Before you jump on that plane to PubCon, don’t forget to make a note in your calendar to attend the Trackur PubCon Social.

Here are the details:

Where: ENVY Lounge located at the Renaissance Hotel–next door to the convention center.

When: Wednesday November 11th from 5:30pm to 7:30pm.

What: Beer, wine and snacks.

Who: All PubCon attendees.

Why: Because you are awesome!

Make a note in your calendar, share it on Twitter, and please join me on the 11th!

NOTE: Space is limited, so get there early!

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It seems that around every corner on the web there is some one selling a get rich quick scheme or program. There’s always someone talking about a magic formula, or amazing tactic, that will make money fall from heaven. The truth is, there isn’t really one program or set of rules that are guaranteed to make anyone rich. The truth is, that some programs work for some and not for others. Some programs work for many and some don’t work for any at all. However, after a few years of building a business online, I have discovered that there is one tactic that most successful entrepreneurs use everyday.

This one tactic has helped millions of business leaders, public figures and even whole corporations see unprecedented wealth. It’s the same tactic that gets politicians elected and drives entire social movements. You can use this tactic to get a raise at work, or completely start your own empire. Sounds exciting doesn’t it?

Now don’t get me wrong this tactic can’t be practiced alone, you still have to work hard and produce good content, but if you can master this tactic it makes everything else so much easier.

So what the heck is this secret tactic??

Well, if I told you it wouldn’t be a secret would it? I hate when people say that! But, seriously this is the type of tactic that you can’t learn from a blog post. To truly understand how this works you have to experience it for yourself. To truly master this tactic you have to see it in action and try it out on your own. A silly blog post won’t do this lesson justice.

So I am going to offer you the opportunity to learn this tactic from me in person! You see, this coming week I will be in Las Vegas attending one of the most well known Internet Marketing events ever, Pubcon. If you can find me in Las Vegas, and ask me about this post, I will share with you everything I know about this tactic. I will point out people that use this tactic everyday, and I will give you tips on how you can get started using this gem instantly. And, for the rest of you that aren’t going, I will do my best to share with you my secret tactic next week in part 2 of this post. Then, I will point out examples of folks from Pubcon that used this tactic. So until then, have a great week, and I hope to see you in Vegas!

Performics reports that Twitter may be the place to get your brand mentioned if you want social networkers’ attention, according to MediaPost. Nearly half (48%) of those who saw a brand mentioned on Twitter turned to a search engine to research that brand. Other social networks lagged far behind, with 34% researching.

However, the study of 3000 active social networkers showed that 70% were on Facebook, and 22% were on Twitter. So of those respondents, 32 researched a brand from Twitter, while Facebook sent 714 running to their search engine of choice.

30% of those surveyed admitted they’ve learned about a product, service or brand from a social network (considerably more than the <5% Knowledge Networks reported in May.)

MediaPost says:

The study found that 44% of people have recommended a product on Twitter, and 39% have discussed a product on Twitter. Facebook skewed a bit higher. Forty-six percent of respondents say they would talk about or recommend a product on Facebook.

Online coupons are the best received brand/product messages. However, most of the findings reinforce the need for companies to maintain presences not only on social networks, but also in search engine results.

Interestingly, companies seem to be more interested in where the consumers are rather than where they see the highest percentage of brand interest. MediaPost reports in another story that

Some 83% of consumer-facing companies maintain a presence on Facebook, compared to 45% on Twitter. Usage was more evenly split among business-to-business companies, with roughly three-quarters of firms maintaining profiles on both services.

What do you think? Is it more important for a business to be where more people are or more brand research? Have you researched brands mentioned on social networks?

According to Technorati’s 2009 State of the Blogosphere report, 70% of bloggers talk about products or brands on their blogs, eMarketer reports. And obviously some of these mentions would be prompted by free sample products, etc.—a practice popular enough to draw the notice of the FTC, which now requires disclosure on such review products.

Interestingly, corporate bloggers were least likely to blog about brands and products (lawsuit anyone?), and hobbyist bloggers were second least likely. Technorati defined hobbyist bloggers as those that blog for fun. They don’t make money (and only some of them want to, which I think is awesome). Instead of brands and products, they mostly share “personal musings” (53% of hobbyists), and 76% blog to speak their minds. 72% of bloggers fell into this category.

“Part-timers” were most likely to mention brands and products. They blog to supplement their main income. 15% of respondents, most part-timers blog to share their expertise or attract new clients.

“Self-employed” bloggers, 9% of the survey respondents, blog full time for their own company or organization. (Corporate bloggers, 4%, blog for someone else’s company/organization—including their employer.)

Despite the focus on products and brands, bloggers felt that the free goodies weren’t the most important benefits from their blogs—gaining visibility (individually or for their business) and bringing in new business were the top two benefits cited by bloggers surveyed.

What do you think? Do you blog about brands? What benefits have you seen from blogging? Which group do you fall into?

The drama surrounding Skype as of late played out like a business soap opera. The accusations flew from both sides of the fence with founders and owners going at it tooth and nail. Check out Kara Swisher’s account over at All Things Digital for the blow by blow description.

Now it looks like the ‘all clear’ can be sounded as an agreement has been reached. Here’s a synopsis for you from TechCrunch

Earlier this morning, Niklas Zennström and Janus Friis settled their lawsuits with eBay and a syndicate of investors in return for a 14 percent stake in the company they founded. The lawsuits were complicating the spin-off of Skype from eBay because the Skype founders still controlled the service’s underlying peer-to-peer technology.

So now the world can rest easy that Skype should move forward without the imminent threat of being taken out of the market. Of course, just because this part of the story is concluded that is no guarantee that something else might not crop up. That goes for anything though.

So what’s one of the proposed new owners Skype think? TechCrunch spoke to Marc Andreesen about the settlement.

“The deal was never held up. The money was in escrow and was going to close” even if the lawsuits weren’t settled. The transaction is on track to close later this quarter. The other investors are Silver Lake Partners and the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board. Index Ventures and Mike Volpi are out of the deal. Josh Silverman will continue to be CEO.

Andreessen is glad that the lawsuits are settled and that the “Joltid IP is now owned by Skype,” but was prepared to litigate if it didn’t work out. He explains: “This was a completely known situation going into it. It was one of the reasons the deal was available, because of the situation. We assumed it would be a good idea to bring the founders on board and resolve all the issues, we are very pro-founder. There was some drama along the way, but we came out with everybody in the same boat rowing in the same direction.”

So now everyone is in the same boat and rowing in the same direction. Skype is tracking for $740 million in revenue so all is good with the world. Yippee!

Unfortunately, all you need to do is check out the real news and know that this is as far from the truth as it can possibly be. Have a good weekend and stay safe.

There’s a growing interest in online reputation management. Over at Wildfire Marketing, I answered some reputation management questions for their Thought Leader Thursday series.

Here’s a taster…

What are some of the biggest mistakes you’ve seen people make when it comes to responding to a reputation management crisis, and how someone salvage the situation if they’ve already made one of these mistakes?

The biggest mistake is simply not having official channels in place to allow your customers to complain. Most disgruntled customers post to blogs and Twitter because they feel like they are not being heard by your company. They get frustrated with your lack of customer service and they think to themselves, “I’ll show them, I’ll post a negative review on Yelp/Twitter/Blog.” If companies would simply look at how they’re listening to their customers, and how they escalate and resolve customer service complaints, many of the reputation problems you see would never make it to the web.

Perhaps the second biggest mistake is not apologizing soon enough. We tend to get too defensive, when we screw-up. We want to try and resolve the problem without accepting blame and without putting our hands in our pockets. When your business faces a legitimate complaint, move quickly to resolve it. Don’t think about the few dollars in refund demanded by the customer, instead think about the thousands of dollars in lost revenue, if the customer creates a reputation headache for your business!

Head on over there for the full interview.

You know that $3.40 you make in Google AdSense each month? Well, Google is about to make it a lot easier to see just how badly your blog sucks at using AdSense.

A new AdSense interface design will start rolling to users over the coming weeks:

For those of you making more than enough AdSense revenue to buy a Big Mac, you’ll enjoy these enhanced features:

• Detailed metrics including the amount you’ve earned from various ad, targeting and bid types
• More options to manage the ads that appear on your site
• Simplify common tasks, such as making a change to several ad units simultaneously
• More help options, tips, and alerts

Google will start rolling out the beta in English, Spanish, French, German, Italian, and Japanese today. Don’t go stampeding to your AdSense account, looking for the update. Google will email you, if you’re one of the lucky ones chosen for the beta.

Aside: I wonder if this new interface is designed to prevent the mass migration away from AdSense by bloggers?

Hey Bert, Hey Ernie!

Welcome to this Friday’s version of surveys, research and statistics to ponder. Of course, how and what you ponder always has more to do with the source of the statistics and your mood which makes the numbers kinda funky but ‘Hey!’, if we didn’t have stats what would we do with our days?

This latest statistical ‘he said / she said’ consists of different numbers regarding the state of e-commerce. Today’s particpants are, “In the red corner”, comScore. They are in the red corner because they are reporting that e-commerce is slipping for the first time in the history of the world (you get it right?). “In the blue corner” is Forrester who tells everyone to not get our knickers in a twist because even in the cruddy economy e-commerce is the light on the hill or a veritable economic ‘beacon o’ hope’. Today’s match is brought to you by the Wall Street Journal.

On Thursday, comScore reported that U.S. online spending in the third quarter slipped 2% to $29.6 billion versus last year. That represents the first time since comScore began tracking the figures that online spending has shrunk for two quarters in a row. (Online shopping was flat in the first quarter, and slipped 1% in the second quarter.) ComScore was slightly more upbeat about the potential of growth in the fourth quarter, if only because we’ll be comparing it to last year’s dismal fourth quarter.

But on Monday, Forrester Research put out a report that reached a different conclusion: online sales in November and December are likely to grow 8% compared to last year. Moreover, a survey Forrester conducted with the National Retail Foundation found that online retailers reported sales in the third quarter grew 16%.

Geesh, can’t we all just get along? Let’s just say this. The rest of the article is the two researchers pointing fingers at each other saying that how they collect data is better than the other guy and having a researchers equivalent of a “my dad can beat up your dad” argument.

How about we do this? How about we look at what has happened and then work toward getting better. Then we assess if we did or did not get better after we actually DID SOMETHING! What a concept.

Aren’t rosy predictions and unfettered prognostications how we got into this mess in the first place? Isn’t predicting the future that never was a mistake? If the Internet truly is a better way to do things then why can’t we find a better way to assess things rather than act like we have some magic 8-ball or crystal ball that tells the future as well. We don’t.

My prediction? People will go out and do their very best to make something happen in Q4 regardless of these predictions and then they will live in the world of reality of whether things are good or bad, not in the fantasy land of what they may or may not be in the future. This research is for the big boys and not the rest of the world and even then it’s dicey at best. One man’s opinion. Have a fun Friday!

Living in the Research Triangle Park (aka The Triangle) area of North Carolina is a good deal. The weather is great because you get 4 seasons but winter is just a taste of what most of the area’s Northeastern US transplants are accustomed to. There is also a very vibrant technology and new media scene as the area has even been considered a threat (albeit a minor one in my opinion to Silicon Valley because of the education focus of the area and a reasonable cost of living. What has been missing, however, is an Internet industry event that was worthy of the area’s reputation.

Looks like we may be on the way to curing that ill. Today was the programming portion of the 2nd Internet Summit that is put on by TechJournal South and Southern Capitol Ventures. The site for the event states simply

The Internet Summit supports web oriented entrepreneurial activity, innovation, and the resultant economic development of the southeast region.

While I did not attend last year it is apparent that there was no evidence of a sophomore slump. In fact, the brand spanking new Raleigh Convention Center as a setting made it very comfortable and that was before any presentations were given.

As for the content it was well presented in moderated sessions with some pretty serious titles on the various panels. There was Rick Klau, product manager for Google’s Blogger platform, John Kosner, SVP of ESPN Digital Media, Richard Jalichandra, President and CEO of Technorati and Joe Kennedy, President and CEO of Pandora to name a few. Oh and of course the organizers had the good sense to make sure that MP’s own Andy Beal was on a panel talking about, you guessed it, New Media and Personal Branding.

A rather cool feature included a demo hall where area technology start-ups, as chosen by the Summit’s team, displayed their offerings. This included a wide variety of early stage companies that had a chance to show off their offerings to a tech savvy crowd.

This is the fourth event I attended this year and it was by far the best of the bunch. While I could give you some of the highlights all you need to do is search Twitter for #isum09 and you’ll get the gist. Better yet plan to attend next year. The Triangle would love to have you!

Everywhere in business these days you hear about dashboards. Dashboards for marketing, dashboards for the C-suite and even dashboards for dashboards. If dashboards are so popular it’s no wonder that Google rolled out their dashboard for your Google account.

The official Google blog reports

In an effort to provide you with greater transparency and control over their own data, we’ve built the Google Dashboard. Designed to be simple and useful, the Dashboard summarizes data for each product that you use (when signed in to your account) and provides you direct links to control your personal settings. Today, the Dashboard covers more than 20 products and services, including Gmail, Calendar, Docs, Web History, Orkut, YouTube, Picasa, Talk, Reader, Alerts, Latitude and many more. The scale and level of detail of the Dashboard is unprecedented, and we’re delighted to be the first Internet company to offer this — and we hope it will become the standard.

Is that true? There is NO other Internet company that offered a dashboard prior to Google’s announcement? I find that a little hard to believe but who has the time to see if that claim is actually accurate? Who even cares if it’s accurate.

As we get plowed under with more and more data the real winners in the race to harness the information overflow will be those who can capture things in a manageable fashion.

Few if any companies offer the range of services that Google does so having this snapshot of exactly what you do have in the Google system can be helpful. Just another service to keep you close to home and on the ‘mother ship’. Honestly, though, while it seems interesting I am not sure how I will benefit from it but that’s just me. Right?

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Remember Twitter’s plans to make “retweeting” an official function?

Sure you do, the mock-ups looked like this:

Well, Twitter just announced the following:

We’ve just activated a feature called retweet on a very small percentage of accounts in order to see how it works in the wild. Retweet is a button that makes forwarding a particularly interesting tweet to all your followers very easy. In turn, we hope interesting, newsworthy, or even just plain funny information will spread quickly through the network making its way efficiently to the people who want or need to know.

So keep your eyes peeled, because you might be one of the lucky ones!

PS. If you’re not seeing the retweet option, Twitter has a consolation prize for you. It’s cleaning up the spam in trending topics.

I think every single one of us could share a frustrating online shopping experience, especially one about trying to find a product you know a retailer offers, but doesn’t show up in their search results. Google wants to make it easier for all of us with their new enterprise offering, Google Commerce Search.

To participate, you submit all your data to Google Merchant Center and Google Product Search (via data feeds, direct uploads or the API), and then customize the look and feel of your search engine with Google. Although Google doesn’t mention this in the documentation, I can only assume you have to do something to incorporate the Commerce Search into your site (probably replacing your old search engine). (Oh, and PS, it starts at $50k/yr.)

And, now, isn’t that awfully handy? Just in time for the holidays, Google has come out with a solution for you that entails you adding your entire inventory to Google Product Search. They warn us that, on average, a user takes 8 seconds to decide whether to stay on a site (although several other studies have shown that people judge sites in less than a second). If we don’t have our products indexed with Google, in those eight seconds, we’ll lose all our potential customers!

Wait, why, again?

(To be realistic, this isn’t even close to being “in time for the holidays.” That would have probably been in June so they could get past the ramp up stage.)

And once again, for the visual learners:

Obviously, I’m all for better usability on eCommerce sites. But somehow, I don’t think Google really has us in mind as they rolled this out.

What do you think? Is this something Google is doing out of the goodness of their hearts, or out of interest for the bottom line?

There years ago, Google and MySpace signed a search deal. Google agreed to provide web, vertical and internal search and contextual ad sales for MySpace and other Fox Interactive Media properties and pay them $900M (guaranteed as long as Fox met its traffic requirements) in shared advertising revenue over the lifetime of the deal. But it looks like this year, the last of the deal, Google has fallen short.

But, says MySpace execs and owner Rupert Murdoch, that’s because Fox has failed to meet its traffic requirements. Meaning traffic is down on MySpace, just a few short years after they fell into the “Trough of Disillusionment” in the hype cycle (translation: the MSM turned on them).

And just how much are they falling off? Rupert Murdoch’s initial assessment on the recent earnings call was that they wouldn’t see any income from Google this year—a $300M shortfall. But the other execs on the line disagreed, saying that they’d probably fall short by $90-$100M.

And because MySpace/FIM (now Digital Media Group, but whatever) didn’t meet their “very high guarantees,” as Murdoch put it, it’s their own fault. Interestingly, at first the deal “calmed some analyst and investor nerves, and allowed News Corp. to claim MySpace was paid for and then some,” says paidContent. News Corp bought MySpcae for $580M in July 2005, and they have seen at least that much in revenue from the Google deal.

What do you think? Was this deal not the good idea it seemed three years ago? Or was this an unforeseeable circumstance?

If you’ve ever suffered a blister on your index finger, from constantly clicking the “home” or “refresh” button on Twitter.com, I have good news for you!

This:

Is coming to your Twitter homepage. According to Twitter:

We’re starting a limited test of notifications on twitter.com for when you have new tweets. So if one of the folks you follow has tweeted since you loaded your homepage, you’ll get a little notice saying “1 new tweet” that, when clicked, will display the new content.

Along with the recent launch of Twitter Lists, this seems to be yet another tactic to get Twitter users to stay engaged. Something that others have suggested is starting to drop off:

I’m not seeing the new feature–are you?–but I’m glad to give my index finger a little break.

Google News just added a neat new feature that can help you keep track of news that’s of interest to you, alongside the rest of the day’s regular news item.

Clicking the new “Add a Section” link brinks up the following page that allows you to add pre-programmed news modules, or build your own. When you build your own, you’ll be presented with the following options:

Section title: The title of your section. This will appear in your Personalized Google News Homepage.

Search terms: Keywords that define your section. Be relevant and creative, and be sure to separate your keywords with a comma. For example, if you’re interested in news about entrepreneurship, you may want to include several phrases such as “startup”, “entrepreneur”, “venture capital” and “innovation.” We make it easier for you to enter these phrases as you type by suggesting related keywords to add.

Edition: Language edition of Google News from which your articles will be selected. For example, a “Football” section with the US as the preferred edition will look very different from one with UK as the preferred edition.

Source location (optional): Restrict to sources from a particular geographic location. For example, if you are interested in the real estate market in Ireland, you could add a restriction to only show news from Irish sources. This is an optional field and nothing needs to be entered. Currently we allow restricting only at the state level within the US or at the country-level outside the US.

The new section will then get added to your personalized Google News homepage and will look something like this one I created for PubCon news:

I was going to recommend this as a way to add reputation monitoring to your Google News page, but after testing, I discovered that the new module is somewhat limited–you can’t include exact matches or negative keywords. So, you’ll just have to stick with Google Alerts or Trackur.

PS. From what I can tell, you have to view your Personalized Google News homepage, before you can see the “Add a Section” link.

Data portability is just all the rage these days. Google, Facebook, MySpace, OpenID, et al. have spent years creating services where you can use a single login and password to access email, network or make comments.

Now Google’s taking it one step further with something called “hybrid onboarding.” When you receive an email invitation in a Gmail account to join another service, including Plaxo, Facebook and more, instead of being prompted to create yet another username and password, you’re given the option to sign in with your Google account:

On the surface, this seems like it might be less secure—after all, isn’t Google sharing your Gmail username and password in this sign up? Not so, Google says:

At the same time, the hybrid onboarding model improves authentication security because websites like Plaxo that use this technique never see a password from you at all. Since you don’t have to enter your password on additional sites, your password remains closer to you and is less likely to be misused.

However, there is the problem that if your one account gets hacked, the hackers will have access to your other accounts (though this is often the case, since most people use the same password for a lot of their accounts).

Google is also taking this capability to your doorstep: The Google Code Blog also gives details on how any site can add this authentication protocol.

What do you think? Is this a step forward for password and online security? What sites do you want to see participating?

Google Friend Connect can help convert any site into a Google-supported social network. In addition to allowing members of your site to send each other private messages, now Google is bringing its personalization home to your site with Friend Connect.

The shared interests that draw people to your site can make it easier for you as a site owner to appeal to them—but not just through your website. Google Friend Connect adds new capabilities for webmasters to communicate with their users in personalized ways, specifically with:

Send custom newsletters: The new “Newsletter” section of your account lets you create, send and manage newsletters. And with the help of “Interests,” you can either send out newsletters to all your subscribers, or send out custom newsletters to different segments of your subscribers, based on the interest responses they submit.

Personalized content gadget: This new Friend Connect gadget automatically presents a dynamic personalized set of links to your site’s content that matches each visitor’s specific interests. Is a visitor learning how to play swing music? Links to articles your site has published about playing swing are presented to him or her.

Google is also adding AdSense units to Friend Connect if you’d like to display those on your site.

As always, for the visual learners among us, Google made a video:

Google has long been rolling out more and more personalization throughout its services. Two of the most recent changes have come in Google Reader, with social- and usage-history based suggestions, and Social Search, now available in labs.

And the roll out has been so slow that many of us have complacently followed along. Will there be a point at which we decide enough personalization, we need more privacy? Or is it too late to change our minds?

It looks like Yahoo isn’t going to be left behind in the real time search race that was kicked off last month as bing and Google both announced deals with Twitter. As we saw last week, Yahoo is partnering with OneRiot for real time results. I’m glad that they are throwing their hat in the ring actually. Why? Well, I actually needed the reminder that Yahoo! is still a standalone search engine. While I have never used Yahoo search personally other than to gather up prospecting data I keep forgetting that the marriage of bing and Yahoo is still off on the horizon. Until then all we can do is combine their numbers with bing to see if there will be any impact at all felt by Google when the dust settles on the bingahoo deal-ahoo.

Reuters reports

Yahoo Inc (YHOO.O), looking to match rivals in providing up-to-the-minute Internet search results, is running tests with several real-time search partners, sources familiar with the matter said on Tuesday.

Among the companies providing real-time results to Yahoo on a trial basis is OneRiot, whose data will be available initially to about 10 percent of Yahoo’s users, said a person familiar with the matter, who was not authorized to speak about the deal and asked for anonymity.

A representative from OneRiot said she could not comment on the matter.

OneRiot is new to me but since I don’t claim to know everything that’s OK. What I do know now is that they have VC backing so someone knows a lot about them for sure. Yahoo appears to be avoiding the direct to Twitter technique that its new search ‘partner’ bing went after. OneRiot has a slightly different approach to the real-time world which is interesting.

One Riot, based in Boulder, Colorado, collects real-time Internet information from various sources, including Twitter, Digg and its own network of 3 million users that use the company’s software. The company has raised $27 million in funding to date.

So as not to make the bingahoo union any less confusing as to how it will eventually look the article tells us

Yahoo signed a separate 10-year search deal with Microsoft in July, which is expected to close next year. Under the terms of that deal, any data Microsoft’s search engine has access to also would be accessible to Yahoo, Yahoo Chief Technology Officer Ari Balogh said last month.

Huh? Will this still be two entities working in co-opetition? Will Yahoo be building out its search offerings up until the time of the unholy alliance and just try to look a little different but not actually be different? Yahoo is trying out the real time search results in a separate box at the top of the SERPs to see if people are really interested in real time results. If they are not interested then will Yahoo just accept that bing does it and have to work with something they may have tossed in the past? Probably not even worth fretting over but it does make one wonder just what this bingahoo thingy will look like when it is ‘official’.

Honestly, I can’t wait until bing and Yahoo officially join forces. I suspect there will be a considerable amount of blogger fodder that is produced by the ‘final’ product. Seeing that they can’t even get the contract in order yet I’m willing to bet the union of these two search entities will be more like co-habitation than a true marriage.

Let’s hope this post doesn’t mess too much with Google’s head–I don’t want Marketing Pilgrim marked as a Spanish language site.

Anyway, for all of our Spanish speaking readers, we have good news from Twitter!

A principios de mes invitamos a algunos voluntarios a traducir Twitter en más idiomas. Gracias a estos entusiastas voluntarios hispanoparlantes, Twitter está ahora oficialmente disponible en español. Puedes cambiar el idioma en la Configuración o visitar Twitter.com y cambiar la configuración del idioma en el la opción situada en la esquina inferior derecha.

Feliz tweeting!