One soda, one candy bar, and—oh—how about a fresh-baked pizza from scratch?

If you find yourself in Milan’s Malpensa airport—or a few other places around Italy—you can watch as your dough is kneaded, your desired toppings doled out, and your pizza bakes … all in just under three minutes. But if you’re hoping to watch a real Italian pie guy work his magic, you’ll have to go somewhere else—this pizza’s made entirely inside a vending machine.

For travelers, a vending machine can be a welcome sight. Perhaps it’s just for a quick snack when the rest of the airport is closed. Or, overseas, an easy transaction without any language hurdles. But these days, the vending machine is diversifying. Now travelers can find all sorts of things inside these contraptions—items that range from the practical to the absurd.
The world’s first vending machine apparently dates back to the first century, when Hero of Alexandria, a Greek mathematician, devised a coin-operated mechanism that would dispense holy water. Perhaps because that was such a tough act to follow, vending machines didn’t really evolve again until the 19th century, when Industrial Age machines started selling postcards or gum.
Today, vending machines tend to be more prevalent—and therefore more exotic—in Europe and Asia, says Michael Provost, president of vending machine company Wurlitzer Vending Machines. A big reason: they have more mass transit. “Vending machines are on the train platforms everywhere—they’re open for 24 hours and don’t need employees.”At the intersection of technology and quirkiness, Japan is the hands-down leader, with all sorts of items offered for automated sale. “Japan has the highest vending machine density in the world—about one per 23 people,” says Christopher Salyers, author of “Vending Machines: Coined Consumerism”.“Machines sell liquor, noodles, underwear, fresh meat, to name but a few,” he says. “And why not?”

The U.S. is making its own strides, too. At Miami’s Mondrian South Beach Hotel, you can use the vending machine in the lobby to buy anything from a toothbrush to gold-plated handcuffs(!), or even to rent a Cadillac convertible. And taking a cue, perhaps, from the Japanese, more than 100 bars and restaurants in the U.S. now carry the Maine Lobster Game. For a mere $3, you get 15 seconds to try to catch a live lobster with a claw on a crane. It’s a big hit with customers, says Chris Keslinger, president of Vending Extreme. “We have had machines bring in over $2,000 in one week.” If you win, just hope the bartender has a pot of boiling water handy.

And if you end up taking your live lobster home in a bag? People will likely still pony up $3. “We love vending machines because their very nature will always remain consistent,” says Salyers. “Some of us would prefer having access to goods 24 hours a day, devoid of human interaction or adult supervision.”

“Change is inevitable,” he says, quoting the aphorism. “Except from a vending machine.”

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Phone Call Tracking provides detailed and real-time phone call analytics reports. Reporting includes tracking data on call volume, routing, duration and more for inbound and outbound phone calls.

Using Phone Call Tracking For Your Business

Do you know which ads generate the most leads? Use Call Tracking software to measure the success of marketing campaigns, track phone calls alongside web data in Google Analytics and increase overall marketing ROI.

Key Features of Phone Call Tracking

• Access to real-time reports from the web
  Ifbyphone’s call tracking software includes complete real-time analytics reports that you can access from the web whenever you’d like. View reports online, download a .csv file, send yourself scheduled reports via email, or integrate reports into your software with our API.
• Campaign Management For Tracking Multiple Campaigns Or Clients
  With Campaign Management, you can group your Call Tracking Numbers together for custom reports. This makes it easy for you to manage multiple campaigns and for clients to login and see the results of their specific campaigns.
• Call Tracking in Google Analytics
  Do you have a website? Track phone calls alongside web data in Google Analytics.
• Track Phone Calls From Online Marketing Campaigns
  Trying to figure out which keywords, websites, or pay-per-click campaigns generate the most phone calls? Use Ifbyphone’s Dynamic Phone Number Insertion software to track which referral sources lead to the most phone calls, by displaying unique phone numbers on your site depending on the referral source of the traffic.
• Call Recording, Lead Qualification, Call Routing & More!
  In addition to call tracking, Ifbyphone’s provides features enabling you to record phone calls, qualify inbound leads, route calls, and much more.
• Whisper Messages To Announce The Caller
  Before you accept the inbound call, listen to a ‘whisper message’ telling you who is calling or where they heard about you.

One of the newest and most exciting things on the Internet today is blogs and blogging websites. Blogs, an abbreviation of the term “web logs”, are individual online journals that allow people to voice opinions, talk about passions, hobbies, business or personal topics. Though journals on the Internet are not new, organized blog websites have now made it possible for people to easily set up personal platforms where they can attract readers and reach out to a large public. This means marketing with a blog can be very effective also, and the cost is simply a little of your time each day.

Blogs can be useful in a variety of ways. A blog can keep friends and family members updated on how your life is going. It can help you reach out to fellow hobbyists and give them the benefit of your wisdom, or send out feelers for some advice. It can showcase your business and expertise in any number of fields.

When you own and run your own business, marketing with a blog is one way to attract clients and customers and can be incorporated easily into an online marketing campaign. When you have a niche in life that you are trying to make profitable, it can be difficult to get the word out without spending a fortune in advertising. Having a blog can help you to reach out to people locally or all over the world, depending on which customers you are looking to attract and still be cost effective at the same time.

Let’s say that you make costume jewelry and want more people to know about what you have to offer. Marketing with a blog can be a good way to do this. Sign up with a blogging website, set up an individual blog and then start writing a daily journal about making jewelry. Talk about the jewelry trade and current news as well as your particular style of jewelry making. Talk about the history behind some of the jewelry that you make and the adventures you’ve had finding the pieces that you put in your jewelry. In other words, make what you do interesting to people and out it on a more personal level.

When people start relating to you and seeing you as an expert with important things to impart to others, they are more inclined to want to buy what you are selling. With your blog you can create a following and start some word-of-mouth advertising that will domino into increased sales.

To get the most out of marketing with a blog, you need to make sure your writing is articulate and interesting. You want people to enjoy what they’re reading and to want to come back for more. If you don’t consider yourself a strong writer, try to enlist the help of someone who is. Write your own blog, but have this person read it over for you and give you tips on how to clean up the text. Entertaining and concise writing will automatically make people think of you as someone who is intelligent, and they will want to know what you have to say.

You want to use keywords in your blog that will attract people who are looking for what you have to offer. Keywords are words put into website and online article text that hopefully match the words that people are entering into search engines. If people are searching for costume jewelry on Google, you want to have those words and related words in your blog entries so that the search engine will hopefully steer them toward it.
Using SEO, more commonly known as Search Engine Optimization is a great way to get people to your blog. Another method is to join communities that are especially geared to send traffic to other blogs. Joining a blogroll which is essentially a listing of blogs that you put on your blog’s page in order to get the same service from other blogs with your link inserted in the list is another method. All of these and others are popular and usually more than one if not all of them are used consecutively.

If you have a business website, put a clear link to that website at the end of each blog entry. Write accompanying text explaining how people will benefit by clicking on your link to learn more and contact you business.
Do your research and make sure that your blog is directed to the target audience needing your goods or services. The point of marketing is to convert readers into customers so tailoring the blog to something that’s of interest to them will give you a better chance of that. This includes not only the content you put on your blog but how it looks as well; the colors, fonts and photos.

You’ll find that marketing with a blog can be one of the best tools for increasing business profits. Follow the simple blog marketing guidelines and be sure to keep up with it each day and you stand to see big financial returns for a minimal investment of time.

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Monday, March 8th, 2010 by Elan

Today we present you with our latest product, VoteByPhone.

Rest assured, this isn’t your traditional Chicago-based voting machine. VoteByPhone is a do-it-yourself live audience polling application: Simply configure your poll online, invite voters to call in, and view real-time results in any web broswer. We launched the application at the SingStrong A Cappella Festival this past weekend, and today we’re opening VoteByPhone to the public.

Here are some ideas for how to use VoteByPhone:

   • Radio shows can poll listeners about an issue being discussed, or which song to play next

   • Live TV shows and competitions can invite audience members to vote for the best performer

   • Politicians can survey citizens about public opinion

   • Speakers at conferences can ask attendees for feedback

   • Non-profits can reach out and ask volunteers questions

   • Associations can run elections for board members

VoteByPhone doesn’t require listeners to be SMS-fluent, Twitter users, or even be in front of a computer. Your voters can be anywhere call in a vote from any phone.

If you want to incorporate live audience polling into your next event, give us a call.

Valeria Maltoni over at Conversation Agent has invited me to contribute to a string of posts dedicated to businesses measuring the ROI and success from social media efforts. If you haven’t already you should check out Valeria’s site – I think much of my audience would find her content very useful and engaging!

I’ve been asked my thoughts on companies measuring social media efforts many times. In fact, I’ve gone through the process of justifying the effort and definitely have a strong opinion. If you’re a marketing manager wanting to jump into social media, but your superiors are hesitant to give budget for the effort, you really need to think out how to position the medium.

I don’t think you can put a dollar figure on social media to prove ROI. You’ll have a hard time showing what the revenue increases were from your blogging or other social media efforts. The medium has not advanced far enough for that. I also don’t think that the medium is wide-spread enough that you can justify ROI with only subscriber count and number of comments. Many senior executives wouldn’t know what an RSS subscriber even means.

With that said, I think this is a very viable form of corporate marketing and there are a number of ways the medium can be sold up the chain and measured throughout the year:

• Don’t Isolate Social Media: Position social media as a component of your overall marketing plan. If you engage in print advertising, you’re used to making the case that print advertising is a branding component that is used to support your overall marketing messaging. Like social media, the ROI from print advertising is very hard to measure. Social Media should be one medium you’re using among many in your communication with your audience and customers.

• Sales Tool: When is the last time you created a brochure and were asked to measure the ROI from that effort? You created the brochure to support the overall success of a product or service. The brochure helped to position and describe your product development effort. Blogging as a social media medium could be considered along the same lines. With every piece of content we create for our company blog, we make sure our sales people are aware they can share that content with interested customers. It essentially becomes a unique and innovative tool they can use to spread the word. As long as you’re providing useful content for your audience, they’ll appreciate your effort and most likely visit again.

• Feedback: We’re also finding success in using blogging as a method for gathering customer feedback through surveys, new product ideas and product feedback forms. Social media is supposed to be a conversation, correct? Well, treat it as such and allow your audience to participate in the future of your products. We’ve already received valuable feedback that rivals that of an individual order placed.

• Promote Realistic Expectations: I think many marketers who are into social media and blogging are a bit misguided as to the affect blogging will have on marketing efforts. In the marketing blog community, you can start a blog, link out to 50 other bloggers in your first week and pick up traffic and subscribers that are fun to measure. Not all niches have that opportunity. Many communities lack a large enough niche in which to socialize. What then? I encourage people in less sociable niches not to pump the benefits of thousands of subscribers, millions of page views, or hundreds of comments. It could take years to develop that following in some online communities as the medium matures. Focus less on expected statistics and more on how social media will be integrated with the rest of your product marketing efforts.

• Multipurpose Content: As a small business marketing manager, it’s always music to my ears when someone says that we can use content we’ve created for multiple purposes. If you’re blogging, you should be creating valuable content. Have you thought about using portions of that content for an eNewsletter creation or the beginning of a white paper? Make sure you have a plan to have multiple purposes for your efforts.

• Go Find Your Customer: One easy case I was able to make for blogging was the ability for our company to more easily go meet our audience where they begin most online searches that lead to our website – Google. Most of our website traffic originates on Google so it only makes sense for us to continue our efforts to get in their search results. Blogging platforms are very solid ways to optimize content for search engines – especially if you’re updating often and using the right methods.

• Stats: I know, I know – stats are important. I just didn’t want them to be the focus of this post because not all social media efforts should be measured with analytics. Believe me, I do follow our stats, but I pay more attention to subscribers, comments, and from where the visits originate. These are important statistics to gauge how well your audience is receiving your content.

In two years, I’ll guarantee that there will be measurements in place that prove ROI from businesses engaging in social media. This method of conversing with your audience is growing by the day. But right now we need to focus on social media as a tool in our marketing toolbox that supports all the other tools we’re using in our marketing plans.

I’m supposed to tag some people to also contribute to this conversation, but there are so many people I’d like to hear from that I don’t know where I’d begin. For starters I’d like to see what Marty, Matt, Pat and Stoney have to say. But, if you have opinions and want to chime in, please do – and send me the link to your post and I’ll add it this one.

Reader Responses:

• Measuring ROI on social media investments (Francois Gossieaux – Emergence Marketing)
• Social Media Measurement (Tom O’Brien – A Human Voice)

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By Heidi Cohen

As a member of the SES Chicago Social Media Checklist panel last week, it was striking to hear from so many small and medium-sized businesses wrestling with developing a viable social media marketing strategy. Small and medium-sized businesses often have more limited resources, both personnel and budgets, than large companies, so they’re looking to build more cost-effective sales streams. With the goals of raising awareness, expanding market share, and improving customer loyalty, it’s critical to be creative in how your business engages and participates in the social media arena.

Nine Questions to Ask When Developing a Social Media Marketing Strategy

Small and medium-sized businesses tend to be so focused on keeping their businesses going that it can be difficult to brainstorm on ways to leverage the dynamic social media environment. Here are nine questions to help you think about your business in ways that enable you to maximize your social media marketing efforts.

1. Does your business tap into people’s passions and/or hobbies? With hobbies and special interests, customers may make different spending tradeoffs, particularly with “staycations,” where customers look for local activities. From a social media marketing perspective, this translates to ways that people can share their hobbies and special interests using photographs, videos, and blogs. For example, I suggested that a tea purveyor in the SES audience create a Flickr account to show off unusual teapots people collect, and invite the public to participate in this community.
2. Can your business show off its work? While this tends to focus on visual portrayals, like photographs and video, it can also include audio and text. Sharing photographs and videos helps businesses where prospects perceive there are high risks. For example, beauty salons and tailors can show before and after photographs. Remember to get patrons’ permission or offer a free bonus to incent customers to participate. Flickr contains many bakeries showing off their finished product’s visual beauty.
3. Can you give prospects information they find useful? Think broadly to help customers use your product. For example, a food specialty shop’s blog may describe new foods with recipes and menus to use them. A resale shop can use a blog to show how to make wardrobes and living areas snazzy using its current product.
4. Can you extend your expertise to a broader audience? This can work very well for professionals like lawyers and accountants. Leverage videos, presentations, and Webinars giving how-to tips to explain wills or budgeting.
5. Does your business provide reasons for people to gather? In a virtually connected world, give people a reason to congregate in person. This may drive additional revenues. Examples include wine tastings for local wine shops and cooking classes for food specialty shops and/or restaurants. Use Meetup.com to organize the community and post comments. Where appropriate, add a Flickr page to gather related photographs.
6. Can your business disseminate fun or related information via social media? Think in terms of bite size chunks of content. This information doesn’t need to be your business’s main focus. For example, a massage therapist can create a Twitter stream and blog for meditations to put people in a more serene state of mind.
7. Are there targeted or niche communities where your prospects and customers naturally congregate? If so, set up a group in this social media site. For example, yarn shops participate and socialize on Ravelry, a knitting community.
8. Do major blogs cover your business’s area of expertise? If so, actively comment and add to the conversation. Offer to create guest posts to share your knowledge and broaden your audience. This means adding real value to the conversation.
9. Does your offering lend itself to creating a small online community and/or bulletin board? For example, many religious organizations leverage Yahoo Groups to communicate with members. These interactions can move online and offline.

Seven Tips to Extend Social Media Marketing Efforts

As a small or medium-sized business, it’s important to think about how to extend your social media efforts and to integrate these initiatives into your ongoing marketing plans. (For more information on developing an online marketing strategy, click here.) Here are seven tips to help you:

1. Listen before you participate. While social media can help small and medium-sized businesses appear bigger than they are, it’s critical not to promote, promote, promote.
2. Monitor what’s being said about your business. This includes a variety of social media offerings including blogs, review sites like Yelp and niche communities, and discussion groups.
3. Integrate social media efforts offline. Provide retail prospects with a similar experience through an old-fashioned bulletin board with photographs or handouts containing how-to information.
4. Promote social media efforts online and offline. Include your Web site, e-mailings, direct mail, local advertising, in-store postings, flyers, business cards, and correspondence.
5. Socialize social media marketing. Ask visitors, prospects, and customers to visit your social media installations and share their experiences. Don’t overlook traditional ways to extend your business such as local events like Rotary and local sports teams such as Little League.
6. Create a content strategy. (For additional insights on content strategy, click here.) Develop an editorial calendar for content creation to ensure that you don’t get stuck thinking of what to write, especially when using Twitter and blogs where customers expect regular servings of information.
7. Make content search-friendly. Use relevant search keywords and tags and add text to photographs and video to aid findability.

Measuring the Results of Your Social Media Marketing Efforts

Since many small and medium-sized businesses don’t spend lots of time using fancy metrics, here are the main factors to keep your business on track.

• Revenues. Have sales increased? It’s important to note that it may take time to build up a social media following.
• Expenses. Track actual costs as well as the time involved in participating in social media marketing.
• Prospects and customers. Track the number of people who are engaging with your social media efforts. Often, there’s a 90 percent readers/viewers, 9 percent commenters, and 1 percent active content creators breakout.
• Feedback. Monitor the type, amount, and quality of feedback you’re receiving.

Remember there are many ways to engage your business in social media. Consider the options and test what works best for your offering.

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Are you shopping around for a solution to automatically send outbound calls to customers or prospects?

Whether you call it Voice Broadcasting, Phone Broadcasting, Voice Mail / Message Broadcasting, Robo Calling, or just automated calling, here are 17 questions you should consider asking before you choose your provider:

1. On-Time Delivery Guarantee – This isn’t the airline industry. Expect on-time service. If your calls go out late, you shouldn’t have to pay. Unfortunately some voice broadcasting providers tend to over-schedule broadcasts at a given time, forcing them to send out your broadcasts behind schedule. Does the provider have an on-time delivery guarantee?

2. Self-Service or Middleman – Can you manage & schedule your own broadcasts, or will you need to rely on a middleman to do everything on your behalf? We strongly recommend the former. In either case, expect excellent customer service.

3. Transfer Fees & Double Billing – Some providers advertise one per minute rate, but double bill by charging you for each person on the line. Ask if they charge extra for a transfer, or if they double bill, to make sure you’re not going to be charged twice the advertised rate.

4. Extra Fees – While you may need to pay for extra ports if you want to send out lots of simultaneous calls, you shouldn’t have to pay for setup fees, unanswered calls, busy signals, disconnected numbers, or fees for transferred calls. Ask what extra fees may apply.

5. Per Minute Rates- How much are per minute rates? More than 10-12 cents per minute is pretty high, while 1-2 cents per minute is suspiciously low. Where are the hidden fees? How is the sound & delivery quality? Ask these companies tough questions, and ask for references.

6. Rounding – If you are doing high volume broadcasting, will the company offer 30 second, or even 6 second, rounding instead of to 60? A provider that offers 6 or 30 second rounding could save you half (or more) of the advertised price of a provider offering only 60 second rounding. If a call is normally $0.035/minute, rounding a 24 second call could cut your call costs in half with 30 second rounding, and even lower with 6 second rounding.

7. FTC’s Telemarketing Sales Rule Opt-Out compliance – In 2008 the FTC enacted the Telemarketing Sales Rule which requires voice broadcasters to offer an opt-out option in their voice broadcast messages. Much like the “unsubscribe” link at the bottom of solicitation emails, certain voice broadcasts now require an “unsubscribe” or “opt-out” option. Ask what compliance tools your vendor offers.

8. Pausing Campaigns – Let’s say you are voice broadcasting to generate leads. Your campaign does surprisingly well and all of your phones are ringing off the hook. If your agents are all busy, you’ll want to temporarily pause your campaign so potential leads don’t get a busy signal when they transfer back. Does the voice broadcasting provider offer a pausing capability?

9. Voice Mail Detection – Can your vendor detect whether a live person or voice mail answers your call? Just like you’d relay a message differently to a live person than to a voice mail, your voice broadcasting company should enable you to deliver an alternative message for voice mails.

10. Interactive Voice Response capabilities – Do you want an interactive voice broadcast, or are you just looking to send a recorded message? If you want interactive calls, ask your vendor about interactive voice response (IVR) capabilities. This can be especially useful in the lead generation business where you want to prequalify leads.

11. Transfer – Ask how you can route customers or prospects when they chose to transfer back to you. For example, many voice broadcasting companies will have you record a message and then tell the caller to press 1 to be transferred back to a single number. What if you want to route the caller based on their location to the nearest store? To an available sales agent? To your office, cell, & home phone simultaneously? To your virtual receptionist, an interactive voice response dialog, or voice mail? Figure out what you need, and find a voice broadcasting company that can route calls to fit your need.

12. Recording – When there is a transfer back to your sales agent, do you want to be able to record that conversation “for quality & training purposes”? Ask if that is possible.

13. Best Practices – Does your vendor truly care about your success? Ask for tips & best practices or assistance from a customer service rep who has experience setting up successful broadcasts.

14. Customer Service – Can you reach the provider over the phone? If you schedule a big broadcast will they monitor the calls? Are they nice, helpful & informative on the phone? Consider your voice broadcasting provider a partner, and demand outstanding customer service & support.

15. Open & Honest – Does the provider publish pricing on their website? Do they answer your questions in a straight forward manner? Do they get back to you quickly? Can you find their phone number, address, and management team on the website? Do they have convincing testimonials from real customers? Find a company you can trust.

16. Reporting – Do you get instant access to reports, or do you need to wait? Can you download them into multiple formats, or is it just some numbers in an email from your sales rep? Using reports to determine your ROI and to improve future broadcasts is crucial. Demand top-notch reporting.

17. Silo or suite – Does your provider just do voice broadcasting, or can they come up with creative solutions to help your business grow? Ask what else the voice broadcasting company does for companies in your industry.

In the voice broadcasting business, you get what you pay for. Spend time doing research & asking the right questions.

by Elan

Here are 10 Find Me Call Forwarding features that you should consider:

Forwarding By Schedule – Easily set up & update a schedule online for how to forward calls.

Simultaneous Forwarding –  Forward a call to multiple numbers at the same time. For example, a phone call forwards to your office & cell at the same time.

Sequential Forwarding –  Forward calls to one number, then if there is no answer to another number.  This should be possible in the same order every time or in a round robin order.

Screening – If you are forwarding calls from your office to your cell, you may not always want to answer it. A good call forwarding service can prompt the caller for their name so you can decide whether or not to take the call.

Recording – There may be instances that you want to record a phone call. Ask if your Find Me service has optional call recording functionality.

Voice Mail Control – If you forward calls from your office to your cell, you may still want the caller to leave voice mail on your office voice mail. Demand flexibility, including one voice mail for all of your numbers that can be emailed to you.

Virtual Receptionist – Rather than just a straight transfer, you might want to prompt the caller with a virtual receptionist that says you aren’t available in the office but the call is being forwarded to your cell phone.

Additional Find Me – Let’s say an important client calls, but you aren’t available on any of your numbers. A full-featured Find Me Call Forwarding service should enable you to start forwarding calls to coworkers if you aren’t available.

Reporting – Want to see details about each call? Ask about Find Me call forwarding reports so you can see how each call is routed.

Custom Hold Music – While you forward the caller between phones, you should be able to customize your own “on hold / forwarding “ music or message.

by Rob Garner

A couple of weeks ago, I lost my keys and must have searched my entire house and car at least three times trying to find them. After that last round of searching, I plopped down in a chair in front of my computer, exasperated. With an open search box in my peripheral vision, I continued to ponder where they might have possibly gone. At that moment, I could have used something like a Google Key Finder. Imagine an RFID setup for the keychain, combined with a more detailed version of Google Latitude (complete with a home floor plan), and then I’d type in “where did I put my keys” and be on my way.

Then I wondered, had anyone actually ever entered “where did I put my keys” into a search box? I went to the Google Keyword Tool to find out. Sure enough, there was a search for “where did I put my keys” with an average of 72 searches per month. Another variation was “have you seen my keys” with an average of 22 searches per month. No keys, but perhaps they felt a little better venting into the search box.

As I continued perusing the Google Keyword Tool, there were a number of other dead-end and clueless searches to be found. Among the other lost items people rely on the Google search gods to find:
- “Where did I put my glasses” with an average of 320 searches per month.
- “Have you seen my stapler” with an average of 390 searches per month.

Realizing that there may be more of these to be found, I went seeking other terms, and scored big time:
- “Who is buried in Grant’s tomb” was entered 1,000 times per month on average. The joke is over before the results even hit the screen.
- “What is the number for 911″ averaged 36 searches per month. For their own safety’s sake, let’s hope they figured this out.

But wait – there’s even more. A search for “what is” yielded the following gems:
- “What is my name?” was searched 40,500 times per month. Is it a song, perhaps? Maybe they woke up after a rough night out on the town that landed them in front a Google search box? Or maybe there is an epidemic of amnesia?
- “What is my religion” got 320 searches per month. I don’t even know what to say about this, other than it strikes me completely strange that someone would legitimately type this into a search box.

“Why am I” also turned up a nice list of stemmed oddities. These two were my favorites:
- “Why am I hot” netted 9,900 searches per month. This phrase is one of two things: A use of the search box as the new “mirror on the wall” for those puzzled by their own hotness, or a question posed by people unaware of the methods of cool air circulation.
- ”Why am I always so hot” was searched 36 times per month on average. These people are not just hot, they’re always so hot, and they don’t know why. Maybe they should go to the front page of Google Hot Trends, and keep hitting refresh until their name appears, and then they will know.
(No, refreshing the page will not make a name come up in Google Hot Trends).

Other “why am I” searches often turn up information that might actually satisfy the searcher, but are still interesting nonetheless. These include:
- “Why I am so tired” – 5,400 searches per month.
- “Why am I sneezing so much” – 16 searches per month.
- “Why am I so broke” – 16 searches per month.

On the existential side of things, the following searches stemmed from (and included) “I am”:
- “I am” – 7,480,000 searches per month.
- “I am here” – 550,000 searches per month.
- “I am me” – 201,000 searches per month.

Along the more intellectual side, “what is the meaning of life” has an average of 22,200 monthly searches. Of course when I think about the meaning of life, I think Monty Python, and also found the stemmed phrase, “what is the air speed velocity of an unladen swallow?” with 1,590 searches per month. But did they mean African, or European?

Many people who lost their mojo rely on Google to get it back. “Who stole my mojo?” yields 91 searches per month. And for others, Google is also the trusted source for finding stolen dogs (“Who stole my dog?” averaged 12 searches per month).

It’s possible that some of these folks may be hitting the wrong box, presumably mistaking search for a chat, or IM client. But for the others, it’s much more interesting to leave it to the imagination to decide.

by Chad White

What Email Can Learn from Social Networks

Expressing personality. Most brands can no longer afford to be faceless entities. The interactivity and transparency of the Internet has elevated the need for personality. Luckily, there are several ways to do this: You can use an executive as TigerDirect does, staff members like Crutchfield, or your customers like REI. The most poignant expression of personality I’ve seen recently is Backcountry’s memorial message for skier Shane McConkey.

Expressing a sense of community. People want discounts and helpful information, but many also want to be part of a community. Including product testimonials from product reviews on your site is one way to do this. Backcountry goes a step further and highlights its top contributors in its monthly newsletter.

Mark Brownlow of Email Marketing Reports recently suggested another way to build a community feel: adding social proof to your email sign-up process, such as a running count of how many subscribers you have. Thanks to blogs, Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn, subscriber counts are a well-established and highly promoted measurement of legitimacy and influence. I haven’t seen anyone try this yet, but the idea is intriguing.

What Social Networks Can Learn from Email

Providing exclusivity. Email subscribers appreciate it when they get exclusive deals and information not available to your Web site visitors. It helps justify them sharing their email address with you. With social networks, there’s a similar dynamic. Some people will ask themselves, “Why should I bother to be a fan if the announcements and other content are available on your Web site or to email subscribers?”

There’s value to making information available via different channels — being channel-agnostic is great m– but if you want to get people to engage with you via multiple channels, then the experience has to be different. Indeed, people expect to have a different experience with your brand via Facebook vs. Twitter vs. email, for instance.

Explaining the benefits of joining. Just as email sign-ups suffer when you don’t explain the benefits of receiving your emails, your “Find us on Facebook” or “Follow us on Twitter” call-to-action put the burden on your customers to explore the benefits themselves. Quickly listing the key benefits can be effective in getting people motivated to take action. In a recent email, Fingerhut did a good job of selling the benefits for engaging with the company on Facebook and Twitter.

Driving subscribers to other channels. Providing customers with many avenues to take advantage of offers and exposing them to different channels has well-established benefits. Just as email programs aren’t maximizing their opportunity when they drive traffic solely to the Web, self-contained social networks are destined to underperform. Look for occasions to expose customers to multiple channels. Sephora did that recently by asking email subscribers to share a digital gift (a tote bag) with their Facebook friends; if they did that, they could get a real Sephora tote from their local store. But the most impressive utilization of a brand’s channels that I’ve seen recently was Buy.com and its Tweet n Seek contest, which had participants following them on Twitter, searching Buy.com, visiting their Facebook page, and reading products pages.

Social media is changing the way travelers relate to big companies like airlines and hotel chains; calling the 800 number and sitting on hold for 45 minutes waiting for your complaint to be heard isn’t your only option anymore.

By Ed Hewitt

It’s undeniable that social media tools like Twitter, Facebook and YouTube can seem like nothing but a sea of banalities — vacation photos, mundane status updates, birthday wishes, comments on what you had for lunch — but every once in a while, a voice in the wilderness breaks through with a post or tweet heard around the world.

This very thing happened twice in the travel industry recently when a couple of more or less ordinary (but very well-crafted) complaints about air travel turned into extraordinary Internet sensations — and forced the airlines in question to respond.

Social media is changing the way travelers relate to big companies like airlines and hotel chains; calling the 800 number and sitting on hold for 45 minutes waiting for your complaint to be heard isn’t your only option anymore. Even as we are standing in line waiting for bad news, being treated about the same as our luggage, and enduring countless slights and indignities, you and I alike can get the attention of big travel companies, forcing them to listen and respond. With the explosion of social media, we are seeing it happen more and more.

Case study No 1: United Breaks perfectly good guitars

Country singer Dave Carroll of the band Sons of Maxwell has become the poster child for this phenomenon (and for our frustrations as travelers) with his song and video United Breaks Guitars.

When I first started compiling notes for this article, the United Breaks Guitars video was known mostly to musicians, having made the rounds of guitar Web sites and message boards. But as I finish the article this afternoon, the video has been watched over 3.4 million times. Singer Dave Carroll has been on “The Early Show,” and news of the video has showed up on CNN and earned full articles in newspapers like USA Today, the Los Angeles Times and the Sydney Morning Herald (yes, that’s Sydney, Australia). A search for “United breaks guitars” on Google News produces nearly 500 news articles worldwide, and that’s in just the first two search results.

It’s been all over Twitter, and was a steady subject even on United’s own Twitter feed (albeit in a somewhat weak and muted fashion — nine tweets is hardly the rock to smash the scissors of 3.4 million YouTube views).

Like a lot of stories that go viral, this one struck a nerve by touching on on pent-up frustrations within the larger public; musicians (and guitarists in particular) have been lobbying and boycotting airlines off and on for the past five years. In 2007, the American Federation of Musicians AFL-CIO organized a boycott of Delta Airlines, and won concessions that allowed many musical instruments to qualify as carry-ons. So when Carroll’s video hit, there were already a lot of interested pro and hobbyist musicians — but the real audience was much wider than that. Anyone who’s ever had their suitcases lost or damaged, been stuck on a grounded plane without food or water, or spent fruitless hours on the phone with an airline (only to hear their complaint denied yet again) could see their own experience reflected in Carroll’s story.

Case study No. 2: “World’s best passenger complaint letter?”

You don’t necessarily need to take your story to YouTube to get heard. A man traveling from Mumbai to Heathrow was apparently appalled at the quality of meals offered en route, and crafted this multimedia complaint letter to Richard Branson of Virgin Atlantic.

If you ask me, the fact that the letter was about bad meals (some in-flight custard wasn’t great, and we’re surprised?) diminishes somewhat the claim to the best traveler complaint letter ever; people have been complaining about bad aircraft meals since JFK airport was called Idlewild. The destruction of a $3,500 guitar, and especially getting the run-around for a year or more: now that is something to complain about. But it’s the humor and presentation of the letter that are the lure; like Carroll’s video, it is the individual’s creativity that got attention, not the nature of the complaint.

Richard Branson, a master of media manipulation, naturally used the episode to his advantage when he made winking jokes about the episode, called the author directly and then offered the guy a job. End of story, with another happy ending for Branson the impish hero. (When these things break out, everyone tries to get on the train — check out the Taylor Guitar Web site —Taylor was the brand of guitar Carroll watched United destroy).

So we have two case studies that went truly viral, to the extent that the folks involved got on the morning TV shows and received calls from Richard Branson. And they got heard in very different ways — one sent an old-fashioned letter using a new-fangled approach; another sent an old-fashioned song using decidedly new media. That’s great if your complaint goes big — but what about the little guys?

Many travel companies are using Twitter and other social media to head off problems before they start. Southwest and JetBlue have both shown extremely quick response times to tweets by travelers en route and in trouble. A Southwest passenger recently tweeted about losing a boarding pass and was contacted by the airline immediately; meanwhile, a JetBlue passenger was unable to be seated with his infant child until he tweeted his predicament, which was picked up while he was still in the boarding area.

These didn’t go viral, so why did the airlines respond so quickly? Because an immediate response solves the problem and eliminates storylines before they have a chance to go viral. In fact, there’s a good chance that the airline’s responsiveness will be the piece that makes the news — much like Branson’s phone call and subsequent job offer. Southwest and JetBlue (not surprisingly, two fairly progressive airlines) actively participate in the medium so as not to get blindsided by that medium.

The buck stops at YouTube

Carroll’s story in particular underscores an issue facing travelers and the travel industry that often goes unaddressed: namely, that of buck-passing. Dave Carroll’s prose retelling of his experience calls attention to the fact that buck-passing is conducted at a state-of-the-art level by airlines.

The customer service agents’ responses to Carroll are all too familiar — you did not complain in time, you have to report it to someone else, we don’t cover that — and Carroll also heard some really good ones that you don’t always hear: we don’t fly from/have a “presence” in Halifax (despite the fact that United’s name was on the side of the plane), you will have to go to the Chicago airport in person to make your complaint … wow. That Carroll smiles all the way through the video shows an Olympian sense of humor; you’d think he would be smashing things himself.

And it doesn’t really stop there. The fact is that United did not hire that baggage handler; the airport did. United merely contracts with the airport baggage handlers to load and unload bags. So really the problem should be addressed to the airport. But this speaks to one of the great problems of airline customer service failures — it’s never anyone’s fault. The airlines can’t control the weather, they can’t control mechanical problems, they can’t control baggage handlers, they can’t accept complaints for codeshare airlines, they can’t accept complaints over the phone, they can’t accept complaints after the fact, they can’t accept complaints because they are too busy, etc.

The disturbing thing is that all of the stories that do reach the media sound exactly like those of so many other travelers who never got any satisfaction whatsoever. If you can write a catchy song, you’re on television; otherwise, you’re on the phone, and on hold. The trick is not getting yourself heard by the airlines, but by other people — which worries airlines enough that they’ll take care of you.

So I should just Tweet my next travel problem?

The simple answer: yes.

There was a time when only the most widely followed bloggers and travel experts could have their voices heard when slighted or abused by travel service providers. If you had a big readership, the airlines gave an ear to your problems; otherwise, you were like Dave Carroll, spending hours upon hours of your life recounting your plight to folks who either didn’t care or couldn’t do anything about it.

This has all changed, for now. It still helps if you have a fair number of readers on your blog, Twitter feed or YouTube channel, but with an increasing number of service providers now monitoring these outlets in real time, you can get heard not only by the right person, but in time for them to do something about it as well.

I said this has changed “for now” — why the qualifier? I believe that this is Twitter’s great moment, and as more and more people flood to the service, and more and more complaints get posted in hopes of immediate gratification, the resources of many travel providers will be taxed to the extent that they will be forced to return to listening only to the loudest and most widely heard voices. At the moment, they’re still enthusiastic about helping their relatively small Twitter families — but when this group numbers as many as they have on their planes every day and is swarming with small complaints, I predict some compassion fatigue, as well as resource overload, for the social media staffs at many of these companies.

But if you can write a good country complaint song and sing it well with a smile on your face, and 3.4 million people like it, you probably won’t need a Twitter account — you’ll need an agent.

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• Web addresses dwarf global population
• Over 31,000 years to read them all
• Technology: 40 years of the internet

THE internet has permeated everything from buying to banking to bonking.

But just how big is it?

Microsoft’s Bing team puts the amount of web pages at “over one trillion”.

And Google has already indexed more than one trillion discrete web addresses.

There are more addresses than there are people on Earth. The current global population stands at more than 6.7 billion.

That means there are about 150 web addresses per person in the world.

Translated: If you spent just one minute reading every website in existence, you’d be kept busy for 31,000 years. Without any sleep.

Bing was more generous with its estimate for those who take more time to read.

“An average person would need six hundred thousand decades of nonstop reading to read through the information,” it said.

Mark Higginson, director of analytics for Nielsen Online, said the global online population had jumped 16 per cent since last year.

“Approximately 1.46 billion people worldwide now use the internet which represents a solid 16 per cent increase from the previous year’s estimate (1.26 billion in 2007),” he told news.com.au.

The largest internet population belongs to China, which claimed this week to have more users online – 338 million – than there were people in the US.

However InternetWorldStats.com (IWS), a website that combines multiple data sources, claims China’s online population is more like 298 million, just a few million shy of overtaking the US population.

“With the rates of India and China still quite low, there is ample room for growth in the coming decade,” Mr Higginson said.

Measuring the online population can be tricky. There are servers, users, per capita numbers, and penetration percentages to evaluate. It’s an epic-scale guessing game using a series of sources to get just one number.

IWS combines data from the UN’s International Telecommunications Union, Nielsen Online, GfK and US Census Bureau.

Its latest global figures puts the number of internet users in the world at 1,596,270,108.

That’s just 23.8 per cent of the estimated 6,0706,993,152 people in the world.

But it changes every day.

“In terms of the future, we anticipate mobile to contribute significantly to internet usage,” Mr Higginson said.

“In the US, the number of people accessing the internet through mobile devices grew 74 per cent between February 2007 and February 2009.”

How we size up

According to IWS, the top 5 countries with the most internet users are:

1 – China (298,000,000 users, or 22.4% of their population)
2 – US (227,190,989, or 74.7%)
3 – Japan (94,000,000, or 73.8%)
4 – India (81,000,000, or 7.1%)

5 – Brazil (67,510,400, or 34.4%)

Australia comes in at 25th, with 16,926,015 internet users.

But we zoom all the way up to 7th place if we measure what percentage of the population uses the internet – a whopping 80.6 per cent, according to IWS.

“The Australian online population has now reached maturity in terms of the number of people online and their experience using the internet,” Mr Higginson said.

“Despite this fact, the rate of internet participation, Australia-wide, increased notably for the first time in several years ,” he said, adding that the latest Nielsen statistics showed it had jumped 6 percentage points to 86 per cent.

However, even experts aren’t keen to guess when every person in the world will be online.

“It’s too hard to tell,” Mr Higginson said.

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Vacation is a time to relax, or a time to seek out adventure. It’s a way to let go of your stress and live out your fantasies. That is, if the stress and pain of planning the vacation doesn’t kill you first.

Whether you want to relax on the beaches of Hawaii, roam the English countryside, or visit the temples of Thailand, you’ve got to be informed, organized, and ready for what lies ahead. To that end, social and web tools can help. From utilizing wikis for collaborative planning to using social networks to share the YouTube videos you record, social media is a useful partner in experiencing the best vacation possible. This short guide highlights some tips, tools, and advice on how to use the social graph to plan and execute the perfect excursion.

Part 1: Research

The first step whenever you are planning to travel is to do your research! Research is key to choosing a location, picking a hotel, and figuring out where you should visit. One of the best ways to get good information is to read the insight provided by others. This is where social media can play a vital role to getting the best information possible.

While there are hundreds of social media websites you can visit for information, here are recommendations to get you started:

Nextstop: Nextstop, which we recently reviewed, provides a ton of simple-to-understand, user-generated guides for getting the most out of any locale.

Where I’ve Been: Not only is Where I’ve Been a popular Facebook application, but it’s also a stand-alone social network as well. Use it to get in-depth information on different.

Wikitravel: Perhaps the largest collection of user-generated travel information on the web, Wikitravel provides good information on where to go, what to expect, and even information on the culture.

TripAdvisor: One of the best-known sites in travel, TripAdvisor has millions of reviews that will help you pick out the gems and avoid the disasters.

The key is to look at a wide range user-generated content and reviews to get an overall picture. For more detailed information and social tools for research, check out our article HOW TO: Use Social Media for Travel Research.

Part 2: Planning and organizing

Picking a vacation spot might just be the easiest part of the battle. Tackling the daunting task of planning, organizing, and building a vacation plan can be the stumbling block that makes the excursion fall apart. Yet social and web tools are ideal for saving this information, creating itineraries, and sharing them with others. There are a couple of things you can do to help make the collaboration easier.

First, if you’re going on a vacation larger than just your family, then you’ll want to collect everyone’s research and thoughts onto one page. Setting up a wiki for the vacation is a great solution for this issue. It will help make sure nobody’s ideas are lost. Set up one at Wikidot, PBWorks, Wikia, or Wetpaint. Want a simpler option? Then Google Docs may be a fit as well.

Planning a vacation should not be a solo effort. Working with a spouse, the kids, and friends not only lightens the work load, but makes the vacation a greater shared experience. Make collaboration a painless process by using time-based tools like Google Calendar and CalendarHub, both of which can remind you when tasks are due. TripIt is also ideal.

Finally, remember that Facebook, MySpace, and comprehensive social networks are an easy way to keep a group of friends in the loop about a vacation. Create a new event or a group for the vacation and post updates via the wall or send messages to everyone in the group. This can be a lifesaver when you need to collect things like signatures, opinions, or vacation funds.

Part 3: Using social media on the ground

Social media’s usefulness in vacation planning doesn’t end when you step off the plane. Even the best-planned (or impromptu) vacation will require adjustments. Here are a few tips and tools for when you need to find a great restaurant on-the-ground or are looking for advice from locals:

Go mobile: iPhone and Android apps are your friends. Having GPS-enabled and informative applications while on-the-go can mean the difference between finding the great treasures of Italy or getting lost in the alleys of Brazil. Be sure to check about data plans in the area you’re visiting – you don’t want to pay enormous roaming and data fees after all.

Some apps need online access, while others will work regardless. So even if the phone is off, there are a great deal of applications that can make life easy. We suggest having ZAGAT TO GO, MapsBuddy, and Yelp [iTunes links] handy to start.

Check tweets in the area: Did you know that Twitter search has location-based search? Say you want to find out about parties near Paris. Just search “party near:Paris” and you’ll have a set of local results. Refine as you’d like. Reach out if you’re adventurous.

Another idea: use Tweetie’s local tweets function to find residents who may be willing to help. Just be sure not to tweet to unsavory characters.

Use location-based social networks: Location-based social networks, while still fresh and new, are a great way to find friends and friendly strangers around you. Check out Loopt and BrightKite and see if either will work for you.

Part 4: Documenting and sharing

Tools like Flickr, YouTube, and a personal blog should be key partners in your vacation plan. Specifically, use these tools to store the memories of your trip for posterity. Creating albums of your adventures helps encompass the memory and can be referenced for years to come. A personal blog chronicling the trip can also be fun to write.

Don’t forget to share your multimedia with your friends and family, as well. You know they will ask, so make it easy for them to find it by posting the photos and links via your top social networks.

Hopefully with all of the tools and information highlighted in this short guide, you will have a no-stress vacation that you can remember for the rest of your days.

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What are Blogs?

Blogs are websites with content management systems that allow visitors to the site to add content. They are forums for organizations and individuals to exchange ideas and communicate with their partners, customers, employees, etc. You can create pages relevant for your business, post articles on different subjects, and offer a platform for others to write their comments or opinions on that post.

Blog Glossary
As a first step towards understanding blogs, its important to get familiarized with some key terms used in the blog world.

• Blogosphere – Community of bloggers

• Posts – Post is an article or a comment written on a blog.
• Trackback – A method for Web authors to request notification when somebody links to one of their documents. Trackbacks enable authors to keep track of who they are linking to, or referring to their articles.
• RSS – Real Simple Syndication
• Web Syndication - Refers to making Web feeds available from a site in order to provide other people with a summary of the website’s recently added content
• Content Syndication – Ability for others to subscribe to the content on your site (using RSS feeds)

• Socializing the blog – Promoting your blog by asking relevant bloggers to review your site by posting, commenting and linking.

Why Blog?

Due of the interactive nature and ability for readers to write their reactions and comments, blogs offers a solid platform for writer and readers to interact and develop a mutual understanding of the opinions of the either party. This allows managers in organizations to get a closer look at what their employees feel or for companies to understand what their customers think of their products.

In the business environment, we believe that blogs offer a solid interaction forum that can be used by companies to read into their customers’ minds, resulting in a better understanding of customer requirements. This information can be used effectively by companies to tailor their product offerings to best meet the needs of those customers. Blogs can be used effectively by companies to establish credibility and trust, and provide insight into the company’s “philosophy and personality.”

Blogs and Search Engines

For an online marketer, blogs offer a powerful marketing platform. Not only do blogs enable marketers to gain a better understanding of their customers, but the content posted on blogs is much easier to find on search engines as well. Search engines love blogs because they love fresh content. Every time new content is posted on a blog, the blog site pings the search engines. This results in frequent search engine spider visits and hence much higher optimization and ranking.

Blogs also have RSS (Real Simple Syndicate) functionality, which means as soon as your article/post is posted on your blog, people signed up to receive your RSS automatically receive information about your post. They come to your blog to read the post or read it in their RSS reader. It all happens in real time on your site. The more you write, the more people will read and comment. Bloggers link to each others blogs while commenting on the post. So, every time a blog has fresh content, whether you wrote a post or readers of the blog commented on your post, search engines get pinged and visit your site.

Blogs help in securing quality links from relevant blogs by trackbacks and comments, which in the blogging world is also called “socializing the blog.” This helps in gaining link popularity and link relevancy, and helps drive relevant traffic very quickly.

Blogs for the Lodging Industry

The lodging industry can utilize blog technology very effectively as a marketing tool. Blogs can be used effectively by hotels and brands to communicate with their customers and to develop an understanding of their needs. In our opinion, one of the best forms of blogs for the hotel/lodging industry is focused on information about the hotel’s local market. Hotels can successfully utilze blogs to communicate about the attractions and places of interest in their local market. A significant amount of people visit hotels because of local events, attractions, things to do, etc. Therefore, blogs showcasing local destinations can be highly successful for hotel marketing.

There are several categories and functionalities to consider while developing lodging industry blogs. An example of a hotel industry blog can be found at http://blog.rivernorthhotel.com and http://www.experiencewashingtonstate.com/. In these examples, blogs discuss the destination and top attractions in the hotels’ local market. It also has information about restaurants in the area and provides reader the ability to post comments and opinions. You can discuss the features and amenities that your lodging offers by creating a section for featured properties.

5 Tips For Making Your Lodging Blog Successful

1. Talk about your destination – Local area attractions and exciting information – rather than about your hotel.
2. Commit time to manage your blog – Unlike your website, your blog does require commitment of your time. Moderate your blog carefully on a weekly basis. Socialize with bloggers who are blogging about your area and request that they review your blog.
3. Convert readers by offering time sensitive offers, discount tickets to attractions, and information about local deals, etc.
4. Offer local videos and podcasts about your area on your blog.
5. Under a dining category, add a post about your hotel’s restaurant and add a personal touch by offering a great recipe from your hotel chef.

Promoting Blogs

The journey of blog promotion is never ending. Here are 10 steps you can take to promote your blog. The more action steps you will take, the more successful you will be and the more ROI you will gain.

1. Create a step by step marketing plan for promoting your blog.

2. Enroll your blog in to blog search engines.
3. Enroll your blog RSS in to RSS search engines.
4. Inform your customers about your blog and the flexibility of adding comments. Make sure to moderate your comments.
5. Offer online functionality for surveys and polls, etc.
6. Offer time sensitive offers, such as coupons, local specials, etc. at least two to three times a month. Send an email campaign to let people know that they can find offers only on your blog.
7. Let your visiting hotel guests know about the blog and ask them to post comments about their experiences with your hotel and the destination. You may want to check first that the guests had a great time.
8. Socialize your blog – this is a very important step towards promoting your blog. You have to seek out bloggers who are blogging about your area and your topics. It is easy to find bloggers specific to your industry by using blog search engines such as Technorati. Make a list of relevant bloggers and write about their blog on your blog. Ask these bloggers to review your blog. If they find your blog relevant and informational, they will post positive reviews on their blog about your blog and will give your blog a very qualitative link.
9. Offer periodic podcasts about local events, attractions, and things to do, etc.
10. Inform and train your employees to be aware of the blog and be a part of the promotional strategy. When they answer a call, they should be able to provide additional information about the blog.

Tracking Your Blog’s ROI

Blogs give businesses indirect, long-term ROI. The best return on investment from a blog comes from gaining a better understanding of your customer. From the customer point of view, people do business with people they know. When people read your blog and comment on your blog, they feel they know you and your business. They might not have an immediate need for your services, but eventually, when they have a need or their friends have need, they will call you.

You can track your blog’s ROI by:

- Enrolling/submitting your feed using Feedburner, software that gives you the flexibility to manage RSS feeds and track usage of subscribers.
- Adding online tracking software such as Urchin and Webtrend to track unique visitors, page views, and referrals, etc.
- Phone Tracking – add phone tracking on your blog to find out what people are asking when they call after reviewing your blog.

Examples of Lodging Industry Blogs

Your blog can focus on delivering news, establishing you as a leader, or can be niche, destination or company specific. Here are few blogs established for the lodging industry.

Leader Blogs - Lodging industry leaders or franchise companies can create a blog to communicate their corporate initiatives, news and history, or add a personal touch by adding voice casts. Bill Marriott has done a great job of this, showcasing Marriott policy, personal achievements, and the Marriott family. Check out his active blog at http://www.blogs.marriott.com/.

Niche Specific Blogs – The lodging industry can create niche specific blogs. Examples of such blogs include those catering to luxury travelers and travelers looking for great deals or travel videos such as Upgrade Travel Blogs. Other travel blog feature tips, news, and commentary for business and leisure travelers looking for comfort, style, and convenience while getting great deals. Check out http://www.aluxurytravelblog.com/.

Destination Specific Blogs – These blogs showcase a destination, featuring top attractions, tours, dining, etc., and offer featured hotels. Destination blogs can feature one hotel or can be used by several hotels. Essentially they are not focusing on the hotel, but rather they are talking about a destination that brings people to the hotel. Once readers decide to try a destination and things to do, they can choose to stay at one of the featured hotels. Check out http://blog.rivernorthhotel.com and Experience Washington blog.

Company Specific Blogs – Companies marketing to a specific industry can create a blog focused on that industry. Blog categories highlight the main products the company is offering. For example, on Milestone’s blog we talk about emerging trends, email marketing tips, local search, blogs, podcasts and information relevant to internet marketing.

FAQS about Blogging

Here are some of the questions I get asked about blogs. I tried to summarize my point of view in the answer.

Q: What if people write negative comments about me or my business because of personal rivalry on my blog?

A: You can moderate all the comments posted on your blog. That means, only allow the comments you want or delete the comments which are motivated by personal rivalries.

Wednesday, May 13th, 2009 by Elan

I’m going to share answers to the most common questions about virtual phone numbers.

What is a virtual phone number?

A virtual phone number, also referred to as just a virtual number, is a telephone number whose routing you can change since it isn’t connected to a specific telephone line.

How does a virtual phone number work?

You can think of a virtual phone number as a phone number alias. Just like you can have multiple email addresses forwarding to one email account, or multiple domain names pointing to the same website, you can have multiple virtual phone numbers all routing to the same physical telephone line. For example, while your cell phone number might be 847-555-1234 you may advertise your phone number as 773-555-7859 and forward this virtual number to your actual cell number.

What are some advantages of a virtual phone number?

There are many reasons why you might want to buy a virtual phone number. Here are just a few reasons: 1. Virtual phone numbers are often used for ad campaigns where a company advertises multiple numbers on different variations of ads to track which ads generate the most phone calls. 2. Buying a virtual phone number with a local area code (as opposed to a toll-free number) can give a national company a local presence when advertising in a specific area. 3. Providing customers with a virtual phone number to call in their own area code means they won’t have to pay long distance changes. 4. If you use telephone applications, like a virtual receptionist, Find Me call forwarding, or hosted IVR that isn’t offered by your dial tone provider, you’ll need to get a virtual phone number from the application provider. When that number is called, the phone call is routed from the virtual phone number, through the telephone applications, to the phone number associated with your cell phone, VoIP phone, or landline.

How do I buy a virtual phone number?

If you want a virtual phone number, you can buy a local phone number or buy a toll free number from a phone number vendor. Most, but not all, area codes in the United States and Canada are available. While you search for the best virtual phone number provider, we recommend considering the additional features and functionality that come with the number.

Have more questions about virtual phone numbers?

Contact us at 1-888-323-5001 or visit www.canunify.com

Canunify Business Solutions Inc. is pleased to announce that a new website package specifically designed for Churches has been developed and is now ready for deployment.

Our goal was to introduce a cost effective solution to provide churches with a website template that incorporates a variety of tools and resources specifically aligned to meet their current and long term needs. The testing and pilot phase of our project went extremely well and client feedback indicates that this solution has become the number one choice for churches to consider before developing or upgrading their website.

The solution is easy to deploy and more importantly easily managed which will reduce the time and cost associated with loading and maintaining content. In addition to traditional website functionality this new package has a number of features and highlight as follows:

• Home Page Banner (rolling images / text)
• Sermon Player
• Ability to incorporate video
• Calendars
• News, Articles & Events
• Ability to incorporate Bible Search
• Online Donations
• Blog
• Click to Call
• RSS Feeds
• Links to Social Networking (Facebook, Twitter, etc)

We are proud to now offer professional church and ministry website solutions that are affordable, easy to use, and will help provide your church with the ability to keep your members up to date with what’s going on within the church. Our template choices are not only attractive and very polished, but are also programmed and developed in such a way as to be more search engine friendly.

Our goal is to become the #1 source for church and ministry websites, and our package has proven to be a great solution for today’s churches and ministries who are looking for an affordable way to get their ministry online.

If your church is considering a new website or are having challenges with an existing one please contact us. We have the knowledge, tools and resources available to help your church get connected.

Call today: 1-888-323-5001

John Hughes helmed just eight films, in the process defining for a generation what it meant to be a teen in the ’80s, but he wrote many, many more. Not only Chevy Chase and John Candy have Hughes to thank for iconic roles (Clark W. Griswold and Uncle Buck, respectively)—the filmmaker gave plenty of other up-and-coming actors their start. Here are 10 whose names and faces you likely wouldn’t know if not for Hughes’s films.

Ben Stein. What would this master of deadpan delivery be doing if it weren’t for John Hughes? Maybe teaching high-school economics. Stein was cast as a chalk-dusted, painfully boring econ teacher in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, and his roll call—”Bueller … Bueller … Bueller …”—is one of the most memorable lines in comedy history. Stein turned his popularity into more movies (Hughes’s Planes, Trains and Automobiles), a few television series (The Wonder Years, Win Ben Stein’s Money), and even celebrity product endorsement (Clear Eyes eye drops).

Molly Ringwald. Ringwald was the creamy-skinned crown jewel of the boy-dominant Brat Pack after she starred in The Breakfast Club, Pretty in Pink, and Sixteen Candles. She played the popular girl and the angsty outsider with equal aplomb, and purportedly dated co-star Anthony Michael Hall for a spell in the ’80s, proving the Hughes mantra that the popular girl really could stoop to date a nerd.

Matthew Broderick. These days, he’s got graying mutton chops and Carrie Bradshaw as a wife, but back in 1986, Broderick was the teen (and sausage) king of Chicago as happy-go-lucky Ferris Bueller. The carpe-diem film Ferris Bueller’s Day Off is still one of the most popular teen flicks ever, and it earned Broderick his only major award nomination: a Golden Globe for Best Actor in a Comedy.

Jennifer Grey. Before Baby was fondling Patrick Swayze’s bulging biceps in the Catskills, she was Matthew Broderick’s acrimonious older sister, Jeanie (and, for a time, his real-life love interest), in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. And in the role, she shared a sexy kiss with another up-and-coming young star: that’s Charlie Sheen rocking a bad attitude and a leather jacket in the police station.

John Cusack. The sensitive heartthrob started out as one of the band of geeks in Hughes’s first film, Sixteen Candles. He never shook the geek typecasting; even as an assassin-for-hire in 1997’s Grosse Pointe Blank, he was nervy and clammy-handed around women (namely, Minnie Driver).

Emilio Estevez. He was the jock in The Breakfast Club, a prescient role given his smash-hit series of Mighty Duck hockey movies in the 1990s. But Estevez is still going strong, most notably with Bobby, the 2006 Sen. Robert F. Kennedy biopic that he both wrote and directed.

Steve Carell. The Office star’s first ever big-screen role was in 1991’s Curly Sue, written and directed by Hughes. The comedian wouldn’t fully break out in movies for another 12 years, when he was cast as Evan Baxter in the Jim Carrey starrer Bruce Almighty. But these days, Carell has a Golden Globe and an Emmy-winning show, and he’s one of the most popular faces in comedy.

Anthony Michael Hall. More so even than Molly Ringwald, actor Anthony Michael Hall was a huge ’80s star synonymous with John Hughes. But like others before him, Hall’s post-Hughes career shows he had a tough time growing out of his earlier roles as a nerd. He’s had some recent success: his biggest movie of late was Oscar-winner The Dark Knight, a film notably missing cream-puff high-school boys of the sort Hughes seemingly wrote for Hall.

Jon Cryer. He was the shoulder to cry on in Pretty in Pink, and his lip-sync of Otis Redding’s “Try a Little Tenderness” is an iconic ’80s movie scene. Today, the skinny, nerdy Duckie has graduated to costar in one of television’s best-rated sitcoms: Two and a Half Men.

Macaulay Culkin. Culkin got both his first major role and his most famous role from Hughes—he was the kid in 1989’s Uncle Buck and, of course, the star of 1990’s Home Alone. The pair of films made him the biggest child star of the 1990s (My Girl, Richie Rich), and his success also helped boost the careers of the other Culkin brothers. Most recently, Culkin had a recurring role on the critically acclaimed TV drama Kings.

Today, we are pleased to announce the launch of a new website to support our CBS Ministry Edition and invite you to visit us at www.cbswebministry.com.

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We invite you to take a tour of our new website and welcome your feedback.