If you haven’t heard of Kumo or Wolfram|Alpha, you’re not alone. But you will. Kumo is a beta rebranding of MS Live Search, which was a rebranding of MSN search which … MS wants to be competitive in the search market. So it keeps changing its approach, refining it, putting new skins on it and hoping magic will strike. (more…)

Give me a hint
The Web is a seemingly endless source of information on anything and everything. Problems arise when the information is incorrect or incomplete. Suppose, for example, your company has a name like Universal Import & Exports. There are a lot of companies with this name and similar names, including Universal Exports, of James Bond fame.

So if a client looks for your company, what do they find? You? Someone with a similar (or even identical name, in a global context)? And what if they find you when looking for someone else? Should you care? To the last question, yes. Everyone is a potential client. Figure out why they are finding you. Some things you can’t fix, but some things you can.

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Google is doing it. Twine. Twitter. Delicious. They offer a version of it. Yahoo and Microsoft are discussing it. What is it? Personal search. It’s being bandied about as the next big thing. A game changer for search engines, search engine marketing and search engine optimization. How does it work? Social bookmarking sites, like Twine and Delicious are straightforward: sites you bookmark lead you to other sites other people have bookmarked that are similar. It’s not so much a search as an exploration of similar sites. A community-based approach to finding what you want. That’s not the newest twist on personal search (more…)

Brevity is the soul of an email marketing subject line. When your new email marketing message shows up you have a nano second or less to differentiate yourself from spam, junk mail, forwards from coworkers and friends and all of the tens or hundreds of emails pouring into people’s in boxes. So what can you do to get your next email marketing message noticed? (more…)

Go ZapIT Interactive has donated their creative services for the Muscular Dystrophy Association’s 25th Annual World’s Largest Office Party. The event, sponsored by the Hyatt Regency, draws thousands of office workers from around the Greater Cincinnati area. It’s a great time, for a great cause, and Go ZapIT is delighted to be given this opportunity to create a lively, fun Web site that gives people a chance to see what a great cause it is.

“Giving back to our community and developing effective marketing for worthwhile organizations is important to us as an agency,” Cowman said, “Over the years, Go ZapIT has been working with Not For Profit organizations to spread ’cause’ awareness, build community relationships, raise more money, while saving valuable time and reducing cost by using the Internet.” (more…)

Ok, they were diaries or journals. My wife would suggest when I was young the pages were stone and we used chisels to carve on them. She would be exaggerating for comedic effect. It’s why I love her so much. The point is blogs are a relatively new phenomena that involves a shared experience. A chance to share my thoughts and have people respond, suggest new ideas, critique the ones presented and generally have a conversation about the ideas.

What’s so important about my thoughts that you should care? I have worked in marketing for 20+ years. (Unless you consider the time I spent with a lemonade stand where I would try to convince passersby to quench their thirst with an amazingly refreshing icy cold beverage–in that case it has been 30 or so years with a few breaks). I have worked with start-ups, fortune 500s, B2B, B2C, non-profits and every other type of business imaginable. (Well not torture for profit, professional assassins or lots of other businesses I can imagine, but I’m a writer and spend a lot of time imagining things). My point is I suppose you might read the blog in case my experiences help you with copywriting, marketing or whatever else your working on that calls for a brain block to be dislodged.
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