I’m not in the Chamber of Commerce or BNI, I don’t go to luncheons, I haven’t done much active sales or participation.

Should I be doing these things?  Probably.  I tend to get busy with other stuff and push it to the side (as all self employed folks do) and I’m not really social by nature.  So what if you, like me, aren’t suited to the business before breakfast type event?  What if you’re not motivated to join clubs, shake hands and kiss babies?  Does that mean you’re doomed to fail?

I don’t think so, but you will – at some point, have to find a way to network with other people to build your business. If you wait for people to find you, no matter how brilliant your marketing is, you’ll fail before you’ve even started.

I mentioned before  that I’m not so great at networking, but I think it’s important to learn, and try.  I’ll let you know how it goes, you do the same for me.

I was looking for directions to the ReStore here in Nanaimo, so I jumped on Google Maps and zoomed around with street view to locate the entrance. Remembering that all of Nanaimo (or most anyway) is now street view enabled, I checked out my little place on Craig Street.

The resolution is pretty good, I can see my Honda Element and neighbours’ cars. Zooming around, I thought to myself “you could create a cool-ish 360 if you screencapped all the street view angles and loaded them into some sort of 360 degree program”. That’s when I remembered MS Photosynth, a cool program that takes your photos and uses logic to seam them together.

It’s free, so I went to Google Maps and used FireShot to capture images of my complex and the surroundings. I cropped the photos using Irfanview, loaded them into Photosynth and got this as a result.

Pretty cool right? Here’s what you need to pull it off

1. FireFox or Internet Explorer
2. MS Photosynth
3. Irfanview
4. FireShot

One year later, the video titled “Dave the Dog goes Crazy!” has come back with a vengeance.  Daily views on YouTube have gone up to by the thousands. Dave’s recent fame really set in for Hosting Nation on the morning of April 28th, when Inside Edition – a popular current events program broadcasting across North America – phoned to ask if they could use the video in their lead out for today’s program.

The recent fame for Dave has prompted Hosting Nation to bring the Pennies for Pets promotion back online.  You can learn more by visiting the Hosting Nation Blog or checking in directly at www.hosting-nation.ca

No dice, it’s not in the libraries (probably cost prohibitive).  UBC has a copy apparently, but you have to be able to log in to their archives to get it. (Any UBC students out there wanna make $50?)

It’s tough to find Canadian consumer data, after digging deep though I was able to find a report from Neilsen (the ratings and ranking company, you know the ones) that places Canada in the top 10 rated countries for overall consumer confidence.

What’s consumer confidence?  It’s how good or bad you feel as consumers about the state of the economy and your personal finances.  It’s measured, in part, by the things we worry about – like global warming and the economy.  It’s also measured by tracking where our money goes, and our thoughts on the future of the economy.

So, what are we worried about?  In a nutshell – our health, global warming and increasing bills.  We’re worried about other things too, but those three are all well above the global average. We’re not as worried about the economy either, a stat that’s confirmed when you look at where our money is going.

When we look at the data, we can learn that while Canadians are lower than the global average  in luxury spending, we are not quite as debt focused as the average American.

A corresponding study in the Neilsen report indicates that an overwhelming number of Canadians believe the recession will be over in a year.

Our language has turned from ‘recession’ to talks of ‘recovery’, which shows that the average Canadian feels confident with their financial status, job futures and the state  of the economy as a whole. Source: Neilsen Ratings: Canada breaks into the top 10

In the internet world, what does it all mean?  Possibly that internet properties will make efforts to target Canadians (and their wallets) more aggressively, and new Canadian startups are more likely to be profitable in the near future.

Now that the ‘lympics are over I’m seeing social updates about “back to normal”, “what now?” and similar sentiments.  What I’m feeling is a bit different, instead of “what now?” I’m thinking “what’s next?”

Sounds the same, but has a different impact.  I was in sales management for many, many years before my time in SEO.  A huge part of successful sales is motivation and energy.  Taking positive feelings and pouring them into your job, your life and allowing them to generate their own momentum.

It would be easy to allow the games to become tainted with scandal.  To suggest that the negative impact on the community, and the country, wasn’t worth the $4 Billion.  I don’t think you can place a price on the good will and pride of a nation.  Assuming that you could, I think that those two weeks were some of the best $150 I ever spent.

If we let the games, Canada’s most successful games, fade into nothing but memories then nothing is gained.  I want to take something more than memories.  I want momentum; action.  I am inspired.  I am committed to working harder, and reaching higher.  Are you?

The Dude talks of takin’ it easy, man.  What will come will come, and when it comes – you just take it and move on.  It’s a philosophy that has served me exceptionally well during my years in marketing.  There’s a lot of literature out there talking about what works in marketing, where it works, what doesn’t work, what works to what degree.  There are hundreds of discussions debating the validity of one method over another.

Debating the validity of one method over another is, well, kind of pointless and not dude-like at all.  Everything works.  If it didn’t work, it probably wouldn’t exist.  There are varying levels of effectiveness, though I don’t think one can debate what that is without trying it.  It’s a marketer’s responsibility to learn and experiment with whichever disciplines they want to specialize in, because when you can prove your answers to the questions of viability it’s easy to get work.

If you don’t know the answer to a marketing question, it’s ok.  Have a seat, take a sip of your white russian and think about your options in terms of  time, money and risk.

If you have the time, you can do the thing yourself.
If you can’t do the thing yourself, you’ll need to scrap the idea or pay someone else.
If you find a cheap and fast solution, it will be accompanied by a massive risk.

There’s nothing wrong with risk, or spending time or money.  If black-hat SEO didn’t work (cloaking and scraping for example) people wouldn’t keep doing it.  Sure, it’s insidious, but it works.  It works most effectively when seasoned hatters sit at the helm of the spam-train.  It works least effectively when you have to search for “how to do black hat SEO”.  It will probably destroy your brand and your reputation, but it definitely works to generate revenue.  White hat SEO takes a long, long time but there’s virtually no risk and the payout always happens, eventually.

This is where Dudeism is helpful.  There is a path of least resistance, and there is a path of utter improbability.   The path of utter improbability contains great treasure and great rewards but is a hard and dangerous journey.  The path of least resistance is cool, meandering, easy and breezy but the pay is terrible.

What about you?  Would you rather take massive risks for a possible quick payout?  Would you rather pay for perfection?  Or take the time and do it yourself?  Whichever you choose, the Dude abides.

We’re currently working with Robbin’s Wreaths of Parksville and providing them with a FREE state of the art e-commerce system for their small wreath manufacturing business.  The site will include a custom design built on the Magento framework, hosting and a domain, graphic design, development, programming, internet marketing and search engine optimization.  As we work to complete their new site, we’re taking applications for new contenders.

If you have an engaging story to tell about your company and the challenges you have faced to get onto the web, we’d love to hear about it.  You never know, you could be selected to receive a custom website valued over $5000, absolutely free!

How do you apply?  Well, drop me a line through my contact form or visit extreme website makeover to get the complete application.

Incidentally, items like this are a great way to promote your business.  Getting involved with community driven projects and coordinating with other agencies work wonders for building your online presence.

It’s a massive oversight on my part, something I should have done as soon as I set up a contact form and launched a newsletter signup form.  If you collect information from your visitors, it’s never too late to put a policy on your site.  If you don’t know where to start, there are plenty online.  You could even link to this one, or copy mine and edit it to suit your needs.

Harbour City SEO: Privacy Policy

In an interview with Techcrunch, Zuckerberg answers a question about privacy by saying “People have really gotten comfortable not only sharing more information and different kinds, but more openly and with more people. That social norm is just something that has evolved over time.”

If Facebook is to pay its investors, it has to focus on growth and monetization, but neither of those are conducive to improved privacy protection for the users, who have undergone changes to the privacy policy twice in the last year.

It matters to me, I believe strongly in protecting and safeguarding personal information because I’ve seen the lengths people will go to to get it (and what they’ll do with it), but I wonder how much it matters to others who seek a louder voice in the crowd or, in Facebook’s case, a direct link to all the voices.

Here’s the video from USTREAM.