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Talking Fingers turning social media into marketing toolMeg Barone, CorrespondentPublished 12:01 a.m., Friday, January 28, 2011

Talking Finger creators Erik Granato and Bill DeRosa pose for a photo Tuesday Jan. 25, 2010 at the Valley Chamber ofCommerce in Shelton, Conn. Photo: Autumn Driscoll / Connecticut Post | Buy This Photo

OXFORD -- The creation of Facebook led to morethan just lawsuits for founder Mark Zuckerberg andan award-winning feature film.

It has launched a new way to implement marketingand advertising strategies as envisioned by twoOxford business partners.

Bill DeRosa and Erik Granato created Talking Finger,a social media marketing start-up company, afterrealizing they could harness the collective brainpower of Facebook and other social media likeTwitter, Yelp and foursquare.

They saw these communication tools as more thanmethods to stay connected to friends.

"Social media is the next generation of marketing.Marketing moves where technology goes,"DeRosa said.

"It's the oldest form of marketing. It's word of mouth,

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only it's being used on another platform," Granatosaid. "People are talking to each other with theirfingers," he said, explaining how they came up withthe name for their company.

"We use our hands in place of our mouth,"DeRosa said.

"Word of finger," Granato added.

For weeks, the two men used DeRosa's cabana as amakeshift office, and occasionally continued theirwork on a boat. "

"Our floating think tank," DeRosa said.

"I got a big poster board and a pack of coloredmarkers and we sat there for hours and wrote downconcepts, business plans, target markets,"Granato said.

The two also listed the skills they developed fromtheir similar professional backgrounds in marketing,advertising and building and designing trade shows.

Talking Finger is a multi-faceted business, which includes in part, monitoring social media andcollecting data about each of its individual and corporate clients as mentioned on social media,and using that information to customize marketing plans.

Reputation management is another component of the service, Granato and DeRosa said.

Businesses owners may have little time to keep up with and adapt to rapid changes in thestructure of social media. Talking Finger can do that for them.

"We're their researchers; we're their developers; we're their strategists," DeRosa said.

The two partners have plans to open a brick and mortar office soon and hire a staff. Granatoand DeRosa give lectures and training seminars, a list of which is available on their Facebookpage at Facebook.com/talkingfinger. Click on the events tab. They can also be reached bytelephone at 203-491-0306.

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