MPLS is on Twitter! You can follow us and see what we're up to. I'll also be sending mobile updates from my phone.

One of our clients, Bloom Apps, had some recent success from Twitter and LinkedIn. They used Drupal to cross-post blog entries to Twitter and also posted items to LinkedIn. Within 24 hours they saw a huge surge in web traffic and sign-ups for their private beta program.

We are making our way through an internal review of our company website, which is a fancy way of saying this: we are hard at work on a design update for mplsmarketing.com!

The updated design will do a better job of explaining our services through case studies, highlight more of our work, and talk more about our experience with clients.

Keep a look out for the design update in the coming weeks.

EMM Group is the world’s premier management consulting company specializing in organic growth, including clients like GE, Microsoft, PMI, and others. EMM Group engaged us in early 2008 to put their existing website on a modern, scalable platform and to improve their search engine optimization. Today, we are proud to announce the launching of a second phase — an update to that modern platform, a full re-design of their website, a re-organization of their content and assets, and an integrated marketing campaign to promote it.

We recently launched Misfit Motorcycles' new website, Purple Makes Green. Purple Makes Green is a website specifically for dealers of Royal Purple automotive products. MPLS took care of the design, development, web hosting, back-end order workflow, Google Maps mashup, and more. I wanted to highlight two areas of this project.

Design

There is a new venture brewing here at MPLS. While we're not pulling open the curtain just yet, we are inviting people to sign up for Bloom Apps e-mail announcements. If you're a small business or a freelancer, I think you'll be excited by Bloom Apps. Check it out.

We've added updated content to our website, including more information on search engine marketing, optimization, and newsletters (more on that in a moment). You can view the updated pages here:

• Search engine optimization
• Search engine marketing
• Newsletters

Newsletter Announcement

Customer Relationship Management systems are awful, period. Why are they awful? First, they’re expensive. Most CRMs have cost a great deal of money and are not accessible to the groups who could most benefit from adopting them (freelancers and younger companies). Second, they’re cumbersome. Most CRMs are difficult to use and never quite fit with any one company’s business model or sales process. Third, they’re closed.

We wanted to welcome Kyle to our staff. He'll be working with us to produce more great designs for our clients. Kyle is responsible for our very own MPLS website, and we were really happy with the results. Right now, Kyle has his plate full with a number of projects. We should have some of his original work to showcase in the next few weeks - including a project of ours that mixes badass motorcycles, phenomenal synthetic oil, and Google Maps! What could be better?

Thanks for all your hard work, Kyle. We're happy to have you!

We often find ourselves in a bidding situation where we are campaigning to win a new project and we are up against dozens of overseas companies, or even worse, U.S.-based companies who outsource behind the scenes. For our prospective customer, it all seems to good to be true. Their prices are typically cheaper than our own -- often by huge margins. We asked ourselves the obvious question: how do we compete with them? And the answer we came up with was simpler than we expected: we don't.

In the next few weeks, we're opening the doors, so to speak, to some of our custom Drupal development. We have written some modules for our clients and now we want to make them available for free to the public. We're going to start with a great module that syncs Drupal with Google Calendar. Our internal date to wrap it up is the first week of April, so look for it on Drupal.org and here by mid-April.