Google’s good for all sorts of things, especially finding old dirt memories. Take my quote here back during my time with Fleishman-Hillard about changes to the Internet:

Looking back: Fastest impacts
What impacts have been felt more quickly than you expected?

The expansion of wireless access has made the Internet far more pervasive that I could have ever imagined. It’s not about going to a computer in the home or office. It’s about checking e-mail or driving directions while waiting for a cab on the sidewalk. – Allen Fuller, Fleishman-Hillard

This comment was part of the Pew Internet & American Life’s Experts Survey of Internet stakeholders. I came across it the other day when I did, finally, Google myself.

It’s funny though, even as the Internet changes and technology changes, somethings don’t change. I still stand by my quote as much today as I did three years ago.

And apparently Google isn’t going anywhere either, even as it changes rapidly. So go ahead – go Google yourself.

We work on a lot of different projects throughout the week. In fact, internally we update our project list in SharePoint almost every day. But to give our clients and prospective clients a better picture of what we’re working on currently, we’ve created a tag cloud of our projects.

A tag cloud lets you take a list of keywords, or tags, and display them such that the more frequent appear bigger than the less frequent. We use it here on the blog to show what categories appear most often. So we just built one to show which projects appear more often. Like so:

• Branding
• Customer relationship management
• Competitive analysis
• Databases
• Disaster Recovery
• E-newsletters
• Event planning
• Graphic Design
• Grassroots campaigns
• Market Research
• Marketing
• Media relations
• Microsoft SharePoint
• Microsoft Exchange
• Mobile e-mail solutions
• Online advertising campaigns
• Planning retreats
• Political consulting
• Public affairs
• Public relations
• Search engine marketing
• Trade show displays
• Web design
• Website hosting
• Word of Mouth marketing

If you don’t see what you’re looking for in the cloud, go ahead and contact us. It may be time we added it!

• Django
  CMS web framework
  (tags: CMS programming development)

• Zaadz
  New social network online, supposedly like LinkedIn but at first glance they’re very different…
  (tags: web2.0 blogs community)
• Wordpress Newsletter plugin
  Newsletter Manager Plugin For WordPress
  (tags: email programming wordpress)

• UrlGreyHot – Resources
  Design templates, icons, more
  (tags: programming development code)

We’ve all seen the ads online that pop-up when you try to go to a new page. It’s a clever advertising ploy to essentially create a roadblock so you have to look at the ad before you go on to the page you really want.

When I see one of these pages, I immediately look for the “Skip this Ad” link, usually hidden at the bottom. But today I was going through Forbes.com and found myself at one of these roadblocks. As I instinctively looked for the “skip this ad” shortcut, I found instead “Skip this Welcome Screen” next to a “Thought of the Day” from Ralph Waldo Emerson.

Skip the Welcome Screen? Why would I want to do that? I skip ads, not welcome screens. They’re welcoming me — heck, they’ve even given me a pithy quote — I should take a look here.

So while your day probably doesn’t begin and end with creating clever new advertising tactics for your website, or digging up quotes from Emerson, your day does involve interacting with your clients, coworkers and peers. So before you fire off that e-mail or wrap up that proposal, take a moment to think about the words you’re using. Put yourself on the receiving end of your message. The difference can go from disgust to warm reception.

• Custom Feed Aggregator
  How to create a custom RSS feed aggregator in PHP and mySQL
  (tags: programming rss)
• MarketingStudies.net
  RSS Marketing and Real-Life Marketing Experience
  (tags: marketing)
• Feedreader.com
  Private-label OEM rss reader
  (tags: rss programming marketing)
• NewsGator
  RSS readers for web, desktop, and mobile
  (tags: rss)

Not everyone celebrates Easter, certainly, but for those of us who do celebrate the resurrection of Jesus, this is an exciting and special day. May you have a blessed and wonderful Sunday.

For a lot of us, we get snow too!

While we see it most often with our political clients, any individual or company is exposed to the risk of getting trashed online. In politics, it means votes. In business, it means dollars. And as comment after comment piles on, each one nastier than the last, panic can set in. As BusinessWeek pointed out:

When the Web turns against them, executives are faced with the problem of how to manage the blowback. They have two choices: ignore the smaller furies and hope they won’t metastasize, or respond outright to the attacks. It’s rarely a good idea to lob bombs at the fire-starters. Preemption, engagement, and diplomacy are saner tools.

There are options. Flat Creek offers a blog clipping service that consolidated blog posts about our clients to give them a heads up about the online conversations that could affect their business and enable them to plan proactively in case an issue does pick up steam.

As an issue begins to heat up, we look at a range of options, but never ever ever is no response a good response. No response immediately gives off the scent of fear and only drives the conversation. Who knows? Most of the time, you have supporters online who are afraid to stand in the way of the mob. But if someone else does it first… it’s just as easy for a positive comment stream to get started as it is for a negative one.

As BusinessWeek advises though, preemption is always the best policy. We make prominent bloggers who write on topics of interest to our clients part of their media relations contacts. Often a blogger will want a lively comment thread but will not allow it to get out of hand with personal attacks.

Ultimately, as with any brand, it comes down to whether or not the experience matches the expectation. If you as a politician or company have not lived up to the expectation you sell, then honestly the online fury may be well deserved. The key is to stockpile goodwill through great customer service, a great product, or a principled message. So when – not if – you are attacked online, your supporters will be there for you and the issue can be neutralized.

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  How we add that fancy footer to our e-mails
  (tags: programming email blogs blogging)
• Personal branding
  Brand names work — so become one.
  (tags: marketing branding)