Today, the RTP Designs photographic team took a stroll over to one of their esteemed clients-The Sutherland for the venue’s premier photoshoot. RTP Designs has worked on crafting the Sutherland’s brand since it’s infant stages. The venue has come a long way in the past 6 months and is now fully decorated with completed landscaping, exterior renovations galore and luscious gardens. We look forward to seeing the look on that first lucky bride to be as she walks up the door to this astonishing venue.

A photo of an RTP Designs team member prepping for the shoot:

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Building one-on-one relationships with people you’ve never met is quite a challenging task, but don’t lose heart. The developments that streamline online shopping also provide a rich source of information just waiting to be mined to your advantage. With every keystroke or click, consumers provide information about themselves. Internet sites, web browsers, and databases help in determining the most worthwhile business practices by giving you important details, such as product needs, spending patterns, and shopping habits.

Luckily, this high-tech approach is neither high-maintenance nor high-priced. A hosted CRM service eliminates much of the start-up, maintenance, and upgrade fees of its on-premise counterparts. Rather, it offers a cheaper, faster, and easier means of tracking consumers.

In 2006, U.S. retail websites enjoyed $102.1 billion in sales from those consumers, reflecting a 24% increase over 2005’s figures (ComScore Networks, cited in “Online Spending Tops 100 Billion” by Ben Ames in InfoWorld, January 4, 2007). Web-based technologies offer a wealth of sales opportunities—without CRM, you’re just selling yourself short.

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Today marked the start of an initiative to build a social media application using the Facebook API. The team kicked their feet back for a few hours to decide on the first and most important part of this project – deciding what to build. After coming to the realization that the “Facebook Gatekeeper” – the ruling hammer of the Facebook application library was not as discriminating as we initially thought, we sighed with relief and began browsing through what seemed like an endless array of Facebook applications.

I’ve spent a lot of time analyzing Social Media marketing trends and potentials. After looking at types of applications with high install rates, most of my conclusions were reaffirmed after what we saw today. However, some new light has been shed on the subject as well.

This is what I believe to be the primary conclusions of day 1.

1. Coming up with a unique idea for a Facebook application is well, difficult… There are numerous redundant applications available with only minor differences in feature and function.
2. Applications that require the nurturing or maintenance of an entity (virtual pet, hatchling, growing trees etc.) have a high rate of daily re-visitation due to a sense of urgency created by that entity.
3. Applications that have a more visual/interactive element present tend to be ranked the most popular – fun walls, videos etc. However, I am not sure how well these applications monetize – especially given the resources required to run them.
4. Applications that project the status of one’s physical, emotional or general wellbeing (biorhythms, horoscopes etc.) are popular and even more so when they can compare this to their friends.
5. Quiz applications are popular as long as the subject matter is intriguing and matched well to the demographic. If sticky, they can monetize well due to the amount of adds present on each question screen.

As of now, we are still not 100% sure of what we would like to build, but have begun mucking around with the Facebook API.

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