The Marketing Technology Blog

links for 2009-07-03

doug@douglaskarr.com (Douglas A Karr) — Fri, 03 Jul 2009 22:04:44 +0000

Pressitt – Social media news release (SMNR) creation, publishing and online news distribution service

A free user-friendly Social Media News Release (SMNR) service that allows you to quickly create, publish and share your news to an online, socially-connected audience.

(tags: smpr news web2.0 socialsoftware socialmedia marketing smnr service pr social)
Are The Words “Social Media” Missing From Your Business Vocabulary? | Owengreaves.com

The real issue isn’t what the words mean, it’s how a consultant or media firm explains them, provides a case study that reflects that a business can derive an ROI from Social Media.

(tags: socialmedia roi marketing strategy)
New Salesforce Strategy: 'Amplify And Extend' | BNET Technology Blog | BNET

As the momentum for SaaS has grown, traditional enterprise software vendors, including SAP, Oracle, Microsoft and Cisco, have shifted their marketing messages away from disparaging the cloud computing model to trying to scaring customers about the cost of a so-called rip-and-replace strategy.

(tags: saas crm salesforce sap oracle microsoft cisco)
Whom did you wake up with this morning?

Christoph C. Cemper has been building links since 2003 and is a well respected guru in the SEO industry, especially when it comes to getting real juicy links on trusted domains.

(tags: links linkbuilding sem)

Congratulations to Curt Franke of Bitwise Solutions who won last month's giveaway! This month I am giving away another subscription to .net Magazine as well as 3 softcover copies of Killed Ideas to the first 4 subscribers who email me. Please include your full mailing address.

Your Business and Marketing as a River

doug@douglaskarr.com (Douglas A Karr) — Fri, 03 Jul 2009 17:09:36 +0000

Had a wonderful time this morning speaking shop with Lorraine Ball. Lorraine’s company specializes in strategic content initiatives for small to medium size businesses in Indianapolis – including blogging, newsletters and press releases. Lorraine has been a big supporter and her husband Andrew is a great guy and incredible artist.

Lorraine and I have had the opportunity to work for very large corporations, but we love the agility and excitement of small business. Lorraine encourages all of her interns to work for a large business for a number of years… I would recommend it as well. The lessons learned in leadership in a large company can be critical when running a small business.

In a very large business, to maintain productivity, you must assign responsibilities to leaders. Supervisors execute the vision of leaders and monitor employees. Managers balance priorities and remove obstacles. Directors help maintain the long-term vision and ensure that the department is staying on the path. Vice Presidents create the long-term vision and the strategy of the organizations. The folks at the top guide, promote, cheerlead, and oversee the business.

[Photo cropped from a background found on Gnome]

Lorraine came up with a beautiful metaphor. Being a leader in a company is very much like controlling a river. If your goal is to stop the river, you’re going to run into problems! Companies have momentum… you’re going to make a huge mess if you simply keep trying to throw up dams or redirect the water where it doesn’t want to go. Micromanaging the river won’t result in anything but a mess.

The objective of the leader should be to utilize the momentum of the water to keep the direction of the water moving in the direction the vision requires. Each leader in the organization and their subsequent teams and employees are tools to shift the momentum. It requires a leader to adapt, empower, and delegate the necessary functions… and continue to keep an eye on the horizon and where the company is heading.

This isn’t unlike Social Media and Online Marketing. Hastily constructed campaigns and ever-changing strategies may result in minor results here and there. Long-term strategies that leverage each medium for its strengths, with properly allotted resources, can direct the river of revenue for your company. The river is going to continue to move with incredible force… the question is whether or not you’re going to harness that force or fight it!

WordPress iPhone Plugins: Admin and Theme

doug@douglaskarr.com (Douglas A Karr) — Fri, 03 Jul 2009 01:25:16 +0000

Since updating my blog and putting WordPress on Amazon S3, I’ve been able to remove caching plugins. The caching plugins performed poorly in comparison to pushing all my images to S3. (My first month’s bill: $0.50).

I realize that caching could squeeze some additional performance out of my site… but it would stop me from updating the site with customizations for the iPhone, Blackberry, and other mobile devices. The issue is that one visitor could visit the page on a handheld device, it gets cached, and the next person is presented with the same handheld version in their full browser. Caching and dynamic themes don’t mix well.

The first plugin I found for beautifully optimizing the themes for both iPhone, Blackberry, and other handheld devices is the WordPress Mobile Edition plugin.

This plugin was developed by Crowd Favorite. I tested the plugin on an iPod Touch and my Blackberry and both views are stunning. Kudos to the developers of this plugin for optimizing the view and navigation for both Safari on the iPhone or iPod Touch as well as the Blackberry and other devices.

One note on installing this plugin, it requires a different install than most plugins. You must first upload the theme to the themes directory, then upload and activate the plugin. Thankfully, the authors even let you know when you install it incorrectly.

iPhone WordPress Administration

The other intriguing iPhone plugin I found was WPhone. WPhone actually allows you to manage WordPress fully within an administration panel optimized for Safari on the iPhone or iPod Touch. Very cool indeed!

I’ve not installed this plugin since I usually do some advanced ‘tinkering’ with each of my posts, but for you folks looking for some iPhone WordPress goodness, this appears to be a great plugin!

As content management systems continue to evolve, I hope that the developers incorporate mobile browser and mobile device integration as part of their strategy. Carl Weinschenk has a great article describing the upcoming mobile browser wars.

With Opera Mobile downloaded over 40 million times and the iPhone now accounting for 0.19 percent of browsing worldwide… mobile optimization will become much more of a competitive advantage soon!

links for 2009-07-02

doug@douglaskarr.com (Douglas A Karr) — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 22:02:15 +0000

iPhone Overtaking Nokia Worldwide | BNET Technology Blog | BNET

Nokia has lost its overall market share leadership in the worldwide smartphone segment to Apple, based on browser calls for mobile ads.

(tags: mobile iphone advertising)

It’s Official, I’m on the Crackberry

doug@douglaskarr.com (Douglas A Karr) — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 02:38:41 +0000

After months and months of deliberation, I finally did the deed and purchased a Blackberry Curve 8330 tonight at the Verizon store.

I’ve been using a Samsung touch screen for the last year and have missed countless calls, can’t synchronize calendars, and can’t stand having to look at it to answer a call.

I’m a big fan of Apple, but I’ve been messing with my iPod Touch the last month to see if I could get used to the touch screen. I can’t. For those of you that say it gets easier, it hasn’t… I don’t want a phone that I must be looking at in order to operate it.

IMHO, it seems to me that touch screens have taken us back a step, not into the future.

As well, too many of my friends moved to the Blackberry. Chris Baggott, CEO of Compendium even got rid of his iPhone to return to a Blackberry. Adam Small, CEO of Connective Mobile, has been trying to talk me into a Blackberry for a while. And new friend Vanessa Lammers told me how much she enjoyed her Blackberry.

Heck, if President Obama can’t do without his Crackberry, I can only imagine how great the service and the product is. Tonight I’m just figuring out how to make and receive phone calls. As recommended by Adam, I downloaded Twitterberry so that I at least can tweet from it!

So… all you Crackberry-addicts, let me know your favorite Apps!

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links for 2009-07-01

doug@douglaskarr.com (Douglas A Karr) — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 22:02:29 +0000

谷歌的工具栏现在包括自动语言翻译

Did you understand the title of this post? Well, if you had installed the new Google Toolbar for Internet Explorer, you would have been able to automatically translate it to: “Google’s Toolbar Now Includes Automatic Language Translation.”

(tags: translation google)
Contenture » Blog Archive » CONTENTURE LAUNCHES MICROSUBSCRIPTIONS

We are launching microsubscriptions, a huge milestone in taking your website Freemium. Many of you asked to charge what you want, and now you can.

(tags: content micro-subscriptions freemium)

WordPress Please Filter Incoming Links

doug@douglaskarr.com (Douglas A Karr) — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 12:33:04 +0000

The other day I commented on Robert Scoble’s post, The anti-community list. It was a great post on methodologies that tools like Friendfeed use to try to promote following between members. Outside of lists that match your current relationships (e.g. your email contacts), I think these tools blur the incredible power of social networking.

Enough of that, though. Yesterday I noticed that Robert Scoble popped up in my incoming links:

Except that it wasn’t really Robert Scoble saying… it was my comment on Robert’s post that was now registering as a link back to my site. Only… it’s not really a true incoming link since it’s got nofollow associated.

WordPress needs to filter the incoming links to allow users to see weighted backlinks versus nofollow links. That would provide an easy way to keep these unnecessary links out of my dashboard.

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Microsoft Bing Should Buy Technorati

doug@douglaskarr.com (Douglas A Karr) — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 01:49:25 +0000

From time to time, I utilize Google Blog Search to see who else is writing on specific topics. I want to make sure that my posts are unique. If I see some results, I read the content and decide whether or not to still post – and I reference the other alternative views.

Bing is lacking a blog search (or filtering) mechanism. I think it’s a key feature that’s missing and incredibly useful. Technorati still has the infrastructure, the data, the methodologies and industry expertise.

I don’t see any overlap between the two of the organizations, do you? I wonder why Microsoft doesn’t simply absorb Technorati as its source of blog data. I’d love to see Technorati gain the resources it needs to rise back to the forefront of blog ranking, tracking, and search!

It seems to me that the two could be quite a compliment to one another.

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links for 2009-06-30

doug@douglaskarr.com (Douglas A Karr) — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 22:02:19 +0000

Put Eyes Behind Your Back: Monitor Your URLs on Twitter

The gallery below shows a sampling what I learned on Twitter by tracking links to my lifestream site using BackTweets. (Other similar tools include TBuzz and Topsy. But BackType seems to work the best.)

(tags: twitter backlinks links)
HOW TO: Use Social Media for Enterprise Business

Companies such as Zappos, Dell, and JetBlue are all known as successes in harnessing the power of social media for business. However, the aforementioned businesses sell directly to consumers. How about the business that sells products to other businesses?

(tags: media strategy socialmedia marketing b2b business)
SyntaxHighlighter – Alex Gorbatchev

SyntaxHighlighter is a fully functional self-contained code syntax highlighter developed in JavaScript. To get an idea of what SyntaxHighlighter is capable of, have a look at the demo page.

(tags: development web programming highlight javascript syntax highlighter syntaxhighlighter)
10 Ways to Promote Your Corporate Blog

Online marketing and search marketing requires some off-site promotion as well as on-site promotion

(tags: blogging seo backlink blog promote promotion)
Syntax Highlighter – Home

Syntax highlighter converts code text to HTML where common language elements are formatted using style sheet classes such that the coloring scheme can be switched or altered as simple as replacing a CSS file.

(tags: syntax highlighter code javascript)
Amazon.com cuts R.I. partners over tax

Amazon.com Inc. cut ties today with its business affiliates in Rhode Island to protest a provision in the draft state budget that would force the company to collect sales tax, Providence Business News has confirmed.

(tags: amazon sales-tax)
Best Marketing, Customer-Service Tool Is the Product Review

Feedback is altering not just how the marketing department works but also how companies design their products and work with suppliers.

(tags: marketing reviews product-reviews)
12 Essential Rules to Follow When Designing a Logo | Webdesigner Depot

The logo is the face of any brand — the very first impression — so its design is extremely important.

(tags: logos graphic graphics design webdesign logo)
Reverse Geocoder for Google Maps API Documentation

Reverse Geocoding is the inverse relationship where each geographical coordinate is mapped to the nearest known address. Currently this features is not directly supported by the Google Map API. But can be done by the Reverse Geocoder for Google Maps, as explained below.

(tags: google maps api googlemaps geocode reverse javascript geocoding)
Where is Everyone? – Articles – Baekdal.com

An incredible graphical representation of media over the years.

(tags: trends internet media history socialmedia)
Howto: Grails, REST, Google App Engine and JQuery

Here’s a quick example how you can build a RESTfull Grails application and deploy it to Google App Engine. For this example you need Grails 1.1.1 and GAE SDK for Java version 1.2.1.

(tags: google rest grails webservices jquery)
45 Incredibly Useful Web Design Checklists and Questionnaires | Developer's Toolbox | Smashing Magazine

Designing websites can be a long and complicated process. Dealing with clients, designing prototypes, coding, programming, and testing – there’s a lot to keep track of and a lot to make sure gets done.

(tags: web design webdesign usability)

Web Site Story

doug@douglaskarr.com (Douglas A Karr) — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 01:58:35 +0000

Leonard Bernstein is rolling over in his grave… but it’s still pretty funny. Web Site Story:

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Video: Twitter in Real Life