It turns out that most respondents think that customer experience is very important for their companies and they are trying to use it as an area of differentiation. While the lack of funding was the top problem last year, the lack of a clear strategy has emerged as this year’s No. 1 obstacle. Many companies have a voice of the customer (VoC) program in place, and nearly half have an executive in charge of their overall customer experience efforts.

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Continue Reading The State Of Customer Experience, 2010

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Marketing Professionals get top tips on developing your lead generation program for 2010-11 in this live webinar “Improving Lead Generation Marketing Effectiveness & ROI”. Based on all-new research by marketing ROI thought leaders the Lenskold Group, and sponsored by emedia Lead Generation, this webinar details:

• Which lead generation offers are most effective
• Where you should consider ramping up lead gen spend
• How improved analytics increases your returns
• How you can improve executive confidence for a larger lead gen budget
• And more

Learn from the experts – Learn from your peers – Register for “Improving Lead Generation Marketing Effectiveness & ROI” today!

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Will Smith is an accomplished musical talent, actor, father and role-model. He’s been at the top of his game since the mid 90′s and after all these years here’s a few pieces of wisdom that I’d like to share with you today.

Listen closely and you’ll find that success has nothing to do with circumstance, upbringing or any of that BS we’re taught. It all comes from within and with that mindset anything can be accomplished by anyone.

Tell ‘em Will…

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If you had all the traffic you ever wanted for FREE do you think you could make money online?

Of course you could…me too!

Fortunately today is that day for both of us.

My boy Ryan Deiss just released his FREE 2010 Perpetual Traffic Report:
http://www.circleoneconnect.com/perpetual-traffic-report

This report changes EVERYTHING when it comes to web traffic and if you don’t read it you will be behind the game.

Ryan has figured out a way to use Google’s own tools against them to get FREE organic traffic any time he wants. It’s CRAZY!

Go grab your copy of the report right now while it’s still FREE…
http://www.circleoneconnect.com/perpetual-traffic-report

Let me know what you think,

- C.A. Simmons

P.S. In the report Ryan also tells you how to get his $10,000 Cherry Picker Software (AMAZING) for Free…

…no strings, for just reading the report.

Don’t wait go grab the report now:
http://www.circleoneconnect.com/perpetual-traffic-report

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“If you’ve been on the Internet in the last few years, chances are you’ve wasted a good amount of time on YouTube. It’s a wonderful place, full of kittens, drugged-up children and people who thought it was a good idea to tape themselves imitating their favorite performers. But if you’re not a prolific amateur filmmaker, you might feel a little limited in what you can do. There are actually a handful of cool things you can do with a YouTube account or with found videos, including re-dubbing, setting alarms and making great interactive features. Here are nine of our favorite things to do with the video-sharing website…”

Continue Reading:  Nine Cool Things to Do With Your YouTube Account :: Blogs :: List of the Day :: Paste

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As we all know the Gulf Coast has been struck yet again by devastating forces that push the residents  and wildlife near the brink, … but this time nature isn’t the culprit. We are. Man.

Although I know we all can agree that BP is 100% responsible for providing solutions to fix this catastrophe we must all do our part to protect our own futures in light of devastating events.

Here’s an article from USNews.com compiling 10 things that can be done to help clean up the Gulf Coast region.

By all means join in conversation by listing any ideas not mentioned and links to other resources in the comments.

10 Things You Can Do to Help the Gulf Coast Clean the Oil Spill

By MAURA JUDKIS of USNews.com

Alarming photos of dead sea turtles washed ashore—as well as satellite images of an ever-spreading oil slick—demonstrate that a serious ordeal is ahead for the Gulf Coast. The April 20 explosion on the Deepwater Horizon oil rig caused a spill that has spread more than 130 miles so far. The spill has reached land in Louisiana, and is expected to reach Mississippi, Alabama and Florida. If it continues, it will surpass the 1989 Exxon Valdez spill as the worst in history. Here’s how you can help:

1. Want to lend a hand? Affected states allow you to register to volunteer online. Louisiana and Floridavolunteers can register online, or Gulf Coast volunteers can call 1-866-448-5816. Oil Spill Volunteers is another registration site that matches up those willing to assist with the groups that need their help. Volunteer opportunities run the gamut from wildlife sitter to administrative support, so any and all help is appreciated.

2. Florida is calling on untrained volunteers to pick up trash on its beaches to minimize the impact of the spill once it hits land. Volunteers are asked to leave natural debris in place, though, as it provides shelter for birds and other animals. If you’d like to help out with areas where oil has already washed ashore, it is recommended that you contact a local group to be trained in how to handle oil-covered materials.

3. If you’re in the Gulf Coast area and see a distressed animal, do not try to assist it on your own. Injured animals can be defensive and may try to bite you—also, crude oil can be harmful when it comes in contact with human skin. A hotline has been established for injured and dead animal sightings. Call 1-866-557-1401 to leave a message with the animal’s precise location. iPhone users in the Gulf can download the Noah project’s app to document distressed animals and the spill’s impact on wildlife. Learn more about Noah here.

4. Two specialized opportunities to help are available for qualified professionals. BP has called upon fishermen and boaters in the Gulf area to participate in their “Vessels of Opportunity” program. Those with eligible vessels will be compensated for their use in cleanup efforts. For more information, call 281-366-5511. In addition, the EPA has called upon engineers and experts to submit alternative cleanup solutions via this form.

5. However, if you’re not already living in the area, it is not recommended that you travel to the Gulf Coast to assist. OilSpillVolunteers.com and other organizations stress that your help would be more appreciated in the form of a donation. The National Wildlife Federation, Alabama Coastal Foundation, and Save our Seabirds are among the many organizations accepting donations for coastal relief.

6. Dishwashing detergent is used to clean oil off of birds and animals, and Dawn is pitching in to help. Purchase a bottle of Dawn and $1 will go towards the Marine Mammal Center and the International Bird Rescue Research Center. Please note that you must go online to activate this donation—it’s not automatic with your purchase.

7. Own a salon or pet grooming business? Hair collects oil, so the group Matter of Trust is taking donations of hair and nylons. For more information, visit their website or call 415-242-6041.

8. For those inclined to send a political message about the need to restore the Gulf Coast, the National Wildlife Federation has created thisform letter you can send to President Obama. Those in favor of halting all ocean drilling can use this form letter from the Sierra Club.

9. The Audubon Society, protecting American birds and their habitats for more than 100 years, has launched a response to the crisis. They’ll be organizing volunteers for wildlife rescue and beach clean-up, as well as researching the effects of the spill on habitats in the weeks and months following its landfall. If you’d like to volunteer for the Audubon Society, you can fill out this volunteer form. If you’d like to donate money to aid relief efforts, you can use this site.

10. For up-to-date news on volunteer and relief efforts, several Twitter users have aggregated the best sources of oil spill tweets into lists. Follow Crisis Camp’s list, Crisis Mappers’ list, or the hashtag #oilspill. Two good individual accounts to follow are EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson, and BP_America.

To follow the progress of the cleanup and BP’s response check out Google’s Crisis Response page that’s dedicated to the Gulf Coast Oil Spill.

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Is there any market that a niche can’t be carved out of? Apparently not.

Online dating site BeautifulPeople.com — a dating website that only allows attractive people to join based on the uniquely biased vote of its members — is famous for it’s ultra-exclusive ‘clientèle’ so to speak, and is now providing a forum/sperm bank where one might search for genetic material from beautiful people from around the world.

Now, the site is taking further steps in the fight against unattractiveness (at least unattractiveness as gauged by people who dig conventionality) by launching a fertility introduction service that allows both members and non-members to score the stuff that dream babies are made of. According to Managing Director Greg Hodge, “There are no financial benefits for us in doing so — we are simply responding to a demand for attractive donors. Every parent would like their child to be blessed with many fine attributes, attractiveness being one of the most sought after. For a site with members who resemble Brad Pitt, George Clooney and Angelina Jolie you can imagine the demand.”

Hintze added that initially the service was to be limited to hotties and hotties alone, “But everyone — including ugly people — would like to bring good looking children in to the world, and we can’t be selfish with our attractive gene pool.” How very generous of him. (via Mashable)

This is a brilliant concept. Creating a niche for a specialty market with a built in desire for ‘attractive’ babies. People search Craigslist and other online gatherings to search for fertility donors everyday. The genius in this concept is they’re essentially supplying the demand that almost everyone of their unfortunately infertile customers wants.

Yes! I know there are no financial benefits for the company but they will benefit a ton in the additional publicity and attention. So if for nothing it’s still one hell of a PR move.

Oh and eugenics maybe? I don’t think so. People make the decision to mate with people they find attractive every single day… until now the people in search of donors didn’t have a cool social way to make it happen.

I’m interested in hearing what you guys think of this and how you could implement a similar concept in your own business.

Check out the full article over at Mashable.com – Dating Site Launches Online Sperm and Egg Bank for “Beautiful People”

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Are you ready for the latest WordPress build? I don’t usually get too excited about upgrade releases but aside from the buzz around this release on social networks like Twitter, there are some sweet new features that are definitely worth mentioning.

WordPress 3.0 features:

• Theme developers have new APIs that allow them to easily implement custom backgrounds, headers, short-links and menus
• New multi-site functionality which makes it possible to run one blog or ten million from the same installation
• 1,217 bug fixes and feature enhancements

When CircleOneConnect.com was started back in 2008 I was using WP 2.5. Although by that time WordPress was already the premiere blogging/cms platform there were definitely some things to be desired. The interface and controls were easy to learn but what about when you had to attempt to manipulate functions that were “hard-coded” into the theme? For most non-technical folk, this is where things can become frightening.

Fortunately, WordPress 3.0 has arrived and aims to fill that gap and offer a truly point-and-click, highly customizable, infinitely expandable CMS platform that can be accessed by the multitudes.

To download the latest WP 3.0 release head over to www.WordPress.org

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I know it’s been awhile since the last time that I’ve updated this blog, and for that I’m sorry. It’s been a transitional period for me recently, but some really cool shit has happened along the way. Some of you were hurt as a result of this transition. Don’t take it personal. I had to grow me and there wasn’t enough space for the both of us.

Now that I’m back all will be back to normal… well not really. I have some exciting new projects in development so actually nothing will be the same.

When I started Circle1ne back in 2008 I didn’t have a clear view on exactly what I wanted to accomplish with this site. Fortunately trial and error has worked in my favor since then and now it’s time to deliver.

I’d like to welcome you to the NEW CircleOneConnect.com.

Here you’ll find a mix of useful resources aimed to expedite your entrepreneurial travels, stimulate your creative energies and sometimes just light a fire under your ass. Yes. It’s true that we won’t alway agree and it is also true that my point of view may seem condescending at times, but one thing that you can count on is that it will be the god-honest truth.

Thank you for coming out. God bless and good night. (lol)

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Whether you value your Alexa traffic ranking or not there are definite advantages to having a high AlexRank. Many webmasters and business folk look at the AlexaRank as a reasonable representation of a site’s traffic. If you are selling advertising from your site the more “proof” you can demonstrate of your traffic – and in AlexaRank’s case it is an independent valuation of your traffic, which adds credibility – the more likely advertisers will come knocking at your door willing to give you some of their ad budget.

An AlexaRank Experiment

AlexaRank is calculated using the Alexa Toolbar. Alexa takes the browsing data from the millions of people using the Toolbar and calculates the traffic ranking of each site. As Alexa states, while low traffic sites are harder to gauge accurately, once a site reaches a 100,000 or less ranking the accuracy of the measure increases. Hence if you can top a 10,000 AlexaRank, or even 1000, the credibility of that ranking is increased.

As Blaine Moore pointed out in a comment made to my previous AlexaRank article, it is easy to – as he put it – “game” the AlexaRank if you have a tool that checks AlexaRank installed on your computer, and that doesn’t have to be just the toolbar, it can be for a FireFox extension like SearchStatus, which I recently installed on my browser. These tools send data to Alexa, and when Alexa receives any data about your surfing habits it will raise the traffic rankings for the sites you provide data for – and if you visit your own sites often you can raise your ranking.

I can’t verify that installing any AlexaRank checking tool will help your own site’s AlexaRank and to be honest after I installed SearchStatus I did not notice any significant change in my AlexaRank at my blogs. It wasn’t until I conducted a different experiment that I noticed more verifiable proof of a technique to increase your site’s AlexaRank.

How I Increased My AlexaRank By More Than 25%

Here’s how my logic went – I figured the toolbar and other AlexaRank checking tools tell Alexa my browsing habits, which is fine, but I’m only one person visiting my blogs (albeit I do it many times each day). What I really want is a way to tell Alexa about every person who visits my blogs, not just me. In order to do this, the Alexa reporting tool needs to be on my blog and downloaded by every person who visits my site each time they visit.

The obvious answer was to install an Alexa Site Widget on each of my blogs. The widget works like this:

If you click it you will be taken to my current Alexa traffic ranking data. You can also find the live widget in the sidebar of all my blogs. After installing this widget on to my blogs, within the next few days my rankings increased at least 25%. Prior to this gain my AlexaRank increases had been slow and steady, but never as significant as this in a short period of time, unless of course I earned a traffic spike from some other site(s) linking to me.

This makes complete sense, as my thinking above explains. If every visitor to your blog downloads the Alexa site widget when they visit your site, then Alexa has data on every visitor you have, at least every web reader, I don’t think RSS readers count since they never download the widget unless they go to your site. You might call this “gaming” your AlexaRank, but in this case I don’t think that’s an apt description – installing the site widget in fact helps to give Alexa enough data to provide your true AlexaRank, as opposed to what it thinks it should be based on the data it has from it’s toolbar users.

If you sell advertising from your blog or website then you should care about your AlexaRank. If that is the case then installing the Alexa site widget is a must. It takes only a few seconds and could significantly improve your current AlexaRank.
If any other bloggers or webmasters out there notice an increase in their AlexaRank after following my instructions and installing a site widget I’d love to hear about it. While I’m confident my results are good enough proof, it doesn’t hurt to have more examples to back up the hypothesis. Please leave a comment and tell me how your AlexaRank improves.

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