Creative Website Marketing

Five Social Media Strategies Your Business Can Use Right Now to Improve Customer Loyaly

noreply@blogger.com (Rich Marcia) — Mon, 25 May 2009 11:29:00 +0000

* You can create a Twitter account and release special coupons, discounts and exclusive products to your followers. Don't regularly schedule a weekly or daily update -- use the power of suprise to keep them guessing.

* Set up a Facebook page for your brand and use it to promote the personalities of your people. Link to their personal profiles and watch the viral power of Facebook generate more exposure for your brand/website.

* List all of your upcoming tradeshow appearances, product release dates, company anniversary, and other important dates on Google Calendar, and then share away.

* Set up your job postings and career listings over to LinkedIn and use the power of recommendations to qualify your applicants.

* Promote your product demonstrations, personalities, and your differentiators on YouTube. Let your customer service people tell the customer success stories.

Diversify your web marketing strategy from complete Google dependence

noreply@blogger.com (Rich Marcia) — Mon, 09 Mar 2009 12:06:00 +0000

Image via CrunchBase

There is no doubt that Google AdWords is a great delivery mechanism for targeted traffic and leads - it definitely works. If you're not careful, tho, you can find your budget soaring and your PPC charges continually increasing -- without a similar increasing conversion rate.

You may wake up one day and also find your organic traffic from Google has dipped. You check your links and see that Google now only considers half of them valid.

Now you've got steadily increasing PPC charges, reduced conversion rates, and a drop in organic traffic from the one search engine which seems to matter.

What do you do? Well, hopefully, you've done some things outside of the Googleverse which could help sustain you in such a dire situation.

Some simple things any size business can do to diversify yourself from complete Google dependence:

* Establish a presence for your business on LinkedIn and Facebook. Don't just dabble. Build a great page on these social networks. Use widgets to add content to your pages and try to initiate interaction with other members as you build your network. There are many other social networks but start with the most popular.

* Write decent PR and distribute it everywhere. Link from your social network pages.

* Create your own industry-related search engine using a source other than Google (Eurekster for example, though they were closing in on the dead pool last I read on TechCrunch) and include a link on your site, in your blog, and social network pages.

* Add some listings in Craigslist. Make sure they are legitimate ads and not just spammy linking -- it's a great place to recruit local talent. Facebook now offers the Oodle service, a competitor to Craigslist.

* Start creating a database of prospects. Do a regular postcard mailing, inviting them to visit your website, try out your services, or attend a webinar. Don't ever count out traditional marketing means. You can use GoTo Meeting or Webex for your webinars.

2009: tech products I won't live without

noreply@blogger.com (Rich Marcia) — Mon, 05 Jan 2009 13:19:00 +0000

Inspiration: TechCrunch

My must-have apps include Google Reader, Skype, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Last.fm, Google Bookmarks, and Picasa. Very heavy on the Google front -- and Gmail is nearly taking over for my 10+ years on Yahoo! Mail. In 2009 I will be searching for the perfect social network aggregator/updating tool.

Other applications I would use:

* I've mentioned before that it would be nice to have a Google Reader Radio, where you could listen to your headlines in the car, and then using some speech-rec technology, tell it to "read" out loud or "ignore". That would be cool.

* An app perfect for new year's: it would track goals for each of these different focuses: health, financial, creative, social, spiritual and career. Perhaps a radar graph would be the best visual. Each focus would be linked to a website/service which specailizes in the topic. For example, financial could be tied to your mint.com service, and social might be tied to your facebook profile. Career could be linked to LinkedIn. Spiritual wouldn't have to be faith-related, it might be yoga training, meditation, or book-reading.

Three web resolutions to hope for...

noreply@blogger.com (Rich Marcia) — Sat, 03 Jan 2009 13:00:00 +0000

* Yahoo, MSN, AOL and Ask need to get together and form something which can compete with Google. Throw in MySpace as well. Google will probably get Facebook and Twitter. We may see a very different landscape toward the end of 2009, after the current economic crisis shakes out. What will this mean for SEO? More of the same: keep fine tuning your content and keep experimenting socially.

* Google needs to add a tagging mechanism to its' toolbar. This way, people can tag websites and Google can use the data to help define sites contextually. Taggers can build reputations and their tags can carry more weight.

* Blogger needs to build in a simple way to bring the blogger WYSIWYG into your own domain. One step publishing to a specific path on a website. Add a script to your website to pull in the blog and everyone's happy.

Paranormal State meets "The Office"

noreply@blogger.com (Rich Marcia) — Fri, 16 May 2008 12:04:00 +0000

Now that "The Office" finale is over, I think it's time to turn to next season. I'd like to propose to both NBC and A&E television that they do a cross-over episode where A&E's "Paranormal State" investigators are called in to check out supernatural happenings at NBC's "The Office".

It's a natural fit, as "Paranormal State" takes place at Penn State university, and "The Office" resides in Scranton, Pennsylvania. They could even bring back Joss Whedon ("Buffy the Vampire Slayer") to direct the episode -- he did the one where Jim convinces Dwight he is a vampire and Dwight captures a bat by placing a bag over Meredith's head.

The episode could find the Paranormal team investigating either the Office itself, or perhaps more logically, Schrute Farms. The possibilities are endless, and the humor potential is amazing.

Do you agree that this episode should be made?

Contact A&E and let them know
- click on "Contact Us" at the bottom

Contact NBC and let them know

A different kind of marketing...for your baby

noreply@blogger.com (Rich Marcia) — Fri, 25 Apr 2008 12:20:00 +0000

Image via WikipediaMy wife and I have been so thrilled since learning we were going to have our first child. I wanted to try and spend quality time with the baby, even while he is still in the womb (yes, it's a boy!). I read all of the parenting and fatherhood books, and two things I came across stuck with me: if you talk to your baby, they will familiarize themselves with your voice, and if you play music, they will respond.

This sat well with me, as my wife and I are huge music fans. Often of different tastes, but we both agree that the best band in the world is U2. Also wanting to make my sessions educational for the baby, I decided to make it more of a radio show for him. I dubbed it "Daddy Radio" and scheduled it for every Saturday morning as we woke up (well, Mommy may have slept through some - I don't know how!).

"Daddy Radio" led to my eventually feeling the baby kick and move, probably earlier than normal. For real. The fatherhood book also said as you get closer to birth, music will help "lead" the baby toward correct positioning, head first to the birth canal.

Here's a recap of each week's theme for "Daddy Radio", as best I can remember (it's now week 31):

Week 1: The 60s - Elvis Presley
Week 2: The Beatles
Week 3: The Rolling Stones
Week 4: The Who
Week 5: Motown
Week 6: The 70s - Led Zeppelin
Week 7: Crosby, Stills, Nash, Young
Week 8: Neil Young
Week 9: Steve Miller Band
Week 10: Southern Fried Rock (Skynyrd, Charlie Daniels, Marshall Tucker)
Week 11: Christmas Music
Week 12: Bruce Springsteen
Week 13: Bob Dylan
Week 14: Fleetwood Mac
Week 15: Eric Clapton
Week 16: Rod Stewart
Week 17: Creedence Clearwater Revival
Week 18: Disco music
Week 19: Van Halen
Week 20: Styx
Week 21: AC/DC
Week 22: Def Leppard
Week 23: Rap Music
Week 24: Indigo Girls
Week 25: R.E.M.
Week 26: u2
Week 27: TV Theme Songs
Week 27.5: Counting Crows
Week 28: Pearl Jam
Week 29: Red Hot Chili Peppers
Week 30: History of music production - 78s to LPs to Tapes to CDs to MP3s
Week 30.5: History of Microsoft vs. Apple
Week 31: One hit wonders

Please comment below with artists I may have missed, or suggestions for weeks 32-40!

Who is king of the cloud?

noreply@blogger.com (Rich Marcia) — Mon, 14 Apr 2008 20:35:00 +0000

Image via WikipediaA battle between web giants has been heating up for the title "King of the Cloud"...cloud computing, that is. Recent news headlines include Amazon's Cloud Computing Business to Surpass Retail and Microsoft bears shield, as Salesforce and Google synch up -- what does this mean for those of us in the web marketing world?

Cloud computing is reality - it's happening, as much as many of the old dinosaurs (Microsoft may be a dinosaur, but they are learning. They always come to the party late, but eventually they figure it out). The day when you can turn on your pc and go straight to the web (no Windows) is a day that is happening very soon.

Many of you use cloud computing and may not even know it. Webmail is cloud computing. Yes, if you've had a Yahoo! Mail account for twelve years like me, you've been in the cloud for twelve years. Google Docs are all created, saved, and shared in the cloud. Salesforce.com exists in the cloud.

This means all of the kids coming out of college, the ones who will be competing and winning jobs in the search marketing landscape, will already be using Google Apps and Google Docs and God, forbid, the kids in grammar school today may not even know what Windows is.

As a marketer, you'll be saving all of your content and keyword research and notes to the cloud, if you don't already. I do, because then I can get to them no matter where I am. Mobile phone? check. Hotel? check. Laptop in an airport? check. My Nintendo Wii? check.

Get used to it. It's not Skynet, but that's a whole different story.

Web marketing in 2010

noreply@blogger.com (Rich Marcia) — Fri, 14 Mar 2008 20:20:00 +0000

What will the web marketing landscape look like in the year 2010? It's only two years away, so it's not as far off as you might initially think. Quite a bit can change in two years' time, though. In order to make these predictions, you first have to come up with the questions.

Will Google still be around? No doubt. They may be replaced in fifteen years, but they're definitely a force to be reckoned with for the short haul, even if Microsoft ends up buying Yahoo.

Will Google still be selling ad space directly? I think a new space will emerge with boutiques and shops reselling Google inventory, and other available inventory as well. Google may want to distance themselves from "selling" everything directly, especially as the Google product catalog grows more massive. What we'll see are specialists cropping up for each vertical. How about starting a small agency which combines best-in-class technology and best-in-class customer service for the biotech industry? Sounds like a winner to me.

Which social networks will emerge as the default one everyone has? MySpace and Facebook do nothing for me. LinkedIn seems to be much more productive -- however it is more specific to my current concerns. I've joined a ning group for a personal hobby, and it's fun and useful. Again, the more niche a group is, the better it's chances of sustaining a bright adaptable future. Not that MySpace or Facebook will be going away, but one of them will probably be swallowed by Orkut and the other by AOL-Bebo or the new Yahoo-MS social entry. Yahoo's never been able to successfully launch a social network, and they have the largest community of users: Yahoo Mail users.

Will we still be able to manipulate organic search rankings? This has become harder and harder. Same old rules apply: if your content is linked from sources relevant to your topic, search engines will pick up on this and reward you greatly. In 2010, content distribution may become more automated: write once, publish to blog, website, social nets, emails, IMs, twitter, and brand new communication tools we haven't seen yet. Don't forget to take those writing classes in college. Still valid.

How dependent will we be on Pay Per Click? Depending on how competitive you want to be, you'll want to track your Web Visibility Share - what percentage of potential exposure could your website link have to your exact audience? If you need a 70% share, minimum, to compete in your industry, you'll need to dominate the paid ad spaces. Will you need to buy ads from anyone other than Google is the more likely question. As of right now, you don't need to. In 2010? They hope you still won't need to pay anyone else.

Finding the right web database tool

noreply@blogger.com (Rich Marcia) — Fri, 07 Mar 2008 11:49:00 +0000

It was so long ago, 2000. That was the year "XtraSite" was launched, which was a new web database tool which would transform the way people used data on the web - easier, and faster. It never really worked out, and no one really used it, but the name was so cool.

Yesterday I spent some time searching the web for an online database tool. I wanted to create a database of the top 50 rock bands of all time. Why? Well, I'm expecting my first child, and every Saturday morning I introduce him to a different band. I started with the 60s, went to the 70s, and now am in the middle of the 80s. I'm pretty sure he has developed his ears by now so he can hear me. My wife hopes I don't give him the false impression that MY singing is the way songs actually sound. I think he appreciates it, especially if he turns out to be a geek like me.

Anyway, I began to really want to keep track of the bands I was using, and I thought it would be really neat to make a top 50 database of the best rock bands of all time. See, I am a geek. I've used Quickbase before. It used to be a really cool free app, and then Intuit bought it, and now it's pricey.

I signed up for Zoho Database, which is totally free, and it looks like it may be a good choice.

I use GoogleBase for indexing a lot of my corporate press releases, but I had trouble with creating a brand new database.

I'm not waiting around for whatever Microsoft comes up with for an online version of Access.

I'd kind of like the database to be interactive, where people can add their own top 50 and the tool would tabulate a collective top 50 based on all of the entries.

Here's my top 10 rock bands of all time, for any other geeks that find it interesting:
1- u2
2- Beatles
3- Counting Crows
4- Sublime
5- Who
6- Indigo Girls
7- R.E.M.
8- Rolling Stones
9- Led Zeppelin
10- Creedence Clearwater Revival

If anyone knows of a good database app which I can use for free to create something fun like this, please comment below.

Remember to use free listing sites in your recruiting efforts

noreply@blogger.com (Rich Marcia) — Thu, 28 Feb 2008 20:04:00 +0000

The task of recruiting new talent can be daunting - and expensive. By the time you are finished writing checks out to Monster.com, CareerBuilder.com, Dice.com, HotJobs.com, and your local newspapers, you could be racking up $5-10k in expenses.

You may need to go that route, depending on your needs, hiring criteria, budgets, etc., but as a basic first step I suggest you submit free online classified ads posting your job openings. Very good SEO benefit here. Craigslist.org is heavily indexed on Google. Kijiji.com is a Craigslist competitor and they are owned by Ebay - also a dominant Google site. Kijiji has vowed to take over the entire classified space.

Of course, your job listings should be on your website, blogs, social networks, news feeds, twitter, etc., and all other listings should point to your website's listing. Instant relevant link.

Other free classified sites:

OLX.com

AdPost.com

The Job Spider

Know any others? Sharing is caring ;-)

Please share below in the comments space.

Find me on the social networks

noreply@blogger.com (Rich Marcia) — Mon, 11 Feb 2008 12:50:00 +0000

I'm always looking to exchange ideas or discuss potential marketing strategies. I've signed up for almost all of the major social networks and on some I have well-established networks, while some I haven't used much at all. All of the links below are to my public profile pages on each network.

Feel free to comment below and I will send you an invitation to join your network. Please indicate your email address and the network you belong to.

LinkedIn - This is the one I use the most. It's great for business to business networking and finding contacts with companies whom you might be trying to work with.

Facebook - Still trying to get a handle on this one. Mainly trying to see what all the buzz is about. It's picking up steam as a business network.

MySpace - Haven't got much out of this one yet either.

Orkut - Pretty new to this one. If it's Google, it must have potential.

Google - a new profile page used for sharing your Google Reader feeds.

Digg - I've been using this for quite a while, but there isn't much interaction going on.

Twitter - Just started to get the hang of what it's all about.

Pownce - Prettier than Twitter, and I have more contacts on there.

Yahoosoft: Predictions for the Yahoo-Microsoft Merger

noreply@blogger.com (Rich Marcia) — Sun, 03 Feb 2008 13:47:00 +0000

Okay, it's not really a merger, Microsoft is doing a hostile takeover, but Yahoo does need the help. There are already interesting theories abound on the net regarding what will shake down. TechCrunch has a few good Microsoft-Yahoo news posts already.

I agree with TechCrunch in that the "Yahoo" brand has no chance of being dropped in favor of the MSN brand. In my opinion, MSN has always had an inferior perception, even with the traffic numbers it does receive. I think Yahoo will be the consumer content brand and Microsoft's "Live" brand will be for business, with it's close ties to Windows.

I think the My Yahoo, Yahoo Messenger, Yahoo Mail, Yahoo Answers and Yahoo Fantasy Sports will all remain, with the tagline "powered by Microsoft Live" or something. Whenever technology is mentioned, the "Microsoft Live" brand will be invoked.

Yahoo Search will be powered by Microsoft Live. AdCenter will swallow up Yahoo marketing. Farewell, any remaining fumes of our old friend Overture.

I have ten years' history in Yahoo Mail, so I need to decide if that is worth staying with Microsoft. Of course, the deal hasn't even been done yet.

Perhaps Google will release an import tool for bringing your entire Yahoo Mail history, messages included, into Gmail. Now that would be interesting. More inventory for their ads.

The key to a successful restaurant is....

noreply@blogger.com (Rich Marcia) — Mon, 28 Jan 2008 21:26:00 +0000

This weekend my wife and I encountered two polar extremes in customer service. Let's start with the good story first.

In preperation for the upcoming Super Bowl between my New York Giants and the Perfect Patriots, my wife obliged to take me to a wings place which I had been dying to try.

I had heard of "Buffalo Wild Wings" during various Super Bowl and March Madness advertising campaigns, and I always wanted to try them. What a wonderful experience it was. Not only did they have great food and a pleasant atmosphere, but the waitress was filling up my soda glass before I was even finished.

I think that's the key to a successful restaurant: how quickly they refill your beverage.

Three other employees stopped by our booth to see how everything was. They were going out of their way to show us how much they appreciate our business, and it really made the whole experience shine.

Prior to that, we had driven down to the Ikea store in New Haven, CT, wanting to browse some of the room interior designs for ideas. Typically, we've received good service at Ikea, but this particular event was so bad I simply had to post about it. We were looking at a rack of bathroom mirrors, and didn't see the one we wanted in stock. I looked over, and thankfully, there was an Ikea employee nearby. I asked if he'd mind helping me with a quick question. He grunted, rolled his eyes, and told me he didn't really have time. Now, we didn't overreact, or report him, or anything, but I'm sure the good folks at Ikea would appreciate the incident report. When I told the employee to "never mind", he simply turned and went back to what he was doing, with no further communication. I couldn't believe it.

I will be back to Buffalo Wild Wings soon, but perhaps never back to Ikea.

I want my Google Reader Radio

noreply@blogger.com (Rich Marcia) — Fri, 25 Jan 2008 02:19:00 +0000

Now I am not a programmer or anything, but I believe this would be a pretty easy web application to create.

1) Take the world's greatest and easiest-to-use RSS feed reader, Google Reader

2) Mix in a little Level 3 speech recognition technology as used in Goog411.

3) Allow Reader users to play a stream of their news story headlines using the voice of their choice (a whole other revenue stream - famous voices used in voice recognition tools?)

4) After each item's headline is read aloud, the user tells the service to "ignore" or "read". If they choose "read", the voice reads the entire news clip. If they choose "ignore", it reads the next headline.

5) Allow radio stations to stream this via widget on their websites or via real radio broadcast so I can listen in my car. Of course, Google can stick in some Ads every now and then.

40 years at the kids' table

noreply@blogger.com (Rich Marcia) — Tue, 22 Jan 2008 13:23:00 +0000

"40 Years at the kids' table" is what I would title my book if I were to write one. It would be semi-autobiographical. I think it's an excellent name for a book. I would write several chapters about all the different stages in life where I feel I've never quite fit in with the adults.

I think my childlike mentality has fueled my creative engines. Ever since I can remember, I would try to come up with new products, new spins on this, and new ways to do that. I can remember being so into TV Guide's "fall preview" issue that I would plot out my own network shows and draft up my own mock prime time schedules, in anticipation of the real thing. Of course, many people would say this is not even childlike, but just plain nerdy. Very true.

There was the time when my nephew and I went to breakfast at this now-defunct diner in South Windsor, CT, and we used the placemats there to script out how this new thing called the Internet was going to lead to the downfall of society. We forecasted how one company would use the Internet to gain control of all the world's media and basically begin to run everything. Sounds familiar.

I've always sat at the kids' table, especially for holiday dinners. I suspect I'll stay there for a while longer as I am about to become a father, and will likely need to remain at the kids' table, if only to feed and entertain my little one.

Let me know if you've enjoyed this brief foray into my semi-autobiographical fiction writing. Maybe I'll write more and compile it all into a book. Well, back to planning my village layout for next fall's halloween display!

New Year's Resolutions for some of my favorite web 2.0 sites

noreply@blogger.com (Rich Marcia) — Wed, 26 Dec 2007 19:10:00 +0000

Google Reader: By far, Google Reader is the easiest RSS reader to use. One major complaint, tho. They need to add an "Mark as Ignored" function for articles you want to skip over. When you "Mark as Read", Reader thinks you've actually read those stories. Thus, when you look at Google Trends, it shows statistics about your reading habits that are largely distorted. This must also influence their new "Recommendations" feature, which suggests new feeds based on your trends.

Gmail: This suggestion is for all the major webmail readers: why not allow messages to publish to a private RSS feed? This way, my email could show up in my Google Reader, and make life alot easier.

Digg: I don't really visit Digg anymore. I do, however, get the Digg feed delivered into my Google Reader (Notice the trend here?). I realize they want their traffic back, and direct, but how about delivering a little more than just the headline in the RSS feed. Same goes for Sports Illustrated and Reddit. Throw an ad on the item, I don't care, but give me more content, less clicks.

Blogger: Blogger has come the farthest in the last two years of any web service I use. It's the easiest blog UI to use and I've been successful in making several blogger-hosted domains SEO friendly and highly visible. Now I wish they'd make it easier to convert my blogger address to a domain, without losing any established indexing, without me having to do redirects or resubmissions. Right now it's a ten-step process. Oh, and how about a nice backup service?

With Christmas comes the ghosts of ideas past

noreply@blogger.com (Rich Marcia) — Sun, 02 Dec 2007 11:55:00 +0000

Everyone has their ideas from the past which haunt them to this day...the ideas which they never fully developed or pursued. For whatever reason, they were never meant to be, at least under your direction. Extremely worse is the case where someone has perfected your idea, and executed a game plan to fulfill the idea to its' potential.

There was a late 1990s website called ideadollar.com where you could submit your ideas, and if the community liked them, you could earn Amazon bucks back. Oh, boy. The $50 on Amazon got me really far. What I would love are my forty or so ideas back that I had submitted.

There were several tv show ideas I had pitched. A replaceable toothpaste cartridge for the toothbrush. Several unique advertising methods. For some insane reason, I never saved them.

I had come up so many ideas, they became trivial to me, and I lost track of them. Shame, really. Now at work I keep an "idea bin" with every business-related idea that comes to mind, even for a fleeting moment. With online storage, massive mail archives and really cheap hard drive space, there really is no need to "forget" anything.

Today's Idea: Save Everything!

Idea # 31: The Web 2.0 Sample Box

noreply@blogger.com (Rich Marcia) — Fri, 09 Nov 2007 18:40:00 +0000

This idea revolves around a few things most people love to do:

* participate in a invite-only web 2.0 launch
* get free stuff
* a chance to win cash
* get something delivered to them from DHL (or any of the other carriers)
* be able to brag about it to your friends

I think an innovative approach to marketing in 2008 would be to have a handful of web 2.0 companies each contribute a unique real-world gadget with their logo on it. For example, MySpace could give everybody a deck of cards with profiles of their top viewed members on each card. Pownce should contribute a big squishy cat's paw, to, well, pounce on people. Digg could include a mini gardening set (with a shovel, get it? Yes, I know, not even close to clever. That's what the promotional experts are for).

So all of this stuff gets placed in a nice package and gift wrapped and sent to 100 or so target users. Their email addresses all have already been logged, and beta accounts have been set up, just waiting for them to confirm via email. Some lucky recipient will get an instant win gift card from a sponsoring credit card vendor, maybe Steve Case's Revolution?

They are encouraged to forward an email to their friends so they too can get a gift box and a chance to win the big prize. People who would be on the target list are bound to have friends with similar target interest. Plenty of viral buzz to go around.

Come to think of it, MyBlogLog should contribute a scented log you can burn. And coffee, someone needs to sponsor a good blend and stick it in the box, or a good energy drink. Google, the energy drink.

$1000 Scholarship brings Udder Hope

noreply@blogger.com (Rich Marcia) — Sat, 13 Oct 2007 13:33:00 +0000

I wanted to mention my wife's company, The Perfect Promotion, is giving away $1000 scholarship to the person who answers this question best: "What does Udder Hope mean to you?". The $1000 scholarship is the Rae Lasky Scholarship for Hope of Learning, and it is dedicated in the memory of my wife's boss, Jody, who lost her mother to breast cancer. Jody allocates all of her time and a portion of her business' proceeds to Breast Cancer Awareness during the month of October.

This year she created a cow for the 2007 Cow Parade in West Hartford, CT, and named it "Udder Hope".

There are also UdderHope profiles on MySpace, Facebook, and LinkedIn where you can network with Jody and share stories of your own hopes.

You can enter the contest by going to udderhope.com and sending her an email with your own interpretation of what "Udder Hope" means to you. It's a legitimate scholarship and you could win it for your kids, friends, or family. It's not limited to a college scholarship - any form of learning will work.

Why don't all my communications have RSS feeds?

noreply@blogger.com (Rich Marcia) — Wed, 26 Sep 2007 15:38:00 +0000

I need one communications center that incorporates POP3 mail, yahoo, gmail, pownce, twitter, myspace, ning, facebook, linkedin, instant messengers, etc....why don't they all produce rss feeds, and then they all can be read in my Google Reader? Is this too logical a next step?

I know there are new tools that have been released which integrates some of the available messaging platforms, but the universal message reader is already here...the RSS feed reader.

A feed of top business blog feeds

noreply@blogger.com (Rich Marcia) — Fri, 07 Sep 2007 12:02:00 +0000

Do you use Google Reader at all? It's the best feed reader I've found. This week, Google finally added "search" functionality to it. Kind of backwards, eh? Anyway, here is a javascript-based feed of the business blogs and feeds that I read. This will always be dynamically refreshed, so bookmark this page if you want to come back and read updated business news.

If you don't have a javascript-enabled feed reader or email client then you'll need to come directly to the blog post to read it:

Fantasy Football league for SEM professionals

noreply@blogger.com (Rich Marcia) — Fri, 24 Aug 2007 19:04:00 +0000

If anyone from the SEM/SEO/Blogging world would like to sign up for a competitive league with people from the search engine marketing industry, please comment below and I'll send you an invite. We play on Yahoo's Fantasy Football site, and we usually have prizes relative to our industry, such as a prominent mention in a popular blog. We're looking to fill a couple of spots and our live online draft is Monday night, so reply quickly.

GrandCentral.com beta invites are available

noreply@blogger.com (Rich Marcia) — Mon, 20 Aug 2007 19:23:00 +0000

I'm a sucker for these web 2.0 betas. I'm in the middle of trying out Pownce but I haven't yet found it to be a breakthrough or anything, although it's got a nice user interface. Mostly it's a combination instant messenger and social network.

I just received my GrandCentral.com beta invite so I'm all signed up and will be trying it out. With GrandCentral, a company acquired by Google recently, you can get a new phone number and manage all phone traffic over the web, and also forward calls to your other phone numbers - so you can always be found (I know quite a few salesman who would NOT like that feature!). If you would like one of my 10 invites I can distribute, leave a comment with an email address.

A great place to find more beta invites is InviteShare, which was recently acquired by TechCrunch, one of the best news sites for information on these web 2.0 and tech innovations.

Customization is the key concept here

noreply@blogger.com (Rich Marcia) — Sat, 11 Aug 2007 11:19:00 +0000

If you've ever walked into a "Build-A-Bear" workshop to purchase a customized teddy bear for your kids or anyone, you'll notice an amazing thing. Customers are in love with this place. Recipients of bears are in love with the product. There's something about making your own products that appeals to people, probably because you take ownership and pride in creating it. The same concept applies when discussing Ridemakerz, where you can build your own toy car. Sounds pretty cool, eh?

What if we extend this concept to other items. Here are some I would consider participating in:

* Build Your Own Coffee Blend (Ahhh - a failed business idea of mine - "YourBlend")
* Build Your Own Pizza (wasn't that on Seinfeld?)
* Build Your Own Espresso Drink (could be dangerous)
* Build Your Own CellPhone/Camera/PC/MP3 player gadget
* Build Your Own Virtual Trade Show
* Build Your Own Baseball Card
* Build Your Own Search Engine (hey, that already exists. For years. See Swicki and Rollyo)

Social Shout Outs Made Easy!

noreply@blogger.com (Rich Marcia) — Wed, 08 Aug 2007 21:07:00 +0000

Now you can share your favorite blog post with your friends and colleagues through IM or text message.

See the little green icon in the top right hand of this post? Once the menu opens, you can shout out about your favorite new blog post.

Viral marketing made easy by MadKast, where you too can easily add this kind of functionality to your blog.