Dear Friend,

A wise man once told us that a business is much like an airplane. To stay in the air, you have to reduce drag (lower costs) and boost horsepower (increase revenues). Another way to put this is simple: make more money than you spend. Please forward this wisdom to Washington DC ASAP before August 2nd. In the meantime, Scott Spaid brings us three articles this month covering Google's new +1 social media play, how social media never sleeps, and his opinion on which new bar code technology will win the format war.

Enjoy!

The In10sity Team

Google +1 Launched for Organic and Pay-per-click Search

Have you seen the new “+1″ feature recently launched by Google? I’ve been reading about it and, lo-and-behold, today its there along with a tightened up search engine results page (SERP) interface. Granted, you have to be logged in to Google to see the new feature, so if you are one of the few people without one, go get yourself a Google account. After that, you’ll have to create a public profile so you’ll be identified when “plus-oneing” something. Wait a minute. This is just like Facebook! No wonder Facebook secretly launched a smear campaign against Google. So, now I have yet another profile I have to manage and I can like, er I mean, retweet, uh no, I mean +1 stuff now. Likes and tweets and +1s, OH MY!

Read the rest of the article ->

Fox News Twitter Hack: Social Media Never Sleeps

Twitter and social media in general continue to amaze me. Just when I think I have it all figured out something out of left field hits me like a brick. This week’s stunning social media blunder is brought to you by Fox News. In the wee hours of yesterday morning, the Fox News political twitter account (@foxnewspolitics) was “hacked” by an unknown ne’er-do-well who posted that President Barack Obama is dead. Not cool. With almost 40,000 followers and a viral effect that makes ebola look tame, six convincing tweets made it out to the social universe and weren’t caught by Fox News people for 10 hours.

Read the rest of the article ->

Format War! Who will win? QR Code versus Microsoft Tag

Ah! Another format war. I love it!!! That is, when I pick the right format early on. In the late 70′s when I was a kid, I remember my Dad coming home with an amazing contraption known as the Video Tape Recorder. It was a Sony Betamax and I felt so superior to all my friends whose parents purchased a lower quality VHS. Well, that was short lived. Then came the Mac in 1984. Short of Apple’s recent amazing comeback, it would seem I was stuck with the wrong format again. Thank goodness I picked Blu-ray over… er, I can’t even remember what the other HD format was called.

Picking the right format is a big deal in business because you can invest a ton of time and money into something that, if your pick flops, leaves you holding the bag as they say. Clients have been posing a new question to us recently: which of the new bar code technologies should we pick? On one hand you have the QR Code. QR is short for “quick response.” On the other hand you have Microsoft’s Tag technology. Both enable people with smart phones to read these codes, which will then load additional information regarding a piece of real estate, golf swing, product, or whatever else is being advertised.

So, which format will win?

Read the rest of the article ->

Quote of the Moment

"A person who never made a mistake never tried anything new."

Albert Einstein