As Expected: Facebookers and Privacy

A check of blog feeds over lunch turned up this: Facebook members aren’t too worried about their privacy settings. According to Compete, traffic of Facebook members to the social networking website’s privacy settings pages has been essentially flat for several months, Beacon uproar nothwithstanding.
This reinforces a thought from last week about people in social networks. They’re in [...]

Borrowing Someone’s Personal Brand: No-No

I saw this last week in the Wall Street Journal and forgot to share it. High school teachers and college professors have software that can detect plagiarism.
Now it appears that Internet dating service enthusiasts or social networkers may also want to do a little background checking when considering getting serious with someone they meet online. [...]

Freebie Friday: Open Source CMS

Ready to create a corporate website you can host and maintain? Launching a community portal? Need something to get off the ground for your small business?
A few years ago, you’d meet with a web design agency. Or pick a tech geek’s brain and hope he’d show pity on you.
Today, there are Drupal, Joomla, Wheatblog, Elixis and other open source content [...]

Google’s Lawyers are Damn Good

Are you on Facebook? Do you want to quit Facebook?
By now, you know the company took a PR whipping this week at the hands of the New York Times in this clip that illustrated new concerns about what happens to your personal data after you cancel a Facebook account. The blogsphere erupted immediately.
The aggrieved ex-Facebooker felt like he was at the Eagle’s [...]

Freebie Friday

When lead generation programs work well, they’re a marketer’s best friend. 
Lead-to-opportunity-conversions that produce sales say more than any beautiful advertisement or new website, and they’re the fastest way to grow a fan base among your sales team, executives or clients.
Lots of marketing blogs cover new throughts, ideas and ways to market. What they don’t do is go in-depth on tools to measure the work so you [...]

Tip Thursday

Want to build an e-commerce site? You don’t need a big team of programmers and $20,000. Volusion is one of several companies that provide free templates, free trials and a variety of la carte services to help you start and scale as needed.
There are plenty of work examples in the company’s gallery, including the Obama [...]

Wildcard Wednesday

Remember “pop under” flashing online ads for security cameras from a company called X10? In 2001, the company’s site was the 4th most visited on the web.
Then text ads by Google changed the game.
While blinking, noisy interrupting ads still live online (that means you, Sprint), thankfully they don’t show up on — or under — every single [...]

Little White Balls as Technology Sell

With the PGA’s Buick Invitational in San Diego, the appearance of the season’s first new ad campaigns are as predictable as a Tiger Woods victory. Last year, the early-season hype was square-headed drivers.
This year it’s quieter: Tiger hawking Buick Enclaves (a given) and PGA tour professionals sharing how they mark their Titleist golf balls (with a Sharpie in all manner of fun and colors).
Golf [...]

Airport Security Advertising

Zappos Shoes has come up with one of the better ads I’ve seen in awhile. And it’s so smart, you have to wonder why it wasn’t done sooner since we’ve been living in an airport security checkpoint world since 9.11.2001.
Inside the security screening trays at San Diego International Airport, there’s a very simple message and colorful visual: PLACE SHOES HERE. [...]

5 Tips on How to Pick a Web Design Agency

Does selecting a web design partner or agency give you nausea? Is the idea of ideation funky to you? Are you ready to talk PHP, CMS, PPC, SEO, MySQL, .NET, XHTML or CSS?
Don’t worry.
The majority of corporate marketing VPs, directors and managers (and most owners of small- and medium-sized businesses) have never built a website [...]