Panic Attack Treatment – This Affects Millions!

Do you know someone who has had seemingly “meltdowns” for no reason?  Chances are, they had experienced a “panic attack”.  Panic attacks are much more common than most people think.

Check out the video below to learn a little about panic attacks.

For more information about panic attacks and panic attack treatment, click here

The Pro Bowl – Should It Be One Week Before the Superbowl??

Video – A Different Type of Business Opportunity – One that Works!!

How many e-mails do YOU get a day??? 10 – 20 – 100 – 500?? More???

We are all getting inundated with the number of e-mails – our best friend is the spam arrestor!! But how are we supposed to communicate with each other, our sales teams, our co-workers, and our customers???

There’s a new company out there that is taking what was once only for the fortune 100 companies (they were the only ones who could afford it) and have made it affordable for ANYONE!!

Check out Katie Couric’s segment on video conferencing

Covideo, Inc. has done it – they have brought this once extremely expensive technology to the everyday person. They’ve gone one step farther and have made a business opportunity for tech-minded entrepreneurs as well. Globalpreneurs is the distribution arm for the Covideo system. Their system utilizes video e-mail, video conferencing, video live presentations, and soon to be a product that rivals GoToMeeting with the ability to capture live screen shots, yet still see the presenters.

For more information on Covideo’s system and the opportunity that Globalpreneurs presents, click on the picture below.

If You are interested in learning more about becoming part of the Globalpreneur opportunity, click here

Veterans Day 2009 – Action Footage of World War II

Veterans Day 2009 – Action Videos of Our True Heroes

The Price of Freedom is very high. We all take for granted the freedoms that we all have. Watch the videos and remember that our freedom has come at a VERY LARGE price – then thank any soldiers that you may see. It is their sacrifice that allows us the opportunity to: Complain how bad our job is…. Criticize our health plans…. enjoy a Sunday afternoon football game.

If you don’t appreciate all the sacrifices after watching this video – God help you!

Please take the time to thank our soldiers today – Veteran’s Day!!

For More Videos for Veteran’s Day – Click Here

Manu Ginobili Catches a Bat During a Spurs Basketball Game

You need to see this!!!

 

How to Measure Social Media ROI

Found a great article from Mashable.com    If you haven’t seen their site, go to http://www.mashable.com  – great stuff!

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Last month, we reported on a survey that found that 84% of social media programs don’t measure return on investment (ROI). The comments in that post indicated that a lot of individuals and businesses want to be able to measure the ROI of their social media strategies and campaigns, but they don’t know where to start.

Companies and executives are finally beginning to really jump on the social media bandwagon, and that’s fantastic. However, for social media to fully work (for everyone), businesses and brands need to be able to evaluate the impact their social media use is having, both positive and negative. Measuring social media ROI isn’t impossible, but it can be difficult because many of the pieces that need to be evaluated are difficult to track. This guide is designed to help you track down those pieces and determine the ROI you’re getting on social media.

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ROI Reality Check

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Oliver Blanchard’s Social Media ROI Presentation is a witty, fun introduction to ROI in terms of social media. If you’re confused about what ROI is (or rather, how it is measured), in the context of social media, check out his presentation (below), before you proceed with this post.

 

Olivier Blanchard Basics Of Social Media Roi

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Defining Clear Goals

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As a standard formula, ROI is pretty basic, ROI = (X – Y) / Y, where X is your final value and Y is your starting value. In other words, if you invest $5 and get back $20, your ROI is (20 – 5) / 5 = 3 times your initial investment. In the financial sense, ROI is measured purely in the context of dollars and cents, however, the principles can really apply to any type of investment — monetary or not.

Having concrete goals and concrete baselines is crucial to calculating your return on investment. So before you set out to measure and monitor your social media returns, you need to have a clear idea of what it is you want to accomplish.

Once you have your goals defined, you need to gauge the baseline for your levels before starting or changing your social media strategy. For example, if your goal is to increase social media mentions of your company, in order to measure the ROI of any actions taken toward that goal, you need to know where you stand now. You can’t evaluate the ROI accurately without a baseline.

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Metrics Tools

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Although ROI ≠ metrics, traditional web metrics like traffic counts, number of comments, Twitter followers, Facebook fans, etc. are an important component when calculating your ROI.

The trick is to not rely solely on the numbers, but on what the numbers end up leading to. For instance, does your increase in website visitors correlate with higher sales? Are people that find your website from Twitter or Facebook then clicking on your product pages or going to the e-Commerce section of your site? That’s the sort of data you want to be able to look for.

Back in January, we did a round-up of 50+ Tools for Measuring Web Traffic. Here are some of our favorites and some additional social media related measuring options:

Google Analytics — It’s free and it can provide a really powerful baseline for a variety of different factors. You can track incoming links and then the activities of the users they send, which can be helpful.

Omniture — Omniture has a slew of services available for businesses, including components that track Facebook and Twitter metrics.

TweetMeme Analytics — This is useful if you use TweetMeme’s retweet buttons on your sites. It’s a lot like Google Analytics, but focused on TweetMeme.

PostRank Analytics — This suite of tools measures social engagement on other platforms and services. What’s nice about PostRank is that instead of just a raw number, you can actually see the messages and comments from other sites that contribute to your stats. This can be really important for sentiment analysis (more on that later).

HootSuite — HootSuite is a great Twitter manager but also offers impressive analytics. The nice thing about the click data you get from an app like HootSuite (or bit.ly) is by looking deeper you can more easily see if those clicks translate into transactions or impressions on your other sites.

Be sure to check out our post on Tracking Social Media Analytics for help with these tools and for the type of data you want to look for. Also check out some other reasons to use a URL shortener.

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Sentiment Analysis

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Having a metric for something like Twitter mentions is pretty meaningless if you don’t know if those mentions are positive or negative. This is where sentiment analysis is interesting. Sentiment is also a useful baseline to look at before implementing or changing a social media strategy and calculating your ROI.

We’ve written a lot about different sentiment analysis tools for Twitter and here are some highlights:

Viral Heat — Viral Heat is an affordable social media monitoring service that includes a sentiment breakdown for Twitter mentions.

Twendz — Twendz is a very basic real-time Twitter sentiments tool.

Tweet Feel — Tweet Feel is another real-time Twitter sentiments search-engine.

Crimson Hexagon — Crimson Hexagon is an Enterprise-level social media tracking tool. The algorithm they use for their VoxTrot Opinion Monitor is really impressive stuff, and will help you determine what consumer sentiment is toward your brand based on social media mentions.

Sentiment Metrics — Sentiment Metrics is another tool aimed at enterprises or larger businesses. We mentioned them in our round-up of reputation tracking tools last year.

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Social Media Product Suites

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These products can be extremely useful in measuring ROI on social networks but are primarily designed for bigger brands and corporations. Still, in terms of all-encompassing tool sets, these tools have the edge.

Vitrue SRM — We’ve covered the Twitter Pages component of Vitrue SRM (Social Relationship Manager) before, but the whole suite is really dedicated to managing and getting the most information out of your social media accounts. Vitrue does analytics for links posted on Twitter or Facebook and can also plug into third-party services like Omniture and Google Analytics. Vitrue SRM is basically a CMS for controlling and monitoring your Twitter and Facebook accounts.

ContextOptional — ContextOptional offers both a Social Reporting Dashboard for monitoring engagement and activity and a Social Moderation Console for Facebook.

Salesforce.com — Salesforce.com’s Service Cloud 2 line of products is really designed to integrate Twitter and Facebook results and pages directly into a company’s CRM. Although this isn’t ROI in the most clear-cut terms, by improving customer service and getting a handle on problems quickly, brands can save themselves from potentially costly mistakes. Those savings can be taken into account when computing your ROI.

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Making the Data Usable

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This is the hard part. After you have defined your baseline, you need to take the metrics from your monitoring tools and see how they correlate to higher sales, better customer retention, or whatever your primary markers for output are.

If your ultimate measurement is sales for instance, look at your sales level. If it has increased, look at the number of referrers on your e-commerce site (assuming you can track this data) from your website or Twitter or the number of coupons used that were given away in a Facebook campaign to start calculating which sales stemmed from your social media campaigns.

Do you see any trends? Is traffic up to your store after posting on Facebook? What about Twitter? Does store traffic correlate with more sales when evaluating that same data? Does a higher sentiment analysis on Twitter lead to more sales or more visits?

Finding trends and tracking them back to their point of origin is the key to measuring ROI.

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What do you think?

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What do you use when measuring social media ROI? Is ROI the best term for measuring impact of social media, or should something else be used? What have you found to be good indicators of things that work and don’t work when using social media? Let us know!

10 Books Every Entrepreneur Should Read

Found a good blog post from David Cancel.  If you like this post, try his blog at www.DavidCancel.com

These are the 10 books that I believe every entrepreneur should read:

1. The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Business Law – LLC vs C-corp vs S-Corp? Founder’s vesting? Liquidation Preferences? Equity vs Debt financing? This book will educate you enough to be able to answer these and many other important questions.
2. Bootstrapping Your Business – From the founder of RightNow.  The amazing story of how a geographically-challenged (Montana) entrepreneur built a world class business.
3. Purple Cow – Dead simple premise, the key to marketing is to build something remarkable.
4. The Art of the Start – The Art of Pitching, Marketing and Funding your Startup.
5. The Innovator’s Dilemma – If your startup beats all the odds and becomes hugely successful prepare yourself for the innovator’s dilemma, cannibalize your product before someone else does.
6. The E-Myth Revisited - How-to create a business not a job.
7. Permission Marketing - The greatest marketing asset your startup can build is the permission to  market to your customers and prospects.
8. Growing a Business – Sincere advice for creating a company culture that your team and customers will love.
9. The Cluetrain Manifesto – Successful marketing is a conversation.
10. Bottom-up Marketing - Pure bottoms-up execution. Marketing tactics to grow your business.

And please don’t build your website without reading these books:

1. Always Be Testing
2. Designing for the Social Web
3. Web Analytics: An Hour a Day
4. Don’t Make Me Think
5. Call to Action

Do you have any favorites that I’ve missed?

How You Can Use Foreclosures to Stengthen Your Retirement Plan

Yes, you can take advantage of possibly the greatest time to buy real estate – EVER to beef up your retirement plans.

Check out the video below:

Click Here for More Information How You Can Easily Purchase Foreclosures with Retirement Funds or Just as a Great Investment

Are You Being “Nickel and Dimed” to Death??? I Bet You Are!

I ran across this video that shows a few of the tricks of the trade. By the way, debit cards are a HUGE source of income for banks – they use a “courtesy overdraft” by allowing charges that should be declined to go through – wait until you see how much that “courtesy” costs you!!!

 

Click on the picture to see What I'm Talking About!!!

How to Use Your Mobile Phone for Internet Access on Your Laptop

Want to know how you can use your mobile phone to get your laptop connect to the internet?   for FREE???

Watch the video below!