If any of you out there would like to be a contributor to this effort, I would welcome the assistance.  Anytime you run across a story that you feel is an example of how green is moving America in the right direction - in business, government or your local community - let me know.  If this is something that any of you are as passionate about as I am, get in touch and I will set you up as an author on the blog. 

Thanks for taking a look.  Your comments are appreciated.

As far as I can tell, their business model remains focused on sales, CRM, and selling their data and their data services. 

Keep it up fellas...you are going to have more data than D&B!

Noun:  800 pound gorilla that decides whether your site gets a ton of traffic or not.

Ah, Search Engine Optimization....the mad science, er, art.  It's something that we all have to be very good at if we want our online properties - or our offline ones - to succeed.  We all know about tagging, and setting up the site in the proper manner, defining keywords that we want to shoot for ownership of....but what about the blocking and tackling work necessary to make Google sit up and pay attention?  Who is doing that?

 A couple of thousand incoming or reciprocal links would be just the ticket, but who is going to get all of those for you?  Good question....and FuelDog just found an answer for you.

HoneyPot Marketing is a SEO firm that hires out full-time link gatherers for your on-line properties in India for short money.  They do nothing except find sites that are going to raise your profile and convince them to link to your site - sometimes in exchange for a reciprocal link, sometimes without.  All of the employees in India speak english, but the process, verbiage and strategic focus is set by you.  I haven't started using them yet, but the rewards of 160 hours per month of effort going to link building can't help but pay huge dividends. 

If it is important to you to 'own' some words, this is an answer that will provide a serious ROI.  Tell 'em FuelDog sent you.
 

There is so much going on with social media, the economy, politics (don't get me started), that it is hard to know where to start.  However, today I ran across a piece of news about my favorite medium that made me sit up and take notice - Email is still the killer app of web marketing. 

How can this be you ask?  With the amount of spam we are innundated with?  Haven't the pundits all declared Email dead for years?  Isn't it all about web 2.0 nowadays?  Well apparently, it's all about Email, which is alive and kicking like Bruce Lee.

According to Datran Media, which interviewed over 2000 media and marketing insiders, Email is the most effective marketing medium, produces the highest level of ROI, performs better than any other channel - including search - and is an area that almost all companies are planning on increasing spending on.  See the survey results here. 

The fact of the matter is that Email is critical to each and every one of us.  Try being without it for a day and watch your productivity disappear.  We spend time in our inbox, it's as simple as that.  When messages show up there, they have a higher likelihood of breaking through. 

Over the 8 years I've been writing DogBytes, Email only comes up maybe once a year...but every time it does it is because it is still exceeding expectations.  How is it making money for you?

There are no restrictions on whether it should only be business people (and there are a lot of young people and college students on there), so Linked In has the key business person demographic over this experiment. However, with all of the professional friends I have on Facebook, and their 40+ MM members, I may start a group on Facebook called Link'd In and try to restrict it to only people who have been in the business world for more than a few years to see what happens. 

Thanks MaryEllen, Facebook is sick.

NOTE:  It has gone up to 940,072 in the amount of time it has taken me to write this post.  Figuring it took me 12 minutes to write the post (and that may be exagerating it), that is 386 new members per minute.  How ya doin?  I had to update the image!

More interesting news about Linked In, it seems that Rupert Murdoch is interested in potentially acquiring the company.  This is something that the shrewd old bastard would do.  Consider what TechCrunch UK had to say about it:

LinkedIn is also on an upward growth path which makes it a good acquisition target. It has more than 16 million registered users globally, spanning 150 industries in more than 400 economic regions and in the last year it experienced 189% growth. It is now the largest professional networking site in the UK, with over 1m users. It has a high calibre of members too - senior executives for 96 of the FTSE 100 companies have their own LinkedIn profile pages. In the US, all of the Fortune 500 companies have an executive level presence.

To me, that sounds like a winner.  Fortune 500 executives have big checkbooks, so advertisers would like to reach them.

Keep your eyes out for developments on this front, and don't be surprised if there are a lot more ads in Linked In in a couple of years - not to mention a Fox News neocon flavor (ungghhhhh).

So, in typical FuelDog fashion, we decided to test the effectiveness of this premise, and do so in our slightly unorthodox, inimitable style.  Over the next couple of weeks, we've decided we are going to try to get in touch with Kevin Bacon.  I'll keep you up to speed on how it goes.

Regardless of the utility of the B2B social network, Linked In is growing like crazy (I think we are all doing it out of peer pressure, but we don't know why).  According to Nielsen Online, Linked In is the fastest growing social network on the web, growing faster than Facebook (hard to believe) or MySpace.  4.9 million users logged in last month, up 3.2 million users over a year ago.  Pretty heady numbers.  And of course, the audience is what all of you B2B media companies and associations out there are looking for...business professionals. 

So, with that said, FuelDog is going to keep checking into Linked In and will let you know if, why and how you should use this thing to add value to your business and to you personally.

A new web 2.0 startup

User Generated content

A widget or a piece of software

One of the announcements by the big guys?  Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, Nielsen acquisitions or new offerings.

Pop me an email, and I will get the crack team on researching and get back to you with a no holds barred opinion.  It's what FuelDog does best...especially when sick.