Category Guest Contributors
Congratulations! Tom Polanski has one of the top 10% most viewed LinkedIn profiles for 2012!
Click on image to expand.
Posted by eBrand Media Public Relations Department in Guest Contributors, Social Media, Success Stories on February 11th, 2013
Top 10 Low Cost Business Marketing Ideas
You don’t need to have a large budget set aside to market you business. There are many great low-
cost ways which can effectively promote your business.
1. Add value to your customers
The basic rule of marketing is to create value for customers to gain value in return. Make your
consumers feel special and let them know how important they are for your business. Don’t forget
your old clients when making new ones.
2. Create your business card
Make sure you have a business card to hand out to prospects with all vital contact information. You
can also hand out notepads to your clients, with your business details printed on every page as they
serve as excellent source of reminders and have fewer chances of being misplaced or discarded.
3. Have a logo designed for your business
Have a professional design a distinctive logo for you. If you cannot afford the cost, you can get a
logo designed from many websites offering the service for a low fee. A distinctive logo will help
your prospects to differentiate you from others.
Posted by eBrand Media Research Department in Guest Contributors on February 1st, 2012
Lift, from Obvious Corp., a social network for ‘human potential’
The Obvious Corp. has announced Lift, its first start-up, and its not obvious as to what exactly Lift is.
Obvious — a San Francisco incubator started just about two months ago by Twitter co-founders Biz Stone and Evan Williams, and former head of product at Twitter Jason Goldman — unveiled the new project in a blog post Wednesday.
Lift, Stone wrote in the post, is an “interesting new application for unlocking human potential through positive reinforcement. We love this software for what it does, and because we’ve tried it and it works. Our plan is to build something extraordinary together.”
How will Lift positively reinforce, uplift, encourage, give an ego boost to its users? For now, Obvious and Lift aren’t saying.
The application is in a private alpha stage and “a long way from opening the doors,” said a separate blog post from Tony Stubblebine, who co-founded Lift with Jon Crosby.
Stubblebine is a former employee of Odeo, the podcasting company that eventually shifted gears to become Twitter after its side-project Twttr started taking off, and about a decade ago worked with Crosby. Crosby too has worked for various San Francisco start-ups, most notably Dave Morin’s social network Path.
Obvious, Stone said, is helping Lift with “strategy, design, funding, recruiting — in general, we’ll be helpful wherever possible. In exchange, Obvious will own some equity in Lift.”
The blog ReadWriteWeb reported that Lift is actually a revamp of a project that Stubblebine, Crosby and their one employee, student programmer Connor Montgomery, were working on earlier this year called Mibbles.
Mibbles, ReadWriteWeb said, looked and worked a lot like Twitter with users sending short messages to each other through an online social network.
“Back when it was called Mibbles, users joined multiple groups with names like Happydog (as in “I want to keep my dog happy”), Love or Home,” ReadWriteWeb said. “Then they gave themselves Awards when they achieved accomplishment leading towards the goals around which they were grouped around.
“The Mibbles team has been working with Obvious all Summer and the service itself appears to have been under active development since at least the spring. The website underwent a dramatic redesign to take on its snazzy new look just a few weeks ago, by which time it was already renamed as Lift.”
– Nathan Olivarez-Giles
Posted by eBrand Media Research Department in Guest Contributors, Social Media, Trend Tracker on August 25th, 2011
How the Bubble Destroyed the Middle Class
by Rex Nutting
A lot of people say they are deeply puzzled by the slow recovery in the U.S. economy. They look at the 9+% unemployment rate and the mediocre growth in national output, and they scratch their heads and wonder: Where is the boom that inevitably follows a deep bust, such as we experienced in 2008 and 2009?
But there is no mystery. What other result would you expect from the financial ruin of the once-great American middle class?
And make no mistake, the middle class has been ruined: Its wealth has been decimated, its income isn’t even keeping pace with inflation, and its faith in the American economy has been shattered. Once, the middle class grew richer each year, grew more comfortable, enjoyed a higher living standard. It was real progress in material terms.
But that progress has been halted and even reversed. In some respects, the middle class has made no progress in a generation, or two.
This isn’t just a sad story about a few losers. The prosperity of the middle class has been the chief engine of growth in the economy for a century or more. But now our mass market is no longer growing. How could it? The middle class doesn’t have any money.
There are a hundred different ways of looking at the economy, and a million different statistics. But if you wanted to focus on just one number that explains why the economy can’t really recover, this is the one: $7.38 trillion.
That’s the amount of wealth that’s been lost from the bursting of housing bubble, according to the Federal Reserve’s comprehensive Flow of Funds report. It’s how much homeowners lost when housing prices plunged 30% nationwide. The loss for these homeowners was much greater than 30%, however, because they were heavily leveraged.
Posted by eBrand Media Research Department in Guest Contributors, The Economy on July 9th, 2011
Will Google Force SEO Companies to Ruin Social Media for Everyone?
By Matt Anton
Imagine the excitement when the internet was first created. Al Gore..err Tim Berners-Lee would be rolling over in his grave (he’s actually still alive) if he knew the additional game he opened up – online marketing. Ralph Waldo Emerson eloquently stated “Hitch your wagon to a star”, and that’s what we are doing. Google is the singular dominate gatekeeper to the internet, and therefore they are in large part the internet – do you hitch your wagon to Yahoo? Didn’t think so.
It wasn’t long before the first ever blog post went up that someone posted, “hey great post, check out my website”; better known as the dawn of internet spam. The Google Gods saw this spam and loved it. The more people that were backlinking (voting/talking) about you the better. SEO opportunists saw this and began to obtain backlinks from every blog and forum. The Gods had more links to find and all was well in the world, until a critical mass was reached.
Posted by eBrand Media Research Department in Facebook, Guest Contributors, Seeing Into the Future, Twitter on July 1st, 2011