The last few weeks I’ve been thinking about how SMS could be leveraged to help our clients market their products & services. In doing so, I found American Airlines txtSAAver program and Ping Rewards. I believe that SMS coupons & specials will become ever more common over time. For the marketer these ads are low-cost and can quickly be generated to maximize sales during low points either in the day, week or month.

However, I do see potential abuse in the system which opens the door to mechanisms which would make SMS marketing less attractive, namely too many text messages and unsolicited messages which would turn customers away from the service. Despite the potential shortcomings I think SMS marketing is a channel which has been largely over-looked to date.

The other day I was searching for a used 1U server for use in our development environment. Since I no longer like eBay, my new path for locating used items is Craigslist. I found several servers in the Denver area however I was too late and the servers had already sold. That’s when I began to think I needed a tool to monitor Craigslist.

At lunch today I told the gang that I’d like us to create a simple monitoring tool which checks Craigslist every hour or so for changes under the region / topic I’m interested. The tool would send me an email once a change was posted.

Tonight, I found my tool. I guess there isn’t a need to recreate the wheel. Here’s Craigslist Watch.

One of my favorite tricks-of-the-trade is using Google to recover content which has been lost. Whether the content is deleted from a non-versioning CMS package or accidentitaly deleted in HTML, Google usually is a good way to recover content. Here’s how:

Say I just deleted the content on our Imulus Solutions page by mistake.
http://www.imulus.com/solutions

I’ll head over to Google.com and do a web search for”Imulus Solutions”

Click on the “CACHED” link and you’ll see the old content from when Google last indexed your site. Hopefully your site will have been indexed in the last 48 hours.

Copy & Paste your content and your back in business. For advanced users just “view source” copy & paste into your favorite editor and you even will have 95% of the original code back after a few minor tweaks.