I recently read an article from Media Post's Search Insider titled "Hyperlinking Reality"which intrigued me. It was about the future of search and brought to mind some recent science fiction movies like Minority Report. It referenced another article from Media Post One Search, 17 Ways, which was written after the Consumer Electronics Show and was a review of the emerging technology which would allow us to search in new ways when we are on the go. One of those ways could be by using a pair of special glasses from Vuzix which can now be hooked up to portable devices such as an iPhone or Camcorder. So from what I understand the article to say, is that it would take a picture of what you see and then it would upload that picture to the portable device where it would identify the place and show you reviews and informational links about what you were looking at. Apparently, Vuzix is also adding more functionality in the devices themselves, so it doesn't seem like it would be too far into the future before we can interact with our environment much like a virtual reality.

It looks like local search is going to become much more robust in the very near future and if this isn't a reason to get your business optimized for local search, I don't know what would convince you. It's too bad iAmplify is an online only business! I would love to experiment more with local search. I must find some side projects soon.

I'm very new to the blog world. Besides one stint in 2005-2006 with a personal blog experiment, I haven't had much experience blogging. Since taking on iAmplify's marketing and customer blog, I've been experimenting with a few of my own. This blog being one of the experiments. One must have an online resume these days and if you can't market yourself then who else can (should) you market?

I've started to look around at other blogs to gather ideas. I really like the content of Debbie Stier's blog The 26th Story. It's among other things a conversation with and about the authors of HarperStudio. It's a conversation about publishing, about books and current events as well. But I focused in on a few of her posts about the authors: How their authors can better market themselves. How they can use online tools to better share their story. It's about promoting their authors and their authors promoting themselves. This is the conversation that I would like to have with our experts via our marketing blog. What tools can we give them to help market themselves most effectively? What topics concern them the most? What are they most interested in reading about?

I'm in sort of a unique position in that I don't have many interactions with our experts. I know more about their products. I merchandise them, listen or watch them, I write about them, I know what sells and what doesn't. But I don't have much of a view into the people behind them. So recently, I've started to meet with some of the business development and Amplifier management team to brainstorm marketing ideas for the blog etc. We started the year off sharing New Year's promotional ideas and we are planning on writing about the different social media tools next. We've had to postpone one of our bi-weekly meetings so I might post something in-between as well. At first I was very reticent about my writing. I still am somewhat, but I figure that if I don't practice and practice A LOT, I'll never get better. So post post post I shall.

I am going to keep researching more blogs. I hope to find more interesting ones to write about.

We had a strategy meeting today that began with a discussion around Twitter but morphed into a discussion about all social media applications. From LinkedIn to Facebook to Self Growth to Twitter ...to name only a few...how does a small start-up decide where to put its limited resources? Plus our marketing efforts are split into two main foci: customer and expert. How do you decide which group to market to and can you market to both either simultaneously or separately?

I have started to navigate into these areas, attempting to start conversations mainly to our consumer. I've created a Facebook group and business page. I've also created and uploaded sample videos to Youtube and other popular video sharing sites. Since we don't have any marketing dollars to draw in viewers, I'm mainly relying on my own community and anything that goes viral. We have a few unique and popular videos on YouTube featuring Phil Hellmuth, which invites a lot of discussion. People are very passionate about Phil. Sometimes they leave terrible comments and give him bad reviews. Unless it is spam, I don't delete any of the comments. I find it is far better and adds more value to your advertising efforts to allow freedom of expression. More often than not, criticism can actually increase your visibility. Specifically to Phil Hellmuth, the negative reviews incite discussion and equal amounts of positive reviews.

I also write a marketing and customer blog. I want to add value to both our experts and consumers to increase the stickiness of these efforts. But it is hard to compete with so much chatter that is in the online space. One of the ways that I increase visibility to our customer blog is to synchronize it with our content emails. The blog was actually born from our desire to experiment with content emails. We were doing basic commerce emails and we wanted to experiment with something that added more value to our customer. We thought it might increase the our open rates and customer loyalty. Recently, I've been testing the amount of content I include in the email with a link to read more on our blog. I'll write an updated post with the results. It's an ongoing experiment.

One of the challenges I've faced at iAmplify is developing an SEO strategy for our partner stores. Our business model hinges upon our partners' success. So for some of our larger partners, we will build a custom store that is hosted by us, but utilizes their branding. One of my responsibilities is to create meta data (URL keywords, title tags, meta keywords) for these stores. With Partner or Co-branded Stores there can be an issue with duplicate content as it relates to search engine rankings. If Google finds duplicate content on multiple landing pages under the same domain, it will make an educated guess about which page to present in the search results. Not only do you lose control over which listing you want to show up in the search results, having your content divided between several different pages essentially pokes holes in any weight the original content held as an authoritative results page for a specific keyword search. One of the ways to combat this issue is to "nofollow" the duplicate content pages. I carefully considered this option. But I didn't move forward with it for a couple of reasons, one of which I will detail below.

Since joining iAmplify, I've worked tirelessly with our technology team to improve our main site's search engine rankings. By improving the site's architecture, title tags, url structure etc. our traffic has increased by over 100%. However, since the company's focus right now is on our experts' sites rather than our native site, we have chosen not to make changes to the native site that would most certainly help improve conversion rates. So the increase in traffic to our site has not been met with an equal increase in sales. Meanwhile, having the Partner Store -- with duplicate content, yet often better built and merchandised -- show up higher in the search results than our native site is actually a plus, because that site will generally convert much better. Right now, I actually want our partner store results to show up before our native site results.

So for now, I've let the duplicate content remain. Until we have multiple sites with the same content and it clearly starts to affect our search engine rankings, there is no reason to block or filter the content. Once we add many more partner stores that feature the same content or we improve our native site's conversion rates, I will reconsider the nofollow solution.

Since joining the start-up company iAmplify in July 2008, I've come to utilize marketing muscles which in the past I had rarely flexed. Before landing this job, I'd honed my skills in affiliate and search marketing at Barnes & Noble.com. I was part of the online group tasked with marketing acquisition, and my role expanded into many different areas. But at iAmplify I've had to master the true talent of multi-tasking. I wear such a variety of hats that it's sometimes hard to keep up. At the same time, I am naturally a perfectionist so it's been a challenge to learn how to let some of that perfectionism go. When you have to tend to multiple projects and concerns, you don't always have the luxury to fine tune. It has taken some time to adjust, but I'm finally getting the hang of it.

One of the most surprising muscles that I've been stretching lately has been my writing skill. I never thought I'd be writing content emails, writing business and customer blogs, et cetera. The strange thing is, I almost got a degree in English. I always loved to read more than anything, but when I took my first creative writing class...I became convinced writing was not in my future! Now, I find that writing is not only part of my present, it's come to play a very significant role in my career. It's funny how life turns out sometime.

I've also been looking into social media platforms like twitter, facebook and youtube. In-between managing paid search, SEO, email marketing and marketing our partners stores...I've had little time to truly build these areas out, but am hoping to expand upon them in the New Year.

What is great about this position is that my skills have been pushed beyond what I thought was possible in such a short time. I'm excited for all the possibilities this New Year brings.