If you are not familiar with Burpee odds are you are not now, nor have you ever been a serious gardener. Burpee is one of the oldest, most trusted and best branded companies in the United States that provides seeds and to a lesser degree gardening supplies. The company has a rich history and is about as “old school” in that respect as it gets, first founded in 1876 we are talking 132 years of domination of a very unique market.

Burpee built their success as a catalog company, mailing more then a million of these catalogs a year by 1925. I remember fondly going through their catalog with my Grandfather in the 70s and 80s. Each year we would order our favorite tried and true vegetable seeds and perhaps pick one or two new ones to try out. The old man would use nothing but Burpee seeds in his pride a joy, (quarter acre home garden with rich Pennsylvania soil that fed us and half our street by fall each year). I mean you could have given him some other seeds for free and he would have tossed them out!

Such was the loyalty created by a product that worked well and always delivered. We would start our seeds indoors in January. By late February and early March they were being moved into our cold frame and getting ready to be hardened for planting in the garden. Every year our crop was as good as it could be considering the weather and such, it was never a bad seed that made for a bad crop. Burpee didn’t have to do any branding with my Grandfather, there was no email either not that he would have used it. Further he could care less about a “review” by someone else of his favorite tomato seed, he knew what grew, he trusted the company and he always went back. Just like his father did with him as a boy.

I have fond memories of my time with my Grandpa (Andrew Spirko). He was a good man from a time we have largely forgotten. There are not many people like him around today, much of what he taught me has been lost and I imagine people such as myself who are keeping some of the really old traditions alive are a dwindling species.

However, gardening is a growing market. Technology is so fast moving, life so stressful, etc that many are looking back to that old school wisdom. One might think a “old company” like Burpee would fall behind the marketing curve but happily nothing is further from the truth. What I love about this and the reason I have put so much effort into this post is the way that Burpee has embraced both what I guess we call Web 1.0 Marketing (search, PPC, etc) and Web 2.0 Marketing with out in anyway stopping the other methods, service and concepts that built the company in its first 120 years. Those people who are still like my Grandfather and have no Internet are still getting great catalogs and still seeing their favorite brand in their favorite old media magazines.

Here is what I mean…

On the conventional Internet marketing front Burpee has done a good job with solid on page SEO. They have encouraged links and their natural strong brand has built them a solid organic search presence. They have what at least from the outside appears to be a well put together PPC approach on Google and Yahoo and even Live/MSN or whatever they finally call themselves. The Live.com move is probably a good one as many new Internet users tend to do things like type Burpee Seed into the IE Browser. They also have a very well run email marketing campaign. Overall they are doing the right things to get effective use from Search and their day to day web traffic.

In the Web 2.0 Social Networking world they have even done pretty good. They have a Gardeners Corner where members can show case their gardens with pride. There is a great data base of helpful articles and what I think is most important is that they have customer reviews on almost every seed they sell. Evidenced by the occasional negative opinion the reviews are honest, unaltered and there by trusted by other site visitors. Best of all users are creating great content for them, a goal any site should aspire to.

In the conventional world Burbee has not forgotten its roots either. They still have a great hard copy catalog and for the old school types that only use the net as needed requesting one via their site is easy. I have one sitting on my desk as I write and while well done, beautifully printed, etc it has not lost a bit of the vintage look that will appeal to the older customer base. From an operational stand point they are still staying true to their many product, on the site and in the catalog 99% of the “product” is seeds or plants. They have not tried to become a total source from everything garden, just a few select additional products.

Overall especially when I look at companies of similar age and background I rate Burpee a “A” for their efforts. To make it an A+ I do have the following recomendations.

1. The reviews are nice but Burpee should should have their own forum. With a few emails a new forum could be off the ground. Sure it would need to be kick started and moderated at first but in a short time it would be a self policing community. Appoint a few power users with Moderator powers and enjoy the rewards of free SEO, a powerful community and a growing knowledge base. I could have a forum up, installed and skinned in perhaps an hour. Small effort, great reward.

2. The Gardener’s Corner has a “tip of the day”. These should be fleshed out into a paragraph or two rather then a sentance and used as primary content for a Blog. The blog then should be set up in all the communities, MyBlogLog, BlogCatalog, etc. Easy to do and you also get exposure in blog search engines etc. Again not much effort to set up and one employee blogging for 15 minutes a day would build up a fast presence.

3. Burbee should have some level of a Social Media community presence. MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, etc. Get out and meet and interact. Give two or three people an hour a week each to do this and you get a lot of viral bang for a few hours of work.

4. YouTube – Burpee should have a YouTube channel. A few informative quick videos a month. No big productions just some easy shooting with a 200 dollar camera, 20 minutes of editing and upload and be done with it. Get other Burpee customers building and doing their own channels and you again get a huge viral marketing return.

In spite of these additions I would suggest again I really think Burpee has done an awesome job that many other large companies could do well to emulate. What I love most though is my Rutgers Heirloom Tomatoes taste as good as I remember from my Grand Father’s garden and I can make fresh salsa and pico with out fear of salmonella or the resulting tomato shortage/ban.

Given we just launched HatedOrLoved.com an online Social Network Community that will be coming out of Beta 1.0 into Beta 2.0 this weekend it may seem odd that I am about to extol the virtues of what is in essence a competitors site. Yet that doesn’t matter because I am going to do it anyway. This is also not going to be yet another of a thousand “Mixx is Better then Digg” posts but I must draw some contrast to Digg because the difference is so stark. Honestly I think the “better then Digg” thing is only stated so often due to the fact that Digg is the most successful site of its’ kind. Honestly I also feel that Mixx is better then Reddit, Propeller, Plime, etc, etc.

Why? Is it the features, the customization, the groups and other cool and new stuff Mixx offers that the others don’t? To me it isn’t that at all, those things are cool and unique but the real difference is the community and its tone, not to mention its’ pleasant lack of anger and hatred for anything commercial, republican or that might result in profit to an evil corporation.

I have self submitted very quality work to Digg and Plime and was descended upon by the masses with hatred, negative votes and malicious attacks of my other non self submissions just to punish me for the horrific sin of submitting something I wrote. The content was never judged, just the fact that I dared to submit something I created. At times I felt as though I had angered an entire legion of Star Trek Fantards by saying something bad about Mr. Spock. My experience at Mixx has been entirely different.

I finally took the leap and joined Mixx just barely a month ago. I started submitting a few items a week, I looked for cool stories and submitted them. I added people with cool submissions as friends and most friended me back, I added all the top Mixxers and most also added me back. I definitely have submitted some of my own content and almost all of it made popular. One of them even got me a “Top 10 Badge”. Oh yea that is cool too, not one Top 10 but two of them now grace my Mixx Profile along with a “Curmudgeon” badge for a day I spent nuking pure spam posts with negative votes.

Before I go on I must note that this same approach I am describing made me a target for attack at Digg and got be banned by Plime before I even got started.

What I must say I have gotten from Mixx that no similar site has offered me is “acceptance”. You see I have an illness a terrible disease that is more shunned in many social networks far more then lepers were in biblical times. You see I am an Internet Marketer and worse then that an SEO! Everyone knows that any time an SEO submits to Digg (even a story about kittens in Ohio that save a mouse) that it is pure spam and nothing more and must be voted down. On Plime the SEO must have his entire C-Block of IPs banned for life.

OK, OK relax my fellow Diggers I am trying to be satirical here. As for Plime well Plime is evil, no satire intended.

No it isn’t as bad as all that on Digg but I could never have been so accepted with say 2 of 10 submissions being my own on Digg. At Mixx on the other hand power Mixxers actually apparently examined my content, decided it was good solid content and not just voted for it, commented on it and welcomed me. No my friends that is not all, there is much more.

A fellow named Bruce (who goes by the handle Yoda on Mixx) invited myself and some others to over see a group called the “Hall of Fame” which features the greatest Mixx stories of all time. Yoda is a “Super Mixxer” and almost always listed as a top Mixxer of the day. He is the analog of a Power Digger and yet he not only accepts the Dark Side that SEO represents (pun intended) he even trusts me as a moderator on a group that features the best of the best.

Why? Why am I so accepted at Mixx? I believe that Mixx is devoid of one thing that infects many other communities. Mixx lacks what I call a “hate crime legislation mentality”. On Digg when someone submits an SEO piece or worse submits his own piece if it starts to get votes the attackers never read it, they don’t judge it based on its content only what they perceive as its intent. In other words they act as “thought police”.

The reality is I am not a bad guy, I don’t try to take over these networks for evil purposes and I do work hard to make sure when I submit something it is damn well worthy of being submitted. I then work the system just like others do and let it results land in what ever way the community wants it to. Simply because the content of my submissions, voting, comments, etc have been judged on Mixx rather then some false assigned view of my intent I have had a great first month and look forward to earning my Super Mixxer badge and making a ton more friends.

So that is what I learned about how to build a great community from the Mixx community. Banish “hate crime laws” from your community, insist that rules be followed but also that content, contributions and participation be judged for what they are not for the intent behind them. That difference in my opinion is a bigger part of why Mixx is what it is today then groups, lists and customization.

So that is the exact approach I plan on taking with my new Social Network and it would be my advice to anyone creating a new site that relies on a self policing community. Police away but police the quality and behavior, to hell with intent. Spammers will still be easy to spot and even easier to deal with and your community will grow because new people won’t be walking on egg shells afraid of the wrath of a few of your veterans.

So what has your experience at Digg been like compared to Mixx? Or vs. Propeller or say Reddit? Also what are you thought on “abolishing hate crime laws” online and insisting that the same rules be applied to all, regardless of their profession or the fact that they may actually benefit in some way by being an active member of a community?

On April 6th 2008, a gathering of 4000 people participated in the Cedar Fest street party. This was organized through a page that was created on the social networking site Facebook that promoted the event. The word of this party, which had been banned back in the late 90’s due to excessive property damage from rioters, spread like wild fire. For those that attended, this was a night of drunken revelry and the chance to be part of a small riot, just to say “I was there and got to see it for myself.”

What could be a more perfect example of viral social network marketing in full effect?

See the video of the Facebook Cedar Fest Riot along with a number of other videos that have been posted by the people who where there, basically creating a mini-documentary of how the night unfolded. Also, notice the ubiquitous use of everyone recording the moment for themselves via their cell phones that will no doubt be shared with their friends and family through Youtube and other social networking sites.

Below, is a brief overview of the history of Cedar Fest and the events that took place this past weekend. Keep in mind that before the rise of the Internet and especially, sites such as Facebook and Myspace, imagine how hard it would have been for a crowd this large to gather in one pre-determined place as is demonstrated in the link above?

Cedar Fest was an infamous gathering in the 1980’s in an apartment complex called Cedar Village. This complex is located just south of the Michigan State University Campus. The events, in the fall and spring, often attracted big crowds which eventually led to thousands of dollars in damage and complaints of the excessive use of tear gas.

Cedar Fest was shut down by a court order and banned by the East Lansing City Council. However, since 1997 there have been several new riots in the Cedar Village area and downtown East Lansing, but under new laws, police have moved in quickly to quell them.

At the onset of the gathering, the crowd was peaceful. The police officers allowed the people to enjoy the evening and only intervened to arrest or ticket those who were heavily intoxicated. As the night wore on, the crowd began to behave violently, throwing beer bottles at officers, tearing up street signs, setting dumpster fires and chanting “We want tear gas.” After being hit with bottles, cans, and various other debris police ordered the crowd to disperse.

The East Lansing Police Department began monitoring a Facebook page created specifically for the event along with the Facebook account holder who planned the Cedar Fest street party. East Lansing Police Public Information Officer Kym Johnson stated. “We’re going after anyone who had any part of getting this party started. We are going to do our best to prosecute those individuals who started this whole resurrection of this Cedar Fest all the way to the last person we arrest tonight and tomorrow.”

Chief Tom Wibert said police were not sure what to expect. “This is the first time we have dealt with something organized on the Internet,” Wibert said. Police made a total of 52 arrests, many of them Michigan State University students. “I don’t know what we could have done different to avoid it. When 4,000 people suddenly decide that they want to take the streets, it’s pretty hard for 50 police officers to stop them,” he said during a press conference at East Lansing City Hall.

Right now, consider this: In the realization that even though the Cedar Fest street party turned into a riot, the fact that such a large group of people chose to act in a pre-defined manner based off an internet site is amazing. What should be sloshing around in our minds is all the different angles that this prime example can be turned into profit.

For those of us who are able to capitalize on the loyalty that these social networking sites generate. We will prosper many times over in terms of revenue and the amount of link power that is the end result of creating a high traffic site that is affiliated with these networks. Imagine how this can be utilized for a client’s brand recognition if they are successfully associated with social networking sites that have the loyalty of literally millions of people.

What if through expert marketing, this resource of people could be tapped on demand, in promotion of new product or service? The point that drives this whole ordeal to heart is this. With a clear call to action, the sheer numbers of people that can be moved to do something in a pre-determined way by a single post on something like Facebook or Myspace is absolutely incredible.

Yet, on the opposing side, one has to accomplish this delicate task without having the users feel like they were manipulated for a profit, such as the nefarious practice of capturing the private information of users, only to be sold to the highest bidder and on and on and on.

Everyone is well aware how Facebook lost a large amount of their credibility regarding privacy when they began offering targeted ads to people in a user’s network, notifying them of when their friend purchased a specific item. I’m not necessarily stating that targeted ads are bad but this obviously has to be judged in the context that they are used.

These practices have to be disclosed in such a way that a user knows exactly what they are getting into without having it sprung upon them. When a large group of users feel violated as a result of finding out that their private information has become exposed to everyone by a trusted source, that creates huge problems and Facebook was at the splitting edge of alienating their user base. See here for the Facebook Beacon debacle.

Therefore, a strategy for monetizing this incredible resource has to strike a fine but crystal clear balance. Figuring out a legitimate way of integrating large swaths of users into a well defined marketing campaign… and from there doing so in such a fashion that users will act of their own volition and make the choice to participate based off of their own interest. I’m definitely curious about the related topics this subject stirs up and I would like to hear comments from what others think about social network marketing.

Erik Lignell
Internet Marketing Specialist

Now before you flay me, before you explain how they have purchased huge social sites (YouTube springs to mind) understand this is not a white paper, not an industry brief, no it is simply an speculative opinion. My first speculation is that I am correct about where social media is going and my second speculation is that Google’s staff is smarter then I am and can predict even more. When I put those two speculations together it forms an very interesting view of the future.

Here is my theory in a nut shell. Search Engine Journal just reported that Google now controls 69% of online advertising. When any company gets to such a dominant position it is not always the champaign and happy times one would expect. Wall Street is a picky mistress and wants growth all the time, every time and at the expense of all other things. Growing when you own a market can be difficult at least growing any faster then the market itself and when a slump hits, even a tiny one you have it real hard.

Again not saying Google won’t continue to make billions, it is the growth of those billions that is getting harder to create.

Now further we must simply accept that Google has never built anything that has really been successful from the ground up other then their search engine. Everything else you can name that they have really succeeded with has been developed by others. The list is long,

• Blogger
• YouTube
• Google Docs
• adSense
• adWords (yep that too)
• Double Click
• And it goes on

Now the problem for Google and their growth long term is that, unlike search, social media is both easier to build platforms for and easier to innovate with. Social Networking is in its’ infancy right now it won’t just be more clone sites in the future exploiting niches (though there will be many of those – successful and flops). No, social platforms will get cooler, more specialized and honestly evolve to change the way people communicate, find jobs, gain education, earn incomes and much more.

One could state that this has already happened. I mean you can get a 100K job at The Ladders, talk to Japan for Free on Skype, find a date on MySpace and get referrals for your next big deal at LinkedIn. All while running a million dollar company from a small home office. Today is a lot different then say 1998 or to really make a point, say 1988.

What this should mean to Google though is growth of market share for the next 10 and 20 years is going to be hard fought. If we are using the web (which was little more then BBSs in 1990 accessed on 14.4 modems) to do these things today, what will tomorrow bring? My guess is some of the innovations we will see in the next 24 months have not even reached a “thought form” stage yet. I bet Google knows this too in fact I am sure they know far more then I do about it.

Now while Google can buy up companies and hire bright minds with something like social media it is going to be driven entrepreneurs coupled with smart programmers and marketers that change the landscape over the next two decades. While most web marketers are not thinking in decades yet, Google must be. As a darling of Wall Street they have to think about this quarter, this fiscal year and their long term plans as well.

I see a future with hundreds of highly successful social networking applications and many versions and niche specific applications of each. Billions of people interacting via hundreds of applications a genie that can never go back into the bottle. Unlike search where there could be a clear winner, social media is to user specific to be funneled down to a “Big Four” which everyone knows is honestly a “Big One”.

So does this scare Google? In my opinion it should. I am not saying that is should make them fear the end of an empire but perhaps the end of an ever expanding empire. In short what I am saying is the social media empire is beginning a growth curve that Google can’t either buy or innovate their way ahead of. Bold statement? I really don’t think it is, it is just my faith in the thousands of innovators out there that are building the future of the Internet.

In conclusion I would like to do one more bit of speculation in a manner anyone looking to the future should do.  Let us look into the past.  If you had to pick the “Google Analog” for say the period of 1980 – 2000, who would it be?  During those two decades who was the “800 Pound Gorilla” of Technology, the Stock everyone had to own and  company that simply could not be beaten?  While you may disagree, the numbers would prove it was Microsoft.

So is Microsoft in danger of Chapter 7 anytime soon?  Will founder Bill Gates be forced to give up his jet or private island retreats?   Of course not!  Yet what kind of growth does Microsoft have today, compared to Google?  How many bright minds want to work there as a “dream job” today?  How often are they now publicly lauded for innovation, creation and changing the way the world does business?  For younger marketers it may be hard to remember but Microsoft was “The Company” just a decade ago.

Then came the browser and even though Microsoft still controls most browsers (for now) it is Google that turned the Browser into a vehicle for a multi billion dollar empire.  When we look at Microsoft today, do we see the Google of 2018?  Now I doubt we can draw an exact analogy, however as anyone who has ever read a mutual fund prospectus can tell you, “while past performance is no guarantee of future results, history has shown it to be a strong indicator”.

Recently I published a very popular post on 20 Social Networking Sites that are good for building links. I put a lot of work into the research behind that project and isolated 20 great Social Sites that actually were useful for good old fashioned link building in the true SEO sense of the terms. Of course it was submitted it to some Social Sites and it did well, so far in fact as of right now it has

• 74 Diggs
• 51 Sphinns
• 19 Plugs
• 34 Mixxes
• 49 Propellers

Now that is a good mix of social sites and not a bad result for an SEO type post especially on Digg and Propeller. The comments were mostly good too, however, one poster took a big exception to my suggestion to self submit to these sites and just basically said it was all spam.

Part of his comment was,

“It’s best to use your brain and not try to exploit community sites in this way. It’s bad for the internet and generally unethical. You’ll accumulate a net negative of goodwill from the internet’s population in the long run.”

If you want to read my direct response just go to the original post and read it there. My question for people today though is, is he right in any way? Is it some how wrong to self submit? I personally do not think so but would like to hear others opinions on this.

My view is as follows considering that if I have that young lady on the left do my submissions I will get great results. As that is the case I think we can agree all things are not “fair and democratic” in the land of social media utopia the way some hard core users seem to claim. In some of these sites you are honestly forced to either get someone to submit for you which I have done on more then one occasion or to submit under a fake name, I am also guilty of that at times. If that is the way of the community just adapting to it makes sense.

That said I do not see why we should see self submission or client submission to a Social Site as being some sort of “evil”. The problem with that is we are judging intent vs. judging content. This is the same moronic logic behind “hate crime laws”. When you submit to these sites it would make sense for the content rather then the intent to be judged.

In many sites that is the case. No one gets bent when you self submit to Sphinn or BiggItUp, of course they are almost 100% internet marketers. Yet look how fast Mixx is taking off, I get great results self submitting to Mixx and no haters are bashing me there. They judge my content and love it or hate it and simply vote as they feel they should. Mixx is not now full of viagra postings and such on the popular pages but my posts have several times made popular there. I self submit to Stumble too, no anger, no bashing and Stumble has great content.

To me social networking has a greater future if we judge the content rather then intent. Who cares if someone wants exposure the “real news” is so driven by PR Firms anyway much of the “pure content” many members are trying to protect is every bit if not more promotional then that of a small business or typical blogger.

So what do you think? Is it OK to self submit or is it evil? I am not asking what works better but only is it right or wrong to do it? Does it pollute the web in some evil way or are a bunch of 16 year olds just hateful of anything with the dirty word “profit” associated with it?

OK so do we really need yet another social bookmarking online community (aka a Digg Clone)? At Franklin Spirko we decided that yes indeed we do and hence the launch of HatedOrLoved.com

The reasoning was simple, there are so many sites like Digg, Mixx, etc that utilize a community approach to share news, stories and just plain cool stuff. In theory they work great and spam is kept down because the community can “bury” (or what ever the equivalent may be for the site) the story and push it off the popular page and out of the normal listings. The theory behind this functionality seems solid enough but the reality is in practice many good (content wise) stories are buried.

These stories could be about god forbid on Digg, SEO, and labeled as spam simply because of the subject. This is one of the factors behind the success of Sphinn. Yet it is not just internet marketers that are beaten down on many social sites. Perhaps the story is political and against the majority thought on the site so it gets crushed. Why should this be? Just because a story is an alternate view does not make it spam, trash or poor content.

So the concept of Hated or Loved is remarkably simple. You don’t bury a story you don’t like, you “Hate It” which is far more and expression of opinion then a false need to push a story 40 other people found worthy out of the popular results. When we are done with our next set of modifications you will be able to view not just upcoming and popular stories but hated stories as well.

So each day you can check out the most hated and loved stories online, we though the concept was kind of cool so our new Web Developer (Bobby Wilson) went to work less then a week ago and we have the Beta (very beta) site up already. We invite you to sign up, sumit your content and play around with some hatred and love.

A few things to note about the site for right now

• When I say Beta I mean Beta the “Featured Hated” does not function yet. It requires a lot of work to basically recreate the algorithms for popular on the other side of things. So ignore the “Top 10 Hated for Now” it is just a place holder.

• The avatar function is not working right yet so you can’t upload a picture with your profile just yet. Bobby is working on it, the platform we are using is on PHPDug, if anyone has over come this issue we would love to hear from you about it.

• This site is designed to be SEO and Marker Friendly you most certainly are welcome to submit both third party and your own stories. We do not use nofollow and we do have permalinks for each story. So feel free to link build away in your submitting.

• When you find a bug let us know about it but give us some time. Again right now we are in really a pre beta mode but wanted to start getting some SEO exposure and some founding members right away so we decided to open up the site.

• We are looking for help with this project. I need both contributors and probably moderators in the near future if you want to be considered for either let me know. If you have a blog and blog about solid content (in any niche) we will consider adding your feed to the site for automatic inclusion. If your are interested just post your blog link in the comments and we will evaluate your site for auto inclusion.

So please let us know what you think of this new concept for a site, let us know your ideas to make the site better and by all means let us know what you love and what you hate.

~ Jack Spirko

There are perhaps hundreds of millions of blogs online today and a significant portion are run by businesses and entrepreneurs. These blogs are supposed generate business and leads and opportunities for the companies that run them. I was thinking about this when listening to a recent Trump University Podcast with Lena West who was speaking about Social Media. Lena stated that “a recent study by the University of Florida found that over 50% of business blogs were abandoned with in 1 year or less”.

Now, that is a pretty dim statistic isn’t it? What it tells us clearly is the majority of businesses are failing their objective to generate leads because business owners and marketing teams would not be abandoning them otherwise. Can you honestly see a quality source of leads being abandoned?

Conversely here at Franklin Spirko we are consistently getting the majority of leads from our company blog or the personal blogs of our employees. So why is it that many businesses put a lot of effort into blogging and never get any quality leads from them, while others seem to generate leads with ease?

Some would surmise that it is the quality of the content and writing or the activity level and dedication in posting to a blog consistently. While both are important we have seen plenty of well written and active blogs fail to actually generate business for many companies. To me it is more the message and angle of the blog.

Most companies blog 99% about themselves, such as…

• “we have this new product bla bla bla”
• “we have this special deal yadda yadda”
• “we just hired so and so yak, yak yak”

The reality is very few people that read blogs really care about those things and they certainly don’t on their first few visits to your blog. Additionally many companies blog at a very high technical level (many SEO and Marketing Blogs do this), they blog about subjects so complex that the only people that truly understand them are competitors.

So just what is the solution?

First you must understand your audience, you must think about your market, figure out what they care about and blog about those subjects. For instance our blog here focuses on business and marketing efforts in Dallas – Fort Worth. We talk about local events, announce networking opportunities and discuss new things in the business climate in the DFW area.

Sure we talk about Public Relations, Search Marketing and Web Sites but we try to do so at a very easy to follow level and attach them to real world happenings that matter to people in the Dallas area. So if you want your blog to do more for you, then do more for your readers. Talk about what your market cares about from your unique point of view, do that, build your reader base and you may find your new number one source of leads is your company blog.

~ Jack Spirko

I just learned about a new social networking website for Real Estate Professionals known as Active Rain.  At Frank Spirko Media we have several industries we really want to be deeply involved in and the Real Estate market is one of them.

While the network is limited to Real Estate Professionals I joined under the category “Real Estate – Other”.  I see our company a supplier to the Real Estate and Property Management Industries.  As such I want our staff to better understand the needs of the industry.   I think that every company should work hard to find a few vertical industries where they can do far more then just make money.  You should find a few industries you have tremendous respect for that you can feel good about helping.  Then seek to give first and let the business that comes from such relationships just happen.

~ Jack Spirko