James Young (Art & Design)

Work Smart: How to Make Procrastination Productive

From Fastcompany.com

trendwatching.com has released their latest report. Here’s a quick summary of the 10 trends:

1. Business as unusual
2. Urbany
3. Real-time reviews
4. (F)luxury
5. Mass Mingling
6. Eco-easy
7. Tracking & alerting
8. Embedded generosity
9. Profile myning
10. Maturialism

View the full report online or Download the PDF version.

Source: www.trendwatching.com. One of the world’s leading trend firms, trendwatching.com sends out its free, monthly Trend Briefings to more than 160,000 subscribers worldwide.

The slashing of paid search advertising is just one symptom of the current economic situation. I’m seeing a lot of questions out there, from Twitter to direct inquiries, regarding the dark art of SEO. While optimizing the heck out of your META tags may never grow your “Organic Search” results to the volume they might have been at when you were spending thousands of dollars per month on Adwords, there are things that can and should be done to move your site up in search engine rankings.

One mantra to keep in mind throughout any SEO effort is: Patience, Analysis, Creativity, Implementation, Repeat. SEO combines many disciplines such as Marketing, Competitive Research, Customer Awareness, and Web Development. It also helps if you are selling/making/talking about stuff that people are interested in. If you build it, it doesn’t necessarily mean that ‘they’ will search for it. Don’t try to get it all done in one day, break your site into prioritized blocks, and work to improve successful pages first, then work through the full site over time.

You are responsible for knowing what your customers are looking for, and the terms they associate with that need. Here’s a three part roll up by SiteProNews, that covers of a bunch of helpful ideas to help you build an SEO framework that can close the gap between your site and the people searching for what you provide:

How to Optimize for Google:

• Part 1 of 3
  
• Part 2 of 3
  
• Part 3 of 3
  

Twittermaven recently surveyed 240 people with 6 questions regarding interacting with brands. Here are some key findings, as well as a sample chart.

• Most users (89%) agree that brands should engage their customers on Twitter.
  
• almost 90% of users would frown upon poor or inappropriate brand use of Twitter.
• 60% of respondents would recommend a company based on their presence on Twitter and 80% of Twitter users will reward those brands
• More than 60% of respondents have 100+ followers and almost 50% of respondents have posted more than 1000 Tweets

For the full results, including a number of other interesting charts, read the article.

Business of Software conference September 2008: Jason Fried is founder of 37signals (developers of Basecamp and Ruby on Rails) and Signal vs Noise blogger