The traditional worlds of advertising and public relations have collided and caused a revolutionary shift in how we build and promote products, services and brands of all kinds – including individuals. Gone are the days of interruption advertising where companies depend on bursting into your life to try and brainwash you into believing their product or service is best suited to satisfy your needs and desires. Whatever it took to get you to part with your hard-earned dollars was fair game – to include deception and even outright lies.

Think about it for a moment, how many times have you read a magazine or newspaper ad, watched a television spot or heard a radio commercial and said to yourself, that’s a crock! No more. Sure, these deceptive tactics are still out there, but usually not for long. If the ad suggests something that may be of interest most people will immediately go online and start looking for reviews to determine if the product or service actually performs as promised.

In fact, I highly recommend before investing in any company that you include in your due diligence an exhaustive search on what people are saying about the company’s practices, products and services. There is a wealth of information to be found.

Those organizations that understand this revolutionary shift will be best positioned to use it to their advantage. So how does one embrace this new architecture and benefit from it? The short answer is to begin acting like a media and entertainment company – a publisher of educational and entertaining information.

Let’s take ESPN (www.espn.com) as an example – the Entertainment and Sports Programming Network. Obviously, this is a pure media company – providing sports television programming as its primary asset. However, over the years, and in the new world order, ESPN has become much more than that. They have their own magazine (www.espn.com/espnmag), they provide individual websites for metropolitan areas (currently five), separate sites for individual sports, a site for high school sports, a site for fantasy and games, endless blogs and contributing analysts with their own pages – and that only scratches the surface.

So what does all this have to do with you? In today’s world even small businesses need to act like publishing companies to build brand awareness and grow. The reality is people aren’t looking to be sold; they’re looking to be educated. In fact, they don’t trust advertising and sales at all; and frankly, rightly so. We’ve been lied to and cajoled for so long that one could make the argument that the distrust of advertising and sales is in our genes.

Brands today need to build trust and the best way to do that is by providing valuable content at no cost to the consumer. And, no cost means any cost – no quid pro quo, no tit-for-tat, no I give you something you give me something – Free! To make that happen you need informative and contemporary websites, ongoing participation in social media, consistent publication of content through blogs, webcasts, podcasts, videos, optimized press releases, case studies, white papers, eBooks and articles. Prospects, influencers, the media, everyone needs to know everything they can about you before you ever know anything about them. That’s the new world order; that’s how you build a brand. If you would like more information on how to build to brand, call 646-543-2499 or visit us online at www.sproutcreatives.com.

By indexing more than 200,000 domain transactions over a six year period, IDNX exhibits the strong correlation with standard economic indicators, suggesting that domains are as much an economic asset as real estate, stocks or shares.

By allowing comparison to other financial indicators such as the NASDAQ or the stock price of internet giant Google, IDNX clearly shows that the trend lines for these indices follow the same path as the trend line for the domain market.

”IDNX shows that internet domain name prices have an economic foundation – they are not detached from the general economy,” said Thies Lindenthal. “On the contrary, domain price changes are very similar to changes in the NASDAQ 100 stock price index or total revenues from online marketing. This shows that domain name buyers and sellers make economically motivated decisions. Domain prices reveal how investors evaluate current and future business opportunities on the web, making IDNX the fever curve of the internet economy.”

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It doesn’t matter how comprehensive your patch and update schedule is — when a sufficiently convincing spam email reaches a gullible employee, all bets are off. With targeted attacks becoming more common, the best defense against this threat continues to be education. Every user, from the newest administrative assistant to the C-level executives, needs training in identifying and avoiding fraudulent email and other messages, harmful file attachments, and Internet behavior that can lead to trouble.

Security Updates: More than 60 percent of malware attacks come from known vulnerabilities, so no matter whether you’re a one-person shop, or manage many thousands of desktops, maintaining not only the operating system but also the third party applications on which you (and your organization) depend should be a top priority. Besides office applications, attacks in the past year have focused on programs like Adobe Reader, Java, Flash, AutoCAD, media players, graphic design tools, and various browsers and browser plug-ins. IT departments should never let a new computer get to an employee that has anything older than the very latest build of these critical applications.

Here are the top three reasons your business should have a Facebook Profile.

1. Attract Prospects – Having a company page allows you access to a large prospective audience, which is why 1.5 million local businesses already have company pages on Facebook. Each day those businesses connect with prospective customers. If your business is not on Facebook that means that your prospects are connecting with your competitors.
2. Build Awareness – You can keep your business top of mind by distributing information through Facebook. The viral nature of Facebook allows your customers to share this information with their friends, effectively promoting your business to new prospects. This viral effect allows you to generate leads and grow your business.
3. Actively Market – Facebook allows you to communicate proactively to your prospects and customers. You can reach out to your customers and update them on promotions, sales, events, and news.

Building A Business Profile on Facebook

Creating an effective Business Profile is very different than creating a personal Facebook page. Just like a business website, a Facebook business profile should be expertly designed to ensure that it looks professional and contains the critical information that customers are looking for. Sprout Creatives has trained Facebook experts that know what it takes to create a professional business profile.

How To Get A Professional Business Profile

Email us or call 443.513.4315 to speak with one of our Facebook experts and get a professionally designed business profile built today.

“It was ironic to hear President Obama say that he wants 98% of Americans to have access to high-speed wireless internet coverage while at the same time his Federal Communications Commission bureaucrats are attempting to regulate the internet which will increase costs for Americans while lessening choices and discouraging private sector financial investment in one part of the economy where the free market has been allowed to create literally millions of jobs and billions in private wealth.”

Internet Tax Bill (HB 3659) passed the Illinois Senate on January 5, and the House on January 6. The only thing left to do is for Gov. Quinn to sign. In short, this means that websites which have affiliates in Illinois will now be required to pay taxes on every sale that originates from those affiliates. The solution for Amazon is to cut off affiliate relationships in the state to avoid paying the taxes. But Amazon isn’t the only one. CouponCabin.com and FatWallet.com are two others that will be affected. FatWallet.com told the Chicago Tribune that they are “actively looking to leave Illinois.” While legislators aim to shrink the budget gap, opponents believe it will do just the opposite – that companies like Amazon and FatWallet will leave, taking jobs and commissions with them, while the small business affiliates lose income and, therefore, pay less in income taxes to the state.

Help spread the word to stop the FCC takeover of the Internet.

Visit www.nointernettakeover.com for more information.

The Google Local Scam. This scam is an inbound call claiming that either 1) your Google local listing is subject to deletion or 2) offering paid position in Google Maps. Google Maps is free, and any threat of removal is fraudulent. If you are concerned about this, contact your web master. Your web master will most likely have control of your Google Local listing.

The link appears to be to your own domain, but in fact it goes to a site that attempts to install malware on your computer. We have developed a content filter for this type of spam and we have applied it to our customers already.

It is important to have multiple levels of defenses in place because no one technology can ensure 100% protection. Defending against spam, malware and viruses is a reactive process which means that any new threat will pass through for at least a few users before the identification engine learns to block it. For email and web traffic anything that passes through before these patches have been released, the damage has been done.

We are seeing more and more spam tactics like this that include links to malware or other harmful scripts designed to infiltrate your network which are not actually attached to an email message or file. In addition to being vulnerable to these types of attacks due to definitions that have not been updated, almost every spam filtering service allows you to define whitelists which are not scanned for content, however they still enforce virus scanning for attachments. These attacks are propagated in the content so your whitelist is effectively removing your protection from these types of attacks.

What you really need to do is approach the actual source of the problem which is your web browser, when instructed, it follows the harmful links and brings back any threats included on the web page. Only scanning your email for attachments is like locking the doors and then leaving the windows open.