THINKing

Dropping Breadcrumbs

How are you helping your visitors find their way around your website? Do you have a good grasp of what visitors are looking for when they visit you? Do you provide them with visual references so they’ll know where they are in your site at all times? Are you leaving them some breadcrumbs to follow? This is something we struggle with when we are designing sites.

Last Gasp

A couple of recent news stories have me thinking about the death of certain types of companies. First we had the story about PRNewswire vs. HARO. Briefly, HARO (Help A Reporter Out) is a new model using the power of social networks to pair sources with journalists at no cost to sources. Here’s the rub: PRNewswire has a service called ProfNet that does the same thing but sources have to pay for it. There has been a lot of talk in the blogosphere about this. PRNewswire is miffed about having competition and is making petty, inaccurate charges against HARO.

How Is Your Personal Brand Batting Average?

Photo Courtesy of Morguefile
Personal brands have been on my mind a lot recently, as you can tell by my posting last week. A couple of episodes of late have me thinking about how people evaluate your brand and how many strikes you are allowed before they chalk up an out in your personal box score.

Links 7/30/2008

Google News Separates Blogs From News Links

Five Free Must Have SEO Tools (hint: be sure to get SEOQuake)

FaceBook vs. Hasbro

PRNewswire vs. HARO

Newspapers vs. Themselves

Brands Joining Twitter

Links 7/29/2008

Why Is Stuart Elliott Shilling On Facebook?

Hundreds Of Bloggers To Interact With On Digg, StumbleUpon

48 Cool Social Media Sites

Social Media Ad Spending Hasn’t Caught Up With Hype

Cuil Stumbles Out Of The Gate

Links – 7/25/2008

A few things I’m reading:
Top 142 Social Marketing Blogs

Media Political Donations Favor Democrats 100 – 1 

How To Use Twitter For Marketing

25 Visionaries Who Created Empires From Virtually Nothing

Press Releases We Wished We Had Gotten

What Are They Saying About Your Brand?

I’m working on a presentation about personal branding for delivery at My Creative Team University. As I was doing the research, it became clear that in today’s working world you must take control of your own brand. If you don’t position yourself, someone else will position you. That’s not always a good thing.

New Business Redux

Are you out looking for new business? Who isn’t? I wrote a series a few months back on the topic. You may want to check it out.

New Business Primer – Part 1 – A Primer

New Business Primer – Part 2 – Positioning

And Now For The Really Bad News…

Newspapers, those media dinosaurs riding off into the evolutionary sunset, received a bit of good news yesterday. Or did they?

Media Daily News reports,

For all the gloom in the newspaper industry, total readership–including Web site visitors–is increasing, according to Mediamark Research and Intelligence, which found a 2.1% increase in audience size to 80.6 million between spring 2007 and spring 2008.

It’s Always The Perfect Day To Send Email

Photo Courtesy of Morguefile
Email, now a teenager in media terms, is so misunderstood. Marketers are always asking questions about it, such as, when is the best day to send an email. The answer: every day is perfect. WTF?

Harry – you’re probably asking right now – are you giving a politician’s weasel-worded answer?