Radio Free Enterprise

Have you ever wished that you could just leave a voice mail for someone without risking them actually answering the phone? Well now you can, with slydial.

This free service somehow manages to put you directly into a person’s voice mail box without their phone ringing or displaying your phone number (most of the time, read below). All you have to do is dial the slydial phone number (267-SLYDIAL) and then type in the number of phone you want to leave a message on. After that just leave a message as usual.

What’s the catch? Well, there are actually two ways you “pay” for the service. First off, every time you call you have to listen to a 30-second commercial before being connected. Secondly, in order to access enhanced features like abbreviated dialing and web access (neither of which strike me as big benefits) you have to register with the site, providing a great deal of personal information including your phone number.

The slydial web site does a great job presenting examples of how and when to use the service. Like the chance to just give your side of the story without the other party having the opportunity to waste your time by giving theirs. Or checking in with your boss from the golf course without risking being assigned with a new task to complete before the end of the day. The potential uses are almost endless and some of the best are provided by users on the slydial blog site.

In testing slydial, I came upon an issue you should be aware of. Sometimes your call is not entirely stealthy. I contacted the company and received a very prompt email response regarding this apparent problem. According to Gavin Macomber of MobileSphere, slydial’s parent company, with some mobile phones

“…the recipient’s phone may emit an abbreviated “half ring” before going directly to voicemail (after all .. you did try to call them). In any scenario, rest-assured that the person you are slydialing cannot ‘answer’ your call.”

One last caveat: slydial only works when calling to mobile phones.

All in all, I think slydial is great and I’ve already saved it in my cell phone’s directory. Give it a try and then come back and leave a comment.

Networking of all kinds fascinates me. Whether it be business networking groups like BNI, network marketing companies like Mary Kay or Isagenix, or social networking applications like MySpace and LinkedIn, this type of distributed messaging really piques my interest.

While researching a post on the use of social networking sites for marketing purposes, I came across a company that is not only doing it but teaching others how to supercharge their sales through the intelligent use of these sites. They’ve even coined the term Social Marketing.

Stomper Net has posted this video as a viral marketing device for their services. Whether or not you choose to employ their services, I highly recommend you spend a few minutes watching it.

The first few minutes are a little hypey, and the animation is a little cutesy, but once you get to the statistics on the growth of social networking sites and how marketers are using them to explode traffic on their sites, the video becomes nothing short of compelling.

Take a look and let me know what you think.

Recent posts have gone from monkey to donkey, and now I’m moving from TWiT to Twitter.

I am seriously investigating Social Networking as it relates to Small Business Marketing. I’ve been on LinkedIn for a couple of years and am now experimenting with FaceBook, MySpace and, most recently, Twitter.

As with all Social Networking tools, Twitter can be a little difficult to explain to those of us who were born before 1990.

In a nutshell, Twitter allows you to let everyone in your group of friends know what you are doing from minute to minute.

This may not sound appealing to those of us who feel the Internet age has left us naked from a privacy standpoint. Sadly, this is something that we’re all just going to have to accept and, in my opinion embrace, since the idea of personal privacy is not just going the way of the Dodo bird, it’s already long gone. And Twitter is less invasive than many other Internet information sources. What you post about your life and actions is up to you. You only need tell the people you want to tell, what you want to share, when you want to share it. Some people go crazy, posting info ever time they have a meal or leave the house. Puh-leeze resist the urge to do this.

Instead, look at Twitter as a great free tool to help stay top-of-mind with your sphere of influence. Twitter posts are short text messages (limited to 140 characters) which can include links back to your blog, website, ecommerce site, etc. which can also potentially increase your page rank on Google. I have just started “Tweeting” but intend to tweet every time I post something on my blog or do something else I think the folks following me will be interested in knowing.

Just for kicks, why not set up your own Twitter account and choose to follow my actions. I’ll do the same for you and we’ll figure out whether this thing has any longterm value together.

One of my favorite podcasts is TWiT, This Week in Tech with Leo Laporte.

Leo has a great radio voice (and years of “real” radio experience) and his ever-changing panel of thoughtful, funny guests makes for a very enjoyable listening experience. Frequent contributors include John C. Dvorak, Patrick Norton, and Jason Calacanis. He also often has surprisingly famous one-time guests like Steve Wozniak and Roger McGuinn.

Leo is constantly pushing the edge of the envelope when it comes to distributing audio and video content and frequently shares tidbits on how he does what he does. For example, he uses Skype to connect his panel from across the country and around the world in a real-time, relatively high quality production. He has also recently added live streaming video.

If you ever wonder how I stay on top of all the cool new tech products and services that I blog about, give a listen to TWiT. Every week you’ll learn about the latest happenings in digital video, social networking, blogging and podcasting - you name it.

You can subscribe via iTunes or just listen online via the TWiT website.

Hope you enjoy it - and don’t say I never gave you anything!

In this 7:30 video Aaron Wall discusses why new internet marketers are best off starting marketing by creating a blog.

If you are a complete novice when it comes to driving traffic to your website from search engines like Google, you ought to check out this short video.

Just two weeks ago I was listening to one of my favorite podcasts, This Week In Tech with Leo Laporte.

Leo was interviewing a young man named Justin Kan, star of his own lifelong version of The Truman Show on Justin.tv. Justin’s claim to fame? He’s made a commitment to LifeStreaming - providing live Internet video of everything that happens in his life 24/7 from a camera mounted on his head. Sound like fun?

Beyond the obvious privacy and logistical issues, the technology Justin had to cobble together was nothing short of daunting - and expensive. But that was two weeks ago, an ice age in Internet time. Today anyone can do the same thing Justin is (if they care to), with no hassle, at no charge and in no time.

UStream.tv allows anyone with a digital video camera (webcam on up) and a high-speed Internet connection to stream their images live to hundreds of viewers worldwide at no charge.

Just like YouTube and other sites which allow the free posting of pre-recorded videos, UStream.tv will no doubt be filled without a great deal of dubious content. But the opportunity for business owners, sales professionals and business groups to broadcast their live events to the world via streaming video is profound.

And the potential to leverage UStream.tv as an Education-Based Marketing medium is also enormous. I’ll be very interested to see where this new channel takes us in the coming months and years.

Ted Turner’s father made his fortune in billboards - the widely despised and widely dispersed giant canvasses of commercialism dotting the highways and bi-ways of this fair land.

Ted took over the firm - then worth approximately $1 million - upon his father’s suicide in 1963. The rest, as they say, is history.

To this day, Turner Outdoor is still a huge cash cow, churning out millions of profits for Time Warner every year - and getting progressively more profitable due to the latest in digital signage technology which allows a single billboard to display multiple ad images every minute.

But that ain’t all. Through wired and wireless Internet connections, hundreds of signs of all sizes in locations ranging from roadsides to retail points of sale, can be controlled and monitored from a single location. Awesome!

This article explains how an advertising medium which had been written off for dead just ten years ago is making a huge comeback thanks to the creative application of digital technology.

I’m not sure whether Jott is revolutionary or evolutionary but I do know that I will be using this amazing new service from this day forward.

Jott combines telephony, voice messaging, voice recognition, email and an online-accessible database to create an amazingly simple yet powerful communication medium that every business owner can put to immediate use.

Here’s how this free service works: You call a toll free number and a robotic female voice asks, “Who do you want to Jott?” You respond “Me.” After a tone, you dictate your message to yourself, then pause to indicate you are finished. In a few seconds the voice says “Got it!” and then you hang up. Shortly thereafter you receive an email with a text transcription of your message along with a link to play the original recording.

You can Jott messages to yourself, to individuals and to groups. For example, in less than 30 seconds with a single toll-free call to Jott, a sales manager can inform his entire team that the sales meeting has been rescheduled.

The Jott web site does a great job of explaining how the system works and the ways that people are using it. It’s easy to register and import your entire contact database.

I’m going to be using Jott to send myself reminders, email customers and vendors, schedule meetings - and a thousand other things - every time it occurs to me, even when I’m on the road.

Several years ago I had an idea about posting educational videos on the Internet on arcane but interesting topics like, how to build a roaring fire in your fireplace, how to parallel park, the basic rules of football and baseball, how to bake bread, change a diaper, set a table, make a bed, plant a flower garden, etc.

Each video would be only five minutes or shorter, offering just the essential information you needed along with links to resources for more details. Kind of like a video instruction manual for life. My idea was that users would generate the content and vote on each video’s value. The best videos and producers would rise to the top, attracting the most eyeballs and creating the most advertising revenue. I registered the domain name FiveMinutesOn.com but did nothing further.

Over the past couple of years, multiple companies have come forward with various flavors of this same concept, with greater or lesser degrees of marketplace success. The most recent one I am aware of, is being created nearby to me in Great Falls, Virginia.

Knowlera Media’s approach is to locate subject matter experts of every stripe and then send professional videographers to do 2-camera shoots of them in HD (high definition video). Knowlera pays for the production and editing and posts the video online. The expert gets free video exposure and the ability to post the content on their web site. But Knowlera owns the rights to the content and receives all revenue derived from it.

Their site has not yet gone live but they are already shooting and editing content. My friend Wes Crawford, who is a master musician and music teacher, has contributed his knowledge to a couple of drum instructional videos for Knowlera.

If you are a coach, consultant or other type of subject matter expert who would like to share your knowledge with the world under the terms outlined above, drop by MonkeySee.com and fill-out the form on the Experts page. Then stop back here and let us know what you think.

This is a great way for any business person with specialized knowledge which brings unique value to an engaged audience to do some high-quality Education-Based Marketing - at no charge!