Earth Day

clipped from www.freecycle.org Welcome! The Freecycle Network™ is made up of 4,341 groups with 4,906,000 members across the globe. It's a grassroots and entirely nonprofit movement of people who are giving (& getting) stuff for free in their own towns. It's all about reuse and keeping good stuff out of landfills. Each local group is moderated by a local volunteer (them's good people). Membership is free. To sign up, find your community by entering it into the search box above or by clicking on “Browse Groups” above the search box. Have fun!

Tool for Landlords

clipped from www.rentomatic.com Become a happy landlord with Rentomatic! Three ways Rentomatic will make you smile: Gain control and visibility of your properties anytime, anywhere. Advertise, manage finances, real-time data tools, and more. Connect with your tenants: communicate, track maintenance, and receive payments – we invoice for you. Automate rents: the only service to process both checks and online payments. We take care of billing, collection, deposit, and accounting updates. Compare your property with current rental market values at rentometer.com.

The Point

Social Media & Activism

clipped from www.springwise.com Few things are more frustrating to those trying to effect social change than an effort that fails simply for lack of participation. The Point is a new activism site that avoids that problem by giving planners a way to organize fundraisers, rallies, boycotts and other events so that they occur only once enough people have promised to join in. Andrew Mason, The Point's founder and CEO, explains: “The Point is a new way of thinking about collective action. People need a way to know where their participation adds the most value. That’s what The Point offers—an environment where people are only asked to participate when their action can be combined with others to create a solution.” Website: www.thepoint.com Contact: info@thepoint.com

Earth Day

clipped from planetgreen.discovery.com Sign the Card for Earth Day Make your pledge for the planet at SignTheCard.com By Jasmin Malik Chua Jersey City, NJ, USA | Tue Apr 22 15:11:00 EDT 2008 Need a place to jot down your Earth Day pledge? TerraPass, actor/environmental activist Ed Begley, Jr., and Squidnote.com have teamed up to put together the ultimate greeting card for our planet at SignTheCard.com. If you haven't decided what you want to do for Earth Day, feel free to browse through other people's declarations for ideas. Who knows, you might be inspired to contribute one of your very own. ::SignTheCard.com

Earth Day

clipped from www.treehugger.com Zerofootprint Offers Earth Day Carbon Calculator by Ron Dembo, Zerofootprint on 04.22.08 Zerofootprint’s Earth Day Carbon Calculator offers a means to honour the day by measuring your personal impact on the earth. Check it out here: Read more: Zerofootprint Offers Earth Day Carbon Calculator

ecommerce

clipped from www.volusion.com At a Glance Ecommerce is Volusion’s core business. We listen to our clients and with a dedicated team, we turn their requests and our own relentless innovations into the industry’s leading all in one ecommerce solution. Kevin Sproles started coding and designing websites because it was his passion, and that passion quickly grew into a service. Out of the hundred clients he soon acquired, most started to request the same feature- a shopping cart. Shopping cart software was in its beginning stages and always up for a challenge, Kevin took on the endeavor. With very little money and a great deal of perseverance, he started coding shopping cart software and has yet to stop! This motivation has led to several awards, including BusinessWeek’s “Best 25 Entrepreneurs under 25.”

Merchandising Tools

clipped from www.gladson.com QuickSet® Image Reset Strips simplify resets and new store set-ups. QuickSet® Image Back Tags™ are pre-cut and sorted in planogram order to save Retailers and Third-Party Merchandisers time at reset.  Manufacturers may also choose to outfit their products and categories with Image Back Tags™ to help maintain planogram integrity after the set is complete. Eliminate counting peg holes Reset up to 60% faster with 100% planogram compliance Use as a visual stocking guide Merchandisers easily identify products that are missing shelf tags and have not yet been received for stocking Maintain planogram integrity Fight out-of-stocks Eliminate mis-stocks and face-overs When a product is sold out, Image Back Tags™ show consumers your store still carries it

Merchandising Tools

clipped from www.hotelmotel.com Online merchandising tools grow more sophisticated This month, the Emperador's Web site is working with TravelClick to implement a booking engine that will determine which keywords on search sites customers are using to find the hotel's Web site, and then what behavior (pages visited, length of time spent, which order the pages are viewed) the customer engages in when they are on the site.  Next on the Web site merchandising agenda will be using search engine optimization techniques to enhance the site's findability and productivity. Not only do these platforms allow the guest to absorb lots of information without having to visit numerous site pages, but they greatly reduce the risk of data (and maybe even the in-process reservation) being lost. For example, if a guest makes a typo while making a reservation, then hits the backspace key to correct, it is entirely possible to lose all the other information previously entered.

Merchandising Tools

clipped from www-306.ibm.com WebSphere Commerce Merchandising Tools Search and Guided Selling provides automated sales assistance and product comparisons to guide customers through the research and decision making process. Advanced Discounts and Promotions capabilities provide the ability to set and manage discounts and promotions based on a wide range of characteristics including time, order level, product category or amount, customer profile or segment, etc. X-Sell and Up-Sell capabilities allow merchandisers to promote complementary or higher quality products Dynamic Recommendations/Collaborative Filtering provide the ability to analyze customer behaviors and dynamically recommend products based on past customer purchases or clickstreams Closed-Loop Merchandising Analysis gives merchandisers the ability to measure and understand the effectiveness of merchandising initiatives

Never Too Old to Achieve

Margaret Greenberg shares the remarkable adventure of Barbara Hillary.

clipped from pos-psych.com What’s Your North Pole Goal? By Margaret Greenberg Margaret Greenberg, MAPP, founded The Greenberg Group - an organizational effectiveness consulting practice - in 1997. Margaret specializes in coaching executives and teams using a strengths-based approach. Full bio. keynote speaker, Barbara Hillary Barbara’s speech was called “Finding Your Own North Pole” However, Hillary really did trek to the North Pole last year on skis Hillary is not only a lung cancer survivor; she was also 75 years old when she did it! Lastly, Barbara Hillary applied another Positive Psychology principle: reframing. At the end of her speech she said, “I’m not a little old lady. But I am an older adventurer and I am an older athlete.” What’s Hillary up to now? Sitting on her porch in a rocking chair? Reserving her spot in a nursing home? Are you kidding! She’s planning to ski to the South Pole later this year! To learn more about this amazing woman visit her site, Prepare to be Inspired! So what’s your North Pole goal?

Interactive Merchandising

clipped from www.ecommerce-guide.com iStorez Ties E-Mail Marketing to Social Shopping By Vangie Beal Over the past year we have seen a huge spike in new shopping portals and comparison-shopping engines. Each offers a different idea on how to make online shopping more interactive and intriguing for the consumer. From sharing interactive wish lists with friends to comparison shopping with coupons and even building entire communities of like-minded consumers, there is seemingly no end to the options. Given our coverage of this trend (see related articles box), we thought we'd seen it all, and then comes along iStorez.com. This new site provides consumers with an online experience that mirrors shopping at a mall, with the chance to window shop, discover hot trends and hunt for bargains. Anand Jagannathan, CEO of Kriyari, the company that owns the site, said that iStorez stands out from other shopping portals because it lets browsers see different storefronts from the user interface.

Originality

clipped from www.chrisbrogan.com Inspirations and Origins We are all derivatives of someone else. It can’t be helped. Musicians have roots in other musical traditions, even if it’s not obvious at first. Nirvana is heavily Beatles-influenced, for instance. Authors are unique-twist copies of other authors. It’s just the way of the world, and how humans evolve. Recently, I saw a few posts from folks that felt a lot like my posts rewritten a little bit. Now, writing about something that I’m talking about and adding to the conversation is awesome. Rewriting something pretty closely to my own words on your site is probably a little less pleasant to run across. My big point: none of us are originals. It’s okay. And I’ve DEFINITELY done it myself, where I’ve thought something WAS my thought, only to find out that I was synthesizing something I read a few days back, or a conversation I had (Did that famously badly once, to a friend I love, and had to rescind).

Internet = Social Inclusion

Stan Schroeder of Mashable encourages countries not to let big business run the show.

clipped from mashable.com EU: Net Access is a Human Right, We’re Not Going To Take That Away April 11, 2008 — 03:56 AM PDT — by Stan Schroeder — Here’s what Guy Bono has to say about the idea of shutting down internet access to anyone, for whatever reason: “The repressive measures are measures dictated by industries that have been unable to change their business models to meet the needs imposed by the information society. Switching off internet access is a powerful sanction which could have profound repercussions in a society where access to the internet is a mandatory law for social inclusion.” The above sentence is right on the money and it nicely summarized this entire mess. First, it clearly says that these measures are “dictated by industries.” This, by itself, is not good. Big business should not be able to dictate laws in any country, otherwise we’re off to 1984. Taking net away from people - for any reason - is not an option, period.

Do You Copyscape?

clipped from www.ecommerce-guide.com Catching Copycats: Protecting Your Online Content By Jennifer Schiff So periodically, just take a paragraph, cut and paste it into your search engine, and see if that block of text shows up, because if it does, chances are that this person did not come up with that paragraph entirely on his own initiative. clipped from www.ecommerce-guide.com The bottom line, said Ennico: "If you have a successful Web site, people are going to try to rip you off." Another problem, he said, is that "to some extent, you can't really own ideas. Even the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence were borrowed from other documents. So you have to live with the fact that if you are in the business of creating original content, if you are successful, people are going to try to copy you in one form or another. And as long as they're not trying to hold themselves out as you, and as long as they're not doing things that are going to take sales away from you, there's really nothing wrong with what they're doing."

Client Research: Merchandising

clipped from www.exemplum.com Our Capabilities: For more info, view our capabilities section. While Exemplum specializes in creating interactive product demonstrations, our wide array of capabilities allows us to offer tailored solutions to meet your interactive communications needs. Looking for better ways to display your products online? - Need a special interactive site for your next major product launch? - Searching for engaging content for your Point-of-Sale kiosk? - Do you need a more effective way to train your sales representatives? - Need content for your CD-ROMS or downloadable user guides? - Seeking ways to reduce support costs through customer self help?

Client Research: Merchandising

clipped from www.fluid.com Online retail solutions that drive conversion, customer satisfaction and brand loyalty. Interactive Merchandising Products See why The North Face, Reebok, JanSport and other industry leaders chose Fluid Retail for their interactive merchandising needs.

Keep On Creating

Yaro Starak of Entrepreneurs-Journey gives practical advice for keeping yourself motivated.

clipped from www.entrepreneurs-journey.com How To Remain Productive When You Feel Like Giving Up Your mind is your greatest asset for success in business, but it can be just as strong a force of hindrance, sabotaging your efforts, destroying your work ethic and leaving you with no option but to return to the soul destroying job you promised yourself that you would never go back to. One of the things I did and still do whenever I feel less than enthusiastic is to focus on output, rather than the external elements that bring me down. I might feel utterly crushed, but I know if I create something or take any productive action, I continue towards my goals. The great thing about output is the power it has over your mood. Negative emotion breeds negative actions - lying in your bed or watching TV for example - or a lack of any action at all. If you focus on creating something and just take one little forward step, the physical effort you exert effects your inner emotional state.

Benefits of a Focused Message

Maki of Dosh Dosh shares the reasons for focusing your message.

clipped from www.doshdosh.com Want Your Ideas to Spread Easily? Try Narrowing Your Message Focus A persuasive blog post or sales letter argues one point and accentuates it thoroughly with analogies, metaphors, examples and references. Just one point, because too many and you’ll not only lose your own focus but the attention of your audience. You don’t want to distract them from taking action. If you can’t sum up your business in one sentence, if your visitors can’t figure out the purpose of your website in 10 seconds, you’re not communicating. You’re not sticking in their head. And that doesn’t help your ideas or brand to spread.

Social Media Manners

Divas at the BlogHer Biz 08 roundtable discuss social media manners shared by Diva Marketing Blog

clipped from bloombergmarketing.blogs.com Etiquette For A Social Media World What is proper and polite in the digital world of social networking? Be Nice. Is it really that hard? Be open & honest. Respect and responsibility. Understand and learn about who you're talking to so you can have a real conversation. Be open to sharing and responding to information and contacts in a way that is always respectful, honest, transparent. If you wouldn't say it to someone in person, don't say it online. Be respectful and transparent. Courtesy matters.

RSS Awareness Day

Daniel Scocco of Daily Blog Tips suggests May 1 is RSS Awareness Day.

clipped from www.dailyblogtips.com May 1st RSS Awareness Day: Get Involved The objective of the RSS Awareness Day is to get as many people as possible talking about RSS and its benefits on May 1st. Bloggers and blog readers are already aware of the RSS format, but if enough of them talk about it perhaps the mainstream media will cover it as well, and the general public will get exposed to it. How to participate Blog about it: on May 1st write a post or article on your website about RSS. You can just mention that it is the RSS Awareness Day and link to some RSS resources, or you can explain what RSS is and teach your readers how they can make the most out of RSS. You can even write a poem about RSS, there are no limitations here. Use a badge or banner: We will be hiring a company (if you wanna help with the badges let us know) to produce several badges and banners that you can use on your site. You can use them throughout April or just on May 1st. Help spread the word