Brogan Goes Bald for Charity

April 25, 2009 By 9 Comments
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You can follow some of the fun from Twitter using the hashtag #baldbrogan and check out what Chris Brogan had to say over about shaving his head for charity here.

Video of the head shaving and photos to follow soon…

Current Corporate Sponsors

Citrix Online (also a client)

Radian6 (also a conference sponsor)

AMD

Crocs (donating 200+ pairs of shoes)

….this will stay updated as we get more corporate sponsors

Can you spare the price of value meal from McDonald’s to help out underprivileged families?

Thank you to all of you who have already contributed and continue to contribute.  Chris Brogan and I both truly appreciate and we know that the families in need will as well.

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Filed Under: Charity, Microfunding Tagged With: , ,

Google Now Helps You Get to the First Page in Search Results

April 22, 2009 By 14 Comments

justinlevy-google-profileGoogle Profiles is your area in Google’s universe where you can store and link all sorts of information about yourself.    Why is this important?  Because it’s yet another area on the interwebs where you can have a presence which is discoverable by search engines, *cough*, especially that little one who made the profile page, Google.

Have you been keeping your Google profile tidied up?  Did you even know that you had (or could have) a Google profile?  You can find your profile here.

Over the past week or so Google has been making improvements to Google Profiles.

First, they changed the way the URL displays for your page.  It used to be (…and still is unless you change it) a string of numbers that identifies the page as YOU.  For example, to Google I was: http://www.google.com/profiles/113345621158656129639.  But, with the change in settings, I’m now easily found as: http://www.google.com/profiles/justin.levy.  The only two minor notes here, as reported by Lifehacker: If you’ve previously linked your profiles page to your Gmail account, you can’t change it.  Your link will be your Gmail user name.  The other caveat is that you can only change your URL once, so be careful with that choice.

The second change was announced this week and concerns the prominence that your profile receives from Google.  Google will now start displaying profiles on the first page of Google search results.

Both of these announcements are HUGE from Google.  Why you may ask?  For some, reaching the first page of Google is a never-ending losing battle.  It can be very hard, if not impossible, to reach the front page.  Now Google is ensuring that at least some part of YOU reaches that front page.  You need to take advantage of this.  Maximize your profile by linking your websites, blogs and other profiles.  Use the “About Me” section to highlight all of the important stuff that you would want a potential employer, prospect or partner to find.

Want some more tips?  Google has provided a few tips on making your profile more useful over here.

Now, stop reading and head over to your Google profile and optimize it…

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Filed Under: Google, Personal Branding Tagged With: ,

Evolution of Comments and Growth – Lunch with the Pirates – Episode 2

April 18, 2009 By 5 Comments
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Episode #2 – Wednesday, April 15, 2009
(Episode Length: 19 minutes, 39 seconds)

Intro

  • You can join us live every Wednesday at 12p ET (9a PT) over at New Marketing TV which gets hijacked and changed to Pirates TV.
  • To interact with us, you can catch up with us on Twitter: @justinlevy or @crbrowning.  Also, make sure to tag your questions, comments or feedback with #piratestv.

Pirate Marketing Moves

  • BackType Comments - The introduction of the BackType Comments WordPress plug-in continues the trend in the next evolution of comments.  This was first tested by Mashable using a combination of Disqus and UberVU back in March.  Colin and Justin provide a couple different views on social media mentions as comments on blog posts.  What are your thoughts?

What’s in the Spyglass?

  • Skype going public, possibly – eBay announces plans to IPO Skype in 2010.  This is a pretty interesting announcement especially in a down economy when many technology companies are struggling.  But, Skype continues to post incredible profits reporting $551 million in revenue during 2008 which represented a 44% growth over 2007.
  • Troubles with TwitPic? – Many users were experiencing problems with TwitPic.  Compete.com reports show that TwitPic has grown to 2.3 million unique visitors per month and over 1 million users.  Is this a problem across the board as these small 3rd party apps grow?  What happens if Twitter disappears tomorrow?  What would happen to the 2,000+ apps that have been written for the platform?
  • MySpace Lite – Users have reported seeing a “Lite” feature in the top navigation bar which will strip out the customization and media which has become such an ingrained part of MySpace.  MySpace sites the reason for this move is for users who do not have a broadband connection since the customizations and media can cause a connection to lag.  Could it also be that MySpace sees the success of social networks, such as Facebook and FriendFeed, that don’t have allow for the same level of customization?  Sites

Note: We had problems with the live UStream.tv feed during Wednesday’s broadcast.  We apologize for this issue and look forward to seeing you again this coming Wednesday at 12p ET.

As always, we want to know what you like, hate or want to see different.  How can we continue to improve upon?  Please let us know in the comments below…

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Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: , ,

Lunch with the Pirates – Episode 1 – Welcome to Pirates TV

April 14, 2009 By 5 Comments
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Episode #1 – Wednesday, April 8, 2009
(Episode Length: 22 minutes, 21 seconds)

Intro

  • You can join us live every Wednesday at 12p ET (9a PT) over at New Marketing TV which gets hijacked and changed to Pirates TV.
  • To interact with us, you can catch up with us on Twitter: @justinlevy or @crbrowning.  Also, make sure to tag your questions, comments or feedback with #piratestv.
  • Lunch with the Pirates is jumping on board with all of the other live broadcasts.  Some of our friends include: HubSpot TV, Permission TV and Blue Sky Factory TV.  It is so easy to start and cheap to start a “TV show” nowadays but, are there companies that shouldn’t start a live online broadcast?

Pirate Marketing Moves

  • Skittles - Was it just a publicity stunt to get conversation going?  Colin doesn’t think so.  Colin believes that Skittles was turning the conversation over to their customers.  Thoughts?
  • iRoadTrip – The first iRoadTrip saw the team travel through the heartland of America to visit with true American innovators.  Next trips include an iRoadTrip sustainable innovations and education.  Disclosure: This is a New Marketing Labs project…

What’s in the Spyglass?

  • New Beta FriendFeed – Is it Twitter or is it Facebook?  I tend to think that it looks similar to the new version of Facebook.  This is very interesting because there were a lot of conversations around Facebook ripping off FriendFeed when they first released the “Like” feature.  However, this beta version of FriendFeed looks very similar to the Facebook stream.

…and with that concludes our first episode.  We actually recorded a few more minutes but realized that the camera stopped taping.  Oh well, we’ll keep improving each week, we promise :)

We know what we liked and what we want to improve upon but now we want to hear from you.  What did you think?  What can we do better?  Did you find the topics interesting?

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Filed Under: Facebook, Social Media, Twitter Tagged With: , , , ,

Fusing Media with AMD

April 13, 2009 By 1 Comment

While down at SXSW I had the opportunity to hang out with a few of the teams at AMD.  Not only were they at the Blogger Lounge every day but they were nice enough to sponsor our Inbound Marketing Bootcamp.  Of everything else I saw at SXSW, there was one product that got me super excited….and it wasn’t even part of SXSW.  You see, one of the things that I arranged with AMD was that during our break for lunch, that we would take a tour of their brand new campus.  I figured it was my chance to geek out and I was correct.

Casey Gotcher, Director of Product Marketing at AMD, was nice enough to give us a demo of some of the cool stuff that he has been working on.  The product that he’s been working really hard on is the AMD Fusion Media Explorer.  The Fusion Media Explorer is a “3D immersive social media and digital media browser”.  Basically, it takes all of the media on your computer, displays it in a really cool way and then allows you to interact with the interwebs based on what form of media you’re viewing and the subject of that media.  Casey explained that the Fusion Media Explorer is based around the concept of “Explore, Experience and Discover”.  While I could list off all of the features and bore you with a long technical post about this new cool toy, how about I just show you a video…

YouTube Preview Image

Since receiving Casey’s email a couple days ago, I have only had a chance to play with the software a little bit myself.  But, I can tell you that there aren’t too many new things that I’ve seen lately that get me as excited as I have been since seeing the first demo a few weeks ago.

In the next couple weeks AMD will be seeding it into public beta and will be free to download.  However, as of right now, it will only work on computers running AMD chips, for obvious reasons.  But, if you are really quiet and don’t tell AMD, you can get a pre-release copy of the Fusion Media Explorer now.  Download the Fusion Media Explorer here.

Once you take it for a test-drive, stop back over and let me know what you think…

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Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: , ,
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