Devoted to online marketing, viral marketing, and web marketing

Fred Durst, Limp Bizkit leadman has taken his fight with the band's fomer quitarist, Wes Borland to MySpace, with Durst using the medium to write a song attacking Borland.

Here are some of the lyrics:

“Stop making plans to manipulate fans and finally stick to something you believe / ’Cause you had us all fooled and, I’ll admit, even me / Manipulating like a crook who’s arrestable / It’s unacceptable, f---ing unacceptable.” You can hear it here.

Borland left Limp Bizkit to hook up with a new group, Black Light Burns.

Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google

With the advent of IE 7, Google (GOOG) is fighting back with the law rather than free market tactics. What it all entails is that IE 7 has a small white search box that is in the top right corner of the browser. Google is complaining to the U.S. Department of Justice and European Commission concerning the issue.

The bizarre complaint is odd when you think that Google has its own search tool embedded into Microsoft's (MSFT) browser competitors Firefox and Opera.

A spokesman for Google, Steve Langdon said "We have spoken with the commission as part of its investigation of Vista, we have expressed our concerns that Microsoft's approach to setting search defaults in IE7 benefits Microsoft while taking away choice from users." He added that Google was not aware of a similar investigation in the U.S. but had also spoken to the Department of Justice "generally about our business and the importance of preserving competition in the search market."

With the local business market being largely untapped at this time, companies are trying to figure out ways to get local businesses to partake in the online marketing arena. I know that I have tried to show the importance of this over the time I've blogged here.

Now in response to this Yahoo! (YHOO) has now created a flat-fee "Featured Listings" that is much easier to manage than the auction-based keyword-targeted ads.

Here are a few of the practicals as reported by Pamela Parker:

"Featured Listings, which are guaranteed to appear on local search results pages, are offered at five different price points ranging from $20 to $300/month. Ads in higher-demand categories and more-populated areas command a larger amount.

Beth Higbee, senior vice president, Scripps Networks Interactive, recently said in a statement "While many media companies talk about convergence, at Scripps we make a concerted effort to encourage our audiences to participate in our programming both on-air and online, as a result we are building loyal audiences in whatever media they choose to access. Each offers different benefits, so more and more of our audiences are migrating back and forth between on-air and online, where we can capture them for advertisers."

Her thoughts give an excellent look into what is happening in the converging online and offline worlds at this time. Even Google has been growing its offline advertising business quietly behind the scenes, almost repeating the words mentioned by Higbee above.

My thoughts are that with all of the devices and options out there in the online and offline worlds, online marketers need to stick to what is working well, while taking one new strategy at a time, learning it, implementing it and then working with it until it is operating well.

The real estate market has been embracing technology and new things faster than a lot of industries. In the area of blogging it has been no different. In response to that they have been promoting blogging as a tool that is needed by all of those in the industry.
 
Here are several tips that they offer that apply to anyone blogging, not matter what industry you're in:

Search Engine Marketing

Blogs give you an increased presence on major search engines, like Yahoo! and Google. A well-written, routinely updated, keyword-oriented blog can enhance your chances of garnering high rankings on search engine return pages.

Direct Communications

Blogs provide a way for you to speak directly, openly and honestly with your customer.