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Two start-ups use online savvy to spin success

By Jenie Skoy

On a gut level, Mick Hagen and his friends knew if they could harness the power of social networking on the Internet, they could develop a real business gem. And that’s exactly what they have done. Meet Zinch, one of the hippest new companies in Utah. It’s a Web community, 180,000 high school students strong, that fosters interaction between students and potential colleges. Students can create a profile for free to showcase their personalities in hopes of landing admission to their dream college. Colleges can then login to find prospective students. The service is free to students and was initially free to colleges, but now Zinch charges colleges a fee of $5,000-15,000 annually to use the service.

Zinch was founded in April 2007 by three friends: Princeton undergrad, Mick Hagen, BYU undergrad, Brad Hagen, and BYU graduate, Sid Krommenhoek. More than 180,000 high school students in the U.S. and 20 countries have created personal profiles on the site which can be accessed by 450 colleges. Even prestigious schools like Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Stanford, Rice and Tufts universities are onboard.

Mick Hagen says the business fulfills the needs of two groups: “Students need to express themselves and to feel like they can get into prominent schools, and admissions people need to access more info about students,” says Hagen who’s the president and co-founder of Zinch.

Hagen remembers a conversation he had with the admissions director at Princeton University while a student there. The orchestra director had asked admissions for help finding more brass players because they were all graduating that year. The admissions director’s response was: “All I can do is hope and pray that these kids apply.” Before Zinch, there was no way to search for students with brass playing aptitude, or any other skill to fit a specific need. But now, colleges can search under something as specific as a musical talent.

If a college wants to find a blind Hispanic pianist from Arizona seeking to study economics, the Zinch site allows them to search for this.

The site has been highly popular for students too because it empowers students and gives them a forum for expressing who they are, and says Hagen, “students are more than just a test score.”

“Kids want to say, ‘this is who I am, I’m not a GPA or a test score,” he said.

One of the tricks to creating this kind of online community is the ability to speak the language of the users. Browse the Zinch site and it’s not hard to be charmed by way it’s set-up: written with attitude— “Dude, join Zinch, here’s why”—in a way that students can relate with. Hagen says it helps that the executive team are all young themselves.

“Students don’t want to be on some site that was done by a bunch of old dudes that don’t know their lingo,” he said.

Students pick a user name, add a photo, then write a brief bio under a section called 20 seconds of Me. Next they can fill out info under The roots section (birthplace, birth date, ethnicity, and heritage.) Under The way I live section students can designate their sexual preference, religion, politics, or disability status, etc. A section called random stuff provides a pull-down menu where they can mark: “raised on farm” or if they so choose even add: “victim of domestic abuse,” or other information like how much education their parents received. There’s a place where students can download photos of their family and a page where students can apply for certain scholarships and a place they can start online threads talking about gripes like an inability to get federal students loans.

When a college is interested in a student’s profile, the student receives an email alert saying, “You got some LOVE from a college yesterday.” The student can then move that college to a priority folder or decide to “bag, shovel and bury ‘em.”

It’s all very personal and, says Hagen, gives students more control by allowing them to initiate conversations with a “shout out” to colleges and respond only to the colleges they like best.

To create the large database of students, Zinch’s founders took advantage of Gen- X’s obsession with the Internet then sold the idea to colleges telling admissions people, in essence, “you need to be where the students are. . . and here’s where they are,” said Hagen. Popular sites like facebook, myspace, youtube or the endless blogosphere dominate teenagers time.

Colleges discovered that students weren’t reading those bulky packages of admission materials sent out via the postal service. And in general, admissions people were having a hard time reaching specific groups of students for the sake of recruitment.

Zinch convinced admissions people that if they wanted to reach this generation, they needed to do it online, because, said Hagen, “students live online: they pay bills online, read news online, shop online. . . students are always connected: connected through text messaging, instant messaging and e-mail.” And Zinch convinced students that their portal was the best place to get discovered by colleges and get info about colleges.

Zinch’s story is a case-in-point describing how creating unique online communities can help launch and build business.

Even companies like Walmart have recognized the power of online communities and have begun hosting company blogs, discussing products, allowing customers to login and submit reviews and ratings and in general connecting a community of shoppers.

“There’s definitely value in allowing users and consumers to communicate,” says Hagen.

Building an online community is Zinch’s key to success, but for another Utah up-and-coming Web business, success has come through building a technology that helps businesses reach customers and vice-versa.

The company is Orange Soda and they’re responsible for “online marketing with fizz.” A clever slogan, but even more clever is the technology platform built by a team of software engineers at Orange Soda. Founded in 2006 by Chris Finken, Derek O. Miner and Jay Bean, the company sought to give small businesses better bang or their online advertising bucks.

Finken says there was a void in the market in servicing small businesses.

Their concept is simple, at the end the day, business people want to know how their online marketing efforts are working, and Orange Soda shows them how. It provides a technology that streamlines the process of creating an online presence through search engine marketing and optimization.

And businesses can pay anywhere from as cheap as $100 a month to $5,000 for small business and some large companies pay up to $100,000 a month for help managing their online marketing.

What’s alluring about the Orange Soda-way of online marketing is that they’ve created a system where customers can track plainly where their money is going at any time. It adds transparency to what Fink calls the often “clouded world of search engine marketing”: a world where customers typically haven’t understood the ins and outs of online marketing. “Companies are accustomed to paying for irrelevant traffic,” says Finken.

“Internet marketing is a science. We live and drink this stuff,” he says.

Customers can login and look at an easy to read page that includes web analytics, graphs and pie charts showing results of marketing efforts: keywords people use, what customers are doing on their site, sales happening and call tracking that shows what times of day people call their business. The technology sifts through information to see what keyword phrases equal business and which ones equal browsing.

“The real difference maker is that we customize what we do for each client and deliver trackable results,” says Finken.

An Orange Soda account rep. manages all the keyword marketing across all the search engines through one interface to tell the business person where the action is happening and make changes based on what is best for the client, in the same way an investment advisor might adjust a portfolio to creates more wealth.

Orange Soda services large clients like Navistar’s International Trucking, Doggy Daycare, Jiffy Lube and Scholastic, but the company’s main thrust is small business people with limited advertising budgets.

Instead of being a Jack of all trades like some advertising and marketing firms who spread ad dollars over multiple areas like magazines ads, viral marketing and PR campaigns, Orange Soda focuses on helping customers build relevant online traffic. This focus allows them to give what they think is the best online marketing help from any firm around.

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