5 Digital Musts

Here are Five things that you need to be testing or doing now:

1) Loosen Your Grip

Find some area of your business, products, or brand that you can loosen your grip on. The most powerful force in business today is democratization. By ceding some control to your customers you will gain far more insight, buzz, and loyalty more that you will risk. Connect with your customers via dialog and collaboration. Let them create your next commercial. Look to Amazon's user reviews and Apple's iMix for inspiration.

2) Be Social

It is no accident or teenage fad, social is a force. LinkedIn, Facebook, MySpace and others are for real. Can you allow customers and prospects to share, discuss, explore, and contribute to your brand? Can you leverage what is happening already in those spaces? See the Microsoft Student Group on Facebook.

3) Speed Up

While still developing, real time or instant marketing is coming on fast. Email is slow by today's standard. I have to notice and open an email. IM, mobile, micro blogging, and other touch points are compressing time. If it's hot, get it out there right away. Check out Dell on Twitter.

4) Get off the Page

User experiences based on clicking from one HTML page to another are going away. Broadband is here in a big way, already in 48% of homes. Your website and digital marketing experiences need to be rich. Customers should be in an experience that moves smoothly and that transitions and updates seamlessly. Check out Kayak's great shopping interface.

5) Do It

Get yourself and staff involved in this stuff. You need collaborative workspaces for your teams. Thought leaders need to have blogs. Play around with Twitter, start a social network of your own with Ning. Only by living with these things will you be able to understand their value, challenges, and be able to implement them to your advantage.

J

Monday List – Save Lives, Energy, Money, Time

A few familiar names here, a few maybe some not so much. Everybody has their list, but hey, at least I give some rationale. If you don't agree, please share some!

#5 Blackle

• Energy saving black version of Google, thats just a cool idea

• Saves energy yeah, but seems how much is a debate

• Needs to just be Google search, not sure what “Blackle” vs. “web” means!

• Green is mainstreaming, other sites should grab this as a marketing/PR/Environmental play

#4 Woot

• If you buy any tech stuff, you will like this site

• One product, one day, until its sold out

• Simple, compelling, social (yeah, some verbz happening here for sure)

(btw - “woot” is an on-line/IM/gaming term used to express excitement, it means “heck yeah!!”

#3 LinkedIn

• This is a great site for professional networking

• There seems to be very little if any competition

• Nearly everyone I know is on it (not sure if that says more about me or the site?)

• Bottom line, much easier than trying to to do this in Outlook or on my Blackberry!!

#2 Google

• No I am not talking about the search interface

• That's still cool (unless you believe Ask's new ad campaign, then it may suck) but how about all this: Blogger, Calendar, Ad Sense, Mobile, Gmail, Reader etc.

• Almost don't need other websites

• Powerful, easy to use, free. For me; they are on the top of the pile at the moment.

#1 Distributed Computing

• OK, so this is not really a website, so what, its my blog!

• This is just great stuff; these programs use your PC's extra processing bandwidth to work on fighting diseases such as cancer, MD, Parkinson's and more!

• As you read this my PC is working on Stanford's Protein Folding project (Protein Folding is a cause of Alzheimer's, Mad Cow (BSE), CJD, ALS, Huntington's, Parkinson's disease, and many Cancers and cancer-related syndromes.)

• Just find one you are moved by and do it, what an easy way to be part of the solution.

J