One of the things we all love about the Internet is all the free stuff available for download. For the profit-minded, there are good reasons to make quality, helpful content available on your web site for free. Useful content gives you credibility in your field and helps to build long-term relationships with prospects. If your content is popular, you can generate revenue through advertising. If your content contains text, there are lots of good keywords for search engines to latch onto. Another benefit of good content is that it attracts incoming links, sometimes called "link bait". In checking the external links for one of my sites on which I sell craft supplies, I can see that by far the most popular individual pages are those that contain project tutorials or free templates. Given that incoming links help your site in the organic search results, and that search marketing has a very high ROI in a time when advertising budgets might be shrinking, having quality content that people want to link to is a huge advantage.

I put my web site address on the free templates available for download on one of my web sites so that users will be reminded of my business every time they see the template. Don't overlook the possibility of placing your content on specialized portals so that people who have never been to your site have the opportunity to be exposed to your content. Be sure to embed information about your company within that content. Just to name a few examples, there are portals for articles, blogs, Illustrator files, movies and RSS feeds. If you publish a Brainshark presentation, there are two types of portals provided in which you can make your content available for free or for a fee. Click here to view Webinar Resources' Brainshark content portal. Brainshark is a powerful tool that you can use to turn PowerPoint slides into multimedia presentations with many powerful features including viral marketing capability.

By giving a little, you could gain a lot!

If the content you provide on your web site or blog is of high enough quality, people will be eager to share it with others and do some of your marketing work for you. Those with their own web sites might go to the trouble of editing one of their pages to add your link. To make the task easier and to encourage more linking, many webmasters have provided code and sometimes an image for interested persons to use. I think that is still a good idea, I don't know if anything beats a good old-fashioned hard-coded link in the search engines. Fortunately with the rise of social media there has come an even easier way to encourage site visitors to spread the word about your content.

This morning I signed up for an AddThis account. AddThis is a free bookmarking/sharing service than enables you to create a button or chicklet that empowers your site visitors to print your content, email it, or best of all send a link to the social networking service of his or her choice. It's similar to the Share This link you see right below this blog post you're reading. Would you like to have that capability to leverage your own content that you've worked so hard on? Just go to the AddThis site and follow the super-easy instructions. You don't have to register to get a button, but I did so that I could receive the additional service of analytics. What a great way to see which content is the most popular!

"Doing Well by Doing Good" is a phrase used in a slightly derisive manner to describe the actions of someone who benefits his or herself while doing something for a charitable cause. In a more positive light, you could refer to this practice by another well known phrase, a "Win-Win Situation".

I found a really good example on the soapmaking supply retailer From Nature With Love's Soap Donations page. Customers of From Nature With Love are invited to donate some of their handmade soaps to two domestic violence shelters and one homeless shelter. In return, they get a listing with a link on a donor's thank you page and the right to display a banner on their site that links back to the thank you page on From Nature With Love's site.

This is a very smart marketing program for several reasons. Web-savvy soap makers get a link from a high profile site to their own sites, which helps them greatly in the search engines. They also help build a good image with their own web site visitors by advertising their charitable act. From Nature With Love gets a boost in the search engines by having participants in the program link back to them, and the keywords contained in the donor listings are good for their search engine presence as well. And people who are down and out, perhaps at the lowest points of their lives, get to enjoy a handmade luxury personal care product, a small thing but speaking as someone who enjoys handmade personal care products myself, a potentially significant morale-booster that is good for physical and mental health. Not just a "Win-Win-Situation", but a "Win-Win-Win Situation"!

A few days ago, Mark and I were discussing ways to try to interact with a company that we would like to do business with. The company's web site sported chicklets for Twitter, Facebook and You Tube, letting us know that they were accessible via these social media services. More and more companies are adding social media applications to their communications toolkit, because it makes sense to have a presence in multiple channels so that a prospect can communicate with you via the channel of his or her choice. Many of us here at Webinar Resources have had individual Facebook accounts for awhile. We decided it was time to have a company profile on Facebook, so I started one. I'm sure we will think of ways to use it as we go, but one of our very first acts was to use it to invite visitors to register for an upcoming webinar presented by one of our clients. Come visit us on Facebook by clicking here:

Some time ago, I was given a stack of books by two former teachers of mine who were getting ready to move to another state and trying to lighten the load. One of the titles was "Growing Up Digital: The Rise of the Net Generation" by Don Tapscott. Written in 1998, at the height of the Internet boom and also the year I started working in the industry professionally, it reflects the heady optimism of those times and the feeling I remember having every day as I went to work that we were participating in a revolution that would have as great an effect on people's lives as the Industrial Revolution did. The book's primary focus is on the generation just younger than my own Generation X, Generation Y, which the author proposes renaming the Net Generation or N-Gen because growing up with the digital media and the Internet is their defining characteristic. How will the N-Gen change the way we learn, play, work, shop, and live as a result of having developed with
this technology?

The author argues that one of the things that is changing is that knowledge is becoming capital. The competitive  advantages that once went to the companies with the most money or equipment will in the future go to companies with the most knowledge. "There is no sustainable competitive advantage today other than organizational learning. That is, companies can compete only if they can learn faster than their competitors."

If this is true, how can businesses make sure that they are fostering a healthy environment in which learning can take place?

Technology is certainly a big help. At Webinar Resources, we use software such as Xerox Docushare, Google Spreadsheets, and Content Circles to organize documents and make them available to all the employees who need them. We use technology such as Brainshark Presentations and ExactTarget emails to help our clients distribute and archive their important knowledge.

At least as important as technology in my opinion is the organizational attitude toward learning and collaboration. At Webinar Resources we have a culture that allows knowledge to flourish. Knowledge flows from the top of the hierarchy down, from bottom to top, and from peer to peer. Employees are encouraged to write up instructions for whatever new techniques we've learned and upload them to our online knowledge base. All employees are allowed to contribute to the shared knowledge of the organization and enjoy doing it (I do anyway). Employees are expected to teach each other, and are given tools and resources for self-directed learning as well.

Contrast this kind of culture with a workplace that you may have been unfortunate to experience, where employees are given incomplete or deliberately misleading information, and employees who refuse to share with each other are tolerated, even to the detriment of customer service. Sometimes this kind of toxic environment results when there are fears that employees will leave the company with important information. Yet the kinds of employees with a lot of knowledge to share are probably the ones who enjoy learning the most. What kind of environment do you think will keep them happier and healthier? Where are they more likely to stay?

In "Growing Up Digital: The Rise of the Net Generation", the author believes that the influence of digital technology leads to the development of workers who thrive in a collaborative learning environment. That may be true, but whatever generation they are from, I believe that it's in your best interest to help all of your employees to reach their full potential by providing a fertile and healthy environment for learning in your organization.

Mark Rice and I from Webinar Resources and our partner  Louise Donovan of Discovery LightTM traveled to Philadelphia to promote the Discovery LightTM at the AIIM/On Demand trade show for digital printing and document management. In this picture you can see a copy of the sample Discovery GangTM book in the uv lightbox which was a the table where attendees could learn about Xerox Specialty Imaging. The effect on display in the lightbox is Flourescent Mark, hidden text or images that are viewed with a UV light. The sample book includes examples of three other specialty imaging effects, plus variable data which has been used to personalize the story by incorporating a child's name throughout the book. The books can be printed to order and on demand for a specific child.

To see more photos from AIIM/On Demand, please click here.

For more information about Discovery LightTM, please visit www.discoverylight.com.

Arr! Talking like a pirate is fun, but if Corsairs of the Internet take away your domain name, you will be having anything but fun.

People I know have faced the following scenario - one day you go to your browser to look at your organizations' web site, and it's not there! In its place is the web page of someone else's site, or even more aggravating, that of a domain name squatter.

Domain name squatters are people who look for domains that have expired, hoping to resell them to someone else or back to you for an inflated price, or use them for some other purpose. If this happens to you, you will either have to pay the pirate a ransom to get your domain name back, or get a new domain name for your site. Neither of these options are very attractive. In the first case, you're rewarding unethical behavior which is infuriating not to mention expensive, and in the second case you face having to reprint any collateral that has your web site address on it, go back to square one on any link building you've done for your web site, or possibly even change the name of your company. What a nightmare!

How does this happen? Often it's because the person who has control of the domain name has changed their email address and they didn't get the reminder message from the registrar with the notice that their domain name is due to expire. I think it's a good idea for someone in every organization to stop for a moment and think about whether you know the answers to the following questions:

• Do you know who in your company is in charge of the domain name?
• Does that person have the current username and password to get into the domain name account?
• Do you know what registrar your domain name is currently registered with?
• Is the email address and other contact information on your account current?
• Do you know when your domain name expires?

I recommend you find out and document the answers to those five questions, then take the following actions. If the contact information with the registrar is not current, fix that immediately. If someone in your organization is not the Administrative Contact, correct that as soon as possible. Make note of the expiration date of your domain and put it on your calendars. Then decide how many trustworthy people in your organization should have access to this information, share it with them, and ask them to store it in a safe place. That way, if there is a domain-related emergency with your web site and the person who usually manages your domain is not available, someone else can step in and help.

Some people don't want to deal with all the above details, they prefer to let their web hosting company or an outside web developer handle all domain related issues and put the domain registration fee on the bill with their other services - understandable, but I don't recommend it. If the person you work with at the outside company leaves, there might not be anyone else in the organization who knows the information, and it's often a bit of a hassle to try to get the registrar to give you access to your account. Not that they don't have good reasons to make it difficult - they don't want your domain to get poached by an unauthorized party. Nevertheless, it's one more hassle you don't need. If you are certain of the name of your domain name registrar (I've run into many clients over the years who did not know that information), you will be protected in case domain name pirates send you a fake renewal notice. The expiration date might be real, that is public information, but the company sending the notice might not really be your registrar - they are just trying to trick you into moving your business to their company. Even worse, if you're dealing with an unethical hosting or web development company, they might hold your domain information hostage until you give them something they want that they're not really entitled to. I personally know someone who found herself in just that situation. So please, make sure you're in control of your own domain name. Share the login information with your web developer or hosting company if they need it, and change the password after they're done with their work if that makes you feel better, but always maintain control.

If you have already lost your domain name, what should you do then? I recommend getting a new domain name as similar to the old one as you can, and putting your web site there. Then, see what the expiration date is on your former domain name. When that date arrives, check to see if anyone has renewed it, and if not, grab it. It's possible that if someone was holding your domain name in order to resell it, they were unable to unload it and chose not to renew it. Domain name pirates usually only renew their booty one year at a time - one reason why search engines are said to favor web sites with domain names reserved for longer periods of time. The preceding scenario has happened to someone I know, so it's possible that you could get lucky and get your former domain name back without having to pay bounty to a pirate. That will leave you with two domain names, which is not necessarily a bad thing. You can redirect one to the other, so that no matter which of the two addresses someone uses to get to your site, they can still reach you. Having two domain names to play with is also an advantage when it comes to Search Engine Optimization - so if you're in this position don't get rid of that extra domain name until you've talked to a search engine expert about the SEO possibilities available to you.

Blog Posts: It's not easy to find the time to complete a blog post, and once I've done that, I still have to see if my boss will accept it and post it to our Webinar Resources Blog, powered by Compendium Blogware software. Once I get that far, I feel like I've really accomplished something. Therefore it's very satisfying to potentially increase the audience for that blog post by making it also show up in several other places. By clicking the "Share This" chicklet below each blog post, I can instantly add it to my wall on Facebook. Via an application called Blog Link, the new post automatically appears on my LinkedIn Profile. And by taking our RSS feed link, putting it through FeedBurner, and then using some RSS integration code on my web site, it automatically appears there as well.

I also maintain a WordPress blog that I started for an organization that I belong to, the Route 66 Association of Missouri. I use FeedBurner and RSS integration code with this blog as well to make my posts appear on another one of my web sites. It also appears on my LinkedIn profile with the use of the WordPress LinkedIn Application.

What ways have you found to leverage your valuable content? Please feel free to share your discoveries by leaving a comment.

Power Point Presentations and Webinars: If you've created a PowerPoint presentation, even if the occasion it was created for is over, it can keep on working for you. Some social media sites include an application that allows you to upload a Power Point presentation to your profile page. If you would like to embed your presentation on your web site, Brainshark can accomplish that for you, plus do a lot more: add narration, music or sounds, questions, polls, guestbooks and more. It will even notify you by email when someone has viewed the presentation.

We have clients for whom we provide webinar services that involve inviting people to the webinar, sending reminder notices out to those who registered, recording the webinar and archiving it as a Brainshark Presentation, and sending out follow up emails that invite attendees to view a replay of the presentation. We are currently working on a proposal which involves making the replays available on a web page. The menu for the replays will have some text describing what the webinar is about, adding valuable keywords to the web page to draw visitors through organic search. In addition, the code that embeds the presentation into the web site will contain a "Share This" link which allows viewers to email the presentation to colleagues. Of course we will include a sign-up form in each presentation for viewers who want to receive invitations to future webinars. Now that is what I call getting the most out of your content!

Photos: Are you having an open house or exhibiting at a trade show? Those are opportunities to post some photos and allow your contacts to get to know you better. Social media applications such as Facebook can help you get those photos online quickly and in front of an expanded audience.

I upload some of my photos to Facebook. If I want to link to a specific photo album or image from one of my web sites using ordinary HTML links, this is easy to do because Facebook provides a link you can use that is visible to everyone, not just Facebook members. In addition there are several styles of Facebook badge that you can choose from to embed on your web site. I use one that contains a thumbnail image of the last three photos I uploaded. If one of those images grabs the attention of a visitor to my site, they only have to click on the thumbnail to view the whole album it belongs to. Not all businesses have content that lends itself to taking a lot of photos, but many do, such as entertainment, event marketing, or event management.

Text messages: I set up a Twitter account for myself, and linked it both to my cell phone and my Facebook account. This gave me the ability to send a "Tweet" and update my status on Facebook simultaneously. I can send my text message from the Twitter application online, or, if I'm not near a computer, I can even send it from my cell phone. As an added bonus, with some code supplied by Twitter, my "Tweets" now also show up on one of my web sites. That's a lot of benefit from a very small effort. Would you like to follow me on Twitter?

We all know that almost any marketing strategy we attempt to use in the online world will not be very effective without content. We also know that unfortunately good content is not that easy to come by - it takes time to produce. Time is very valuable, so when I succeed in creating some content, I am anxious to get the most benefit from it that I can. The diagram above shows all the ways I am currently using technology to get the widest audience possible for my output of text messages, photos, PowerPoint presentations, and blog posts. Whether or not you are using any of the same services or applications, I hope you can get some ideas for how to use your content from the following examples.

Being "Green" is trendy. Being "Green" makes you feel like you're doing the right thing. Giving the impression of being "Green" makes you look good to your customers. Appearing to be "Green" is an effective marketing tool for products that, according to one study, are only 1% likely to really be beneficial for the environment. As a business person, you know that in a competitive environment you can't afford to fall for Greenwashing and hype when the time comes to find ways to make your operation more green - it makes sense to be skeptical. On the other hand, when you can find genuinely environmentally friendly practices that have additional benefits for your business, that's a win-win situation.

We've found that one such win-win situation in our work is the use of online forms for collecting information from customers. Using an online form instead of a paper form saves the paper and the resources that went into making it, transporting it, and printing on it. But there are many other benefits to an online form that have nothing to do with saving paper. For example, the data you receive is in a format that you can cut and paste, reducing retyping time and human errors that take time to correct and can cause delays in a project. If your customers are in the habit of leaving out important information on paper forms, you can make those fields required on an online form, and the customer will not be able to send the form without completing it. This not only eliminates the time it would have taken to contact the customer for the necessary information, but also you will be able to turn around projects more quickly, which improves customer service and your profits. Another productivity increase that comes with online forms is the ability to send the data to multiple recipients with one click, saving time that might otherwise be spent gathering the information and making it available to colleagues who need it. With online forms there is an opportunity to upsell or give your customers better service by providing links to information that you want your customers to have, either on the form itself or on a web page where they are directed after completion.

None of the benefits I've mentioned so far are new - online forms have been around for awhile. What is new are some of the added functions that you can add to forms and landing pages with products like email marketing by Exact Target and automated, on demand voice messaging by Vontoo. It is now possible to send a voice message or a text message to a customer's mobile device at their request with forms and other triggered sends. It's possible to show them a personalized image on a landing page that is generated by completing a form or by a click in an email - for an example see this Personalized Landing Pages demonstration - or wow them even more with a rich media Brainshark presentation with customized content that reflects the customer's input from the form.

Please contact us if you would like to deploy any of these exciting new techniques in your customer acquisition program.

It all adds up to: let your "Subscribers Rule" and let your customers communicate with you the way THEY like to communicate with you, which these days is very likely to include Social Media. I am a recent and enthusiastic convert, but I am trying very hard to be careful and not offend anyone with my Social Media experiments. I know what it's like to get unwanted commercial messages, just as you do. For example, I've taken the rather drastic step of having the text messaging function on my cell phone disabled because I resented having to pay to receive spam messages. This past June I saw the rock band Rush in concert for the 15th or 16th time and would have loved to have been able to text message something like "Geddy Lee Rules!" and have it show up on the big screens during intermission (as if people didn't know that already), but that's one of the small pleasures of life I was deprived of when I gave up on text messaging with my phone!

People can get resentful toward you for much less egregious cyber-offenses than that. One reason for the popularity of Social Media is that users feel it's something they can control better than their email inbox, so please keep that in mind when you are thinking about how to use Social Media for business lead generation. If you take the time and learn the technology and the culture by using the media for more casual, personal purposes first, you should get a feel for what is acceptable behavior and what is not, and then get ideas for how it can help with customer acquisition.

If you want to learn more about the kinds of concepts that were discussed at Connections '08, which include the customer acquisition process, personalized marketing campaigns, and effective lead generation, try visiting the Subscribers Rule Blog.

As you read in Mark's recent blog post, Discovering the Discovery Light at Graph Expo, we attended Graph Expo in Chicago in October to promote Discovery Light^TM, an interactive system for helping young children learn to read by using a special light that creates discovery through hidden messages.

Some of the hidden messages are revealed through a font that produces tiny printed text that can only be viewed with a magnifier.

Other hidden messages are revealed by shining a UV light source, the Discovery Light^TM, on certain areas of the book. Below is a demonstration of the flourescent text in action.

We also put variable data into the books we were displaying at the show. To demonstrate that the books can be personalized for the child that will receive them, we put an assortment of different sample names in the giveaway copies of the book.

Kids aren't the only ones who like personalization - adults take notice of it too. To emphasize the personalization theme, we personalized the emails that we sent out to invite customers to our booth at the show also.

Mark has written about embedding personalized images into the body of an email before in his blog post How to Acquire Customers and Influence People with Personalization. For the Discovery Light^TM, we decided to go a step further and create personalized landing pages for each recipient, a feature available in the ExactTarget email software that we use, that the customers would reach if they clicked on a link in the email. The behavior of the individual customers who clicked on the link is trackable through the landing page.

With these powerful tools we were able to generate interest in our exhibit at the show, the brand new Discovery Light^TM web site, and the value of personalization all at the same time.

If you would like to see my photos from my short but interesting trip to the show, please click here - Graph Expo '08.

In my last post I talked about how social media gives your audience more ways to receive your content. They can choose many different ways to send you information as well. In addition to calling you or filling out a form on your web site, depending on what services you make available to them, they can for example leave a comment on your blog, or write on your wall in Facebook. Effective lead generation includes giving more choices to your audience so that they can have the kind of relationship with you that suits them.

Other than the natural instinct to make it as easy to contact you as possible, what other reasons might there be for making the effort to branch out into social media? At the Connections '08 conference, I took lots of notes. Here are some excerpts from those notes:

• "Relationships with customers are one thing that competitors can't copy."
• "79% of customers buy from companies that they are in a relationship with, rather than just on price."
• "About 30% of email addresses go bad every year."
• "22% of Internet users are using social media instead of email."
• "Facebook - must be on it to understand what is going on."

Those random notations lead me to some ideas about why businesses might want to have a social media presence to help with customer acquisition. If about 30% of email addresses go bad every year, then you can't count on email alone to keep in touch with your customers. It makes sense to have other channels available.

Relationships with customers and personalized marketing campaigns are clearly important - how can social media help to build those relationships? Blogs can help a great deal by humanizing your company through informal communication that allows transparent feedback. Blogs are also a great way to possibly get on social networking and bookmarking sites without you having to do anything - for example on our Webinar Resources Blog, at the bottom of each post is a Share This chicklet. If you click it, you will see dozens of chicklets that a visitor to this blog can use to share our posts using the service of their choice. This is just one of many ways that the people who really like what you're producing can do some of your marketing for you by their own free will.

If 22% of Internet users are using social media instead of email, as effective as email is, it's clear you are going to have to reach those particular customers some other way. If your customers are looking for you, it's important to be where they are. If you are using a social networking service, are fellow users on that service manifesting their relationships with different causes, organizations, brand names or products? Can you get any ideas from how they are doing it?

Believe it or not, there ARE still some business today that don't have a web site or email yet, but these days there are even more communication choices. When doing a web marketing proposal now I would ask clients if they want, in addition to a web site, email marketing, possibly with personalized images or landing pages, a blog, interactive Brainshark presentations, and Vontoo voice messaging. I would ask them if they participate in services such as Facebook, MySpace, YouTube, or photo sharing sites and if so are they interested in those services playing a role in their overall customer acquisition strategy.
 

So now we have many more ways for people to contact each other, and yes it can be confusing. I'm still trying to sort out what all those little "chicklets" (a slang term for a button that users click on to save, catalog, and share information or to download something) you see all over the web mean. One thing I know they do mean is extra control for the consumer of your content. For example, on this Webinar Resources Blog, readers can come to this web page to read the content. Or, they can click the orange "chicklet" in the right-hand column to get the feed link to this blog, and paste that into the feed aggregator of their choice. I'm just beginning to learn myself all the things that can be done with feeds and it's entirely possible people might be reading this blog post in ways I haven't even heard of yet.

Why would a business want to get involved in social media? By nature, it is unpredictable as we human beings naturally are, and that can be scary.

At the Connections '08 conference for users and agencies that I attended in September, ExactTarget selected "Subscribers Rule!" as the theme. What does that mean? You can read Exact Target's exact definition here. ExactTarget is in the business of email marketing, so they want us to think about the needs of our email subscribers and how to keep them happy. You want to give them control, to let them "Rule" over how you communicate with them. For example, you allow subscribers to choose to get your emails instead of sending them unsolicited spam, and make sure to send them content that fits their interests.

In the early days of my web design and development career, which started 11 years ago, I encouraged clients to make it as easy as possible for customers to contact them by providing information about multiple means of doing so, such as telephone, fax, mailing address, and email. Different people have preferences for how they like to communicate. I for example, am very comfortable sending email but don't enjoy talking on the phone. A company that provides an email contact is much more likely to get my business than one providing only a phone number.

According to the ExactTarget 2008 Channel Preference Survey, the trend is for younger consumers to place less importance on email as a communication channel than older consumers. This does not mean that email is going to go away any time soon however. Among the youngest age group in the survey, 15-17 year olds, email is still the second most favored channel. All of the other groups surveyed showed email either tied for first place or in first place. And since you need an email address to register for many services, people will still need to have an email address even if it isn't used as the main form of written communication.

Mark, JoAnna and I just got back from the ExactTarget users conference, Connections '08, which was held in Indianapolis earlier this week. We brought back a lot of new information and inspiration about email marketing, lead generation, social media, customer acquisition, and more. I'll be blogging about some of the topics that inspired me soon. In the meantime, here is a link to some photos of the conference. Enjoy!

Everybody is talking about Social Media. Sites like MySpace, Facebook, YouTube, WordPress and Flickr are becoming household names. I've been curious about what is going on out there for a long time but it took me awhile to put my toe in the water of the Social Media pool. Why? I had several of my own "traditional" web sites and I didn't see the need for it at first. I added links on my sites to the blogs, MySpace pages and photo sharing sites of several friends, without feeling compelled to immediately get one of my own.

Then we started our business blog here at Webinar Resources. Blogging had become part of my job description, but it quickly became much more than that to me. Web sites are not only part of what I do for a living, they are a personal passion, and I never get tired of finding new ways to get people to come to them. With all the millions of sites out there screaming for attention, why not use whatever advantages you can find? One of the first things I did after my first blog post was to figure out how to syndicate my posts to several of my own web sites. Content is what draws visitors, and it takes valuable time to create good content, so any way to leverage what you've created is a bonus.

My next move was to respond to an invitation from a friend to get a Facebook account and join her friends list. Like many other similar services, Facebook offers the ability to create online photo albums. That's an obvious incentive for potential users of this service, as so many of us now have digital cameras or cell phones that can take pictures. Photography is one my hobbies, so with lots of content to choose from, I immediately started to upload photos, and to link to the resulting collections from one of my other web sites that already contained photo pages. And to leverage the content even more, I put a Facebook badge on some of my other web sites that contains browseable thumbnail images of photos I've recently added.

It's easy to see how such tools could enhance your social connections. But what about business? Can Social Media help businesses with lead generation and the customer acquisition process? I'll explore that question in a future blog post.