Come and visit the new agency’s website. Check out our portfolio. If you need any services or know of someone who does, we would appreciate your referral.

• Shop.org Annual Summit 2008
• Online Market World
• Search Marketing Expo (SMX East)

For details how to enter see their “Big Ecommerce Conference Contest” post. I hope to win the “Online Market World” tickets.

One of the Northwestern Mutual projects I work on is Let Your Worries Go campaign. It is a fun project which caught a nice online viral buzz. The idea behind it is more grandeur than just a fun, highly interactive online experience. In this online experience you can virtually get rid of your worries by launching those using different vehicles. In addition to your personal financial worries, you can choose to launch societal worries like world hunger, natural disasters, illness, and health and fitness.

So, what’s the grandeur idea?

Northwestern Mutual Foundation will distribute $1,000,000 to causes that address your societal worries. The more times your worry is selected between now and December 31, 2008, the more money the related cause will receive. Selected causes are listed on this page.

Please let me know what you think!

We were just recently nominated for 2008 Adweek Buzz Awards. If you like this project you can cast your vote here. You will need to register with an email address only.

More coverage from Search Engine Roundtable – (if you haven’t noticed yet, I love these guys from NYC)

Right now at the SMX West search marketing Expo and conference the panel composed of Google, Yahoo and Eurekster representatives are discussing the next generation of search – Personalized Search.

Some of the points are: content is king (deep and fresh), enabling search history (Google) allows the search engines to establish a relation between what you search and what you mean. E.G. a search for a “jaguar” are you interested in a big cat or a car. When you click on a link talking about a big cat, the next time you look for anything jaguar related they will know to serve you more of the animal websites rather than cars.

A challenge is to not show you info you don’t need anymore. Once you buy a diamond for your fiance you don’t need any more engagement rings, or diamonds for at least a while (until some significant anniversary). In this case you need to go to your search history and just delete that entry so that no more diamonds are served.

Eurekster mentioned Swicki: Social Search Widget and Social Search: Search Media meets search (swicki).

Eurekster mentioned some challenges: trusted relationships, expert source, how to effectively apply the social graph to search? high quality content (UCG), feedback loops.

Once again for detail coverage of this Barry posted on SERoundtable.

I am currently attending “Local Search & Blended Results” sessions of SMX West. Local search results are being blended into web search results. This changes the desired “number one position” rules on the search engine results page (SERP).

So, what does it mean to be number one on the search result page? It is not just a web page of your site only anymore. Click on the image in this post to see that the number one position of the organic results is not even showing up in the first page on my screen. It is right below the fold. Sponsored ads and the local business results with a map occupy the entire screen.

It is a blending of all your digital properties, like: news, images, video, blogs, music, shopping, products, cars, etc… If you want to optimize the traffic from the search engines you need to start incorporating optimization techniques for all, or some of these “vertical search” categories. For latest tips on optimizing images and video see a post from the previous session written by SEO Roundtable.

A great capture of more details from this sessions is done by Barry on his post.

Details can be obtained on YSearchBlog.

Before

After

SMX West will take place February 26 – 28, 2008 in Santa Clara, CA. With over 50 search marketing sessions and an Expo Hall, you will find all you need to either learn for the first time or sharpen your industry skills at all levels.

Michael McDonald of WebProNews created this humorous video commercial about the event.

To learn more and register about the event visit their website.

I am attending a first event on Facebook in Seattle. Very interesting event drawing a team of Facebook pioneers such as Nick O’Neill a creator of AllFacebook.com, Dave McClure, Jeremiah Owyang a Forrester Research Social Computing analyst, and .

The topics discussed are:

• – Presented by Jeremiah Owyang
• – Presented by Jason Beckerman, Rodney Rumford
• – Presented by Brian Solis, Dave McClure, Teresa Valdez Klein
• – Presented by Justin Smith, Nick O’Neill, Rodney Rumford
• – Presented by Adam Loving, Dave McClure
• – Presented by Baratunde Thurston, Jeremy Pepper, Tris Hussey
• – Presented by Lee Lorenzen
• – Presented by Connie Bensen, Jake McKee, Mónica Guzmán
• – Presented by Christian Anderson
• – Presented by Halley Suitt, Jason Preston, Todd Sawicki

Web Community Forum organizers created a page allowing to post their short bios.

From time to time, it’s healthy to poke a little fun at ourselves. In that spirit, I offer the following:

You MIGHT be an Internet Marketer IF…….

1) You are familiar with names such as Mike Filsane, Gary Ambrose, Joe Vitale and Mark Widawer, but you think Barack Obama is a type of sushi

2) You have more email addresses than silverware

3) You are considering replacing your office chair with a port-a-johnny because going to the bathroom takes away too much valuable computer time

4) You are actually able to convince people that they will make more money by reading emails at 3-cents a pop than getting a part-time job at 7-11

5) You manage to get visitors to your splash page to believe that the mansion, sports car, swimming pool and yatch displayed on your page actually belong to you

6) Words such as niche, matrix, and AdSense roll off your tongue effortlessly, but you occasionally struggle to remember the names of your kids

7) You consider 1:00am a reasonable time for lunch

You believe spending $5000-$10000 on a particular “gurus” mentoring program is a better use of funds than spending it on a college education, or food

9) You use the term “guru” regularily

10) You spend more time in Internet Marketing discussion forums than you do in your own living room

11) You believe there are ebooks available that are actually worth $97

12) All of your products are priced ending in 7 rather than 9

13) You have a spiral-bound notebook to keep track of all your UserIDs and passwords

14) You think “Winepress” is a new type of blogging software

15) Your spouse tells you in the morning that you kept uttering the word “downline” in your sleep

16) All your “friends” on MySpace are Internet Marketers

17) You don’t see the irony of the words “bum” and “marketing” appearing in the same sentence

18) You have the Paypal support number assigned to the “1″ button on your speed dial

19) You believe people actually read every word of those mile-long columnar sales pages

20) Your family and friends suggest that you are becoming obsessive/compulsive with this Internet Marketing “thing”. You spend the next 3 days developing an “Obsessive/Compulsive Internet Marketer’s” niche site with AdSense.

21) Unlike the general population, you use the word “viral” in a positive context

22) When your teenager comes home from school, he tells you he made the JV team. You ask him what his product is.

23) You believe firmly that your products are worth $97, $197, $297, or more, but you constantly ask others where you can buy a domain name for $1

24) You think “I want to make money” represents a valid business plan

25) When you woke up, your spouse reminded you that today is your 8-year old’s 10th birthday

26) You think a Pop Tart is a new kind of floating ad

27) You celebrate the freedom that running your own IM business from your home gives you, while you sit at your computer for 80+ hours a week

28) And finally, you understood more the 90% of the above

Your are welcome to add your own little ditties to this list in the comments.

-Ray

http://www.imadspace.com