Cory Treffelitti wrote a great blog post today on MediaPost.com titled “What Does It Mean To Be a True Partner?” This article should resonate strongly with any and all agencies that care about their business and care about their clients. Location3 has always tried to interact with and establish all of our client and partner agencies in this way but Cory has put it into words quite nicely.

“The antithesis of a partner is a vendor, and there is a simple point of differentiation.  A partner is a valued relationship.  A vendor is an order-taker.  A partner is someone who adds value beyond the exact words of a contract, where a vendor does exactly what they’re told and nothing more.  A partner is willing to say “no” and willing to fight for ideas and engage in intelligent discourse.  A vendor fears conflict and does what they’re asked, even if they don’t believe it’s the right thing to do. ”

You can read the full post here.

On Friday, Google announced that their location extensions were given a makeover. Location extensions, which allow advertisers to enhance their paid listings by either manually or automatically including their location information, used to be limited to one location per ad. Now, if you have a Google Places account linked to your AdWords campaign up to four of the business locations closest to the searcher can be displayed.

This new feature can have some great benefits for brands with multiple locations.

1) For brand terms location extensions allow the customer to pick the closest location to them. It also adds real estate to any brand term search

2) For non-brand terms location extensions allow a brand to gain additional coverage on the SERP. This is especially helpful for locations that may not be in the 3 or 7 pack of the map listing results

3) Improved campaign click through rate. This is from an informal survey of my campaigns that have location extensions implemented but the ads that show with location extensions tend to have a CTR that ranges from .8 to 2% higher than ads that don’t show with location extensions in the same campaign.

Although this makeover is a step in the right direction, there are some situations where implementing the new set-up may not be right for an advertiser.

1) The new extensions only allows for four locations to be visible so groups of stores larger than four that are advertising together may not want to take advantage of this feature because it may result in uneven exposure of the stores.

2) You need to have a Google Places account hooked up to your campaign to take advantage of this feature. If you don’t have access to the Google Places account or you don’t want to hook it up because you don’t want up to four locations to show, this feature is not available to you.

Yes, Facebook is distracting, but the reality is that graduates who are entering the workplace have been eating, sleeping, and breathing status updates, blog posts, photo/video uploads, and more. It’s time social media tools are put to good use in the workplace and collaborating in real-time seems like the perfect fit. An article on Mashable couldn’t better define the concept of immediacy when it comes to our obsessive habits when using Facebook and other social media outlets.  We aren’t home five minutes before we are posting pictures from our summer vacations even though we tweeted and updated family and friends everyday of our whereabouts and what we ate for dinner. Imagine how the concept of immediacy at work could change efficiency?

Mashable illustrates a side by side comparison of social media in the workplace vs. social media and personal life. My favorite comparison is “You follow @Starbucks on Twitter for the latest deals and customer service in your personal life, try following important customer accounts to be sure issues and open items are resolved.” Most of us already have our Facebook and Twitter accounts open in our browsers to periodically check on, how convenient would it be to work straight from Twitter? The best part behind this social move into the workplace is that we all know how Facebook and Twitter work—we don’t need the IT guy for this one.

Tomorrow (June 30^th) is officially Social Media Day!

We celebrate Bike to Work Day, Go-Skate Day, Have a Coke Day, National Deviled Egg Day, Moldy Cheese Day, and Sneak some Zucchini ion your Neighbor’s Porch Night. Why would we not have a day in Celebration of Social Media? By the way, I did not make up any of those holidays; they are all the real deal.

Social media has changed the way we do business and conduct our daily lives, so a celebration in great uses of technology is in order. Across the world on June 30^th there will be events held where people can gather and hear social media experts speak.

Victoria, British Columbia started the events off when the city council declared June 30^th officially Social Media Day. Now, driven by mashable.com, there are events and ‘meet-ups’ in 92 countries with over 9,600 registered attendees on every continent except Antarctica.

In Colorado we have four registered events, the largest one being in Boulder at the Lazy Dog on Pearl Street. The Denver event is located at Paris on the Platte on 15^th and Platte, but there are only 3 people registered to attend.  Step it up Denver, I guess we are winning over Antarctica! At least go and check it out, try the tuna melt and the guacamole it is delicious!

So grab your alpaca friends (the mascot for Social Media day.. it is the most social farm animals of course) and form an event or register to attend a current listing. To receive updates on the celebration follow @mashSMday on twitter and use the #smday to tweet about where you will be commemorating. There are also pages on Facebook and Flickr.

Mergers and acquisitions happen every day in every industry and rarely (ok, pretty much never) do I feel compelled to write about them. So what makes this one different? If you have ever attended a conference on search and/or social marketing, whether that is SMX, SES or PubCon, you’ve most likely seen the prime suspects strutting their stuff on stage. These are people to know in the search/social industry, and now they are joining forces to bring their collective knowledge together under one virtual roof.  Chris Winfield of 10e20, Brent Csutoras of Brent Csutoras Inc, and the team from Search and Social have come together to create BlueGlass Interactive, an agency offering everything from Social Media and PR to Pay Per Click and SEO (much like another agency you may have heard of…ahem…Location3).

BlueGlass Interactive is a Tampa based company, with 40 employees across 4 major cities: Salt Lake City, New York, Tampa and LA.  One criticism is their complete oversight of the best city in the US. What, you guys don’t like to ski?

After speaking with both Chris and Brent at the last SMX Advanced conference in Seattle, their enthusiasm for this merger was infectious, so much so that I am excited to say that we will be working with them on some big projects in the near future. Bringing all of their various strengths together can mean great things for those posed to take advantage of their services, and we look forward to doing just that.

Unlike messy search engines that force you to spend time looking though pages of results for one piece of information, WhitePages may become your new solution. When I found out the online directory just announced its new version of WhitePages Business Search, I was immediately interested and wanted to know more. After all, features include people search, reverse phone and address lookup and a store locator, all of which are available for mobile.

After I got over the initial shock of finding my own name and address on the “People” tab of the site, I decided to look for an actual business. I searched for a few of my favorite places around Denver and even downloaded the free app on my Droid. In my short time using both the app and site, this is what I thought…

Pros:
•Good if you know exactly what you’re looking for and just want to get a phone number or address.
•You can text the listing to a phone if a friend doesn’t have access to mobile web both from the site and the app. Plus, you can choose to add the listing to your contacts if you need it.
•The Store Locator can be useful especially when you’re searching for larger brand names.

Cons:
•Limited content. It doesn’t really help if you want more details on services provided or lots of menu options. However, if you know a little about local advertising and have already provided detailed content on sites like SuperPages or YellowPages, some of that content is pulled into WhitePages if you search by keyword or category.
•No review space. Can’t read ‘em, can’t write ‘em.

Suggestions for Users:
Try it out. See what you like. If anything, you can take a break from stalking people on Facebook and find out where they live instead.

A month or so ago Steve Jobs from Apple posted an open letter to explain why the iPod and the iPad do not and will not support Flash. To paraphrase, it is because it is a proprietary 3rd party closed source development tool. Adobe can update Flash at any time and if your hardware or applications can’t support the update it can become redundant. There are also serious concerns over the security of Flash.

I have to agree with Job’s sentiments and businesses should always be wary about relying on 3rd party systems to support application development.

Last week I received an email from Yahoo about their “wizz bang” (quotations mean sarcasm) Desktop Tool and the platform it is built on – Adobe Air.

Dear Advertiser,

As you know, Yahoo! Search Marketing Desktop uses Adobe AIR as the platform from which we run the application. Recently, Adobe launched Version 2.0 of AIR, but at this time it is not yet supported by the Search Marketing Desktop. Using Version 2.0 at this time may cause errors in the SMD application.

Your Partners at Yahoo! Search Marketing

Too late, I updated Adobe Air when I started up TweetDeck the week before and I am not going to waste my time reverting it. YSM, and its decision to go with style over speed and functionality (that’s all I see their choice to build on the Air platform to be) has now put them in a hole. We still don’t know if the AdCenter Desktop or the Yahoo Desktop will become the successful tool for the merger, but it’s pretty obvious that it will be the Microsoft version since it’s built on the Office platform and Microsoft control their own development environments.

I can’t see Yahoo scrambling to update the YSM Desktop, and I can barely be bothered to use the tool anyway, but they should have known better in the first place since they have been around this industry long enough.

Recently a friend sent me an intense and rather angry rant that she found about how lazy people are in writing, especially correspondences.  I will not go into it much but there was a lot of cursing and general hate for people who use contractions, misuse words, or shorten them (u, b/c). The language was crass but I understand where they are coming from in their frustration with “text message language”.  This rant was humorous and intended to be so (or so I hope, otherwise there is a crazy, angry grammar enthusiast out there) but it made me curious about other rants that are written and posted.

What I found out was that people will publicly complain about absolutely anything! I read some streaming rants, written while sitting in front of a television watching shows that have no impact on the writer’s life. I also read some legitimate forums to discuss issues that affect people’s lives.  All of the posts were interesting, whether they were relevant or not, reading a stranger’s opinion on any topic will likely teach you something you did not previously know.

Posting a rant is a great way to share your opinions and concerns. Every day we encounter little annoyances that may seem trivial but sometimes you just need to let the frustration out that has built from small snag on top of small snag.  A quick tweet about a hangnail, the wind, or your office-neighbor’s squeaky chair may relieve a great deal of stress. Chances are other people are interested in your insignificant woe because they have experienced a similar situation. Let’s be honest, other people’s small misfortune can be funny, especially if you have been just as irritated with the same circumstances at some time.

I recently read a blog post on 6 Things I learned as an Intern, about the overall ideas that the writer took away from an internship. She said things along the lines of “coffee makes the world go-round” and “it is OK to lie a little to get ahead”. She mostly said don’t say no or ask too many questions, no matter what just figure it out.

I am assuming that this girl worked at a pretty large company where the interns were in charge of making copies, getting coffee, and when they do get an actual assignment, not asking questions as to not annoy someone else.  But I question how beneficial a situation like this is to either party. The person coming into an internship may know the basics of the business or the random book knowledge they got from school, or they may not. This person is there to learn and to be successful enough to possibly warrant being hired. By doing meaningless tasks and wasting time using trial and error to find the desired end result, I wonder how much is actually being learned or accomplished. This does not provide the company with much efficiency or a quality candidate for hire; they receive shoddy projects with the satisfaction of a terrified intern. This goes double for newly hired employees, if no one takes the time to welcome a new hire and properly train them they will not thrive or be a very valuable asset to the company.

So the moral of the story is don’t ask me to get you coffee. No, not really, I mean I don’t know how to make decent coffee but I am not here to learn to make coffee. I have so far enjoyed a very welcoming group that wants me to understand what and why everyone is doing what they are. More importantly, I am not afraid to say “I don’t know what that means” or “I know you already explained this, but can you tell me again”. This may be that I have a different personality than the girl in the original blog, or a more inviting environment. I just do not think that people should go into a new situation being so afraid to sound dumb that they end up looking dumb because they botch a task. Sitting down with someone to fully explain the end result that is sought and maybe even some of the steps to get there will result in a better outcome and less work for you when you have to re-do the task after they do it wrong.

Image from zedomax.com

For more information you can visit Laurie Sullivan’s article in MediaPost http://www.mediapost.com/publications/?fa=Articles.showArticle&art_aid=129714