: ExchangeHunterJumper.com: Building a Brand with Social Marketing

1. Dagny Amber Aslin creator and owner of The Exchange saw a unique need to make it easier for horse professionals to buy and sell their horses. Aslin grew up riding and working with horses and knew the difficulty that horse professionals had when trying to buy or sell horses. She took this as an opportunity to create a specialized website for high-end competition hunter-jumper horses. At the time many of the websites in which you could purchase horses were unreliable, contained old information, and required a lot of time weeding out the reliable information within a multitude of unreliable classified ads. In creating The Exchange, Aslin wanted to make a website that would provide the most reliable information that was easy to use for the many technology challenged horse professionals. In assessing how Aslin made her website unique to others, I did a comparison between her website, exchangehunterjumper.com, and myhorseforsale.com, another site in which horses are showcased and sold. Below are some of the things that The Exchange offered that myhorseforsale.com did not:
a. Specialized marketing plan for each listed horse.
b. A page similar to the Sale Barn page, where you can post links to the seller’s website.
c. Professional editing of videos.
d. A showcase of ‘sold’ horses.
e. Newest listings link.
f. Headline archives.
g. An archive of the horses you have recently viewed on the Web page.
h. A calendar showing when the horses listed will be in an upcoming show.
i. A history of milestones listed on the website.
j. RSS feed.
k. Quick links for banner advertising on webpage.

2. There were a few ways in which Social Media had helped The Exchange promote its brand. The Exchange had RSS feeds through, FeedBurner, a free service that automatically informs users on any updates on