How much of your day do you spend online? Honestly, how many hours? The proportion of time online to offline in my typical week day is shocking. There is the roughly seven hours online while in the office, then probably another combined hour of home surfing and mobile browsing. So I’ll assume I’m online for approximately eight hours of the day. Also I will assume that I get a full eight hours of sleep; a wishful assumption but appropriate for this example. That leaves another eight hours of the day that I am conscious; doing whatever else it is that I do. Alas, on a typical week day I spend as much time online as I do offline or sleeping. What did people do before the internet, anyways?

I would expect my proportion is similar, or probably becoming similar, to the majority of professionals in America. So it makes sense that traditional media is on a moribund slope while online media is on a burgeoning incline, right? Well then, why is the primary online guerilla starting to run good old fashioned television ads? That’s right, Google, the search engine company, is touting the benefits of Chrome, the web browser, by means of television advertising spots. Check out the “The web is what you make of it” spots, It Gets Better and Dear Sophie. The commercials are poignant, using emotional appeal to encourage viewers to form a relationship with the speedy web browser Chrome. Though Google is using traditional methods to promote new media technologies, I believe that this underscores, not enervates, the inevitable demise of traditional media.

The reason is that Google recognizes that the majority of people still paying attention to or even watching commercials at all are those that have not fully migrated to the online world yet. Google is reaching out to these laggards in an attempt to plant the Chrome seed before alternative browsers are actively discovered. As the New York Times states, “the more people use the Web, the more they use Google.” If users start off using Chrome, they are pretty much guaranteed to use other Google products as well, which is the ultimate goal. More or less, Google is utilizing a dying medium to promote the very thing that is killing it.

– Kenneth Hurta

Throughout my life, I have in one way or another been involved with volunteering and community service.

Whether it was in my early teens visiting retirement communities with my church youth group, Saturday morning clean up with the Key Club in high school after a Friday night football game, serving as a Big Brother in college, maintaining hiking trails with the local chapter of the Sierra Club, taking the kids at the Virginia Home for Boys and Girls out for a “funtertaining” event, facilitating a warm meal and place to stay overnight for the homeless at the Carpenter’s Shelter, volunteering and working to help Gallery 5 Arts in Jackson Ward (Richmond, VA), helping 2^nd graders improve their reading skills through a Reading Star Program, or playing in a golf tournament to help raise funds for a young child needing brain surgery, I’ve been giving back.

However, since I’ve moved to Austin recently, I now feel it’s time to give back more than I have been giving around here, and I am acting upon it with full conviction of this purpose.

One of my latest community service outings was working in the warehouse for the Central Virginia Food Bank.  Our task was to sort and filter the various types of food donated from a common bin, organize, and place the items in a bin designated for them. For example, tomato soup has its own bin, as does chicken noodle soup, and green beans, and corn, and beets, and potatoes, spaghetti, peanut butter, etc. While I was working away, a feeling came to me that had been missing for some time. It was a feeling of accomplishment in serving a greater good for my fellow man and community. And just as the feeling came to me, I said to the other volunteers around me “I almost forgot how good this feels. I could do this every day.”

I am neither a saint nor a savior.  I am merely a humble servant in this world with my flaws and imperfections, but I do find great comfort and peace within that I now choose to serve more.  And as I write this message and share with you all, I hope that you too will want to serve more because our world needs it.

My reaffirmation to serve did not come from myself alone.  It also manifested through the example of other friends such as Deona volunteering with Meals on Wheels, Mark and Shelli working with the kids at Mind Games, Wayne feeding the homeless in Monroe Park every Sunday, Tom and Amanda providing a place to transcend artistic boundaries in the Richmond community, and Stan going to Guatemala on a mission to help improve living conditions for families there.

These are just a handful of volunteer and community service examples I have witnessed and encountered recently.  I know there are many more, so I encourage you to share with me and others reading, your stories of serving and giving back to the community.

In closing, I believe the quote below compliments my note rather appropriately.

“At times our own light goes out and is rekindled by a spark from another person. Each of us has cause to think with deep gratitude of those who have lighted the flame within us.” – Albert Schweitzer

Here’s to you all who have lit, and will continue to light the flame in me and others.  Spark on!

We have  said it once and today we will say it again (a third time actually)– following up with web generated leads as soon as possible is a good idea.  A  2008 study by MIT and InsideSales.com, should help to  increase your businesses sales, if you take this research to heart and create a process that ensures web-generated leads are followed up with quickly!

• According to the MIT study, “the odds of contacting a lead if called within 5 minutes versus 30 minutes drops 100 times.”  Statistics for qualifying leads are equally as surprising – “the odds of qualifying a lead in 5 minutes versus 30 minutes drops 21 times.” Since the qualification stage is where we find out the purchasing potential of the web generated lead we should pay close attention and strive to follow up with all leads within 5 minutes.

• What’s interesting about this study is that it only takes into account leads that were called upon at least one time.  Many studies exist that show between 30-80% of web generated leads are never followed up on.  If your business has any leads that fit this category, maybe it is time to add additional sales staff or other tools that can help your sales team quickly follow up on web generated leads.

• The best times of the day to make contact is between 4 to 6 pm. 7-8 AM and 11-12 were some of the worst times to call during the day. The study seems to suggest that calling leads around breakfast and lunch time is not the prime time for contacting or qualifying leads.  The study still leads the reader to believe that regardless of the time called – calling within 5 minutes is the most ideal follow up time.

• The study also found that Wednesdays and Thursdays are the best days to call in order to contact web-generated leads. Tuesday is the worst day to make contact with a lead, with Thursday being a 49.7% better day to call.  Now, we wouldn’t suggest that everyone takes off Tuesdays for the rest of the year, but maybe Tuesdays should be earmarked for learning sessions and quarterly off site meetings for your sales teams.

If you don’t already have a way of making sure your web generated leads are being followed-up with quickly – you should set a process in place right away.

Facebook and Google are taking targeting to a whole new level with advertising that’s based on real-time and weather forecasting, respectively. With these advancements in conversation and location-based targeting, advertisements are either going to become more like editorial content that’s of interest to consumers or customized ads will just become really creepy, depending on who you ask.

Facebook’s testing a real-time advertising tool that will match highly-targeted ads to users based on up-to-the-minute status updates and wall posts. Were I to post an update saying, “Beautiful weather in Austin today. Wish I was reading a book in the park,” within minutes, I would begin seeing ads from say Barnes & Noble, or a local independent bookstore, like Book People, or maybe even an author, promoting their most recent release. While Facebook’s real-time advertising has the most potential for advertisers in my opinion, I don’t necessarily think it will contribute to Likes on B&N’s Facebook page or to brand engagement. I think this targeting technique is an opportunity for advertising to lead to eventual sales if advertisers can capitalize on this real-time tool by  offering a deal, coupon, or other incentive for me to purchase that book I wanted to read in the park.

Google is developing a weather-forecasting tool that will display ads based on where people are located and what the current weather is like. This will enable advertisers, such as Australian boot maker UGG, to target potential consumers that are in chilly, icy, and snowy climates. This type of advertising will work in much the same way that product placements do in grocery stores–if it’s raining, the store moves the umbrella display up to the front door or near the cash registers. While I do think this weather-based targeting tool has a lot of potential, I don’t know that it has much purpose outside of when a region is experiencing unseasonable weather. There’s enough data available to UGG to know what time of year certain locations are experiencing frigid weather and when and where to target their ads.

It’s almost too bad that Google and Facebook can’t harmoniously, and profitably, merge advertising efforts because the real promise in these targeting advancements would be in Google using Facebook’s status updates to target and display ads to users who can then click, and in one single step, complete a purchase transaction. At some point, probably in the very near future, we’ll see real conversations turn into sales conversions.

Smartphones are predicted to be in the hands of half of all Americans by the end of 2011, according to GigaOM. The growth of smartphones is impacting how we stay connected through social media, how we discover new restaurants via local search, and even the way in which we donate to charities after natural disasters, like the earthquake and tsunami in Japan. With the onset of QR codes, phone applications, and other mobile advancements, users expect businesses to, at the very least, have optimized websites for mobile use.