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As part of the Business Builder Seminars, one of the areas I stress is that the Internet provides an unparalleled tool for communication between businesses and their customers. I talk about the importance of:

• Providing several options for your customer to reach out to you
• Being timely in your responses to any and all communication
• Answering the question asked in an empathetic tone

Image via Wikipedia

Why? Because the bad news is that in today’s digital age anyone can wield an enormously large stick if unhappy with your product or service.

Why? Because the good news is that in today’s day-and-age of CRMs, customer service alone can be an untouchable value statement for a business.

I cite Jeff Jarvis (as many do) as a disappointed customer who used the internet to call attention to a billion-dollar brand’s disregard for his concerns and needs.

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In a rush to meet deadlines or share a blog post with the masses, many of us fail to dedicate the necessary time and effort to the most critical and viewed element of any article: the headline. The headline is the first — and often only — means of converting a viewer to reader. Fail at this and you negate any reason for writing the article at all.

Recently, I read that Google knows of 1 trillion unique URLs on the web. That’s a tremendously large sea of content in which your article will either sink or swim. Without a compelling headline to not only grab attention but also lure the reader into the body copy, you’ll quickly find your article slipping into its murky depths.

I certainly haven’t expended enough energy on my post titles historically, but in having conversations with many of you regarding growing your online audience, I’m attempting to collect my thoughts and put my money where my mouth is. My long-term hope is to continue this conversation as a series that addresses headline creation tools, search engine optimization, social networking and keyword/ keyphrase consideration.

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With my recent speaking gigs across the country on how to start an online initiative and the art of effective marketing,  I’ve been trying to focus my thoughts and writing on online marketing and the specific technologies that support those efforts online.  I’ve always attempted to write about the online industry as a whole, however now with every post will I ask myself the question, “How would one use this information to either introduce or enforce a brand online?”

With my renewed focus, I was glad that I found Wordle:

Wordle is a toy for generating “word clouds” from text that you provide. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text. You can tweak your clouds with different fonts, layouts, and color schemes.

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Following up on the recent comments Google CEO Eric Schmidt had concerning newspapers and their future, Advertising Age has posted video of him at their Ad Age Madison & Vine conference.  In his stage appearance, he forecasts the future as “bleak” for the newspaper industry, adding that the loss of investigative reporting in which newspapers excel is a “tragedy” as it “is so important for democracy.”

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Courtesy: The MyBlogLog Blog

MyBlogLog has finally unveiled its new design which is a good upgrade in aesthetics and user experience over the previous. Unfortunately, the redesign is solely that - a redesign.  There are no new features.

…[N]ow everything is framed with shiny shadows and rounded edges! Also notice that on your profile we have moved the most recent visitors module, up on top, not down below the fold so you can quickly see who’s been checking you out.

The redesign does give the impression that the team is committed to giving it the professionalism that it deserves to solidify its role in site metrics and building community online.  However without serious attention to the functionality rather than the “funsies,”  they run the risk of becoming irrelevant as people migrate to  FriendFeed and Google Friend Connect.

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