Without a web site address to call home, a business is homeless. It’s seen by customers as the equivalent of working with a computer in the dusty corner of the garage near the clothes dryer lint trap.

Many small business owners start this way, working out of a P.O. Box and sharing the family phone line with a teenage daughter who believes that talking to her BFF is far more important than business calls on that phone line.

Face it, it’s time to buy that $7.95 domain name and start down the road to business legitimacy. Just as we have gone from “Do you have a fax machine?” to “What is your fax number?”, so too are we moving rapidly away from “Do you have a web site?” toward “What is your web address?”. How is it that we accept the need for the fax machine, the copy machine, the phone and the computer, but not a web site?

Every business is expected to be online, just as they are expected to have a telephone and a fax and an answering machine. Size will always determine resource allocation. Hire a professional if you can, but get online now!

The first step to getting your business Online is to get a domain name, which is typically your business name or generic word or phrase and includes the famous dot com, dot net, and .org extensions. Here’s a complete tutorial on Domain Names to help you learn everything about choosing a name for your web site and how domain names work to help you navigate the web.

Or, you could just research a domain name now, buy it today and grow your business.
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This article at CNET, “Corporate employee blogs: Lawsuits waiting to happen?“, caught my eye. Large corporations definitely feel nervous about allowing all their employees to have a public voice, but I think it’s now something that must be allowed, and good common-sense management can be used to help avoid some of the risk of lawsuits such as the one mentioned in the article involving Cisco.

Some companies’ legal departments think that blogging is just too risky to allow, and that it’s not worth the time and administrative headache to try to manage. The problem that I see with this is that it causes a company to be stuck in a Business 1.0 world of the past, disallowing the grass-roots-level public relations that employees can provide - blogging allows a big corporation to have a human face and can help explain and communicate what the company is up to.

More importantly, attempting to disallow employee blogging at all would push employees to do the very thing that Cisco is having to deal with: anonymous blogging. Employees who don’t understand nor agree with the corporate blogging policy will end up blogging anyway, under aliases.

Sun Microsystems’ 4,000+ employee blog is probably the gold standard for corporate-blessed blogging, but many other companies have effectively leveraged blogging and there are particularly well-known bloggers out there who are associated with major companies. Just a small sampling includes: Read the rest of this entry »

I was approached by a friend with an idea. It went along the lines of “What if we get a group together to promote this cause…” and from that point on my imagination soared with what-ifs and can-we’s.

And I wondered about the can of worms we might be opening.

Those of you in Facebook know from experience that when someone who is your “friend” joins a cause, everyone gets a notice about it. After awhile, we begin to get a sense of what our friends are interested in, besides work. We can gauge how well matched we are, how different we might be from each other and see sides of friends we never knew about. Read the rest of this entry »

VentureBeat talked to Google’s Marissa Mayer, vice president of Search Products & User Experience, about Google’s future: specifically about their future in social search.

VentureBeat notes that as recently as August, Mayer “said social search hasn’t shown much promise, but if it does, Google would be in a good position to incorporate it.”
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Hitwise has some new numbers about social networking sites.

Though down, MySpace is still gets the most traffic with 76% of visits in 2007. It’s actually down. Number two, Facebook is up 51%. They monitored 53 different social networking sites to get the data.

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You know those “new” episodes of your favorite TV show when a character gets hit by a car, and then all their friends gather by their bed side and retell their favorite stories through a series of clips?

Welcome to my clip show.

Here’s a quick list of the 12 articles we published in flyte log, our monthly Web marketing ezine:
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…for your 2008 Website:

• I will get connected so I know it when I get a lead

• I will syndicate an RSS feed that originates at my Domain

• I will become an authority for my area and/or niche topic

• I will rank on the first page organic search results

• I will convert my dead site to be interactive

• I will become a do-it-yourself video blogger

• I will reduce my bounce rate to below 50%

• I will treat my website like an asset, instead of an obligation

• I will build value in my web-property real estateget connected with your leads in real time

• I will use my presence in my listing presentation

• I will blog testimonials

• I will add sticky social media features like forums

• I will stop letting my geek write my ad-copy

• I will seek reliable professional help this time

• I will get serious about online media in 2008!

How many times have you heard “Wow! Thanks for getting back to me so fast!”?

I thought so: me too!
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