audio posted from recent marketing panel

a new audio segment has been posted under the “meet eric” tab. this condensed clip is quite long at nearly 30 minutes and represents the majority of my panel time from the may 20th washington area music association event. be forewarned – while the information is excellent, the quality of the audience recording is only average. the subject for the evening was marketing your music on the internet. i discuss planning, branding, sales, social media marketing, building a team, publicity, and customer retention. moderator kenneth m. kaufman, noted entertainment lawyer in the washington dc area, introduced me for the segment and the q&a that followed. other panelists included ann chaitovitz (former executive director for future of music coalition and current consultant), greg berger (videographer), andrew mcknight (touring musician), and bryan calhoun (vp of soundexchange). enjoy!

10 things that google penalizes

want to get lost on google? if you’re concerned with google search ranking penalties (as anyone serious about sales and marketing should be), then below are some sure fire ways to get nabbed. grabbing page views “by any means necessary” can’t be part of any sensible, long-term marketing strategy. google protects the consumer – so what’s bad for the consumer is bad by google. getting knocked down in search rankings (or banned altogether) takes you away from the action and immediately hurts sales. beware of any company that recommends the below tactics for your business. if you’re anything like me, then you’re researching all over the internet for best practices, trends and the latest news in this important field. you’ve got someone hawking this on the daily. click on for these topics: cloaking, duplicating content, content writing by robots, embedding unrelated keywords, linking to bad neighborhoods, text hiding, title stacking, distributing viruses, creating doorways, and automating inquiries.

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economists predict the end of the recession

a survey released today by the national association for business economics predicts that the recession will end by the close of 2009. about 74 percent of the forecasters expect the recession — which started in december 2007 and is the longest since world war II — to end in the third quarter. another 19 percent predict the turning point will come in the final three months of this year, and the remaining 7 percent believe the recession will end in the first quarter of 2010.

no such thing as deleted on internet

if you think that a photo that makes its way up to the internet can easily be deleted – think again! a study by researchers at cambridge university shows that nearly half of the social networking sites don’t immediately delete pictures when a user requests they be removed. while you may keep one copy on your personal computer, large-scale services like facebook rely on what are called content delivery networks (cdn) to manage data and distribution. data is copied to multiple intermediate devices, usually to speed up access to files when millions of people are trying to access the service simultaneously. since changes aren’t reflected across the cdn immediately, ghost copies of files tend to linger for days or weeks. here’s how to delete various profiles from the internet.