Garret French and others have recently re-started conversations concerning Social Media and marketing. Two camps of though have been proposed, which you can read more about at the links above. I myself find I am in camp 3. I, unlike most web developers, began in print design, a more traditional marketing medium.

Camp 3 is simply this:
Social media was once the truest form of online journalism/news/sluething/diaries/etc available. Drudge being a great example. Fark.com still being one of the truest sites out there. Big time marketers saw potential in social marketing(Blair Witch Project being one of the first) and decided to utilize it, no different really than product placement in movies and television. American Idol is nothing more than digg geared towards wannabe pop stars as opposed to blogs/news. If you watch American Idol(which I don’t past the embarrassing audtions), you’ll see Coco-Cola cups in front of each judge. Now, informed comsumers see two types of content simultaneously taking place. The first bit of content takes place via the judges, contestants, interviews and montages. The second piece are the product placements. Now, no one feels that the product placements taint the other content on the show, they simply co-exist. No one would be disappointed to find out Simon is really drinking coffee, Randy is drinking Pepsi and Paula is drinking liquid Valium. We understand why the cups are there and their intentions and we are not alarmed, offended or tricked by this.

Now, online social media is no different. We, as consumers and average Joe’s, understand what is taking place online. We don’t get our shackles up(sorry, a southern colloquialism for getting upset) over the corporate placements within any social media. SNL post clips online. Does it bother us? No we understand it is there as both an advertisement for the show and for our enjoyment. Fortune 500 companies pay employees to maintain corporate blogs and they have discretion over what is posted like wartime morale officers comming down on Robin Williams in Good Morning Vietnam. Does this bother us? No, we take it for what its worth and move on.

Garrett is an old friend of mine, his post is worth the read as most of his client base resembles mine. Neither one of use are going to land a big Nike or Sony or Microsoft contract anytime soon. And thats great with us, we’re not going to get our shackles up.

Just a little tidbit here….Owning a website is really no different than catfishing. When people catfish, no matter what actual method they are using, they basically throw a line out there with bait and a hook and then you wait. You hope the fish likes what it sees and takes a bite. Owning a website is really no different. Millions of people own websites. There’s millions of things in that lake a catfish can eat. You put the best product out there that you can get your hands on and hope you land the fish. Bass fishing on the otherhand, you’re trying yo make the fish think it is eating something other than what you’re presenting. While there are people out there that practice such unethical methods, most websites I build for clients and my person websites are more like catfishing. Sure, you can spend tons of time researching the best landing pages the direct people to take the action you want, just like I can spends hours trying to get the attention of a catfish. But, when it’s all said and done, people, like catfish want the best thing available. In the case of catfish, it’s the stinkiest, stationary object out there. With people however, its always about quality. The quality could be in the product itself, in customer support or even in pricing.

Ok, I know this is kind of an obscure and random post, but when you are sitting by the lake enjoying time with your kids and you own a web development business, weird things pop into your head.

Ok I know this is a web development blog, but that doesn’t mean I can throw a little fun stuff out every now and again. Here in Madisonville,Ky we are in a ‘State of Emergency’. It’s bad enough tornadoes ripped through here last week leaving people homeless, injured and even worse, dead. Now we’ve had three days of ice storms. The kids have been out of school, roads have been closed, power has been out and tree are down everywhere. It truly looks like a war zone in some spots, my house and driveway included. I’ve been through this before. When I lived in Lexington,KY we had one of the worst ice storms in the history of the U.S. Millions of dollars of damage to houses, power lines, trees, yards and businesses. Not to mention the loss due to business lost. However, in the middle of that, the company I worked for still expected us to make it into work. I had to stay at a hotel 40 miles away. We didn’t have power in our apartment for 5 days, I’m stuck in Richmond,Ky and I was told “We’re an international company, our clients still have to work.” It was my first real job and I didn’t know any better. But Jeff Phillips, the previous owner of CADWebsiteDesign.com, taught me alot about being a business owner while I worked for him. On many occasions he and his wife, Lucinda, put employees and even their integrity before the almighty dollar. Sure they were in business to make money, but they had ethics. Employee safety came first. He stood up for his employees if they were ever mistreated by clients. He would turn down projects for both moral and ethical reasons. I guess that really speaks to their success doesn’t it? I feel their attitude towards owning a business is what lead them to achieve the American Dream. Retired in your early 40’s, life must be tough huh? They’ve deserve it!

Anyway, I’m posting some pictures of the ice storm. If anybody happens to stumble onto these in Google image search, feel free to use them however you wish. It’s not that I think of myself as a photographer, it’s simply that I think if you publish a photo on the web on a publicly accessed site/page, you should be willing to allow people to use that photo. If you want to manage the rights to a photo, go through the proper channels. Let Getty or someone else properly handle that.

War Zone

Ice

Winter Wonderland

Believe it or not, there is absolutely no snow in this picture. It is entirely ice.

Dewy

Anyone who knows me knows I will own nothing but German shepherds. This is my newest pup. My son, Mason, named him Dewy after seeing the movie Firehouse Dog. Dewy is 5 months old and just over 60lbs. To me, that rocks! I like dogs that look at other dogs like chew toys. My last German shepherd, Cain, had an entire graveyard of cats. Where he found them, I don’t know, but he kept a steady stream flowing in. So here is Dewy outside with me while I took these pictures:

As the holidays are gearing up and my mood seems to become a bit lighter, I would like to take the time to promote my favorite charity. It’s called Let’s Bring Em Home!

What started as somewhat of a pet project for webmaster Ernie Stewart has turned into a full-blown operation each year as Christmas rolls around and military personnel are sadly stuck in bunks thousands of miles away from the their families.

The goal of this charity is provided, free of charge, airline tickets for active military personnel trying to get home for the holidays. 96% of all funds donated are used to purchase tickets. Read what Ernie has to say and if that doesn’t pull on your heartstrings, I don’t know what will:

Each year I receive heart wrenching emails from a young female soldier who was forced to send her children to live with their grandparents, while she fulfilled her military duties. And now the only thing she wants for Christmas is to be able to give her children presents in person. Are you going to tell her no? Each year a young soldier fresh out of boot camp pines for the chance to spend just one more holiday with his parents before beginning a long deployment to the Middle East. Will he come home in once piece? Will he come home at all? I don’t know. But what if this is his last Christmas? Wouldn’t you want to spend it with loved ones, and not with the concrete walls of a dormitory?… And rest assured folks, nothing but heartbreak and disappointment await these fine people. You heard me. Nothing but heartbreak and disappointment await these fine people unless you and I do something about it.

- Ernie Stewart
ehowa.com

Today, I realized that I am turning nerdy four tomorrow. It would be fourty four if it weren’t for the exception that I realized I was smitttten with something I found on the web, that by other observations, would be considered rather mundane. I couldn’t help it, I just loved it.

My wife and I love to cook. I mean get in the kitchen with a glass of wine and fix something we saw on Rachael Ray kind of cooking. Neither of us are very creative when it comes to cooking, but when we follow the recipies provided, we can whip up some masterpieces. Maybe it’s just the wine that makes us think so, but good just the same.

As we sat in our living room this morning, Lucinda decided to put together a shopping list to prepare our menus for the week. This is rather time consuming as she has to write out everything she needs to shop for. It was at that moment that I decided to do a search for an open source shopping list generator. What I found was Freaking Awesome.

It is a Firefox extension called Grocery List Generator and it gives you an area online to share recipies and generate grocery shopping lists for the mouth watering dishes you are going to prepare.

It seems to be relatively new based on the age of the recipies added to the shared database. If you like to cook, install it on your Firefox browser and add some recipies.

If you like wine, come read some of our wine reviews at Novice Wine Blog.

For many years we have heard the sirens wailing on and on about the death of a hard-copy yellow pages. As the Gen-Xers age and those who lived through the Great Depression are beginning to rapidly disappear into the great beyond, futurist have been telling us the phonebook will cease to exist. The yellow pages will become irrelevant. Why? The reasons vary. Phonebooks are often outdated the day they are printed. Also, they are not the most userfriendly method of tracking down a person or business. But my favorite point is that we are becoming a population of wired individuals, meaning that more than likely we are already infront of one of multiple devices we own that are readily connected to the web. Why get out of the Laz-y-boy, track down an outdated spider-killer that’s stuffed in a desk drawer, the whole time missing David Lee Roth in his cheek-less spandex on VH1 Classics, just to look for a phone number that may or may not be there when your iPhone is right in your pocket?

But today during my lunch break I was enjoying the finest delicacy my wife could whip up using a microwave and a chicken pot pie and watching ‘Drake & Josh’ with the kids and I noticed something about the commercials. Ever since DoubleClick was a mere glimmer in the eye of the internet, the knock on T.V. advertising has been that it doesn’t provide the statistics that online advertising can obtain. For years, 1-800 numbers have been linked to individual ad campaigns, a company’s ad on a a particular station, or even a company’s ad during a particular time slot. So trying to track leads through television advertising is nothing new. The new incarnation of this is all the scam artist out there running ads about working from home or debt consolidation. You’ll see the same generic ad on every station. In that ad, the web address is never spoken by one of the actors. The only place you’ll see an address is at the bottom of the screen and usually the url will be something like www.workfromhome2543.com. The 2543 isn’t relevant to to anyone except the advertiser. The url usually redirects to some other domain altogether, but 2543 allows them run that url on MSNBC, www.workfromhome777.com on FoxNews and www.workfromhome666.com on CNN. Now they know what news network is driving the most traffic. For more legit companies, Intuit for example, I’ve even recently seen www.quicken.com/TV or some variation. All this used to be done simply to track who produces and who doesn’t.

But today during that somewhat enjoyable episode of ”Drake & Josh’, I noticed television advertising has almost passed me by. Actually, they have given in to my subliminal thinking. Effective T.V. advertising no longer feels the need to bombard us with as much information as they can squeeze into a 30-second spot. Why? We’ve become so savy, they realize that we will find the information we are looking for. If an advertisement catches my attention, I don’t call a sales rep and play 20-questions. I simply pull up Firefox and I’m presented with the greatest advertising machine ever built, a search engine. I simply search for what I want to know. The roll of commercials is becoming to simply create awareness that such a business exist. Case-in-point, New Wave Communications. They’ve recently become the local cable service provider. Even before they officially took over, they began running ads simply telling the viewer ‘We’re here and our name is New Wave’. The rest was left up to me. It was up to me to search for their site, find out their packages and rates and basically inform myself. It looks like T.V. advertisements have evolved. It looks like advertising on television will be around a little while longer, which is great because I can’t wait for Terry Tate to come out of retirement. I’ve got to call a plumber, now where did I put that phonebook?

For years pictures from the various satellite image providers like Google and Microsoft have been passed around the web. Funny pictures, pictures of Area 51 and even crop circles have made their way to inboxes around the world and sites like Fark.com. With the lauch of Google’s Street View we often get intimate snap shots of everyday happenings and those not so everyday. There are already sites setup to track and log these ‘Easter Eggs’ and all of them are worth checking them out.

Check out:
http://www.streetviewr.com/
http://battellemedia.com/archives/003680.php
http://www.mapmole.com/

Follow Your Dreams Stephen Colbert, The Greatest Living American

You may know Stephen Colbert as The Greatest Living American, but not so long ago, he was spinning his wheels looking for Mr. Goodwrench.

Stephen Colbert spent many years perfecting his comedic delivery and timing while searching for Mr. Goodwrench, but gave up on finding him.

Stephen Colbert now has a new obsession. The new obsession is a Google Bomb, and that dedication to his obsession has earned him the title of The Greatest Living American

We have purchased a Horizon Houseboat from Green Turtle Bay Yacht Sales and are naming it “The Black Pearl” due to it’s color scheme.

It is a beauty of a boat at 16′ wide by 77′ long. It has twin 3.0 ltr mercruiser engines, stern thruster, power inverter, 12.5kw westerbeake gen set, and lots of other goodies that are going to make for great houseboating weekends on Lake Barkley in Western Kentucky.

The boat is white with a black party top and bimini top. All of the interior is done in black and tan.

We have made an offer that the current owner has accepted, secured financing, now we just need to get through the Marine Survey part and she will be ours.

We will be moving the boat to Prizer Point in March. I can hardly wait to get her out in a cove and spend the weekend with some friends. My wife’s father has said he would like to be on the dock to see my face when I try to put it in our slip for the first time. I have never driven a boat this big (my previous boat was a 33′ Cruisers Inc Ultra Vee) but feel that I am up to the challenge. With the help of the stern thruster, it should be something I can get the hang of after only a few minor bangs and dents.

My biggest problem now is that even though I was born in Owensboro Kentucky, and even though I now own a boat named The Black Pearl, my wife expects me to be as hot as Johnny Depp

Maybe I will make a deal with her like, if she can be as hot as Keira Knightley, I can pull off the Johnny Depp thing :)Â