Internet Marketing and Social Media Consultants

I’ve never been a big social network user, so it took me awhile to get an up close and personal idea of what Facebook is really like. I had used it and fooled around with it a little bit, but never spent a significant amount of time using it.

So for the last week, I got into Facebook. I actually added some friends, signed up for some apps, and checked the news feed religiously. I won’t deny it, it’s been fun, and I have a few rudimentary observations.

From what I can tell, Facebook’s best feature is that its apps allow you to aggregate your web experience into something easily accessible and viewable by your friends. I was hoping they had a decent Netflix app so my friends knew what I was watching, but the app is subpar and doesn’t really work. However, the Twitter and Digg apps are simple and good. If anybody wants to know what I’m Twittering or Digging, they can hit my Facebook page and it’s all there.
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CBS has launched an intriguing new music service, Last.fm. On the site, users will have access to over 3.5 million songs from four major labels (EMI, Sony BMG, Universal and Warner) and bunch of independent ones, and users will be able to listen to whatever songs they want while they are shown an ad during the song.

The catch? Users are only allowed to listen to each song a maximum of three times. However, this is only the beta version of the service, and in the future, unlimited listens may be available with a subscription.
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While the candidates are sweating it out in Iowa and New Hampshire, Yahoo News has released a dashboard that shows the poll numbers, relative buzz (based on Yahoo search queries), money raised, and prediction market (basically the Vegas odds for each candidate winning).

At first, I wasn’t too impressed with the dashboard because it didn’t seem to have easy access to state-by-state numbers. But I wasn’t looking hard enough. A tab on the upper right corner labeled “states” gives access to all the poll number from all fifty states (at least the ones that have had polls taken so far).
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There’s a good article in the Sunday New York Times by Anne Eisenberg about Vizzvox.com, a website that, among other things, lets home sellers create online multimedia presentations about homes they are selling, complete with the home’s address as the domain name.

For $149 a year, Vizzvox provides the user with hosting, domain name, and software to help realtors (or anyone, for that matter) create sites that showcase the home’s appeal. One realtor in California sold a home after only one week, thanks to her presentation. After that, she sold another in a matter days using Vizzvox, in spite of a major slowdown in the housing market.
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I give a lot of advice to clients on how to improve their ecommerce sites. I give them tips from my experience about “live” shopping carts, simplified checkout processes, and funneling customers. But every now and again I see a site that defies the rules. Some websites offer such great products for the right people, that there is no need to mess with it. One of these sites is Saddleback Leather.

I have been doing more international traveling lately, and I have been keeping my eye out for a good bag. I of course travel with my MacBook Pro everywhere I go, so it needed to accommodate that. But I also wanted something that would function as a bag for walking around foreign cities without my laptop. Something I could keep my camera, map and guide, and souvenirs in. After looking around for months, I didn’t really see anything that caught my eye. That is until I came across the Saddleback Leather site, and their incredible bags. Continue Reading