agency budgeting

Money, budgets, agencies and the like…

Ad Spending Barely Budged in 2007

http://adage.com/article.php?article_id=125921

Recession Can Be a Marketer's Friend

http://adage.com/article.php?article_id=125877

Further your career by being tech savvy or just learn a little about whats going on web wise

In today's world one of the best ways to stay on top of your game is to NEVER stop learning. Some go to college most of their lives, while others are self-taught, and others are just naturally adaptable and savvy so they can pick up things quickly. I doubt everyone is Einstein so for the rest of us self-teaching, tech savvy, education lovers I have put together a quick list of placing you can go to learn more (and why they are helpful resources) --this list is targeted to the advertising industry, but if your not in advertising just use this as a guideline for where to look for other industries because I believe it applies to most everyone from teachers to plumbers.

Anyone who wants to do their best and get ahead in their career please enjoy:

Microblogging, blogging, podcasting, webcast, video, online tv, news, presence platforms and social media/networking.

To follow whats happening around you in the world and in your industry in your industry will help you understand your peers, what co-workers are working on (and more importantly what standpoint they are coming from), whats will become mainstream popular trends or just popular fads, and how that will impact your business and the economy as a whole.

Today's Hot topics:

• Recession
• Hulu.com
• Podcast:Rocket Boom
  

• Free online TV that is better organized then tv.com, and doesn't allow random users to put up boring videos so everything is more streamlined and not a YouTube nockoff.
• The site does have some of the top YouTube Videos/Clips
• Also showcases "Sunday Movies" basically most of the movies that are presently on their are not worth watching, but it does keep track of multiple popular networks and tv shows (which is EXTREMELY convenient and needs to become FASTER!)

Diggnation

• For everyone who never gets online (or if your new to podcasting and social media) Diggnation is a podcast about the top "Diggs" from Digg.com, a social platform that allows users to share content and rate it, Diggnation focuses on what has been shared the most or seems the most interesting and showcases it all in a short and funny clip-- Kevin and Alex if you end up reading this sorry this isn't that wonderful of an explanation, but I'm hoping most people know what digg.com is.

Branding with "new media" aka social/online platforms

• Building custom niche platforms for brands that have deeper strategies to engage consumer loyalty, brand expression, and increase consumer loyalty/awareness.
• Creating consumer evangelists to promote your platforms by creating someting that is unique and interesting.

• See Porsche's Bloodline Campaign
• Starbuck's idea boards and igoogle meeting planner
• @Dell on twitter to inform tech gurus on deals
• If your on twitter.com I recommend following: @today show, @nytimes, @TechCrunch, @MattDickman, @macrumors, @rtm, @adfreak, @astonmartin, @risdall, @JasonCalacanis, @ivesdigital, @Scobleizer, @chrispirillo

• These people either have wonderful insight on marketing, are doing something brand wise that is unique, or put out a lot of links that are useful.

Advertising to Target ideas and interest rather then broad target audiences

• ie. Joey the skater, Molly the cheerleader, Dan the hippy, Evelyn the stay at home newly wed mom, and Cory the tech savvy internet guy all have three things as common interests they all watch heroes, cashmere mafia, and enjoy chocolate chip cookie doe as a snack.
• vs. Joey and Molly are in highschool (ages 15-17), Dan and Evelyn geographically live in Orange County California and are in their mid-thirties, and Cory is in his twenties and otherwise has nothing in common with the other 4 examples. From a broad sense it would be hard to group this people together if we didn't know they all liked a certain genre and food.

Social Media/ Networking ie. Myspace, Pownce, Twitter, and Facebook and the other sites that facilitate sharing of information.

These site help streamline interaction with your clients, co-workers, and peers while offering you a platform of tools for collaboration and to share/learn indispensable industry knowledge that is relatively easy to find if you take the five seconds to look for it or in twitter's case ask for it.

People with great blogs, famous, well set-up or informational Myspace pages, groups you should join on Facebook, and Sites you NEED to join:

• Linkedin

• A social networking site specifically designed for business networking and professionals of all industries.

sd

Facebook Group: Risdall Marketing

• Risdall.com's Agency group to connect with peers and learn more about whats happening in our SEM/SEO/Social Media side.

Pownce.com

Merchant Circle-- For Branding your company and connecting with other companies.

Important Bloggers (note all of these people can be found on Twitter.com as well):

• Chris Brogan
  
• Matt Dickman of Technomarketer
  
• Mahalo's JasonCalanis
  
• Robert Scoble of Fast Company
  
• Greg Swan Perfectporridge
  
• Chris Pirillo
  
• Michael Arrington of Tech Crunch
  
• Tim Brunelle
  
• Online Advertising http://twitter.com/advertising and http://www.addigitalmedia.com/
• Valeria Maltoni http://www.conversationagent.com
• Graywolf - How to go beyond the single Digg, Delicious, and Reddit
• Media Guru Herb Sawyer of Carmichael Lynch
  
• AdFreak
  
• Frank Martin
  
• DMinc
  
• Cory Vandenberghe
  
•  (shameless plug for desaraev's blog)
• Light reading
  - 10e20.com
  - brentcsutoras.com
  - seomoz.org/blog
• Neil Patel - Dark side of social Media

  1. Paying for votes - whenever he has used the pay sites, they have worked
  2. social media rings - email lists and have friends vote
  social media apps
  - add friends
  - vote on stories
  - have a developer build you an app
  - use iframes to vote/add a friend/subscribe to something
  
  

Long list of up and coming presence platforms and social media/networking.

flickr.com - live link on photos
deviantart.com - comments, live links
care2.com - group billboards
dfinitive.com - social bookmarking site
adultswim.com - message board
fanpop.com - profiles have links
sphinn - live links
tweako - socail bookmarking
mixx.com - fantastic site
bloggoggle - not a bad site even if you havent heard of it
couchsurfing - profiles have links
comagz.com - has some spam (reads off some of the live links) only one of the group like this (as of now)
ballhype.com - sports based digg like
qoolsqool - andy hagans (thanks) as some were taken from andy's presentation
buzzflash.net
chipin.com
scoreguru.com - like ball hype
blogs4god.com - religious
dnhour.com - profile link
hugg.com - green community
sk-rt.com - profile links
memeorlame.com - getting more popular
showhype.com - pop celebrity
photographyvoter.com - photos
pixelgroovy.com
plugim.com - pretty popular
smallbusinessbrief.com -
babblz.com -
videosift.com
23hq.com

Social Bookmarking Sites:

http://www.blinklist.com/

http://del.icio.us/

http://www.fark.com

http://blogmarks.net

http://smarking.com/

http://segnalo.com/

http://www.shadows.com/

http://www.gifttagging.com/

http://www.simpy.com/

http://www.wists.com/

http://www.feedmarker.com/

http://lilisto.com/

http://ma.gnolia.com/

http://www.faved.net

http://www.spurl.net/

http://www.blummy.com/

http://myweb2.search.yahoo.com/

http://buddymarks.com/

http://feedmelinks.com/portal

http://www.hyperlinkomatic.com/

http://www.linkagogo.com/

http://unalog.com/

http://tag.zurpy.com/

http://de.lirio.us/

http://www.furl.net/

http://www.linkroll.com/

http://blogmarks.net/

http://www.givealink.org/

http://www.looklater.com/

http://netvouz.com/

http://simpy.com/

Content Rating:

Fark.com
slashdot.com
picks.yahoo.com - site of the day
hacker news - news.ycombinator.com - everyone should be reading it. Its for web folks and should be read
adobe showcase
askmen.com site of the day
cssbeauty.com and cssvault.com
newsvine.com - good source
meneame.net - spanish language and lots of traffic
boingboing.net
techmeme.com - great traffic if you can get on it

digg.com -
stumbleupon.com
myspace.com - bands and groups do well
wikipedia.org - profile pages if you do alot of edits on the wiki
mybloglog.com - very strong as of late
technorati.com - tag pages do well
slideshare.net - rising star
youtube.com - channel and profiles
amazon.com - rate things and your profile could do well
deviantart.com
linkedin.com
bookclubs.barnesandnoble.com - very strong
del.icio.us
epinions.com
yelp.com
last.fm
imdb.com -
blogger.com
tribe.net
stylehive.com

http://doggdot.us/

http://www.listible.com/

http://www.digg.com/

http://www.blogmemes.net/

http://www.blinkbits.com/

http://www.netscape.com/

http://www.spicypage.com/

http://www.shoutwire.com/

http://www.youhypeit.com/

http://reddit.com/

http://www.rojo.com/

Social Networking Sites

http://consumating.com/

http://www.blogcatalog.com

http://www.linkedin.com/

http://www.ning.com/

http://www.facebook.com/

http://www.myspace.com

http://allconsuming.net

http://www.othersonline.com/

http://www.mybloglog.com

http://www.tickme.com/

http://www.orkut.com/

http://standpoint.com/

http://www.meetup.com/

http://www.43things.com/

http://www.43people.com

http://www.43places.com/

http://www.efamilyties.com/

http://www.9rules.com/

Video Networking Sites

http://youtube.com/

http://www.broadcaster.com/

http://www.dailymotion.com/us

http://www.metacafe.com/

http://vsocial.com

http://www.springdoo.com/

Micellaneous Social Sites

http://alexadex.com/ad/

http://www.jot.com/

http://www.spinspy.com/

http://googlemark.org/

http://www.meebo.com/

http://www.slawsome.com

http://www.stumbleupon.com/

http://rollyo.com/

http://quimble.com/

http://www.twitter.com/

http://metawishlist.com/

http://www.seomoz.org/ugc

http://www.rawsugar.com/index.faces

http://www.squidoo.com/

http://wink.com/

http://kinja.com/

http://tailrank.com/

Wiki Sites

http://swicki.eurekster.com/

http://www.wetpaint.com/

http://pbwiki.com/

Job Sites

http://www.jobsinsearch.com/

http://cssbeauty.com/

http://www.pagebites.com/

Organization Sites

http://hipcal.com/

http://www.backflip.com/login.ihtml

http://www.connotea.org/

Tagging Sites

http://www.citeulike.org/

http://www.tagtooga.com/db.tag

http://tagalag.com/

Photo Sites

http://flickr.com/

http://www.slide.com/

Music Sites

http://odeo.com/

http://www.mystrands.com/

http://www.last.fm/

http://upto11.net/

Political Sites

http://gabbr.com/

http://www.newsvine.com/

http://www.blogniscient.com/

Shopping Sites

http://www.judysbook.com/

Program Sites:

http://www.campfirenow.com/

http://www.basecamphq.com/

Feeds Sites

http://www.feedburner.com/

http://www.tagsy.com/

http://www.feedmeme.com/

http://technorati.com/

Maps Sites

http://www.wayfaring.com/

http://www.frappr.com/

 

Continuous presence with your blog and popular wikis in collaboration with HELPFUL marketing, design, social media, development work and PR information (or information that is relative to your field of experise).

Today businesses are using these devices as informational sharing platforms (like I am doing know), tools to connect with consumers, and overall learning devices like wikipedia.

How else do you think these can be used? Is there a deeper business application that can be applied with creative strategy? Do you know of any other platforms or tools that can be added to this list?

April Fools for the Tech Savvy

Google Blogoscoped posted "Google April Fool's Jokes Galore" today. The post featured Google's extensive (all in good fun) practical pranks on/for it's users. The list included everything from a gmail "custom time button" so you can set what time your mail says it was sent all the way to google knowing your future.

 

Other top dogs in the tech world got in on the geeky fun such as YouTube,  Anti-Google Search Engine Lovers, Microsoft and Search Engine Land,  Google Calendar's Wake up Land,  Virtual Turism Blog (post on google maps sensoring competitors like apple),  Search Engine Roundtable,  Orkut changed their logo to Yogurt for the day,

 

For more fun news on Google and other April Fool's Hoaxes:

 

Freep.com on Googles Yearly Fun.

Grumpy People Ruining the Good Humor.

World Media Play Up on April Fools Jokes.

Top 100 April Fools Jokes of All Time.

 All in Good Fun -- Jokes For You and the Family.

My latest online addiction: Financial Planning.

My latest online addiction: Financial Planning.

March 10th, 2008, desaraev

You heard right. With everything going on in the economy it is only fitting, but this epiphany that benefits my banking budget was not born from financial difficulty. Believe it or not Mint.com is a great way to budget yes, but also keep track of expenses, plan for big trips (or future shopping sprees) by building that budget, receive sms alerts in regards to low funds, high purchases (you can set the limit when you want notified), monitor what seems like an unlimited number of bank accounts, investments, and credit cards, as well as graph your spending report and compare how much you spend on gas with people in any other region you would like to compare to.

While writing this quick blog post I found some interesting articles on the up and coming site:

Lifehacker :

Is Mint Ready for Your Money?

 piaws review:

Review: Mint.com

Mint Wins TechCrunch40 Top Company Award; Takes $50000 Prize

Mint.com:

Free Personal Finance Software, Money Management, Budget Planner …