It will be interesting to see how things progress in this area.

When I was a new salesman, I was scheduled to give a product presentation to my branch about a new product our company had. I had given presentations to customers about it before and I had above normal knowledge of it and was comfortable with it.

The night before my talk, I partied with my group and had a really good time. So, the next day, I started my presentation and had a complete case of memory block. I could not remember basic facts and information about the product that I knew so much about. I looked stupid and incompetent. It was the first time I realized that having a hangover could affect my ability to function.

The next year I gave a talk on a different product. I hit the presentation with belief that showed and presented the facts and figures without a hangover. I won the branch prize for the best talk. I went on to give a lot of product presentations nationally.

This last Thursday and Friday, I attended a presentation skills training class given by Anne Warfield, CEO of Impression Management Professionals. Anne is a nationally recognized speaker and author. She is friends with many nationally known speakers and (to me this is awesome)is a friend of Vince Flynn who is a New York Times best seller every time he writes a book and admired by former presidents like Bill Clinton and George Bush.

Anne’s training held my attention for two whole days and with me being an Internet marketer that isn’t easy. I’m convinced that IMers develop ADD as a side effect of our business. But Anne held it completely because she knows how to teach and she knows how to speak to an audience or in our case a class.

Full Disclosure: Anne is a client of mine for Internet Marketing but, if I didn’t believe what I am writing here, I wouldn’t write it at all. This is unsolicited and she won’t know I’ve written it until after it has been published. I only share what I think will be helpful to my readers.

Anne showed us new ways to approach and begin our talks like telling stories that others can relate to. She went over personality types and how they think about things and how we should present to them. She taught us about their hot buttons and how they receive what we are saying. Basically, she taught us how to give a presentation from the audience perspective.

One of Anne’s abilities is being able to drop into role playing so that you can picture a message she is teaching you happening before your eyes. Its an incredible experience and the learning happens at the subconscious level which is more effective than learning at the conscious level. That is also important because learning from Anne is like drinking out a fire hose. There is so much information that it will take time to soak in and germinate. but when you need the information it will be there to pull out. And, in case I need to review the information, I left with a binder of notes and other materials Anne provided.

While I have given quite a few presentations over the years and had various levels of training, I have never had training that is so (and I hate to use this word) transformational.

In case you are wondering how this all relates to Internet Marketing, well, IM is connecting with your customers at a level they can relate to and learn from. The best copywriters are doing this all the time even if they don’t know it. That is also what makes Social Marketing so successful.

Now back to my original story, I hope I never have to give a presentation again after partying too much the night before, but if I do, I think Anne gave me the tools to get through it just fine.

If you want to know more about Anne’s training go to http://www.impressionmanagement.com.

We’ll have to wait and see. I’ll keep you posted.

If they aren’t doing it already, Google intends to know where you and your mobile phone are at any given point in time. They do this now with your IP address but a search engine company being able to locate you without the hassle of court orders like the Government would have to have is amazing. The technology they are working on is facinating. The potential for invasion of privacy is for smart people other than me to decide.

The slides where posted by a brilliant young student named Yvo Schaap from the Netherlands.

Why are they even using Twitter? After all, if they are a Chief Marketing Officer, shouldn’t they be listening to what their market has to say? Isn’t that Marketing 101?

Here are some possible answers I have come up with and I don’t like the implications of any of them:

1. They don’t give a damn.

2. They are on Twitter to stroke their own egos.

3. They think they are Oracles and everyone is holding their breath waiting for their next insightful statement.

4. They have someone on their staff Tweeting for them.

5. The most benign - they don’t get Social Marketing. This one can be fixed.

If anyone can give me a better answer or insight, please let me know because I’d like to understand and maybe even communicate with them. I sure would like to know.

As an example, Google uses a person looking for forum discussions about a specific product, but she is most interested in ones that have taken place more recently. With the new Search Options she can search for the product’s name, apply the option to filter out anything but forum sites, and then apply an option to only see results from the past week.

The Search Options “panel” also gives you the ability to view your results in new ways. Google says, “One view gives you more information about each result, including images as well as text, while others let you explore and iterate your search in different ways.”

Google has also begun implementing a process to help people by providing better information than you are used to seeing in the preview text. They call this information “rich snippets.” They give an example “… if you are thinking of trying out a new restaurant and are searching for reviews, rich snippets could include things like the average review score, the number of reviews, and the restaurant’s price range:

In this example, you can quickly see that the Drooling Dog Bar B Q has gotten lots of positive reviews, and if you want to see what other people have said about the restaurant, clicking this result is a good choice.”

Google says it provide these snippets on its own, so they are hoping that web publishers will help them by adopting microformats or RDFa standards to mark up their HTML and bring this structured data to the surface. This will help people better understand the information you have on your page so they can spend more time there and less on Google. They have in the past talked about “time on site” being a part of their search algorithm.

Google plans to roll out more changes soon so there is much to stay on top of if you want to “stay on top of” the first page of Google.

Detailed information is available at the Google Blog.

Now, when one of the blogs I follow has an update, I get a pop-up alert. That makes it soooo much easier than checking all the blogs every day or every other day.

Watch the video below to see how to do it.

Down load the ticker at

http://edition.cnn.com/services/desktopnews/

I hope you like this.

While it is true that China is restricting the information flow on the internet in China, smart hackers who can break through firewalls can break through China’s information fire walls. Eventually, governments who thwart the will of their people fall and often with the violent loss of their own lives.

Following are the charts from Comscore:

The Asia-Pacific region accounted for the highest share of global Internet users at 41 percent, followed by Europe (28 percent share), North America (18 percent share), Latin-America (7 percent share), and the Middle East & Africa (5 percent share).

* Excludes traffic from public computers such as Internet cafes or access from mobile phones or PDAs.

China represented the largest online audience in the world in December 2008 with 180 million Internet users, representing nearly 18 percent of the total worldwide Internet audience, followed by the U.S. (16.2 percent share), Japan (6.0 percent share), Germany (3.7 percent share) and the U.K. (3.6 percent share).

* Excludes traffic from public computers such as Internet cafes or access from mobile phones or PDAs.