The question of what age we are in?, is important for us as marketers because it helps us understand our macro environment and informs our strategy and our decisions about the future.

There can be no doubt that we are seeing a transition at the moment – and I’m not talking about from capitalism to socialism, but rather something less tangible and equally pervasive. This change, I think, is from an age of objects into an age of ideas. Be it an iPod, a Blackberry or an iPhone, we as a society have come to depend on our objects, but the trend toward ‘one box solutions’ and centralising our PDAs, mobile phones, e-mail and music devices shows a longing to free ourselves of the objects, devices, countless power cables and the increasingly cluttered assortment of gadgetry churned out over the years. The inevitable movement towards cloud computing shows the urge of our society to become less dependent on material objects in favour of something more powerful and less immediately tangible. It is in this very transition from physical to ideological that we can see the beginnings of a permanent change.

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Today, Payback Time, a Facebook application promoting movie review site Spill.com, was featured in an article at Wired.com.  Payback Time was developed by the Grape Thinking team, and originally launched this past summer.  It has been growing organically for the past several months, and announced and released a new feature today.

The Payback Time application gives Facebook users the ability to make reviews of boxoffice movies, either defending their honor, or demanding a refund.  If you earn enough money, you can use it to purchase movie tickets from Fandango.com.

We’ve certainly enjoyed working on this application, and look forward to watching it grow.  Please check it out, and let us know what you think!

UPDATE: Since this article was published, Payback Time has more than quadrupled their app user base!

Wow, what an excellent conference! A game changer. I have to thank my friends over at Village Green Energy for hooking me up with a free pass. I’ve been so passionate about this movement as long as I can remember… ever since 6th grade when I messed around with electromagenetic fields and plants. Early education for me was all about ecology and environment, and that followed with rigorous economics in college, which I didn’t quite understand about myself until now. Having not gone into banking with my degree and now seeing the state of the economy I was like shit… but David Suzuki put it so clearly… it’s (eco)nomics. I can’t believe I never recognized that. I automatically associated economics with the greedy, short-sighted mentality of Wall Street that focuses solely on the bottom line and exploiting the market for cash and egoic status. Yet you realize the bottom line is not the statement of cash flows or the balance sheet… it’s the fuckin planet. Ecology + Economics = Sustainability. This conference was absolutely buzzing! People were feeling alive and connecting and touching each other like I’ve never seen in my life. We all knew the green revolution is ready and about to change the world in a big way.

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Every day we talk to clients and potential clients who are trying to build their business exposure through Search Engine Optimization. In most every case they come to us after trying to do their own SEO, only to find that their rankings suddenly started to fall.

These cases are generally the result of bad linkbuilding. There are so many varying opinions and resources for linkbuilding that as a novice web marketer, you can easily travel down the wrong path. The problem with all of the advice you find across the web, is that most of it is outdated.

For example: A year ago, it was extremely popular for marketers to try and use deep-linking (linking to pages inside of their site instead of the homepage) as a means to boost the rankings for those particular pages. Well.. this became common knowledge, spammers took advantage, and now that tactic raises red flags. If you are a blogger reading this, you know that more often than not, when you link to a website, you reference the name of the site, and link to the homepage ( e.g. Fermentation Wine Blog ).

Here are some more linkbuilding concepts that you should avoid: Read the rest of this entry »

I saw this slideshow while browsing through SlideShare and thought that it would be great to share with our readers who are trying to find new ways to connect with the Millennial Generation through social media marketing and viral marketing…

Enjoy!