WebVisions (in Portland May 16-18, 2012) has expanded from one city to five and has gone international, adding Barcelona, Spain to the venue location. This year’s conference featured keynote speaker Baratunde Thurston, host of Popular Science’s Future Of on the Science Channel, and author of How to Be Black.

His opening talk titled “Correspondent from the Future integrated topics of social media, networking, marketing through social media and networking and race.

Tune in to The Digital Divide on Friday, June 8th at 11 am and of course you can stream online.

They can get filled with dust and that can cause your computer to OVERHEAT. Heat and Your Computer are three words you want to avoid using in the same sentence.

Try to avoid blowing dust into the computer. Try gently wiping the dusty vents (see how I’m assuming you might not have done this for a while/ever?) first to remove a thick layer of dust, and then blow out the rest with canned air. If you are gonna use a vacuum, use only plastic hoses to avoid static electricity charges. Old toothbrushes can also work nicely to clean dusty vents.

Sorry to underwhelm you with what you probably already guessed or knew; a Shopping Cart can be either an entire web site or just part of a web site. Some software is designed to provide everything you need for an entire online store including regular web pages, blogs and the cart features. Other software “integrates” into your web site or blog and adds cart features. And of course some carts are hosted in the “Cloud” (BigCommerce) and others live on your web site hosts (self-hosted).

In the following weeks I’m going to give my evaluation of the carts I’ve been exposed to in the last twelve months which include Interspire Shopping Cart, various WordPress carts, Big Commerce, OpenCart, PrestaShop and XCart and WildApricot (which is Cloud-based Membership software with a cart feature). Some are free, others have a fixed one-time fee, and others are annual subscriptions.

Stay tuned as picking the right cart or software for your needs is the first BIG decision you’ll make about your online store.

Please note: Your author has just, as in December 26th, 2011, availed herself of a used first generation IPAD satisfying two years of continuous longing and CraigsList doodling for that device. And let me add, that I am wholly satisfied with my acquisition. (1st Generation IPAD, 64 gig and WiFi)

I only share that factoid to establish that while I found the story of the workers, from the workers point of view and voice, to be tragic, I am also not a ideological puritan.

However, if you use technology and mostly love it, check out this week’s episode of This American Life. All of our technology we get from China is relevant to this story, not just Apple. It seems the storyteller in this instance is a devote of the late, well technically not late, Mr. Jobs and Apple products. A real #1 Fan, however with a journalist’s integrity and a storyteller’s wit, he went to China and with his translator interviewed Chinese workers at the plants, toured the plants, and reports back to us, the truth of the matter.

http://mysite.com/index.htm.

Google’s Matt Cutts explains it all here. It’s not a new video but the information is still correct and current.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Of course the bottom line is “I want to generate more revenue.” But on the internet, revenue comes in different ways and if you provide a service, rather than a product people can order, the results are not necessarily as instant or as obvious, but they are just as real.

The first two things you need to determine is your budget and your goals. We can help with the goals by asking a few simple questions, and perhaps some follow-ups depending on your answers.

Do you want the phone to ring more often, get more leads, touch your contacts more often, sell more products, build relationships for future sales/service appointments?

Give me a call and we’ll talk. There is no charge to call and if nothing else, you’ll be thinking about where you want to go, who you want to connect with and what you will need to gather to arrive at your “destination.”

971-409-3832

Company A provides print, television and radio advertising for their client(s). They see an opening for online marketing and an opportunity to add services to their offerings and increase their revenue.

They advise the company, whose online marketing is being managed by an experienced consultant, to stop everything and they will take care of the rest. They advise the company to stop posting images of their satisfied customers on Facebook. They tell them it’s a bad idea. They (the BIG company) knows best and will provide them with a generic unified message, custom Fan Page, etc.

Why this is misguided at best!

What could possibly be more persuasive than photos of real people proudly displaying their joy at ownership of your product? What is more convincing, a fancy graphic banner promising results, or a photo of your clients or customers with your product?

So why would this happen?

The BIG company can’t provide the photos of every customer leaving your business with your product. In order to extract as much revenue as possible, they will attempt to control every aspect, word and image of your online reputation. Since they can’t provide the on-site, in-the-moment image of your customers, they shut them out. Maybe they will use stock images, purchased to “convey” how satisfied your customers are.

Which would you find more convincing?

Why online marketing must be personal

Sure you could go this route. Hire a company to create the impression of happy customers, but nothing is as powerful on the internet, than real people expressing real happiness and satisfaction about their purchase, or investment. Nothing is as powerful.

Sure we at Flying Forms help our clients plan out and execute online marketing strategies, but we can’t do it all for you. We provide the recipe, the plan. We can even execute most of it for you, online reputation management, set up your custom Facebook Fan Page for your business, and provide you with Search Engine Friendly content for your blog or website. We’ll set up your infrastructure, tutor you, add content for you, post your customer photos, but the ingredients come from you, and from your clients.

The fact remains that you and your customers provide the most powerful content in the form of photos and testimonials, and no third party message will ever be as potent. When you think about getting help for your medium to smallish size company, consider Flying Forms for personal service that takes the time to consider the idiosyncrasies of your business, you and your customers.

And remember flashy doesn’t trump personal. Not on the internet.