Hey Glenn,

A CMS can also cause slow load page times resulting from a poor configuration or overzealous use of plugins/addons. As you know that’ll wreak havoc with the quality score and cause wasted spend with visitors who hit the back button after waiting a couple seconds.

I have the Curve 8900 and UMA calling is a godsend when I’m visiting the folks house. My carrier has no signal out in the boondocks and wifi is the only way for me get calls and texts.

Hey Stephan,

I’m glad you’ve found success with Wordstream. But I’m not sure the ability to show the exact keyword users are searching for is a key differentiation for them. This type of information is freely available as an inline report in adwords, and available for Yahoo (just have to ask your rep.

I think their bread & butter feature is the keyword grouper.

Unfortunately spam exists because it can be profitable.

For an interesting look at the economics of spam you might want to check out Berkeley’s Spamanlytics paper:
http://www.icsi.berkeley.edu/pubs/networking/2008-ccs-spamalytics.pdf

I love Mailchimp, their monkey makes me smile every time I log in to view stats.

Here's another basic tip for businesses to increase their open rates. Follow best practices by only accepting email addresses of people who opt into receiving your messages. In other words, it's not ok to put the email addresses from business cards gathered at a tradeshow/networking events into your list, unless those people have specifically given you permission to do so.

It may be tempting to do otherwise, but its much more important to have list of engaged
subscribers than to inflate your list, and spam people who didn't ask for it.

While I haven’t used it myself, Woopra looks like an interesting analytics package. Unlike Google Analytics, Woopra stats are real time, which is really powerful combined with it’s built in live chat feature.

If you set up the right trip wires (i.e. customer spending a certain amount of time on a page, etc) you could drastically improve your site’s conversion rates.

http://www.woopra.com

Hi Miguel,

Here’s another option for branding twitter.

Use your background and icon for company branding. Also include a sidebar in the background image with the pictures of the people contributing tweets. Show their names, personal twitter account urls (if what they tweet on these is applicable to your business), and also a unique identifier for each person, like ^JK, that they append to their tweets.

This mix of branding and humanization worked well at my last company, and I’ve seen others like @CoTweet doing this as well.

That’s why the LA Galaxy signed up David Beckham, no? To hopefully help win a major championship (Your #6 point), and the launch the sport into the lime light.

Maybe they should allow more slide tackles, would appeal to our natural tendency for violent sports. Just kidding…

I see my alma mater library has this journal in print. Figure I’ll give it a gander when I drive by there later this week. Thanks!

This one’s about a local coffee shop using Twitter to create more walkin traffic, even hosted a Tweetup. http://cli.gs/Eq25nU

This links to a post about a small pizza parlor using Facebook, Twitter, & video to promote special deals. http://cli.gs/2jJ9NX

What do you think of taking the balanced rational emotional approach in marketing?

Although people have a tendency to lean in one direction, I believe you can’t divorce the two because people are inherently rational and emotional.

For instance, I had a woman/mother walk into the ski shop and we narrowed down her choices to two expert level skis. She was torn between the two, feature wise each was quite similar, so I suggested a vision of the type of skier for each. One is better for a mother who’s out teaching her kids to ski, but still wants to rip a few turns on her own time, the other is for mom with an attitude who sends her kids off to an instructor for lessons. I’ll leave it to your imagination which ski she chose.

While her decision was emotional in choosing her ski, she was quite rational/practical in picking out the kids equipment. This involved my explaining how it makes more financial sense to buy the kids skis rather than lease, considering we have a guaranteed price tradein program.

Different approaches to buying, same person.

Kellie,

If Zuckerburg has his way we’ll be able to begin setting with finer granularity what parts of our FB personality are shown to different friends.

For example we may be able to have:

- A profile for grandma to keep our little angel images. No drunk photos or profanity allowed.

- A profile for the boss. Again no drunk photos, only images of company events and maybe more prominent placement of relevant reading materials for work.

- A profile for close friends. No holds no bars on what’s shown.

Personally, I shouldn’t have to banish from the record the many foolish things I did in college. So I’d welcome greater privacy/display options.

On the flip side, I wonder if an argument can be made against more privacy options?

Paul, I wish I had this advice when I was a kid!

I agree location can determine success. During Woodstock 1999, a field near our house was planned to be a backup parking spot for the event. So my little brother and I whipped up a lemonade stand. Unfortunately for us, they had enough parking near the airbase so our stand didn’t turn a profit, and we ended up drinking lemonade for the next year.

Despite failing, it proved a valuable learning experience. A mobile stand would have definitely been handy.

Thanks for jogging an old memory.

Great hierarchy. It’s hard to tell with you graphic, but planning is the wide base that supports everything else in the social media pyramid.

In their excitement to jump on the social media bandwagon I could see many companies start right off with listening when they should probably hold off at first. It’s easy for voices and opinions to be amplified by social media, to the point that these people don’t represent your target customers. It’s really easy to get lost in the sea of conversation.

That’s why your strategy of who you choose to listen to is as important as how you go about engaging.

Hi,

I can understand why Flickr would want to prevent blatant explotation of their service
by businesses.

My company has a situation where we create new, professional photography for our product lines
(gift bags, boxes, ribbons, tissues, etc) every few years. We’re sitting on these, old beautiful photos without intention of ever using them again.

I was considering providing these to the community via an Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike License. But now I’m not sure I should, if Flickr is only going to delete my account.