Top Five Reasons to Use Twitter:1.) Twitter is about the conversation.

Sure, you can have conversation on blogs, on Facebook and on some other social media sites, but it’s a different kind of conversation with Twitter. The best way I can think to describe it is to give real world analogies. With blogs, you’re on stage speaking to a crowd. Sure, there’s Q&A via your comments, but you run the show. With Facebook, you have insight into each person via their profiles, but you’re mostly communicating one on one. Twitter is sort of like a giant dinner party. There are tons of conversations going on and you can easily join one, or you can start a new one. If you start a new one, others can easily join in. You can even carry on multiple conversations at once. It’s total conversational freedom.

2.) You can use Twitter to promote your social bookmarking submissions.

Spend any amount of time on Twitter and you’ll see folks asking for help voting up a submission at Digg, Sphinn, StumbleUpon and a variety of other sites. With Twitter, you can get a feel for who uses which sites, you can keep tabs on who tends to respond when you ask for votes and you can pitch in to help other people’s submissions do better. Twitter can be a great way to promote your activity and accounts with social bookmarking sites.

3.) Twitter can boost your blog.

It’s a no brainer that you can send out a tweet with a link to your latest blog post. (In fact, many Twitter users now claim they rely more heavily on tweets than RSS feeds for finding good content.) Using Twitter to boost your blog doesn’t end there. Twitter is a great source of blog topics. You can pick up other posts and expand on them, get ideas from the conversations you’re having and discover new authors to add to your feed reader.

4.) Twitter is networking gold.

Listen to anyone talk about building links, launching a viral campaign or getting bloggers to cover your products and you’ll hear them mention the importance of relationships. PR firms are struggling to learn how to pitch people who aren’t trained journalists. The truth is, it’s quite simple. Respect them as a person and offer something of value. Make a connection. You don’t have to be their best friend, but you do need to make an effort to build a relationship.

Since most Twitter users share a combo of business and personal information, it can be a great way to learn a little something about your pitch target. Twitter has taught me who likes Trader Joe’s Black Licorice (Wendy Piersall), who goes nuts for Honey crisp Apples (Martin Bowling), who has dogs (David Wallace) and who spends two mornings a week working from Panera (oh, that’s me!.) Besides, if you find someone new you like, you can quickly look them on up Facebook or LinkedIn, add them to your network and learn even more about them.

5.) The Power of the Re-Tweet equals Viral Gold

It’s been said that blogs can take an idea and spread it from New York to Tokyo in minutes. If that’s true, then it’s also true Twitter can do it in seconds. It takes very little time to blog something. It takes less time to email something. It takes even less time to tweet it. Send something interesting out into Twitter and folks will pick it up and repost to their own list of followers in seconds. Suddenly your own network grows infinitely.

Time and time again, I’ve seen breaking news come across Twitter before I saw it anywhere else. I don’t have to check my feed reader, don’t have to wait for the news to break in on television, don’t even have to wait for a phone call. The second one person on Twitter hears the news, it spreads like wild fire. I saw this in action earlier this year when Heath Ledger died. I saw tweets come through around 4:45pm EST. I later learned he was found dead at 3:30pm. That’s some speedy news travel. (I sometimes wonder what Twitter would have looked like on the morning of 9/11.)

Read the rest here ….

To borrow from an article featured on Forbes.com, “The project addresses an unmet need for a population that exceeds 50 million, half of whom are regular Internet users, says RushmoreDrive CEO Johnny C. Taylor, Jr. RushmoreDrive also leveraged IAC’s experience in Internet search. Taylor says colleagues at IAC/InterActiveCorp property Ask.com helped develop the concept and refine the search engine.”

It’s true, black people do use the Internet. I’m black, I should know. So, what does this new search engine do that others don’t? According to the article it does all of the following:

Taylor says that program aims to do “identity search.” Algorithms sift the Web and deliver results deemed particularly interesting to black users, drawing from both mainstream sources and black media and blogs. A query on “recipe,” for instance, brings up popular sites like RecipeSource, as well as soul food and Southern cooking results. In a search for “sports,” RushmoreDrive ranks AOL’s Black Voices community site higher than ESPN.

What do you think? Should companies create race-specific search engines? What about gender-specific? Are the major search engines biased against specific groups when returning results? Are these new search engines really necessary? I would love to hear your thoughts.

You can also check out the full story at Forbes.

As a regular googler of myself and everyone else I know, I am well aware of what’s floating around in cyber space with my name attached. I recommend you do the same if you haven’t already. But if you aren’t interested in googling yourself, you should definitely be very aware of what’s being said about your business or product and its online reputation.

Sound like high-quality weekend entertainment? Great. Here are 12 tips to help you get started stalking your online reputation! Don’t thank me. Thank my homie Andy Beal for putting this great list together and get busy monitoring your online reputation.

1. Your Personal Name
Whether you’re an independent consultant, or a very small cog on a big corporate wheel, you should absolutely monitor any media mentions of your own name. An extra tip, monitor your user names too: monitoring “andy beal” would likely not include mentions of “andybeal.”

2. Your Company Name
Another “no brainer.” Monitor your company name, but also monitor any likely misspellings or legacy company names. For example, GlaxoSmithKline should also monitor “GSK,” “Glaxo,” and “Glaxo Wellcome.”

3. Your Product Brands
If you’re Google, you should monitor the reputation of your key product brands. What’s being said about “Android” or “Gmail.” The same goes for your product brands. You may not be able to keep track of all your products, but you should track the ones that are the most vital to your business.

4. Your CEO (and other execs)
I’ll make you this promise. At some point in his or her tenure, your CEO will put that huge foot squarely in the mouth. You should monitor all possible iterations of his or her name, so you can be the first to know–or at least know before the WSJ finds out.

5. Your Media Spokesperson
Even if the CEO is a recluse, I’m sure someone in your company is in the public spotlight a lot. If I were Lenovo, I’d monitor mentions of David Churbuck–after all he’s likely discussing Lenovo on his blog and Twitter. (Knowing David, this post made his radar within 2 minutes of being published…hi David!)

6. Your Marketing Message
“So easy even a caveman can do it?” “Just do it!” What if those campaign slogans were accompanied by “sucks” or “I’ll never buy from them again?” Monitoring your marketing campaigns will help you understand if your message is getting across, and what your customers have to say about it.

7. Your Competition
Surely you’d find value in knowing your biggest competitor just got the jump on you. Reports suggest that inside Lenovo, execs knew about the launch of Apple’s Mac Air within minutes–important for Lenovo, as it was planning it’s own ultra-light notebook.

As we explain in the book, Pepsi found itself in troubled-waters over the revelation its Aquafina was nothing but purified tap water from New York. If Coca Cola monitored the buzz for Pepsi’s products, they would see how consumers reacted to the news–and prepared for the questions about its own “tap water,” Dasani.

8. Your Industry
If you keep a watchful eye on industry trends, you can spot opportunities and potential disasters. Everyone’s raving about the iPhone, but some hate the touchscreen keypad? Maybe BlackBerry should offer a handset that offers both a touchscreen and its highly-praised keyboard.

9. Your Known Weaknesses
Your brand has a weakness. If that’s a shock to you, I apologize for being the bearer of bad news. Still, it’s better I tell you now, than a customer tell the New York Times.

Take an honest look at your products and services and ask yourself, what are our weaknesses. If Dell has admitted to itself that it’s customer support sucked, maybe it would have been in a better position to discover–and respond–to Jeff Jarvis sooner.

10. Your Business Partners
If you’re Boeing wouldn’t you want to know if one of your airline customers just declared bankruptcy? How does that effect your quarterly sales numbers? For you, maybe the CEO of a company you did that “co-branded” campaign with, was just snapped leaving a brothel–how would that reflect on your own reputation.

Identify your key business partners and make sure you know what’s happening to their business.

11. Your Clients’ News
OK, for all of your internet marketing agencies–and anyone else that knows the value of keeping clients happy–here’s a tip for you. Monitor the news for your clients and then send them a note to congratulate them on their accomplishments–or maybe “get their back” if you see trouble brewing. Your retention rate will go way up!

12. Your Intellectual Property
If you invested the time–and expense–to register a trademark or copyright your work, shouldn’t you make sure it’s not being infringed upon? Apart from enforcing trademark infringements, you should also make sure there aren’t any cases of mistaken identity. Did someone just complain about how much their Google iPhone sucks? You might want to suggest a correction–or maybe not, if you’re Apple.

How do you monitor all of this? Check out his original post for more tips and tools!

According to a recent report released by PQ Media and USA Today, companies are expected to spend 82 percent more on next generation marketing campaigns over the next few years. For those who don’t know, new generation marketing or new media includes online videos, store-based TV screens, sponsored events, TV and movie product placements, mobile phone advertisements, video games and digital video recorders.

It is believed that new media marketing will account for 27 percent of all ad and marketing dollars spent by 2012. So, what does that mean for you? Depends on where you fall in the spectrum.

Online search professionals will make out like a bandit with an estimated $26.1 billion going that way. E-direct marketing (e-mail, pop-ups and pop-unders and other strangeness) will account for $22.1 billion. Finally, online video and rich media will get about $12.2 billion. Not bad if you work in those areas of new media marketing. Of course, it’s a matter of working for the companies that are driving this growth, as well as having the skills.

So, it might be a good idea to start exploring these emerging areas of new media marketing if it means job security. But as it goes in marketing and advertising, nothing is certain and what seems hot right now could deflate overnight. Remember friendster? Yeah, I didn’t think so!

I’ve been a diehard Wally World fan for a long time now. I shop there all the time, giving them way more money than  I should. But as a web marketer, I cringed when they launched their corporate blogs a few years ago. In theory, they wanted to diffuse the bad press they were getting, so they had a public relations firm create bogus blogs to show how personable and community-friendly they were. The backlash was worse than the initial bad press and the blogs quickly came down.

Now, older and wiser, Wal-Mart has launched a new blog called Check Out that features posts by Wal-Mart buyers. The buyers focus on electronics with occasional features on environment, toys and furniture. No matter the topic, the key is to present an authentic, uncensored voice.
“Readers can tell if people are being genuine or monitored,” Alex Cook, the merchandise manager for Wal-Mart’s entertainment division was quoted in New York Times.

This is certainly a lesson Wal-Mart learned well. I will be looking forward to reading the blog in the future to see how successful they are at staying true to their mission. This new method of corporate blogging might be authentic and pure, but is it in the best interest of the company? I am inclined to believe it is, but only time will tell.

I know what you’re thinking. What does being a meat and plant eater have to do with technology use? On a very basic level, it means I, along with 8 percent of the American public, use my “extensive suite of technology tools to do an enormous range of things online, on the go and with cell phones.”

The basic stats are regularly blogging, maintaining personal web pages, generating digital content and being an active participant in cyberspace. So, who makes up this obviously intelligent group of Americans? The quiz results reveal technology omnivores to be “young, ethnically diverse and mostly male students.”

This is no surprise to most people. Although web use is widespread among women, men, boys and girls, gadget use is not. Men still corner the market when it comes to being early adopters of the latest tech gadgets and gizmos. They are far more likely than women to camp out overnight to snatch up the latest video game system, phone, music player or whatever magic item marketers shove at them.  But women are making a come up with 30 percent of omnivore quiz takers identifying themselves as female. I’m thrilled to be in their company. And I bet there will be more women joining the ranks as geek becomes more chic both in and out of school.

Other Internet Technology User categories include: Connectors (7%), Lackluster Veterans (8%), Productivity Enhancers (9%), Mobile Centrics (10%), Connected but Hassled (10%), Inexperienced Experimenters (8%), Light But Satisfied (15%), Indifferents (11%) and Off the Network (15%).

What kind of information technology user are you? Answer a few questions to see where you fit in the new typology of information and communication technology users developed by the Pew Internet Project.

Why am I using my marketing blog to talk about using the internet to hunt down diagnosis? Because, it is further proof that your audience is savvy enough to find what they are looking for, and you want them to be looking for you. How easy do you make it?

Right now, I am suffering from a bad cold. The first thing I did was look up the difference between a cold and the flu. After reading numerous sites I knew it was a cold. I then looked up the best treatments for a cold. Each search brought me to WebMD, Health.com and a few others that have become experts in internet health information. People trust them. Do people trust your brand? Is it considered an authority in your particular area of specialty?

If not, it’s not over for you. Worst things have happened. Like, me misdiagnosing my flu for a cold. Darn those check off list! Anyway, start by giving your audience a reason to search for you. Publish a few articles about things of interest to them. Invite costumers to submit stories and pictures of them using your product and then post them on your site. Weigh in on industry trends and topics by representing your company on industry blogs and social networks. Your possibilities are endless. The key is for you to provide a value to your costumers online in addition to what you do face to face.

You can also choose to ignore my recommendations altogether and self diagnose and develop your own treatment plan. If you do, feel free to share your results with the rest of us!

As a columnist (which is fancy for “journalist in jammies”), I ought to personify the conventional wisdom that distance is dead: All I need to get my work done is a place to perch and a Wi-Fi signal. But if that’s true, why do I still live in London, the second-most expensive city in the world?

If distance really didn’t matter, rents in places like London, New York, Bangalore, and Shanghai would be converging with those in Hitchcock County, Nebraska (population 2,926 and falling). Yet, as far as we can tell through the noise of the real estate bust, they aren’t. Wharton real estate professor Joseph Gyourko talks instead of “superstar cities,” which have become the equivalent of luxury goods — highly coveted and ultra-expensive. If geography has died, nobody bothered to tell Hitchcock County.

Maybe it’s because society hasn’t wholeheartedly accepted the idea of working remotely. Or perhaps communications technology just isn’t all it’s hyped up to be. After all, the journalists and consultants who tell us that location is insignificant are biased. Like me, they’re the people whose lives have been most transformed by the Internet and cell phones.

But I think the truth is more profound than either of those glib explanations: Technology makes it more fun and more profitable to live and work close to the people who matter most to your life and work. Harvard economist Ed Glaeser, an expert on city economies, argues that communications technology and face-to-face interactions are complements like salt and pepper, rather than substitutes like butter and margarine. Paradoxically, your cell phone, email, and Facebook networks are making it more attractive to meet people in the flesh.

You can read the rest of the post here.

I tend to side with the columnist here. I am able to keep in touch with my family and friends, planning face-to-face interaction through the use of technology. We then use technology to relive our experiences together through picture sharing, video posting and commenting on the posted media. Technology does not separate us, it makes it easier for us to come together. And the more we come together the happier we’ll be.

According to the post, and this is purely secondhand as I have not had a chance to substantiate anything, a law firm representing Ford contacted CafePress to let them know that pictures that car owners have taken with their own cameras of their cars infringes on Ford’s trademark, which includes the use of images of Ford vehichles and logos.
As a writer, I am all about intellectual property protection. But as a marketer, I know a goldmine when I see one. When you have a group of consumer fans eager to broadcast to the world their love of your product and how it affects their life, by all means let them do it. Their endorsement of your product will do far more than your paid advertisement ever could. Ford must not have gotten that memo. You would think they would jump at the chance to get favorable brand marketing considering the bleeding they are taking on the show room floor. Because of the way they were treated by Ford, many of these fans have decided not to continue their relationship with Ford. You have to ask yourself, in the end, who is the winner here? Certainly not Ford. When will companies learn?

Malware is not the only ‘bad guy’ issue anymore

Malware is not the only problem that Search Engines and others need to watch in 2008 …..

There’s a huge challenge ahead for search engines, particularly in the blog space.

It seems like just yesterday, yet it was eleven months ago when ICANN was caught in the middle of a dispute between an official ICANN-accredited registrar and several thousand customers who, almost all at once, started a huge and horrible buzz.

Not only were their credit cards being charged multiple times, but their domain names were expiring or ‘being locked down’.

The legitimate owners lost access to their control panels, and in many cases lost ownership of their domains.

We are all still at the mercy of our respective registrars.

The fact was that the registrar had (1) had serious technical problems,

(2) apparent financial troubles, and

(3) an internal management (partnership) fallout.

There were no safeguards. Despite ICANN’s charter at the time limiting what they could and could not do, they did in fact spend money, travel, visit the company and more, to try and rectify the problem.

The matter literally became an international incident, effecting foreign government websites, non-profits and thousands of small and medium size businesses, many of whom had to lay-off employees as legitimate websites went dark.

Non-US companies actually blamed the United States in more than a few blog posts!

Ultimately, the problem was solved when GoDaddy stepped in and ‘took over’ (terms were never disclosed) the remaining portfolio of the registrar. They did an excellent job repairing what damage they could and bulk transferring the names. It was a tedious and time-consuming process.

I maintained consistent communication with ICANN and others throughout this unfortunate chapter in Internet history. Several of my clients were effected. They were ‘as responsive as they could be’ and maintained an open dialog on their blog. Their charter, plus the registrar’s somewhat inaccurate registry history made it impossible, at the time, for ICANN to simply flip a switch and return the system to normal.

In fact, companies completely folded that depended on the web. Many jobs were lost, and for the purpose ‘our space’ and SEO / SEM , search engine rank was considerably effected as many of these companies websites disappeared with no explanation, some for many months.

The continued irony of this story is that someone claiming to be this registrar is contacting ‘former clients’ by e-mail soliciting renewals right now, while in fact those domains were either bulk transferred (or entirely lost) long ago. The website still comes up in number 1 position on Google despite an ICANN mandated message on the front page ??!!

Today came news that we have a new ‘issue’ with domain names known as ‘Front Running’. It’s not a rogue registrar using it. It’s Network Solutions? The story, and a little ‘understanding of what this is’ can be found on the CircleID website here. While not as severe as last year’s saga, it deserves early attention and awareness.

The bottom line is while ’some’ continue to predict Internet bottlenecks and outages due to more video, etc. (How many times have we heard this in the last decade??), the industry does have to be kept abreast of other and new problems facing our growing infrastructure including malware, rootkits, spyware, and attempt to predict by examination and avoid situations such as those posed to ICANN last year.

We all have a vested stake and should not be complacent, participate in the dialog, and remain active in assisting those which greater resources to protect Net Neutrality and the Internet as a viable vehicle for everyone, whether they are technically literate or not.

Check out SEO and Tech Daily at http://anzman.blogspot.com/. For some reason wordpress’ link builder is not worknig and I’m at work so I’m going old school on you. Until next time.