain no unnecessary folders or words and characters for that matter. The advantages of shallow site structure are faster indexing and better link equity retention.

3. Internal linking - Proper linking between pages of your own website can be extremely helpful with regard to achieving strong rankings. If done right, internal linking with strong keywords will have the same effect of off-site links with strong keywords. Say, for example, you had a website for your business where you manage other company’s affiliate programs. You might want to make sure that whenever you write in an article something about this service, which is called outsourced affiliate program management, you link to it (see how I did that…?). When search spiders crawl your site, they credit you with a link like they would if they were crawling another site that had a link on it to you. While these links are probably not as valuable as a great link from a credible site. Stay away from using image based links if possible. Although search engines can follow these types of links, the link itself is less valuable. If you can help it, always use text-based links to help pass link popularity from one page to the next. If you must use image links, make sure to include strong alt texts. In image links, this replaces anchor text.

4. 301 redirects – Now that you have made some nice looking keyword rich URLs, what are you going to do with the old ugly URLs? If your URLs are completely different, you will need to redirect all old URLs to the new proper pages. Using a 301 will help pass any link equity from the old URL to the new URL. This will help with a couple of things; re-indexing the new pages by way of search crawlers coming from external websites. Also letting the engines know that “this is the new page, remove the old” from their search index.

5. Sitemap – This one is simple! Include a standard HTML sitemap. You can either construct this sitemap by hand, or you can use a tool and edit whatever the tool puts out. Either way, this goes to the point of having a shallow architecture. Putting a sitemap on your site, and providing the Search Engines a link in the footer of every page, will make every single page on your site no more than 2 or 3 clicks from the homepage. These are just the general basics. Your mileage may vary with limitations to your server or software. But rather, basic rules to follow when re-designing.

We are humbled by this award, but I know that the network of people we have been able to work with are top-notch and every bit deserving of such an honor. The JAR Group affiliate team, led by director of performance marketing Donna McCarthy, has been working non-stop to demonstrate excellence in our work and drive value for our clients. We also have an amazing network of publishers and great clients which makes for a perfect trifecta.

We were also happy to host a cocktail party recently to show our appreciation for top performing publishers across our affiliate programs. A great time was had by all as we watched the sun set on the Hudson River from our private venue in Midtown, Manhattan. It’s always great to catch up with the people who help make our programs such a success. Our hope is that we can make this gathering an annual event, so we hope to see you next year as a client or VIP publisher!

I hope everyone has a great summer! Here’s to a great second half of 2010!

Thank everyone again!

A.J.

“Hello loyal listeners!“

In this week’s episode of Real Time Digital Emily and I were lucky enough to speak exclusively with the CEO of Tunecore, Jeff Price, and the CEO of Bonobos, Andy Dunn.

Tunecore is a JAR client focused on digital music distribution. If you want your music on iTunes, Tunecore is the place to go! Jeff was gracious enough to sit down with us to speak about Tunecore, how it began, how it has grown (extremely swiftly), and where it is headed.

Bonobos is another online business focused on men’s clothing. They started in pants only but Andy and his team have quickly expanded their horizons to encompass everything from dress shirts to blazers. (Not to mention their fabulous seer sucker suits, one of which our very own CEO rocks!)

Make sure you find our shows on iTunes as well! Thanks for listening!

1. After speaking at Techmunch, a conference for food bloggers, I decided that this week we would do a site assessment on BakeSpace, a social network for foodies.
2. This week the World Cup and the BP oil spill are big news. If you’re interested in understanding how these events have affected search, give our show a listen!
3. Site Review for Raven SEO. We love this tool, and we’ll sell it all day long. Find out what’s great and what’s not about Raven.

In the future, we’d love to do site assessments for your site. If you want us to do a site assessment for your site, then, let us know. Email either me or Matt and put in the subject line JARSEO.
Email Joshua Unseth
Email Matt Lerche
If you have any questions while listening, ask them in the comments section. We are happy to answer anything you want to know. Enjoy!

In our third episode, Emily and I discuss Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, and how his Facebook hoodie with a mysterious insignia was found on eBay. We also feature interviews with the CEO at DealNews.com‎, Dan de Grandpre, and Steve Greenwood of online private sharing and real-time collaboration service Drop.io. If you missed hearing it live, listen here!

Disclaimer:  The opinions expressed on this WebmasterRadio.FM program are those are those of the host, guests, and callers, and do not reflect those of the staff, management, or advertisers of WebmasterRadio.FM. Any rebroadcast or retransmission of this program without the express written consent of WebmasterRadio.FM, is prohibited. [musical sound effects]

Announcer:  You are now logged in to Real‑Time Digital presented by TheJARGroup.com, online marketing with measurable results. Welcome two of the JAR Groups’ savviest Internet marketers, Emily Liedblad and Lauren Garcia. Listen as these digital divas analyze hot trends and chat with the in‑crowd of the digital world. Real‑Time Digital starts in real time right now.

Emily Liedblad:  Hello loyal listeners, welcome to Real Time Digital hosted by TheJARGroup.com. We are your digital diva hosts Emily Liedblad….

Lauren Garcia:  And I’m Lauren Garcia, welcome.

Emily:  So glad to have you back with us. We hope everybody is enjoying the nice summer weather. We know we are. OK. So first off on our web hotlist is Mark Zuckerberg, who as you all know is the CEO of Facebook. The CEO, and founder of the company. So apparently during the digital D8 conference last week, he was in the hot‑seat being interviewed or something on some type of panel, and he at some point took off his hooded sweatshirt.

Which, the person who is interviewing him, discovered had this weird logo type badge sewn into the lining of the sweatshirt. And of course, she pointed it out, and the tech world got a hold of it, and got a picture of it, and there’s just been like blogs all over the place about what this secret logo badge could mean.

Lauren:  Yeah, I’ve seen a lot of different people talking about is it Illuminati? I’m like, what kind of symbol is this? Obviously it’s a Facebook symbol. It has their mission statement, their unofficial mission statement in it. But, I think it’s crazy because as you know, it’s now ended up on eBay, the sweatshirt.

Emily:  That’s right. That’s right. Yeah, so apparently once this blew up in the media, and people have said some pretty ridiculous, outlandish accusations and suggestions about what it could be. But, regardless of the meaning, one of these ended up on eBay, and you’ll never guess how much it’s going for?

Lauren:  Tell me.

Emily:  Over $4, 000 for quote unquote “an exclusive Facebook hooded, size XL”. And, whoever the seller is, they describe it in their little summary as, “the same exact one worn by Mark Zuckerberg at the D8 conference. I was gifted this hooded by a friend and employee at Facebook.” So if you are really interested in seeing it with your own eyes, you might want to hop on eBay and up the bid, if you have a few extra thousand dollars hanging around.

Lauren:  No big deal. No big deal.

Emily:  That’s ridiculous. And I think that goes for being not hot. That’s a little ridiculous.

Lauren:  Yeah. Mark Zukerberg’s sweatshirt is fairly hot, and he was apparently at the conference. But, paying 4K for a hoodie, not hot.

Emily:  Yeah, definitely not hot. I don’t know if it was supposed to be a secret. But people weren’t happy about it. It’s pretty funny how something like this can become such a major issue. Well, what else is hot?

Lauren:  Well, going off of that, Facebook continues to be the subject of much buzz. Bangladesh lifted their Facebook ban after about a week. So, that’s good, I guess.

Emily:  So they had put it on and everybody’s Facebook disappeared for awhile?

Lauren:  I guess. I’m not really sure how stuff like that works countrywide. But, obviously I’ve heard a lot about China blocking things. And so I guess Bangladesh just lifted their Facebook ban. I think that was for images and like cartoons surrounding religious figures, so, touchy subject.

Emily:  What’s not hot, going off of that. I just read an article about how China just blocked Foursquare. Be lucky or be fortunate, be glad that we live in a country where you can show yourself in pictures playing beer pong on the roof, or getting low at the club.

Lauren:  Not sure if you want to put those pictures up there for your potential employers to see!

Emily:  Yes. Self‑regulation is key, definitely.

Lauren:  And with all this freaking privacy options on Facebook, it’s always tricky, but get in there and figure it out.

Emily:  Yes, it’s important.

Lauren:  So what else is hot?

Emily:  You know what? I guess we should actually jump ahead to what’s not hot on this one. So what’s not hot is that we are currently in the 51st day of the BP oil spill, which is just an unfathomable disaster.

Lauren:  Crazy.

Emily:  And federal authorities are estimating that over 798, 000 gallons of crude oil have been gushing into the sea every single day.

Lauren:  Every day. An insane amount. I can’t even…

Emily:  It literally makes my blood boil every time I think about it. And I am happy to report that on the what’s hot side of the situation that people in the digital world are definitely taking action and figuring out how they can use social networks and social media to really help out with the gulf oil spill.

Lauren:  Definitely. I think people are really stepping up to the plate. We’re seeing these different apps coming out. I was just looking at one today, it’s called The Oil Reporter, and if you’re in the area you can take a picture, or a video, or report what you’re seeing so that you can alert people that this is another area that needs help, this is what’s going here just to make sure the word is getting out. Also, I was reading about Tumblr. It’s made its dashboard black now to raise awareness and also money to support the oil spill. I guess users can donate right on the dashboard, which is awesome. It makes it so easy and accessible just to reach out and help in whatever way you can.

You can donate to different kinds of groups. The ones listed are Save Our Gulf, the National Audubon Society, Greater New Orleans Foundation. These are all great causes, and this is affecting so much wildlife and the environment…

Emily:  Destroying tons of diversity in wildlife that’s really distressing. If you can, get out there and get onto the National Wildlife Federation website. See what you can do to help volunteer and raise funds, whether it be a few dollars or just want to donate some of your time. Any bit helps.

Lauren:  So what’s coming out of a very not‑hot situation is some hot social media coverage and support, I guess.

Emily:  Absolutely. Well, going off of that, it’s a grim thing but definitely a huge, huge, huge topic of conversation today so we thought we would mention it, but we’re super‑excited to feature our guest today.

Lauren:  We have Dan, the CEO of DealNews, and later we will have Steve from Drop.io.

Emily:  Exactly! So stay tuned with us, and we’re going to feature some awesome interviews right after the break.

Announcer:  Real Time Digital will be back after this download from our sponsors. [radio break]

Announcer:  Welcome back to Real Time Digital, presented by TheJARGroup.com, online marketing with measurable results. Here are you digital divas, Emily and Lauren. [music]

Emily:  Welcome back to Real Time Digital, hosted by www.TheJARGroup.com. We’re your digital divas Emily and Lauren, and we’d like to welcome Dan DeGrandpre to the show from DealNews.com. Welcome to the show, Dan.

Dan DeGrandpre:  Hi, thanks for having me.

Emily:  Absolutely. So, you’re from DealNews.com which is actually just right down the street from The JAR Group offices. Why don’t you just go ahead and start off by giving us a little bit of background telling us about how DealNews got started, and what exactly it is.

Dan:  Deal News is a bargain shopping website. People can use us to find news on deals, kind of like, “Where every day is black Friday” is our tagline. So, any time that a store has a particularly good price on a deal ‑‑ on a product, I should say ‑‑ we help people by telling them about that information. So news on deals, that’s all we do.

Lauren:  So Dan, how do you find these hot deals?

Dan:  Oh, a lot of ways. We have some software that goes out there and looks at this kind of information. Once we started to gain some size, a lot of the retailers started coming to us and saying, “We’d like to get rid of this product, would you list this on your site?” And, of course, then we also look at what else is going on out there. We check out the other sites out there that help people shop online, to see if there’s anything out there.

Lauren:  Awesome.

Emily:  That’s awesome. I’ve got to say, I love Deal News. I peruse it many times a week, and… My main question, that’s just burning is, do you ever find yourself hoarding up on these deals? Like, do you have 18 luggage sets, or like 50, 60″ screen TVs?

Dan:  It’s totally dangerous. This is like… When we hire somebody, we tell them, “By the way, the big danger of this job is you see this stuff usually before we actually post it on the site. So the danger is you’re going to buy stuff.” And that’s a big deal! [laughs] People will do a lot of this… I try to keep myself buying things that are $10, but I can’t always do that. But I don’t have multiple luggage sets, but I used to. I seriously did. You brought up luggage sets: I had like three different luggage sets that I got the real good prices on. Some like high-end Samsonite and some other ones, and I was like, “Look, I’ve got to streamline this,” and wound up giving it away to family.

But, all kinds of stuff. I haven’t gotten to the point where I have like eight TVs in my home, but I’ve got like…

Emily:  In every room?

Dan:  I’ve got like seven computers at home. And in a New York apartment, that’s a lot of computers, you know?

Lauren:  Yeah!

Emily:  Well, people must be really looking forward to your holiday gifts and birthdays.

Lauren:  Oh my gosh.

Dan:  [laughs] Yeah, we do pretty well on the Secret Santa kind of thing, because it’s under $10 or whatever.

Lauren:  Oh my gosh. Yeah, I can imagine. That’s hilarious. I want to be involved in your Secret Santa, exchange. [laughter]

Emily:  Can you expand it to neighbors as well?

Dan:  Absolutely.

Lauren:  Dan, how did you determine that something like this would be profitable?

Dan:  We actually… We’re kind of different than most online companies that are out there, because we’ve been around way too long. I should say it better than that, but it’s true. We’ve been around 13 years, so we actually started the company in 1997. It’s kind of funny. We’re actually proof that you can actually run a .com through two busts. You know, through the .com bust of 2001 and the things that have been happening over the last 18 months or so, and still manage to grow.

And we’ve been able to do that because… Part of it’s been some luck, like finding this idea back in the day. And back in the day we had to change the model, because when we first started it was all banner ads, revenue on the site. And it was designed to do that. It was designed to be the kind of site where people would want to advertise, and the retailers were the ones advertising.

And then around oh, five or six years ago, we changed to be more of a performance marketing model, where we used more of CPA, CPC, affiliate program, that kind of revenue. So it was a real big change actually, about five years ago.

Lauren:  Right. So, what are the differences then, or what is the difference between the two .com busts as you put it, and how has ‑‑ aside from the advertising ‑‑ how has DealNews evolved through those two?

Dan:  Well, we’re… Probably one of the things that’s helped us out a lot is that we’re recession resistant, in that people actually look more for our kind of information when they don’t have money. And that’s just a nice place to be in that situation. It’s not just benefited us, it’s benefited a lot of companies, like Groupon or Gilt, and a lot of others who are far larger and grown super fast. But it’s also been useful for us to be diversified. No one client constitutes even 10% of our revenue. We have a lot of revenue diversification, so this last bust when, if you remember Circuit City, the retail store going under?

Linens ‘N’ Things going under. These things didn’t hurt us like they might have. I know some sites that work in the deal and coupon space had some big problems when some particular stores either went under or started to cut back on their marketing spend. And we didn’t have any kind of anchor client that was killing us because we had really good diversification. And so, revenue diversification is really important. It’s kind of like if your business model’s based entirely on Google and the algorithm changes, that’s trouble. That’s a big deal. And we don’t have those kinds of problems as well because most of our traffic is repeat visitors. Less than, I think it’s like a quarter of our traffic that comes from search.

Emily:  Yeah, no, cool. I was just looking and it looks like DealNews.com has over a hundred… Or, one million unique visitors. So that’s great. [laughs]

Dan:  Yeah, I think our internal reporting is close to two million this time of year. It depends on which service you use. And Christmas, it’s five million. Five million’s a lot. Five million’s a pretty good place to be at. It’s in the top 500 or so, some kind of big number. But it’s still… We’re still very targeted, so we’re able to do a lot because people… One of the stats we love to trumpet is that the typical DealNews visitor buys something online every three days or less. Seventy‑five percent of people who come to our site buy something online every week. So that’s a lot of online shopping going on.

Lauren:  Wow!

Emily:  That’s huge!

Lauren:  Yeah.

Emily:  Incredible.

Lauren:  And it says a lot about your business too and the retention and loyalty of customers and everything.

Emily:  Yeah. Congratulations on that! That’s huge.

Lauren:  Yeah.

Dan:  Well, I’d like to take the credit, but it’s really just good people. We’ve got about 50 employees and they’re just really smart people. They’re really, you know, the ones who make us look good.

Emily:  In terms of all these other deal sites that are out there, how do you differentiate with, you know, there’s like so many. Like you were saying, there’s Groupon, which are slightly different, but then in the same channel there’s like SlickDeals and Fatwallet. What’s your competitive difference at DealNews?

Dan:  Sure. Absolutely. Well, we’re not user driven and those things are. And there’s a couple differences there for the users and then some differences on the business side as well. You look at somebody like Groupon. Groupon, they’re aggregating information about local stores. Groupon’s somebody that we might want to do a partnership with, you know. If Groupon has these local deals, we can work with somebody like Groupon and all the other local deal of the day sites as opposed to somebody, let’s say Fatwallet. People are more likely to want to visit them or us and maybe both actually. A significant portion of our users will use more than one because it’s really easy to move around. And a lot of their users float back and forth between each other.

The thing about the difference between us is that we’re editorially driven. We’re kind of old school in that respect in that we choose what goes up on the site. And then we do that in a way where our users are happy. So we do a lot of data mining to see what deals are performing really well. And then make sure that we list those kind of deals. And that simple formula, focusing on that, focusing on high quality, we tend to ban stores that are not reputable. We tend to spend a lot of time researching every deal making sure that the price is actually the best price on that product because if you could just float to Amazon and buy it for less, there’s no point in us listing it. So we do that kind of research before hand. And that’s a different, you know, tact than a user generated site.

A user generated site has a lot of advantages. It doesn’t have what we have, but it has different advantages like, for example, the users will be more likely to tell you whether or not the product is very good. They would be able to tell that right in the thread. So it’s a different kind of information. Ours is, you know, very user driven. You just don’t see it from the site. If you look at the hotness ratings from our site, those are user driven. And they are what drives what deals we list on our site.

Lauren:  So, I mean, given that in your user interaction (I know that you guys have a Twitter and Facebook account) do you really use that to do user interactive marketing?

Dan:  Absolutely. You know, Facebook is just a community for our fans. I don’t think Facebook yet is where people engage in commerce so much as people are just talking about things that the companies and the people that they love do. And for our fans on Facebook we try to engage them by doing things like, “Tell us about what’s going on, about DealNews and list your opinions.” We have surveys through there. And then, of course, we just do a lot of normal kind of Facebook promotions like giving away free T‑shirts. In fact, we had a free T‑shirt give away where somebody was coming up with taglines for the site. Just write on the wall to win something. And one of the taglines was, “It’s like Internet porn for my wallet, ” was what they called DealNews. And we thought that was really funny so we printed it up on T‑shirts and gave them away on Facebook all over again. And so using Facebook that way. And the Facebook users thought it was freaking hilarious, right? And so that was just really one example of something that we’ve done with Facebook.

Twitter’s very different, right? Twitter is real time information and conversation. It’s not the same kind of thing. And honestly, we’re still working on Twitter right now. We’ve only got, I don’t know, total maybe seven thousand followers to all of our quoted things, maybe, ten thousand, somewhere in that range. That’s not very many, not in this day and age, at least.

So, we’re trying to figure out how to get more and more there. We actually have some role apps, some changes coming up in the next couple of weeks.

Lauren:  Very cool.

Emily:  Great. Well, I guess we’ll look forward to seeing some sweet DealNews apps on the horizon. Anything else in the works for DealNews?

Dan:  There’s always stuff even though we’re already into Black Friday planning. It’s just the way it is. We’ve got to prepare for the day after Thanksgiving. We start that prep pretty much in January, and as we get closer we have more and more development geared up. We actually have a large development team on staff, and a lot of the work they’re going to be doing over the next four months is for Black Friday.

Lauren:  Planning ahead.

Emily:  Yeah, absolutely. I can see why.

Lauren:  Yeah, absolutely.

Dan:  You’ve got to.

Emily:  Yeah, absolutely. So, just to wrap up, we’re almost out of time. But, one last question. What is the sweetest deal that you, at least, in your opinion have seen on DealNews?

Dan:  You know, that’s funny. It actually is a really old deal. It’s not that we haven’t seen great deals since then, but I’m talking about 10 years ago.

Lauren:  Oh, yeah.

Dan:  Things were different 10 years ago because…how do I say this honestly? VCs were stupid. That’s the nicest way that I could say it. VCs decided to give truckloads of money to online retailers to essentially give away to their potential users. They basically would pay any price for client acquisition. You probably have heard of WebMD. One of WebMD’s promotions was they gave away New Balance shoes worth 80 bucks, just give them away. You’d go register at WebMD. You didn’t have to purchase anything. You didn’t have to look up an illness. You just got shoes worth 80 bucks. That was great. That’s not the best one.

There was another store that basically gave away‑‑they were kind of a department store called Value America. And in essence, they gave away $300 for free. This is essentially what they did. So, you ask me what the best deal ever gotten was?

It was from venture capitalists through this company called Value America. At the time I bought a PC and a Compaq. And I remember it was like, it’s a Compaq, but it’s free! So, I basically paid nothing for it and got an entire PC for nothing. You don’t find those deals.

Emily:  No, not so much anymore.

Lauren:  That’s awesome.

Dan:  There’s amazing deals but not like that. So, I’m sad to say that that era’s over and people decided they wanted to get saved.

Lauren:  Oh well, you’re still coming up with quite a few pretty sweet deals as it is.

Again, I thank you so much for taking the time to be on our show. It was great to have you.

Dan:  Absolutely. Thanks for having me.

Emily:  Thank you so much.

Announcer:  Real Time Digital will be back after this download from our sponsors. [radio break]

Announcer:  Welcome back to Real Time Digital presented by TheJARGroup.com, online marketing with measurable results. Here are your digital divas, Emily and Lauren.

Lauren:  Welcome back to Real Time Digital, I’m Lauren.

Emily:  And I’m Emily!

Lauren:  We’re from the JAR Group. We’re now here with Steve Greenwood from Drop.io. He is another DUMBO‑ite. That is DUMBO like we talked about in the last show, Down Under the Manhattan‑Brooklyn Overpass.

Emily:  [laughs]

Lauren:  Isn’t that it?

Emily:  Yeah, down under the Manhattan Bridge Overpass.

Lauren:  Oh, the Manhattan Bridge Overpass. It works out, same thing. Anyway, we’re really excited to have Steve on the show, so welcome Steve.

Steve Greenwood:  Hi, thanks for having me. I also always get that acronym wrong, as well. [laughter]

Emily:  That’s funny.

Lauren:  Whoops! Well, anyway, we’re happy to be here and it’s a cool space. I guess if you just want to start out by giving us a quick introduction to Drop.io, the background explanation of what it is and how it came to be.

Steve:  Sure. First, hello everyone and thanks so much for having us and finding Drop.io interesting enough to share with your audience. Basically in short, Drop.io is based in DUMBO in New York City. We’re a venture capital backed company. What we do is help make file sharing really easy. We were selected by Time as a Top 50 website last year. And what we do is power constant sharing between millions of users online today for thousands of different uses. We can get into that in more detail, as you like.

But in addition, we also have different product applications we’ve built on our own API plus we allow third parties to also engage in our API. We have this very simple way people can engage in content sharing and that is what we do very well and make it easy for others too.

Lauren:  Awesome. So who then, is your target audience and how have you been marketing to them?

Steve:  I think what’s really interesting when we look at how you market and promote different businesses and services, one of the things we thought very strongly about at Drop.io is that we want to provide immediate utility and usefulness to users. And so our marketing is creating a drop for free. You go to Drop.io and there’s no marketing message, there’s no advertising on the site. You literally go to our home page, there’s an open field there where you can name your drop whatever you want and click “create drop”. And then you now have this drop where you can add any content to it, any sort of way whether it’s a video, a photo, audio, a document. We can convert it into a web friendly format and you can share it any way you want.

And what’s so amazing again, back to that marketing question, is we first provide the user immediate utility and then what happens? They then share that drop with others, whether it’s coworkers, it’s clients, it’s friends, it’s family. They then experience Drop.io and how easy it is to use and then they use it.

At the end of the day, that is our primary source of marketing. It’s just providing a really simple service that provides utility for people.

Emily:  That’s awesome. The product speaks for itself. That’s the best thing you could possibly have.

Steve:  Yeah, I think in an interesting way we are entering this age of authenticity where it’s you are who you are. What’s great about Drop.io is we give you right away what the service does. You click a button you now have a place to share content.

Emily:  Awesome.

Lauren:  Right.

Emily:  I feel like Drop.io hasn’t gotten to where it is today without being totally ahead of the curve. You’ve had some really interesting partnerships with other companies as a way to enrich your services. Tell us a little bit about how you’ve had partnerships with other companies and applications to enrich Drop.io and that service offering.

Steve:  I think one of the partnerships we’re really proud of and happy to be working with is Yahoo. Yahoo has over a hundred million email subscribers, I don’t know the exact number, but they are, I think, the largest email service in the world today. It’s a very simple thing. Their email service is great but what they’re looking to do is provide additional value to their subscribers and they saw that Drop.io could be a great application to add into their platform.

And that’s what we did. We worked together to integrate the Drop.io functionality into Yahoo. Now every Yahoo mail user, with a click of their button, while they’re logged into Yahoo mail, can create a drop. Upload any photos or videos and the thumbnails of those images will display in their email.

When they send that email to someone else, the email comes in just like it normally would but below the text they’re written in the email body will show a link to view the drop with the content but also those thumbnails.

I think that’s a great application both for us, and continuing to be able to share the service more broadly and also for Yahoo and for their users as a way to provide them with additional utility.

Lauren:  Right.

Emily:  That’s great, really cool. You guys have been ahead of a lot of the trends especially when it comes to this type of digital integration with other platforms. So that’s really cool. I also saw that you were one of the first services to release a Facebook connect integration. It’s probably a few years ago by now but it allowed users to publish updates of any sort made to their jobs onto their Facebook feed. That was probably really revolutionary when you guys decided to do that integration. Where do you get these foresights and what opportunities do you see for the near future?

Steve:  I think it’s really cool that the “io” in Drop.io stands for input and output.

Lauren:  Oh!

Steve:  So what we try to do, we have all kinds of fancy graphs we can show people about it, but basically you have a drop which we talk about as a point of exchange on the Internet and there’s ways you want to put content in and there’s ways you want to take content out. Ways of putting content in can be directly going to the drop and clicking the add button and uploading stuff. Each drop also has it’s own email address, so you can email into the drop and any attachments that are connected to that email will also be in there. Each drop also has it’s own voicemail number so you can call into a drop, reporters do this a lot, there’ll be a recorded interview with their phone by dialing their drop’s voicemail number, conducting their interview and ending that phone call. That phone call will then be converted into an MP3 file in their drop.

We have a whole bunch of ways people can input content. What you were just talking about with Facebook, is there’s a whole bunch of ways to output content. Whether it’s output via email notifications, text notification, RSS, Twitter, Facebook, et cetera, et cetera. So literally what a drop is a really simple way to share content, and again the application while you’re in it is really simple.

We convert the files into a web‑friendly format so you don’t have to be concerned about what software people have on their computer or this or that. They just click a button and it plays. Or you see it or you interact with it. And then the same thing goes for how you put content in and you push content out.

Lauren:  Very cool. And Drop.io is 100 percent cloud application at this point, right?

Steve:  That’s right.

Lauren:  So how do you rival other cloud applications like Google for instance and keep your offering with Drop.io ahead of the game?

Steve:  And Google’s an awesome company. [laughter]

Basically, the way we focus on what we do is there’s a lot of value to our users and to us as a company in being very focused. As we said, and probably when we hear back on this recording, we’ll have said many, many times that what we do is power content sharing. So by having a very clean focus on that and just doing that one piece of functionality really well, it helps us really carve out and build a service that does that one thing better than others. So that’s what we focus on. That’s what we do, and that’s what our incredible development team spends their time working on.

Emily:  What are some of the fun uses? Or tell us a really funny story about how you’ve heard Drop.io being used or just something that’s just amusing.

Lauren:  A funny anecdote.

Emily:  Yeah. [laughs]

Steve:  Yeah, it really ranges. It’s fun. You have really good applications like teachers who’ll use it to share homework, and architects who’ll use it to share drawings. One of the really interesting ones, we had cattle ranchers using us to collect bids for selling their cattle. And they were using a drop as a hidden upload feature. So people were privately submitting their bids, and then the cattle rancher was able to receive those. I think the reporter ones are really fun. So a friend of mine was covering the presidential campaign. I asked her. I was like, “Oh, how do you guys deal with recordings and sharing files when you’re on the road?” She hadn’t connected the dots about Drop.io. She’s like, “Oh, we use this really simple service, Drop.io.” I was like, “Wow! That’s amazing!”

[laughter]

Steve:  It’s pretty amazing the different types of uses people have. What was another really? Film producers use this a lot, too. It’s really interesting. Every day on a production set there’s something that’s developed called “dailies” which has a collection of the different shots taken. They want to share them both with people there but then in a geographically dispersed team. So what people use is Drop.io to share those files day in and day out to throw the file or the video up there or photos, whatever, and then get the other people to interact with it in real time.

Lauren:  Then also we wanted to ask about PressLift. This is a new product you’ve recently introduced into the mix. So if you want to just tell us a little bit about that, how it came about, and how it stems off of Drop.io?

Steve:  Yeah, so this is such a natural story. So again, what we do is we’re power content sharing. We grabbed the service, Drop.io, where people use it in all these different ways. Well, one of the ways people were using us were by communication professionals or PR pros who were taking their text press release and saying it wasn’t enough and that they needed to share a video, or a photo, or an audio file, or something else. So what they were doing was creating a drop, putting in the videos and photos, then taking the URL of their drop, and then sharing it along with their text press release. That made a ton of sense. This is the world where communications is changing very rapidly, and you need to tell your whole story and you bring it to life.

So we decided we would build a new application on our own API called “PressLift.” It is the simplest way to create a press release today in that you have all your custom branding, you have unlimited multimedia, the really great search engine optimization and Twitter and Facebook integration, all that sort of great stuff.

But fundamentally it’s just powered by Drop.io, and it’s powered by API. But it’s geared for this one particular audience, which is the communications pro who’s trying to create a press release that is social media enabled and that they can then send to journalists and bloggers. So the journalist and blogger will get not only the text as part of that that they always expect.

But now they’re getting everything else they needed but with one click to view any sort of video or photo, one click to download it, and one click to grab an embed code. So in this world of making things social media enabled, making them multimedia rich, and then also real time trackable, that’s what PressLift’s really about.

So when you connect it to Drop.io, where there’s millions of users, thousands of uses, PressLift is designed for just one use of creating a press release. You can imagine both with us at Drop.io and third party developers who can build on our API all sorts of applications.

Lauren:  Awesome!

Emily:  Yeah, that’s really cool. That’s really awesome to hear about that kind of evolution of the service and just where it’s going. So just going off of that, what can they expect to see from Drop.io in the future? And just more of this effortless evolution of what‑could‑be type of thing?

Steve:  Yeah. It’s really exciting. There are hundreds of different individual product applications that we have engaged with users on who are interested to build. And hopefully what we’ll see is third parties take advantage of our API and build applications they want, whether it’s in the advertising space, whether it’s in workload management, whether it’s with teachers. Who knows what it is? But there’s a lot of things we’re looking at in working with third parties and doing things internally, and then hopefully people will just surprise us and develop all sorts of great things we could never have thought of.

Emily:  Seriously. Well, we are…

Steve:  I mean I think…Yeah, go ahead.

Emily:  That’s OK. I was just going to say we’re definitely going to be looking forward to that.

Steve:  Yeah. Me, too. I think what’s really fun about this world we’re in today is there is so much engagement within communities. So we don’t just build a product and then go off somewhere. We’re actively engaged. It’s so exciting to see how people use Drop.io, how people use the API, and see all the things that are going to come to be.

Lauren:  Awesome! Well, everything sounds fantastic. I’m excited to see what comes next.

But Steve, thanks so much for being on our show, taking the time to talk with us about Drop.io and PressLift.

Emily:  But is there anything you want to tell our listeners before we part ways?

Steve:  Yeah. Well, first thanks again for having me, and hopefully this is interesting. If you’re interested to learn more, please check out our website at Drop.io. Feel free to email me at Steve@Drop.io.com or on my Twitter handle, SGreenwood. And thanks very much.

Emily:  All right. Thanks so much, Steve. We really appreciated having you as a guest on our show, and we hope to be talking to you more soon.

Steve:  Good. Thanks very much.

Lauren:  Thanks, Steve.

And for everyone else, make sure to tune in next week for Real Time Digital…

Emily:  Yup.

Lauren:  …hosted by The Jar Group.

[music to end]

The award will be given to an Outsource Program Manager who does an outstanding job in managing an affiliate marketing program within the LinkShare network. The ceremony brings together more than 400 Advertisers, Publishers, Outsourced Program Managers and Agencies to celebrate great industry leaders and innovators.

Our client, DollarDays, has also been nominated for a LinkShare Golden Link Award.  DollarDays is in the running for the Innovative Advertiser of the Year award, which will be given to the advertiser that has used unique initiatives to facilitate new partnerships, increase sales, and generate exceptional ROI.

We want to take this opportunity to thank our great clients and publishers for contributing to the success of our affiliate program management offering. In just one year, we’ve grown our affiliate clients from 0 to 11 and have been able to expand our outsourced program management services internationally. We couldn’t have done it without such awesome, innovative, interesting clients and affiliates! We’ll keep you posted!

Click through to read the full press release.

Below are all the materials I brought to the conference. I was happy to share this stuff, and I hope that it helped. Feel free to embed any of this content on your own site, all I ask is that you send a link over to this post or to JAR’s site in general (like I said, links are the key to good rankings).

Also, ask any questions you might have in the comments section, I know there were a lot of people who were not sure of things after the super quick presentation (don’t be shy, I’ll try to answer anything you ask, or at least direct you to a place you can find the answers).

Embed this Image on Your Own Site
<img style="max-width:100%;" src="http://www.thejargroup.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/06/techmunch-handout.jpg"> <div style="font-size:9px;line-height:10px;">This image was created for TechMunch New York by Joshua Unseth, an SEO Analyst at The JAR Group - <a href="http://thejargroup.com">Online Marketing Agency</a>. Feel free to embed <a href="http://thejargroup.com/seo-food-bloggers">SEO for Food Bloggers</a> image on your own site.</div> <p>

Embed this Presentation on Your Own Site
<div style="width:425px" id="__ss_4483074"><strong style="display:block;margin:12px 0 4px"><a href="http://www.thejargroup.com/seo-food-bloggers/" title="SEO Presentation for Techmunch">Techmunch SEO Presentation</a></strong><object id="__sse4483074" width="425" height="355"><param name="movie" value="http://static.slidesharecdn.com/swf/ssplayer2.swf?doc=techmunch-seo-for-slideshare-100612123144-phpapp02&stripped_title=techmunch-seoforslideshare" /><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"/><param name="allowScriptAccess" value="always"/><embed name="__sse4483074" src="http://static.slidesharecdn.com/swf/ssplayer2.swf?doc=techmunch-seo-for-slideshare-100612123144-phpapp02&stripped_title=techmunch-seoforslideshare" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="425" height="355"></embed></object></div> <div style="font-size:9px;line-height:10px;">This presentation was created for TechMunch New York by Joshua Unseth, an SEO Analyst at The JAR Group - <a href="http://thejargroup.com">Online Marketing Company</a>. Feel free to embed the <a href="http://thejargroup.com/seo-food-bloggers">SEO for Food Bloggers</a> presentation on your own site.</div> <p>

Site Name	URL	Indexable Blog	DoFollow
Gather	gather.com
BakeSpace	bakespace.com
Group Recipes	grouprecipes.com
Open Source Food	opensourcefood.com
Food Buzz	foodbuzz.com
Epicurious	epicurious.com
Chowhound	chow.com
Eats	eats.com
Food Candy	foodcandy.com

Two weeks ago The JAR Group teamed up with the Brooklyn Community Foundation to host an overwhelmingly successful DigitalDUMBO here in the heart of New York’s new digital district.

Together we were able to raise over $700 for the Brooklyn Community Foundation from donations and tips to help “improve the lives of people in Brooklyn by strengthening communities through local giving, grantmaking and community service.” Thanks to everyone who came to the event and donated to this great cause!

This month’s event took place at the DUMBO Loft. There was music, there was booze, there were silly pirate names and it was an all around good time. But it’s time for the mystery to be revealed! For those of you who figured out what the big bar code projected on the wall was, congrats. For those of you who didn’t…well, you missed out. If you scanned the bar code with your cell phone, it took you to a page where you could guess how many jelly beans were in a particular jar (and win a bottle of wine from Blanc & Rouge if you were closest!). And so without further ado, the winner is…

Xavier Thomas! Xavier is the co-founder of Dream Village and the co-founder of DNA Guide. Congrats Xavier!

In our second episode, Real Time Digital comes at you with discussions and interviews about our beloved DUMBO. (And if you didn’t listen yet, listen now!) Emily and I speak with Sawhorse Media CEO, Greg Galant, about The Shorty Awards and how Twitter has become such an influential media platform. Also featured on the show is The JAR Group’s own Andrew Zarick and Kaitlin Villanova from Carrot Creative. These two will talk about Digital DUMBO–how it came to be and why DUMBO is the new up and coming digital mecca!

Move over, Madison Avenue!

Announcer 1:  The opinions expressed on this WebmasterRadio.FM program are those of the hosts, guests and callers and do not reflect those of the staff, management or advertisers of WebmasterRadio.FM. Any rebroadcast or retransmission of this program without the express written consent of WebmasterRadio.FM is prohibited.

Announcer 2:  You are now logged in to Real Time Digital presented by TheJarGroup.com, online marketing with measurable results. Welcome two of The JAR Group’s savviest Internet marketers, Emily Liedblad and Lauren Garcia. Listen as these digital divas analyze hot trends and chat with the in‑crowd of the digital world. Real Time Digital starts in Real Time right now.

Lauren Garcia:  Hello. Welcome to Real Time Digital. I am Lauren Garcia.

Emily Liedblad:  And I’m Emily Liedblad.

Lauren:  And we are digital analysts at The JAR Group, a full service digital marketing agency located in DUMBO in Brooklyn.

Emily:  Funny you say that, Lauren. Today on our show we’re actually going to be highlighting a lot of the things that are happening in DUMBO. For those of you who aren’t familiar with DUMBO, it’s not the Disney character who can fly. DUMBO is the neighborhood in Brooklyn Down Under the Manhattan Bridge Overpass. The reason why it should be on your radar is because it is becoming a huge digital mecca. In fact, the “Wall Street Journal” just released an article titled, “Madmen, Meet the DUMBO Crew.”

So, basically, DUMBO is just an up and coming neighborhood where there’s a lot of digital marketing companies, everything from digital online marketing agencies to developers, programmers, anything you can think about digital. So, move over, Madison Avenue.

It’s kind of overriding the theme of our show today. The guests that we’ll be interviewing in a few minutes are all located in DUMBO. So, just a little background.

Lauren:  Of course, the first thing we’ll get started is we’ll have our usual what’s hot and what’s not hot.

Emily:  Not hot.

Lauren:  To get it started, I just wanted to take it with…

Emily:  What’s hot today, Lauren?

Lauren:  Fledgling Wine is very hot, I think. I think it is an example of…

Emily:  Wait, wait, wait. Hold up. What is Fledgling Wine?

Lauren:  Fledgling Wine is Twitter’s new wine. I think $20 of every bottle, if I’m not mistaken, goes to the non‑profit, Room To Read. Which is, again, a non‑profit to help educate children around the world. So, on my radar that’s extremely hot when huge companies or people with a big platform to get the word out for great causes really takes advantage of that to help other people. I think that’s extremely hot.

Emily:  That’s right. That is hot. [laughs] How are they selling this wine? On Twitter? Can you pre‑order over at Twitter?

Lauren:  Oh, I don’t know. You can probably tweet them and find out.

Emily:  Yeah. We should do that.

Lauren:  What’s not hot?

Emily:  Probably drinking too much of that non‑profit wine and getting sloppy drunk.

Lauren:  Yeah, not hot.

Emily:  Yeah. That’s not hot. But, yeah, that really is cool. I’m excited to hear how that goes for them.

Lauren:  Good job, Twitter on doing something great.

Emily:  Very cool.

Lauren:  So, what else is hot, Em?

Emily:  What else is hot? We’ve seen lots of stuff on the blogs about Google TV. Everybody is really excited about that all over Twitter. I’ve seen tons of articles about that on TechCrunch and Mashable. Do you want to tell us a little bit about that?

Lauren:  Yeah. I definitely was one to tweet about Google TV. I think it is great. It could take off. I’m not sure how it will go. I’m eager to see the pricing on it. But I think it is really a great idea being able to integrate, not only the shows that you watch on TV but what channels you like to watch on YouTube, updating your status on your social networks, everything like that, all integrated into one digital TV.

Emily:  So, the story is, if I understand it right, is you can either purchase a Google TV which means you can search directly onto the television interface. Or, you can buy a box that attaches to your TV and basically use it. And it’ll have full web browsing functionality. Is that what’s understood? Is that what’s going to work?

Lauren:  I think so. You can always get online, obviously on Google and learn more about that, but just something to keep on the radar. I thought it was interesting because I think Apple has had an Apple TV version out for a little bit now. I’m not sure if it has the exactly same capabilities, but I thought it was interesting that with the Google‑Apple feud going on right now that they would come out with such a similar product. Actually, it’s not that surprising, given the feud. [laughter] But, something to keep on the radar.

Emily:  So, what’s not hot? Google TV is smoking. What is not smoking?

Lauren:  Not even having TiVo. I mean, I can’t even record the shows that I watch.

Emily:  You don’t have TiVo?

Lauren:  No. I am usually like: “Hey it’s nine o’clock. Gotta get back and watch “LOST“. Sorry we can’t meet you for drinks after work. Can’t record it.” That’s definitely not hot.

Emily:  Don’t worry. It’s probably even less hot to not even have a TV, right? Well, I guess that solves all of your problems.

Lauren:  Right.

Emily:  Yeah. I watch all of my shows on the Internet, anyways. So, I’m excited.

Lauren:  I’m big on Hulu at this point. One of my roommates got me started on that, so…

Emily:  Cool.

Lauren:  I’m excited.

Emily:  All right. Well, yeah, maybe, it’s time to turn in that cardboard box of a TV and get a Google TV. Sounds awesome.

Let’s see, one more what’s hot and what’s not before I get started with our interviews.

Lauren:  Well, location is still hot.

Emily:  Yeah. We talked about it.

Lauren:  It’s consistently hot.

Emily:  It’s going to be hot. It’s like the next big thing. Location wars are all the rage. On our last radio show we talked about how location, location, location is hot, and it is still smoking. There are still huge battles between the check‑in champs everywhere you go.

In fact, Facebook just announced that it’s soon going to be introducing its geo‑location platform.

Lauren:  Oh my goodness.

Emily:  Geo targeting, yeah. So, there’s been a little bit of controversy, I feel, about that.

Lauren:  Facebook is, like, hot and extremely not hot at the same time with all the privacy issues going on. People are getting rid of their Facebook accounts. It’s crazy.

Emily:  I think it’s pretty insane. There’s just really, really bad sentiment about the open graph changes that have been taking place on Facebook. I don’t know. People usually eventually end up adapting to whatever changes Facebook makes, but in this case I’m really not sure. A lot of people have just had enough with all of the changes going down without anybody’s approval, and they just do their own thing.

Lauren:  Right. I know I keep seeing all these blog posts, like “why I’m getting rid of my Facebook account,” “five reasons why I’m keeping it” and all these things. Tips on securing your privacy. It’s just getting out of hand.

Emily:  I always thought that Facebook would‑‑just my prediction‑‑Facebook would outlive Twitter, just because people have invested so much time into Facebook. It’s just basically a huge content storing platform.

Lauren:  Right.

Emily:  People have their histories. They have all their friends and contacts in there. They have years of photos stored at this point. So, it’s a really, really bold statement for these huge people on Facebook to be organizing efforts to get a bunch of people together just to entirely delete their accounts.

Lauren:  A mass exodus.

Emily:  It’s huge. Exactly. So, Facebook needs to‑‑Mark Zuckerberg, whatever you’re doing, you ought to take a look. Yeah.

Lauren:  Figure it out.

Emily:  Figure it out. I’m, literally like, I would never delete my Facebook just because my college years are stored in there. It says a lot. You can tell it’s a pretty big thing to be saying that you’re going to delete your Facebook account. That’s pretty crazy. So, we’ll see. I guess we’ll see how this geo‑targeting platform of theirs works.

Lauren:  Right. Right.

Emily:  And they do have the huge base, and people are debating whether or not it’ll be a competitor with Gowalla and Foursquare, and then on the shopping side, LinkedIn, and the gaming geo‑targeting MyTown, and those types of programs.

Lauren:  Right.

Emily:  They do have the user base but we’ll see what they can do with it. We’ll see if their partnering with really huge companies to give great discounts. What are they going to do to entice Facebook users to use their places platform?

Lauren:  I don’t know but it’s an exciting time in digital.

Emily:  Yeah, absolutely.

Lauren:  And speaking of being…

Emily:  Hot. [laughs]

Lauren:  …hot and digital, we are very excited to have several digital guests today…

Emily:  From DUMBO.

Lauren:  …all from DUMBO.

Emily:  Woo.

Lauren:  Our first guest on the show will be Greg Galant, the CEO of Sawhorse Media.

Emily:  Very cool.

Lauren:  Very cool and we’re thrilled to have him on the show.

Emily:  And then after that we are going to be talking to the founders of Digital DUMBO, which is actually a monthly meetup in DUMBO founded by The JAR Group’s very own Andrew Zarick and Kaitlin Villanova from Carrot Creative, which is another agency in DUMBO. So we’re thrilled to talk to these guests, so hold up and we’ll bring you all back after the break.

Announcer 2:  Real Time Digital will be back after this download from our sponsors.

[radio break]

Announcer 2:  Welcome back to Real Time Digital presented by TheJarGroup.com, online marketing with measurable results. Here are your digital divas, Emily and Lauren.

Emily:  All right. Welcome back to Real Time Digital. We are thrilled to bring you our first guest of the day. This is Greg Galant, the CEO of Sawhorse Media. Greg, welcome to the show.

Greg Galant:  Thanks a lot. It’s great to be here.

Lauren:  Yes, we’re very excited to have you. I guess let’s just get started. Just tell us a little bit about the background of Sawhorse Media and where you got started, how you got the idea.

Emily:  And what it is you do. Tell everybody, tell the world.

Greg:  So about a year and a half ago we’d noticed that Twitter was really starting to take off in an interesting way where for the first time ‑ unlike Facebook at the time, unlike MySpace, unlike Friendster ‑ people were really taking it seriously in terms of publicly creating content that was useful to audiences aside from their friends. So, people were actually starting to cover topics.

We were fascinated by this and we thought it was completely unstructured. How could anybody every find who’s worth following? So, we thought, Well if it’s a form of media ‑ movies have the Oscars, plays have the Tonys ‑ there should be an award for the best Twitterers on various topics.

So, we hacked together this site in two weekends called the Shorty Awards where anyone could tweet a nomination for another Twitter user. At the time you’d write: “@shortyawards I nominate @so and so for the #whatever award” and our site would create a real time leaderboard.

We did this thinking that it would just be a small, fun project, and we’d do it so there would be an awards ceremony. We thought there’d be 10 people showing up. And then we launched this and it took off virally over Twitter. The first year we got 50,000 tweet nominations, the second year we got 300,000, millions of people tuning in.

So, after that first one took off, we put together a big awards ceremony. We have the Knight Foundation, Pepsi, FedEx as sponsors. Then, I can talk more about some of our other products in a bit. Bu,t it put us on this path of creating a network of websites that tell you who’s who on the real‑time Web.

Lauren:  Awesome. Unbelievable how quickly it took off.

Greg:  We honestly weren’t all that big of believers in Twitter until only after we did the Shorty Awards and we saw how quickly they could grow over Twitter.

Emily:  So did Sawhorse Media exist before Twitter, or was this how it all started?

Greg:  Well, we existed before Twitter. Early on we were experimenting with a bunch of different products at the time. So, we were actually really interested in short form media. We were working on a couple websites that were kind of inspired by Twitter but we didn’t build them on top of Twitter because we didn’t believe… Again, Twitter was also a lot smaller at the time, but we didn’t believe that as a platform that you could ever build another business using.

Then, it was only because the side joke project took of that we saw: “Oh wait, there really is something to Twitter.” Then, we repositioned the whole strategy to go from short form content on its own website to plugging in with existing social networks and existing profiles people have.

Lauren:  So, how do you see Twitter now at this point? Obviously, it’s played a big role in especially the Shorty Awards. But, given that and your changed attitude towards it, how do you see it factoring in at this point?

Greg:  It still just continues to grow and get much bigger. The second year, we more than doubled the size. We also launched a network of vertical sites including Muck Rack that aggregates all the journalists on Twitter. Venture Maven that aggregates all the VCs on Twitter. Then we’ve also started working with American Express to power our site for them, and Conde Nast. Most recently we launched a site called Listorious that’s a directory of Twitter.

So, we’ve seen that the challenges to find good stuff on Twitter have only grown because there’s just many more people on Twitter. Whereas, a year and a half ago it still felt like virgin territory and people weren’t taking it terribly seriously. Now, there are just so many Twitter accounts.

So, we’re finding that the chaos of Twitter and social media in general is only increasing and we think that creates more opportunity for filters and people who can tell you what’s important.

Lauren:  So, how do you determine what’s important then? Who are the top Twitter people who Tweet to follow?

Greg:  We find that the real key to it is to crowdsource and get lots of people. A lot of people have been crowdsourcing content, famously Wikipedia and then Google tried with Knol. There’s been a whole effort to do that. We’re really working to crowdsource curation.

So, our premise is that now… five years ago you’d need to create more content, make content creation easier. Now, we’ve got lots of content out there. You need to make it easier for people to curate and for lots of people to say what’s important of all this content.

So that’s really how we do it. With the Shorty Awards it was primarily through the nominations. So we got hundreds of thousands of people nominating each other. That was the first filter. Then we paired that with the Real‑Time Academy of Short Form Arts and Sciences to choose a winner ‑ a group that we helped to create of various industry luminaries.

Then with Listorious, that one we took advantage of Twitter’s new list feature. So, when Twitter launched their list feature last November, they approached us about just publishing all of our sites and Shorty winners as Twitter lists. This is a feature that Twitter introduced so anyone could make a list of other twitterers. So, you could make your list of experts in SEO. Put them on this Twitter list and then other people could find it.

Except with Twitter, we were talking to them and they said they really weren’t building any features to find these lists. They would just let everybody make it. So we saw that as an opportunity. We called them back two hours later and said, “OK. Well, we’ll make a directory of Twitter lists. And we’ll build a search engine around it and analyze it.”

With that we launched Listorious. So with that site we’ve had tens of thousands of people create these Twitter lists, then submit them to us and tag them so that we have some classification of what they are. Then, through that, we were able to index this metadata of the lists and the tags on over a million Twitter users.

So if you go to Listorious now and do a search for “SEO expert” or “New York City venture capitalists” or whatever term you want to throw in there. It will give you pretty good search results as a result of tens of thousands of people creating Twitter lists.

Emily:  Dang. [laughs] That’s seriously crazy. There is so much content on Twitter. It’s pretty unbelievable. So where do you see… it was such a great idea when that started out, because like you had said before, before it was like, “OK. Well, we need to grow the content.”

But, now there is an unbelievable amount of content on Twitter. So would you say that the main way that you dig through the content to find these lists to follow, is that mostly on user interaction and just people submitting the lists?

Greg:  Yeah. We found it just has to work that way. We tried doing it with an editor‑driven way. Where we would have editors take on different verticals and try to categorize who is in it. Then we were mapping out. Like:”OK. What would it take to scale and have enough editors to go through every vertical and find out all the people who are important?” And we did the map. And it was just overwhelming.

Probably the most famous example of someone doing it with an editorially driven way is About.com, where they had said: “OK. We want to do topic pages on every category. So we’ll just hire…” They hired hundreds of editors to create content on all these different categories.

But, About.com had going in its favor that, one, the Internet was a lot younger then. So there was less stuff out there. Two, that it was all permanent content. So, you had that person write the guide to the best tourist spots in New York City once. And, it’ll change a little bit year‑to‑year. But pretty much it’s evergreen content.

With the real‑time web you have a few challenges. You just have much more content out there. You imagine just in one day of this year we’re probably creating more content than they did in an entire year back in the 90s. And that’s a totally made up statistic, by the way, so don’t check into it!

Emily:  [laughs] I would believe it though.

Greg:  The other really big challenge is that it’s real time. So, whereas before you’d only have some blog posts come out everyday, or newspapers articles come out maybe once or twice a day, now you have tweets coming out extremely quickly, and when news breaks, when a trend happens, people expect to hear about it within seconds or minutes. So, to put a human editor in between the tweets and the reader, just isn’t practical, or would undermine the entire point of real time.

So, what we’ve found is that the challenges coming in, is you get lots and lots of these updates, and you really can’t spend the time to have anybody process each individual tweet, each individual update. What you have to do instead is be able to analyze the millions of sources that are out there, and to know which sources are trustworthy, which sources have expertise and which sources are worth listening to.

Emily:  So, another point is that you’ve seen the evolution of Twitter go from a thing that was really cool in the tech circles, and then it got a little bit more mainstream. Then, eventually, businesses caught on to it as a way to market their services, or run promotions et cetera. So, how has that evolution of Twitter, to have become this huge blow up thing, really affected what you guys do with Sawhorse?

Greg:  It’s really let us grow our company, and grow our brands around it. Where we found even when we did the Shorty Awards the first time around, the late ‘08, early ‘09, we found it was notable in that, it was at the early adopter phase then, but it wasn’t just techie early adopters. It was early adopters, a lot from the advertising, media and entertainment circles, which delightfully surprised us, and it let us have an event that was very diverse, in terms of the industries that it drew from.

We got to interact early on with a lot of journalists who were on Twitter, and figuring it out. I think part of that too, because it’s strong in media, gave New York ‑ where we had the event ‑ a bit of an edge over San Francisco, even though Twitter itself is based in San Francisco.

It made the evolution of it much more interesting, in that even the big figures of Twitter, early on, back then it was Shaquille O’Neal, Ashton Kutcher, names that everybody knew very quickly, all the presidential campaigns getting on there. Whereas it didn’t have to go through the cycle that we’ve seen of so many other trends, where it just stays within techie circles for years, before starting to break out into other industries.

Emily:  So Sawhorse Media is located in DUMBO, and you just happen to be being featured on our DUMBO edition. So Sawhorse media started out in DUMBO, how many years ago? When were you guys founded?

Greg:  We got started about two, three years ago now.

Emily:  Awesome, awesome. And so you guys, then, were located in DUMBO before it became this huge competitor, almost, to Madison Avenue. The “Wall Street Journal” just featured an article about how DUMBO is the new digital Mecca.

So how do you see DUMBO, and the digital services that are located in DUMBO, evolve over the years that you’ve been there?

Greg:  To me, my real metric was when we started, I’d call people up, partners, clients, potential employees. Nobody would come out to met us, they’d be like: “DUMBO, where, in the middle of the day?” And I’d have to meet them all in Manhattan.

Now, it’s really easy to get people to come out here to meet us. Everyone’s heard of DUMBO. They’ve heard of great companies that have come from DUMBO. They’re intrigued to come and check it out and go under the East River.

So, that, to me, has been the real measure of success, is can you get Manhattanites to leave their island? I think that we all have achieved that. And even… I think a lot of the events here, now… You meet a lot of people who neither live nor work in DUMBO. They’ve come out to check it out.

I think that the Shorty Awards, the ones that we did the first time around in early ‘09… I think it’s safe to say that that was the largest tech advertising/media event in DUMBO up until that time. Since then, there have probably been a few others of at least equivalent size, if not attention.

It was really exciting to be able to bring the Shorty Awards… Do the first one at DUMBO. That only happened because we were fortunate enough to connect with Galapagos, and they were very supporting for us, getting it off the ground in just a two month time span.

It was a lot of fun. The reason I wanted to do it down here the first year was just to take people out of their element, into something completely new for them, and make it a full on experience. I think that’s what DUMBO offers.

Emily:  Definitely become the envy of the town. That’s super exciting.

Lauren:  Speaking of events in DUMBO and digital, are you coming to “Digital DUMBO” this week?

Greg:  I will be there.

Emily:  Fantastic, then I will meet you in person. That’s so exciting.

We just have one more question for you then. What are your next thoughts for Sawhorse Media? Where are you guys going to go? A lot of odd changes are happening on Twitter, where their user base is still growing really, really quickly. They’re introducing Twitter as an advertising platform; sponsored tweets are huge.

Where do you see the opportunity lying, and how do you plan to use those benefits with Sawhorse Media?

Greg:  We’re still staying focused on figuring out the who’s who of this all, so the who’s who of Twitter. We’ll also start to be doing some stuff with Facebook, where we provide similar value to tell you who’s who on Facebook, since they’re starting to open up in the style of Twitter. We think that that’s the area that’s really our niche, our sweet spot within all that.

We’ve got a lot of new products coming out now to deliver on that promise. So, over the next month, you should see us launch these two big new products. They should provide a lot of value, in terms of figuring out who’s who.

Lauren:  Very exciting.

Emily:  Very exciting. Thank you very much for being on our show. We are huge fans of Listorious, and it’s quite an accomplishment to have some of the number one directories of Twitter. So, that’s very cool.

Thank you so much for taking some time out of your day to talk with us.

Lauren:  We can’t wait to meet with you at Digital DUMBO.

Emily:  Absolutely. Any of our listeners can meet you, too. We’ll be looking forward to that.

Greg:  My pleasure. It’s always great to talk to fellow DUMBOites.

Emily:  Absolutely. [laughs] All right, thanks so much. Great talking to you, Greg.

Lauren:  Thanks, Greg.

Greg:  Bye.

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Announcer 2:  Real Time Digital will be back after this download from our sponsors.

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Announcer 2:  Welcome back to Real Time Digital presented by TheJarGroup.com, online marketing with measurable results. Here are your digital divas, Emily and Lauren.

Emily:  Welcome back to Real Time Digital hosted by The Jar Group. Check out our website at TheJarGroup.Com.

We’re really excited to bring on the next two guests of our show. They are Kaitlin Villanova from here at Carrot Creative, Hi, Kaitlin. And we have Andrew Zarick, from The JAR Group. We’re super excited to have you two as guests. Thank you so much for joining us.

Do you want to start out by just giving us a short introduction?

Kaitlin Villanova:  This is Kaitlin Villanova. I am the director of account services and business development for Carrot Creative. We’re a full‑service social media shop, focusing on everything digital, from strategy to creative development, and really focus mainly on our flagship clients, which are Disney, Ford, the NFL, The Onion, Ralph Lauren Chaps, and a number of different clients.

Lauren:  Awesome.

Andrew Zarick:  My name is Andrew Zarick. I’m digital strategist for The JAR Group. I’m on the execution team, and managing strategy, communicating business goals between clients, and those goals back to our internal team.

Lauren:  All right, to get the ball rolling, how did you guys come up with the concept of Digital DUMBO?

Andrew:  Digital DUMBO started in January of 2009. It was a collaborative effort myself and Kristin Maverick from Carrot Creative, and since then, Carrot Creative has played a tremendous role in supporting the event.

Basically, the idea of the event was to create a forum in the DUMBO neighborhood of Brooklyn so that people could come together to share ideas, and educate each other on what’s new and developing in digital, as well as fostering new business in the area.

For those listeners that aren’t exactly familiar with what DUMBO is, it’s a neighborhood in downtown Brooklyn. It’s about a four block radius between the Manhattan and Brooklyn Bridge. There happens to be a tremendously large population of digital shops, creative development startups of all sizes. So, well established companies, and then growing agencies and entrepreneurs, as well.

Kaitlin:  I think the important thing to note is that Digital DUMBO, when it started back in January… Before my involvement, it was really 20 people in a bar getting together, having a chance to learn about what other agencies were doing. Now, it’s turned into a 400‑person, with people from all across the industry, and giving them a location and a place to really get together and learn.

Emily:  As you know, last week the “Wall Street Journal” released an article pointing DUMBO as the next rival to Madison Avenue and it is pretty awesome that Digital DUMBO has been able to play a part in that.

So, how have you seen DUMBO evolve, since being there with Carrot Creative and the JAR Group? And how do you think Digital DUMBO plays a role in that evolution?

Andrew:  Digital DUMBO, like I said, was started at the beginning of last year. I’ve been in DUMBO personally for about three years. In those three years it’s been amazing just to see the number of digital companies that have moved to DUMBO, mainly because the cost to rent office space in DUMBO is very reasonable compared to that of Manhattan.

So, as more companies began to move to the neighborhood and people began meeting each other, we created Digital DUMBO to, like I said, serve as a forum to enable networking, people to meet.

So, I’d like to think that Digital DUMBO, having grown over the past year in attendance, has brought more people together and has also kind of brought the spotlight on DUMBO in addition to the neighborhood being coined the New York Digital District. So, the press we’re receiving around Digital DUMBO combined with the New York Digital District effort has definitely served to put the spotlight on DUMBO.

Kaitlin:  So Digital DUMBO is really the catalyst that led to the development of the New York Digital District, which is a non‑profit parent organization that really was guided by the draw of Digital DUMBO. And we were thrilled to see mentioned in the “Wall Street Journal” article promoting not only the agency that I work for Carrot Creative, but also the fostering of technology’s new headquarters right in Brooklyn, New York.

Lauren:  So how do you guys then use digital media to promote Digital DUMBO?

Andrew:  Initially we kind of seeded the concept with a few digital thought leaders in the neighborhood and got the word out to them to let them know that we were forming this meet‑up. From there, the first thing we really did was establish our social media presence. So we set up a Twitter account, a Tumblr account, a Facebook fan page and also set up a group on LinkedIn.

So between tapping the influencers in the neighborhood and seeding the idea for Digital DUMBO, we then leveraged our social media presences to organize and grow the attendance. Clearly at this point we’re still working on developing our website. So, the social media presences have really served to spread news that there was this new meet‑up in DUMBO and it virally spread and attendance has continued to grow through both word of mouth and across social media over time.

Emily:  So, how have you seen Digital DUMBO grow since you guys started out? I know it’s had amazing growth, but just firsthand, why don’t you talk a little about how it’s just become so huge.

Kaitlin:  A lot of the growth of the event has really been around word‑of‑mouth marketing. I think that social has played such a part in the outreach for the event. Whether it’s the Twitter handle, or the Facebook page, or even the fact that on the Eventbrite invitation, you can see the attendee list. I think that there’s a lot of draw in that you want to know who is participating, who is part of the community, and really if you’re looking for whether it’s a job or a client or a certain service, you can find that in a comfortable, non‑intimidating community, unlike some of the other tech groups that are more Manhattan centralized.

This has a really welcoming vibe to it, and I think that the spread of the event has really… We can attribute it back to the fact that it’s a comfortable place for people to go and really just get a chance to have real conversations.

Andrew:  One thing that’s definitely worked in our favor, I think, is the fact that we are in DUMBO and we did start the event in DUMBO and there’s somewhat of a built‑in audience there since there is such a high concentration of companies in the neighborhood.

So it’s not too hard for people to stop in, to grab a drink and to see some like‑minded people on their way home, catching the F train or the A train. So, that factor along with what Kaitlin said, the format of our event.

So, we usually try to have a free drinks, which in itself is a bore, but also we do have a sponsoring company and we let that sponsor plan the event as they want it. So, usually a 10 to 15 minute presentation and some of them, they like to brand it in other ways, too. Whether it’s icebreakers, or giving away gifts, that sort of thing as well.

I think, initially, most of our audience was in DUMBO. But, over time we definitely see more Manhattan people make their way over to DUMBO. We’re by no means exclusive to only people that work in DUMBO, and that is a question that comes up a lot. We’re open to people attending no matter where they are.

Emily:  Right. Yes, so I guess some of the bigger agencies have a new kid in town that they got to deal with. Do you think it’s going to be a peaceful co‑habitation, or do you think there’s going to be some Madison Avenue versus DUMBO wars?

Kaitlin:  Well, Andrew And I have been asked a similar question in other interview segments and we don’t see it as much of a rivalry at all, only because if you are in the digital age, the idea of this elusive Madison Avenue almost doesn’t exist.

I think the days of traditional, you know, I’m picturing a “Mad Men” type environment isn’t really part of our culture working in digital. So, we don’t necessarily see any animosity at all because we don’t necessarily work in the world that acknowledges that side of the… You know, it’s not part of, or something that we engage with daily.

Andrew:  Right, I would agree with that as well. We’re in an age where traditional is merging with digital and we’re hoping to embrace that and we’re obviously open to anybody that works on quote unquote Madison Avenue to join us, because there’s a lot we can learn from them and there’s a lot they can learn from us as well.

So, we’re trying to do foster that collaboration, but I definitely don’t see it as a war, per se.

Emily:  That’s a really good point and an awesome outlook. So, we’re happy to hear that. So why don’t you just tell us a little about this week’s event. What’s going on this Thursday? I know it’s hosted by The JAR Group, so we’re really excited about that. Do you want to tell our listeners a little bit more?

Andrew:  Sure so this week’s event is of course taking place in DUMBO at a venue called the DUMBO Loft, sponsored by the JAR Group and DumboNYC.com. We’re announcing a program to give back to local charities. DUMBO has a large population of artists as well, artists and a number of other non‑profits. From this event on forward we’d like to give back to those charities by giving a portion of the tips that go into the tip jar.

So, this event will, like I said, be sponsored by the JAR Group and DumboNYC and all charitable donations will be going to the Brooklyn Community Foundation.

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Lauren:  Awesome. Well, listeners if you’ve never been out to DUMBO, here’s your chance to come take a visit this Thursday and be a part of something great.

We’re out of time but we want to thank Andrew and Kaitlin for being on our show and we’re very excited about this Thursday’s event.

Kaitlin:  Thank you.

Emily:  So come on out to this Thursday’s event and we hope to see you guys next week. And tune in to Real Time Digital again, hosted by TheJARGroup.com. Thanks so much.

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