Anyway… we got to talking and I discovered that Rich has transcended the air waves and taken his radio chops directly to the folks over the internet. Seems media giant CBS decided it would be better to cut expenses by changing from a Hot Talk format to a Hot Music format. Sadly it actually makes sense as you will hear in this fascinating story of innovation which I hope you will enjoy as much as I did.

To listen to Rich Boerner online visit HotTalkLA.com or the 2 Guys and a Mic website.

Rich Boerner is featured on HotTalkLa.com

Players at Bayside High School are glued to recruit757.com

In real estate that has one meaning, in business another… at least in this century. And for me it has still another – as in – “what!? Did you fall off the face of the earth??” My business – IMS Strategic Internet Marketing – has been really busy over the past year – and being a relatively small operation – well up till now a miniature operation – I was just running out of steam before getting around to updating my Facebook, LinkedIn, or Plaxo – never mind getting out my first tweet!

Andy Hilton - Owner recruit757.com

In the past few weeks I brought Amy Whitley into the business to help with project management and billing and it has taken a lot of pressure off of my schedule. Amy will be working her way through school helping me make sure IMS’s clients are happy. That’s a win-win-win – I love working with Amy, the clients all love her – and she actually gets around to doing the billing where I found it hard to make time to deal with it. Amy makes a cameo in this podcast.

Besides that, what have we been up to?  A few projects that you will not see because they are not for the public side of the Internet – and a few that you will.  One that you will is called Recruit 757 dot com, and is the brain child of a former radio colleague of mine, Andy Hilton.  You’ll hear an interesting – although kind of noisy – interview I did today in a Sushi Restaurant in Norfolk Virginia.  A shout out to Local TV LLC – the company that owns WTKR TV in Norfolk, and provider of Andy’s “real” job on the sales team there.  As always thanks for listening!

Chandler Turner

I am really excited to present this conversation with an old friend of mine and now president of his own consulting firm. Chandler Turner is President of Accurate Business Communications and a seasoned pro in sales and marketing. Originally Chan and I worked together as business consultants at Goodman and Company, a Virginia Accounting and (obviously) Consulting company. We trained together and worked together for a time and then drifted into different directions, although always in touch.

In this episode Chan and I discuss the real world of business strategy and truly talk in terms of What Business Owners Need and what they need to know. Hope you enjoy.

I had a great day today reconnecting with Constant Contact. That’s a major long-time vendor for email marketing services, and I was one of their very first dealers back in 2003. In fact it was not even called Constant Contact back then – it was called Roving Software.   It has been interesting to see this company steadily grow.  They make email marketing pretty easy for users on many levels.

If you can only do wizard driven templates with the art work built in – they do that. If you are a slick HTML person you can customize your campaigns to a very fine detail.  It is easy to manipulate your database into multiple categories. And since my company, IMS Strategic Internet Marketing Services is again an active dealer I can throw in a free trial…

Re-establishing my dealer account took some doing.

In about 2005  I was elected to serve as the Chief Executive Officer of Pinnacle Wireless LLC, DBA Atrius.  At that time I converted my existing dealer agreement with Constant Contact  for use by Pinnacle/Atrius  which included an extensive personal contact database.  During my tenure, most Pinnacle/Atrius  Customers were added to this master database.  I have long since left Pinnacle/Atrius  and recently launched IMS Internet Marketing Services. So here is the problem – there is no practical way for me to distinguish between my original personal contact list, and names added later for use by Pinnacle/Atrius.

There were almost 5000 names in there that may or may not want to do business with me… and although most of them were probably dial up customers and have no need for an Internet Marketing company like IMS – if only 10% did hold some interest … well that would be more customers than I could handle at the current size of the company. Not a bad problem to have.

The other problem is that my company provides high level email marketing consulting and one of the cardinal rules is:

“It’s Not The Technology – It’s The Relationship”.

So yes technically, I could  send out 5000 emails tonight shamelessly asking former Atrius clients for business – but not only is that by definition “SPAM” – it would really tick off a lot of people – not the least of whom are the other owners of that company.

I solved it by changing the dealer account status into a  Confirmed Opt-in (a.k.a. double opt-in) which is the most rigorous method of obtaining permission to send email communications. It requires the contact (email address owner) to affirmatively respond to an email confirmation request in order to be added to an email list. If the contact does not affirmatively respond, he or she will not receive any further email communications from you.

I give a little more back ground and some pointers in this, the tenth episode of the Web Strategies Podcast.

I am also featuring our new theme song- Westward Leaning – enjoy!

In this first Video version of the Web Strategies Podcast  we are only talking about how this first video was produced. I used a sort of “poor man’s green screen” process to create the video for several reasons. First, and most obviously the video was produced in my home studio. In the video we discuss how problematic it would be to move my entire setup to my business offices.  In all likelihood this particular office will be temporary as my marketing company is starting to gain momentum. (IMS Strategic Internet Marketing)  I can see a time very soon when additional employees will require additional office space.

Sony DCR-VX2100

The second reason for the inexpensive green-screen set up was to demonstrate that this type of video can be produced in-house.  I do an insert of video recorded simultaneously on a Logitech QuickCam for Notebooks Pro webcam on top of the video recorded with my Sony DCR-VX2100 Digital Handycam® Camcorder.  While you would definitely see a huge difference on a TV monitor, on a computer screen – even a good one – the difference is surprisingly hard to spot.

I have also included two versions of the video here, and an option to view the HD version on YouTube.  Since YouTube now limits videos to ten minutes this version was edited to conform to YouTube limitations. Most of the last few minutes features the song “Leaning Westward”, new original music I composed to be used as the theme of the program. You may download or listen to the full version on my music site – The Open Source Music Project.

The version below is  technically posted as the media of the podcast is configured for iTunes and is intended to be a continuation for subscribers of my previously produced audio-only podcasts.

As always I welcome your comments and will give my best effort to answering any questions.

Digital Body Language

I have been working on posting meaningful materials from the Online Marketing Summit in Atlanta, and  I hope you will find some benefit from the experiences I brought back from OMS Atlanta. I was among about 200 people in attendance and met some great folks.

Aaron Kahlow, Founder & CEO,  Online Marketing Summit & Institute kicked off the event with a great presentation. He gave a good background on the purpose of the event and great advice on how to get the most out of each session. I selected the advanced track and without exception the speakers were all well-informed and gave up-to-date information. Questions from the floor were also a great part of the event.

During the lunch break Steve Woods had a very interesting presentation on understanding online behavior. I was pleased to win a copy of the book Digital Body Language from Steve – and of course I did get him to sign it for me!

I guess the one session I enjoyed the most – and got the most out of was by Stacy Williams, President of Prominent Placement, an Atlanta based  Search marketing Company.  She provided my quote for the day – “For every $1 spent on search marketing you get $9 in return”

I’ll have more on each session on the Web Strategies Podcast – including some interviews. Soon.

What a great time as a guest on HearSay with Cathy Lewis yesterday!  The other guest – Ed Sykes of The Sykes Group, and Malcolm Venable of the Virginian-Pilot. Both great guys, and very well informed on various aspects of social media – or as Cathy likes to call it “The Facebook”

One of the topics we discussed was the public and private side of social networking – Cathy accepted my Friend Request – but instead of posting to her personal Facebook account I added a comment to the HearSay with Cathy Lewis fan area. If you listen to the show you’ll get the perspective – but essentially we were saying that sometimes the personal and the professional get unintentionally intermingled.

The content level here is about to improve – if nothing else by default… I have been asked to be a guest speaker on a radio talk program – and my recording of that interview will serve as the next new Web Strategies Podcast. See OMG

Hope you like the new look and feel of the site too – I use WordPress and just updated all the plug-ins too. Enjoy

Podcast Extra:

Today’s Podcast Extra is about something called “Add-ons” for the Firefox web browser. Add-ons are mini programs that let you personalize your browsing experience – and if you are not using them, not only are you missing out – you may be drifting behind your competitors. There are all kinds of add-ons, the most popular are tools to help you block ads or download files.

The most useful (at least to me) are add-ons like web developer, which adds a menu and a toolbar with various web developer tools. Perhaps it is a little to geek side, but it has been downloaded over six and a half million times. Not just web developers, but us plain folks are using this tool bar to see how web pages are made.

Another Add-on category you should be aware of is SEO tools. There are probably a dozen good tools out of about a hundred or so available as of this posting. I use KGen (Keyword Generator) which is an add-on that allows you to see what keywords are strong on visited web page. For my own blog pages it lets me see which words will most likely be indexed, and it is useful in figuring out which words to use for social sharing. My hot list if Firefox add-ons can be found here: http://del.icio.us/tomanthonydotcom/addon

We will discuss social sharing and tags in an upcoming episode.

Next week we talk about the Big Catalog Project, and Marrying Integrators…Not that kind of wedding … tying together a line of business software to a website.

How did we pick the name?  Well, first the program is a podcast, and it is specifically about web strategies.  That is where I live my professional life. In my day job I am the Vice President, Client Services for our program sponsor Web Teks, a Virginia based Consulting and eBusiness Solutions Firm.

Second – this is true so help me – while sitting in the waiting room at a routine doctor’s appointment I looked up this domain name on my Palm Treo phone. When I found it was available I actually purchased the domain through the browser on my cell phone. Seemed like a good sign.

Shortly we will post a series of programs with a focus on the strategic internet.  We welcome your feedback and hope you will review our podcast on iTunes.  Thanks for your interest.