You call all the time, but never leave a message. You could be a potential client, but hiding your number makes me wonder if you are someone to be trusted & I make it a point to only work with people I can trust.

Plus, telemarketers hide their numbers and we all hate those calls whether they be personal or business in nature.

Take the caller ID block off.

Show me who you are.

Then we can talk.

via Digital Inspiration Technology Blog

As some of the comments on the Youtube page have pointed out, this does not work as some sites don’t allow non-alphanumeric passwords and limit the length to something ridiculous like 6 characters or less.

Still, good to know.

Feeling brave and DIY-ish? Amit runs you through the basics (and a little more) of customizing your Facebook Fan Page.

A very nice rundown from Mashable of a Vitrue study showing when Facebook users are most active & when to make that post promoting your business and/or event.

Unless you’ve overdone it and everyone has dropped you or hidden your posts from their feeds.

I watched a rather long presentation by the CEO of a large media operation this week. Usually I try to avoid these things, but it was highly recommended by a partner/friend so I fired up the web browser and prepared myself to fight sleep.

The presentation turned out to have a lot of good information, but I really perked up when he started talking about how they actually turn away clients for certain mobile marketing platforms. The reasoning was this:

• The platform relies a lot on the fact that customers trust their brand.
• The platform is permission based. People must opt-in to get deals via the platform.
• If a advertiser offers deals aren’t good, people will not use the platform and it loses value.
• Not only does it lose value for that one advertiser, but it does so for all the advertisers and thus the station operating the platform.

Because of this, they don’t look at this particular relationship with advertisers as being a provider/client relationship. They see it as a partnership. Both parties live and die together based on the performance of the platform, and so they pick their partners carefully.

Sometimes, the easy money robs you of more in the long run.

When I worked at WWAY, we always greeted the ratings book with a high mix of anticipation & anxiety. The provider of the numbers that we lived and died by also provides a crazy amount of information about digital media, consumer trends and a wide array of info that’ll make your head spin.

Click on the big pic of their homepage for a link to the wire section, or if you’re interested just in marketing, I highly recommend the Media + Entertainment Section.

I attended a Mobile marketing event sponsored by the Star News today. At one point the presenter asked everyone what mobile phone they were carrying.

The results?

• 2 iPhones
• Several Droids
• A whole slew of Blackberries

It’s anecdotal, but why the skewed results? I think the audience needs to be taken into account; most of the attendees were business people and Blackberry is still #1 with enterprise users.

All the rage is over iPhone & Droid, but Blackberry is still #1 – for now.

story via Brand Flakes for Breakfast

It’s a interesting story – a restaurant is about to go under and social media comes to the rescue. You’ll need to read the story over at All Facebook: How Facebook, Radio & Mimosas Saved A Local Restaurant, but I want to make a couple of points:

• They already had a awesome product
• They didn’t do this alone (They partnered with a Hilton Head promotions group on Facebook with over 66,000+ Fans)
• They gave away stuff for free ($25 gift certificates)

I’ve decided to take a 30 day break from social media.

I still believe in the value of social media as a business promotion tool, but I’m taking a long look at who I follow and why.

980+ people are hard to keep track of and it’s beginning to feel a lot  like a online networking group to me. I’m following a lot of people in hope that they’ll notice how awesome I am and they’ll throw some work my way. Unfortunately, instead of spending time actually being awesome, I’m wading through tweet after tweet of shameless self-promotion and auto posts from Mashable & Techcrunch.

I think the value of social media is the ability to be authentic and engage people on a personal level. You don’t always make a immediate buck on it, but the return on investment comes in the long haul. A little shameless self-promotion isn’t bad, but too much and it loses the personal touch. You might as well buy broadcast time if that’s all you’re gonna do.

My battle cry for social media has been, “Don’t tell me how great you are. Show me!”

I think it’s time I heeded my own call.

Paul Rand Retrospective from Jeremy Cox on Vimeo.

(video found via Jack Nack on Adobe)

With all the fuss over the new Gap logo this past week, I thought it would be a good idea to point everyone to the master, Paul Rand.

Rand designed logos for IBM, ABC, UPS, NEXT Computers, Westinghouse and a whole slew of others that I’m sure you’ll recognize.

(Yes, I think the Gap logo is ugly and it’s a shame that they paid a obscene amount of money for it.)