Posted: July 12, 2010 | Author: Rebekkah Hilgraves | Filed under: blogging, clients, customer service, design, marketing, search engine friendly, social media |

Images Coterie Photography, Theresa Saxon, Photographer :: Reflection on the hood of a Ferrari http://www.imagescoterie.com
In a recent visit back to my HQ office in Tennessee (I’m still on contract with OppenheimerFunds in New York City), I met my business partner‘s twin sister. They live on separate coasts and look so much alike they fooled my mother–who has known Theresa for years! Theresa Saxon, my business partner, is a very talented photographer–and so is her twin sister. However, the comparison ends once you start looking at their images. They have quite different specialties and their creative impulses flow in different directions.
It started me to thinking about what SheTech and Company does and how we compare to other providers. We might look like a great many other providers out there, and offer some of the same services–on the surface. Yes, we have a low-cost do it yourself option, and so do many other providers. Where the comparison does and must end is when we start talking about custom work.
With access to top-notch designers and developers all over the country, as well as literally decades of experience in both technology and marketing, we offer a unique blend of expertise resulting in unique web properties designed specifically to meet strategic business needs.
That means that, no, we can’t do a custom web site for $500–often not even for $5,000 (we’re what I like to call “overkill” for that sort of service). But for small, medium and large businesses that have both a marketing budget and the vision of a digital strategy (or need a digital strategy), we are poised to make a web property go from merely good to truly great.
This is because in addition to web production expertise, we are consultants: we sit and work with our client companies to deliver far above and beyond the “cookie cutter” web site that many other, lower cost, providers offer. We ask questions: who is your target audience? What message are you trying to convey? What tone? Will you be including social media in your digital strategy? How? What’s the overarching purpose of your web properties: sales and marketing, information or support (it can be some combination of all three, but one really must dominate)? We research competitors; we research search engine optimization techniques; and so on…
By the way, when you start thinking about a web strategy, remember to focus on the differences between sales strategy and marketing strategy. It’s not always clear which is which, but your direction will be vastly different when you choose one or the other.

SheTech and a Ferrari -- are you ready?
In the end, comparing other web hosting companies with SheTech and Company is a bit like comparing apples with Ferraris. They’re both usually red, and SWEET, but do very different things.
Vrooooooom!
Posted: November 14, 2009 | Author: Rebekkah Hilgraves | Filed under: marketing, networking, social media |
In the last week I have begun researching a topic for a new book with David Busch, along the lines of the last two, this time with a great and, to me, relevant spin: Flickr; specifically, how to promote your photography using Flickr.
These days, social media platforms are nearly as prolific as video games, and in the Game of Social Media, a few are inevitably rising to the top. Flickr and Facebook currently reign in their respective niches, even while users continue to spread their presence out among multiple platforms. As a result, and as the technology has made such a thing possible, users have demanded–and developers have responded with–ways to connect all these many media. Particularly because many of these platforms have evolved into very specialized sites, it is useful to be able to connect them in order to take advantage of one’s not-always-overlapping circle of contacts across the sites. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted: July 16, 2009 | Author: Rebekkah Hilgraves | Filed under: blogging, community, economy, marketing, networking, social media |

Social Networking can be a great marketing tool!
We hear it over and over again, and see expanding proof of its truth: times are tough, and it looks like they will be for a while. A few months ago, I was pooh-pooing this fact (and for a while we got reports that “everything’s getting better right now!”), but the evidence is striking closer and closer to home, most recently in the form of massive layoffs in my home town (it was a few months ago, and the effects are dramatically evident now in the form of house foreclosures, empty storefronts, and so on). What do you do when you’re trying to stay afloat? How do you market your business and stand apart from your competition, who might be doing what you do, but at a discount?
Read the rest of this entry »
Posted: July 9, 2009 | Author: Rebekkah Hilgraves | Filed under: blogging |
StumbleUpon is a great service, wherein users can tag favorite sites and share them. This was in my “recommended” list.
Truer words were ne’er writ!
Posted: July 3, 2009 | Author: Rebekkah Hilgraves | Filed under: blogging |
Because business has slowed down a bit, I thought I would try something new: a Facebook ad. In minutes, I had already hit my clickthrough limit, but none of those clicks resulted in sales (at least not so far).
It’s interesting, being my own guinea pig. As I test methods on my own site, I can share what I’ve learned with my clients. “If at first you don’t succeed…” is a phrase by which all marketing lives, I think, but these days it’s important to have fewer failures. We want to spend client marketing dollars as efficiently as possible.
Part of the problem is that everyone is so VERY cost-conscious these days that they’re looking for free solutions for everything, including marketing. There’s lots of free stuff out there, but it takes knowledge and experience — not to mention a great deal of time — to really make it work for you.
I’d love to hear from readers about their experiences testing their own methods on themselves.
Posted: June 16, 2009 | Author: Rebekkah Hilgraves | Filed under: community | Tags: community, domestic violence, emergency shelter, Haven House |
Haven House in Maryville Tennessee, which specializes in crisis intervention, prevention and education around domestic violence, has itself suffered a crisis in the last couple of weeks: a kitchen fire has rendered the emergency shelter nearly unusable, leaving many domestic violence victims with no place to go. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted: May 15, 2009 | Author: Rebekkah Hilgraves | Filed under: general | Tags: 911, community service, domestic violence, e911, leaps.tv |
Yesterday was a significant day for me in in interesting way: I took part in a webinar for LEAPS.TV (http://leaps.tv
) around the topic of domestic violence 911 call handling. We had a panel of experts from local E911, two different police forces and Haven House, a local domestic violence shelter and advocacy service.
This webinar was wildly successful from the standpoint of attendance alone, and certainly from the information being exchanged between panel members and the audience.
Being the moderator, I had my hands full juggling technical issues (inevitable in a program as complex as this one was), fielding questions and keeping the conversation fluid. Much more than this, the topic is of great personal interest to me, and it was extremely important to me that the information itself be passed around and shared so that every participant benefited, and came away with new ideas.
It worked.
The response so far has been tremendous; so much so that we’re already planning follow-up sessions.
Domestic violence is an epidemic. Over half of the calls that come into an E911 service have to do with domestic violence, and thousands upon thousands of cases occur each year. It represents among the riskiest calls a responding officer can take (remember what happened in Pittsburgh), and getting the right information, at the right time, to the right people, can literally be a matter of life and death.
In the course of working with Haven House and the members of the LEAPS.TV panel, I have learned a great deal and shared a great deal.
I firmly believe everyone–everyone–should participate in community action of some kind. My cause need not be your cause, nor yours be mine. But service to our neighbors is a giant part of how this country came to be built. Reach out. Help. Be part of your community.
Posted: May 9, 2009 | Author: Rebekkah Hilgraves | Filed under: customer service, general | Tags: customer service |
This weekend, SheTech is on the road. More accurately, SheTech is in airports. I’m traveling for client meetings and encountered some interesting examples of both outstanding and abysmal customer service–from the same airline!
You may or may not be aware that United‘s regional shuttle service is operated by a number of smaller carriers, depending on where you are. At my home airport, Knoxville’s McGhee-Tyson Regional Airport (TYS), Comair runs it. You may have heard rumors about how Comair runs its service (or lack thereof), and I can attest to those rumors. Okay, I’ll just say it: Comair Read the rest of this entry »
Posted: April 4, 2009 | Author: Rebekkah Hilgraves | Filed under: general, marketing, social media | Tags: location, moving, office, place, shetech and company |
Over the past week, if you have been following me on (most of) the social media platforms (Facebook, mySpace, Twitter, etc), you have seen lots of activity around a move to a new office space. SheTech and Company has been growing and changing over the past two years, and I decided that it was finally time to graduate from a home office to a real live commercial space.
Read the rest of this entry »
Posted: April 1, 2009 | Author: Rebekkah Hilgraves | Filed under: blogging |
Today is moving day for SheTech and Company! Please be patient with us; we will be mostly offline today & tmw, exc for mobile & blackberry. Thanks!