Brand Thunder Launches Baseball Browser Themes for Firefox and Internet Explorer by Brand Thunder

COLUMBUS (April 26, 2010) — Brand Thunder LLC (http://www.brandthunder.com), the browser customization specialists, announced today its browser themes for major league baseball. With the beginning of the baseball season underway, fans of the sport can enhance both Firefox and Internet Explorer with the feel of the ballpark. The free downloads are available from Brand Thunder at http://pages.brandthunder.com/baseball/download or the Microsoft Windows Internet Explorer Add-ons Gallery at http://www.ieaddons.com/us/Details.aspx?Id=8125.

These are interactive browser themes so baseball fans will get more than just a visual upgrade to Firefox or Internet Explorer. They will enjoy the latest league headlines and scores in the news ticker, quick links to the Major League Baseball site, tickets, and more. The theme features a multimedia sidebar that includes videos and a video news player. Plus, the theme has a customizable button, which fans can set to their favorite team’s homepage.

The theme is delivered through an easy-to-install browser add-on allowing baseball fans to transform their drab web-browser into an immersive experience that delivers the ballpark to the browser.

“We have a great portfolio of interactive themes on Firefox,” says founder Patrick Murphy. “As we extend this new theme capability to Internet Explorer, the Baseball theme offers a balance of design and functionality, and with spring here seemed a natural to release.”

Brand Thunder’s interactive themes provide an extreme makeover of the Internet browser. They are free, lightweight active customizations that can include themes, toolbars, sidebars and other content or functionality. Users can switch real-time between any installed Brand Thunder themes.

About Brand Thunder:
Formed in April 2007, Brand Thunder creates extreme makeovers for the Internet browser. Brands enjoy a persistent connection to their Internet consumer driving more website visits and increased revenue. Through a software installation, end users change the drab Internet browser into an immersive experience from their favorite sports team, entertainment franchise or Internet site. The interactive browser themes feature official logos, colors, content and functionality, and can also extend capabilities including video, music players or other Internet widgets. Current business partners and clients include Bing, The Daily Beast, Huffington Post, Major League Soccer, NASCAR, NBA, NCAA, NFL, NHL and Universal Music.

Contact:
Patrick Murphy, CEO
Brand Thunder, LLC
614-408-8202

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Posted in News, Press Releases | Tags: Bing, brand thunder, browser theme, firefox, Internet Explorer, major league baseball, Microsoft, Mozilla Firefox, Web browser | No Comments »

Customer Feedback Loop – 5 Easy Tools to Help You Listen and Act by Kevin Dwinnell

The ability to capture the voice of your consumer today is quite abundant and that’s a fantastic thing. Like at most businesses, Brand Thunder continuously looks at how it can improve its product. We’re thankful for the various channels available that allow our users to voice their own thoughts on where we should focus. Collectively, we build a better product faster.

It’s also not too surprising that what half the audience thinks is great, puts off the other half. I think that’s where a blend of looking at your business metrics and listening to your consumer helps paint the more complete picture of what you should be delivering. A recent example for Brand Thunder can be found in the New Tab search box we include with our interactive browser themes. To look at the performance of the tab search box shows active usage and win for our users, however, listening to complaints in our uninstall survey suggests a contingent dissatisfied with the placement. We added a simple check box to allow users to remove the feature. Win-win.

I’ve captured the placements and tools we find most useful to hear what our customers have to say. Would love to know your thoughts if there are some obvious ones we’ve missed.

Surveys

In the web applications business, you realize that when you get a lot of people trying your product, you get a lot of people leaving it. That’s a great pool of people to help you understand likes and dislikes. We tapped into it by looking through the WordPress Plugins in search of a survey tool we could use on our Uninstall page. We felt Surveys fit our need best and the developer offered good information on his site.

Get Satisfaction

Get Satisfaction has been our support tool for a long time. The site has been growing its capability and adjusting its pricing structure to be more available to small businesses. It’s a great place to talk directly with your consumers and address their immediate needs. We’ve been able to help users find the tweak they need to a product for features that aren’t available or haven’t rolled out yet. It’s been a great community tool.

TweetAlarm

Just as much commentary is going to happen outside your channels as it will in them. I’m a big fan of TweetAlarm. It’s proven much more reliable than other Twitter alert services I’ve used. It might help that its mostly good news that its been sending.

Google Alerts

For all the printed word of the web, you’ll need to tap into Google Alerts. It’s a great tool for tracking articles, commentary or re-posting of stories about your company.

Real-time Search

If you’re in a category that’s hot, or something is breaking in your industry the real-time search tools that are available are a huge help, and your options are growing. You can use a comprehensive discovery tool like Bing which has integrated Twitter search, has Foursquare up and coming for its maps and a host of other features. You can also use specialty search engines like Collecta which does an amazing job of scouring blogs, comments, photos and other content as it gets posted.

These are some of the tools we like and depend on. If you have some we shouldn’t miss, please share.

Posted in Commentary | Tags: Bing, brand thunder, browser themes, Collecta, Get Satisfaction, Google, Twitter, Web search engine | 1 Comment »

Brand Thunder to use Bing to Extend Web Search into Interactive Browser Themes by Brand Thunder

COLUMBUS (February 16, 2010) — Brand Thunder LLC (http://www.brandthunder.com), the browser customization specialists, announced today its relationship with Microsoft Corp.’s Bing to integrate their web search into all Brand Thunder interactive browser themes.

Interactive browser themes are like an extreme makeover for the web browser. With an easy-to-install browser add-on, end users transform their drab web-browser into an immersive experience. The theme features official logos, colors, images and style, plus content and functionality that extend browser’s capabilities and can include video, music players or other Internet widgets. Bing is now central to the experience as the default search engine included with all Brand Thunder products.

The growing list of company’s leveraging the communication power of an interactive browser theme includes leading Internet news sites, The Huffington Post (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/firefox) and The Daily Beast (http://www.thedailybeast.com/browser-theme), leading sports teams like
NHL’s 2009 Stanley Cup Champions Pittsburgh Penguins (http://penguins.nhl.com/club/page.htm?id=56396) and the 2009 SPL Champions Glasgow Rangers (http://www.rangers.premiumtv.co.uk/page/RangersOfficialBrowser/0,,5,00.html), colleges and universities including the University of Cincinnati Bearcats (http://www.gobearcats.com/ot/browser.html), corporate clients like Comcast and Mercedes Benz and many more. The full list of active custom browser themes can be found at http://brandthunder.com/gallery/.

“Bing is an innovative new search product and we’re looking forward to working together to address the core need of search,” says founder Patrick Murphy. “Brand Thunder uses brand affinity and strong design to attract users to our product, but it’s the integrated content and functionality, like Bing, that helps keep them there.”

About Brand Thunder:
Formed in April 2007, Brand Thunder creates extreme makeovers for the Internet browser. Brands enjoy a persistent connection to their Internet consumer driving more website visits and increased revenue. Through a software installation, end users change the drab Internet browser into an immersive experience from their favorite sports team, entertainment franchise or Internet site. The interactive browser themes feature official logos, colors, content and functionality, and can also extend capabilities including video, music players or other Internet widgets. Current business partners and clients include Bing, The Daily Beast, Huffington Post, Major League Soccer, NASCAR, NBA, NCAA, NFL, NHL and Universal Music. Samples found at http://brandthunder.com/gallery/.

Contact:
Patrick Murphy, CEO
Brand Thunder, LLC
614-408-8202

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Posted in News, Press Releases | Tags: Bing, brand thunder, brandthunder, browser theme, firefox theme, Microsoft, Web browser, Web search engine | 2 Comments »