Doug Theis Leave your comfort zone.

Word of mouth plays a big role in creating a positive brand image and prompting prospects to make that final leap into making a purchase or patronizing a service. The web has a plethora of review sites… most of which are open to anonymous users that have become problematic due to trolling competitors and false reviews. These sites are overrun by competitors hoping to damage your reputation.

Businesses are surprised to find out how different our client, Angie’s List, is. On Angie’s List, your business account is free. Your reputation is built from a 1.5 million strong subscriber base, all of them registered and usually paid subscribers, eliminating the chances of bogus or biased reviews. Angie’s List even provides a mediation service to ensure issues are reported accurately. The service has become so popular to its users that people often search for Angie’s List + the service and city!

Angie’s List is the nation’s premier provider of trusted reviews on contractors and doctors in over 550 categories, like roofers, plumbers, house cleaners and dentists. More than 2 million members check Angie’s List to find the best local service providers and save on projects with exclusive member discounts

Marketing Tech Blog – Service Industry Marketing Must Include Angie's List

Whenever I post about the impact of beliefs on lives and careers, I tend to get at least one comment contrasting “optimism” and “realism.” That’s an odd comparison to make, because they’re actually the exact same thing.

Let me explain.

Because you are human, you are not capable of discerning “reality.” Everything you see, hear, feel, smell, and taste is being channeled through your mind, which assigns meaning to all of those events.

So your experience of reality is actually an experience of your interpretation of reality.

Now, the world around you consists of a long list of things that you can’t control and a short list of things that you can control. That short list, in fact, consists of exactly one item: the actions that you take.

Inc.com – Be More Optimistic. Here’s Why

Nearly a quarter of the changes often seen in a person’s intelligence level over the course of a lifetime may be due to genes, a proportion never before estimated, new research shows.

The study suggests that genes may partly explain why some people’s brains age better than others, even though environmental factors likely play a greater role over a lifetime.

Understanding the factors behind healthy mental aging has become an increasingly vital one for societies with large elderly populations. However, it isn’t an easy task.

Traditional methods of estimating the influence of genes and the environment on intelligence have largely been limited to comparisons between people who are related, such as identical or fraternal twins. The shortcoming of such studies is they didn’t clearly apportion the effects of each factor on intelligence.

More of the WSJ article from Gautam Naik

I don’t live in a high risk area for deadly tremors, but after watching this earthquake-proof table easily survive having a 2,200 pound block dropped on it, I think I still want one for my office—just in case.

The table was designed by Ido Bruno and Arthur Brutter primarily for use in schools. Students are typically taught to hide under their desks in the event of an earthquake, but most desks aren’t designed to support the weight of all the debris were the building to collapse. Which is clearly demonstrated in this video when they drop just a 1,000 pound weight on a traditional desk and it’s immediately pancaked.

More of the Gizmodo article from Andrew Liszewski

Think all the banter on Twitter and in blog comments is for naught? Here’s how social envy and the competition of ideas it generates will lead to faster innovation.

Jason Fidler has posted a very interesting rebuttal to my recent blog post on the envy effect. I originally argued that the e-social revolution will likely lead to more competition among people, because increasing transparency makes it easier to compare attributes.

Fidler suggests my argument is flawed because competition for pay (and other things in the economic world) is based on actual transparency, while competition for social media dominance is based on “selective” transparency. In other words, we are transparent in social media only to the point we permit ourselves to be, choosing either to disclose or not to disclose different personal attributes.

Moreover, he says, the economic comparisons required by the SEC led to actual improvements in CEO pay, while “it is safe to assume that few have truly better personal lives because of their activity on social networks.”

More of the Fast Company article from Don Peppers

Infographic: Ways to Target Your Website Traffic

We’re behind on customization of our mobile and iPad versions of the new theme on the Marketing Technology blog… it’s in the works, though! One thing you will notice is that, based on the categorization of the post, we have different advertisements on the page. We did this by customizing our own dynamic widgets and utilizing iSocket for self-service placement of the ads.

There are many more ways to target your audience than the device they’re utilizing, though, and this infographic from Monetate speaks to them. Recent average order size, location, visit frequency, operating system, weather, products or pages viewed and even the distance to your fulfillment center (or office location) can be used to customize the experience and increase response rates.

Site Targeting

Source: Marketing Technology Blog (http://s.tt/13L2b)

More of the Marketing Technology blog post from Rob Yoegel

Do you think a sheet of paper is a better form factor than a tablet?

I thought that E-ink was just about tapped out for innovation and the only thing that could be improved was its refresh rate. But then AU Optronics (AUO), one of the world’s largest makers of LCD screens, came out with this concept e-reader that’s self-powered and is as flexible as real paper.

AUO built its e-reader device using a flexible organic TFT display and a thin-film photovoltaic battery. Thanks to the built in solar cell, the e-reader can be completely self-powered while it is being used in sun light, as it generates “1-watt or more” of electricity.

More of the ITWorld article from Kevin Lee