I’d like you to meet my new best friend…CINCH!

Cinch allows you to record an audio from your phone or computer.  If you’ve got an iPhone they have an awesome app you can use to record your message and automatically send it out via Facebook and Twitter. If you don’t have an iPhone then you just call into a special phone number and hola! the magic happens.

There is no excuse now for those that aren’t writers to not connect with their followers everyday! Especially when its as easy as picking up the phone, jabbering away and hanging up!

What do you think? Ready to give it a try? Please leave your comments below with links to your Cinch profile so we can be friends there too!

BTW-if you use the heart social media icons…feel free to start using the Cinch Heart icon I had my wonderful graphic designer Morgan make!

Since you don’t have coffee on the brain you might not have noticed how much faster and relevant your Google searches have become in the last few months. So I thought I’d share with you what’s going on behind the scenes so that you can include a few more search engine optimization strategies in your marketing portfolio.

Since July 2010, Google has been using their new site indexing platform called Caffeine! See what they say about their old vs. new system:

Our old index had several layers, some of which were refreshed at a faster rate than others; the main layer would update every couple of weeks. To refresh a layer of the old index, we would analyze the entire web, which meant there was a significant delay between when we found a page and made it available to you.

With Caffeine, we analyze the web in small portions and update our search index on a continuous basis, globally. As we find new pages, or new information on existing pages, we can add these straight to the index. That means you can find fresher information than ever before—no matter when or where it was published.

Caffeine lets us index web pages on an enormous scale. In fact, every second Caffeine processes hundreds of thousands of pages in parallel. If this were a pile of paper it would grow three miles taller every second. Caffeine takes up nearly 100 million gigabytes of storage in one database and adds new information at a rate of hundreds of thousands of gigabytes per day. You would need 625,000 of the largest iPods to store that much information; if these were stacked end-to-end they would go for more than 40 miles.

Web searches should now be 50% fresher. What does this mean for you?  It’s time to step up content development (that means more blogging) and your social media creativity to stay ahead of the competition and stay as relevant as possible to your prospects and customers.

Are you up for the challenge? Did you notice any fresher results when Google searching? Please leave your comments below.

Today’s tip comes from a chapter from Oreo cookie’s playbook. Take a look at some of their recent Facebook Fan Page Status Updates and staggering statistics.

• “Ever try dunking an Oreo cookie with a fork or anything else?” 8,200 likes and 2,300 comments
• “Pick a flavor, any flavor! If you could create a new Oreo cream flavor, what would it be?” 7,100 likes, 12,500 comments
  
• “Pop quiz: Twist, lick, then…” 6,500 likes, 6,200 comments

Would you like these same sort of comments and likes on your fan page? Or how about even a 1/10th of those likes & comments?

(Hell, ya!)

It’s hard to resist that masterful combination of crunchy chocolate cookies and sweet creamy filling.  Oreo has over the years created a strong brand, in fact 491 billion Oreo cookies have been sold since they were first introduced in 1912.

So what’s their secret to success and how can you transfer this secret to success into your own Facebook Fan Page?

Let’s look at the classic combination of crunchy and creamy and apply that to the types of status updates you make.

Think of any of the promotional status updates, videos and tweets you make as ‘crunchy’ marketing.

Then picture the valuable content you provide as the creamy center.

If you package your creamy (rich, problem-solving information) content around the crunchy (promotional) cookie  you can please a lot more people AND get what you want…more people to pay you money for the work that you do or product/service that you provide.

Play with me a bit more with this analogy. (I promise you can run out to munch on some Oreos in just a minute)

Many people don’t like the crunchiness of the Oreo cookie just like many people get really cranky when people or companies self-promote.  And often heart-centered entrepreneurs don’t like being self-promotional or crunchy themselves.

How do you make your Oreo cookies less crunchy?

Most people…dip them in MILK! (Remember Oreo’s are Milk’s Favorite cookie!)

What’s the milk in your marketing?

How do you make your promotional marketing more palatable?

May I suggest that the milk be…conversation?

How do you start a conversation?

ASK questions!  Ask questions about what people think about your content, your industry, the way they use your products or services.  Ask about how you can support them and service them better. Ask them about how they are.

So what do you think about my Oreo Marketing Secret? Please share your comments below or on our Facebook Fan Page.