qtags founder featured on Blogger Stories

Client Allison Gower, president and co-founder of qtags, is featured today on Toby Bloomberg's Blogger Stories.

In her feature, Allison talks about how her blog evolved from a marketing tool to a source of connectivity between her company and resellers and clients.

That's interesting because we don't often thinking of blogging as an internal information resource -- it's primarily "sold" as a conversational way of marketing your company or service, or as a vehicle to personalize a company.

In the early days of All About qtags, I continually urged Allison to show more of a personal approach and let people know what it's like to build a small social media company from scratch ... the daily ups and downs of being an entrepreneur in a pioneering field.

But she saw -- long before I did -- that she'd get more ROI by using her blog in a more functional manner. And it's worked.

The message there for all of us is that it doesn't make sense to try and dictate what is and isn't a blog, or what constitutes successful blogging. It's simply about using the technology to communicate more effectively, right?

On a side note, qtags is gaining lots of traction among digital signage firms and retailers who recognize the value of text messaging interactivity. For example, imagine the power of delivering a coupon directly to a consumer's mobile phone, simply by adding a qtag to existing signage.

Allison and her team have a lot going on these days with new deals percolating, and recent programs -- like the NYC GoodyBag display in Times Square -- have been successful.

One interesting stat that Allison told me the other day -- in addition to receiving a text reply or coupon/offer when you send a keyword text to q-ta-g-s, you also receive the advertiser's weblink stored in your personal inbox at the qtags website.

Allison says that advertisers are getting click-through rates of 30-50 percent with the qtags' weblinks ... an amazing response!