Those unfamiliar with The SEO Rapper get thyself immediately to the SEO Rapper site and his YouTube page. We highly recommend:

The Design Rap

If you have animation / Please use moderation; Because search engines can’t / Index the information.

/and

The Paid Search Rap

Research all your keywords and your phrases / they all sound good but they may not be a factor / several ways to check and I prefer word tracker / very vague phrases should get denied / longtail keyphrases are more qualified.

And that’s just the beginning. After the break, we learn how the SEO raps came to be and what Chuck sees as the most common online marketing mistakes.

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Phil Villarreal is a writer.

Oddpodz: You write the blog Because I Told You So. You subtitled it “Free Porn” despite it having no porn. Besides disappointing me, what a genius SEO decision that is; can I steal it?

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Lou Harry is the Arts & Entertainment Editor for Indianapolis Business Journal. He has authored or co-authored a large number of books including The Encyclopedia of Guilty Pleasures, In the Can, As Seen on TV, Creative Block, and The High-Impact Infidelity Diet: A Novel and created popular novelty items such as the The Portable Voodoo Kit.

His work has appeared in many magazines and he was the editor of the now defunct Indy Men’s Magazine. He agreed to speak with us because, in America, he’s free to do so.

As a writer you really cover the spectrum of areas. Do you suddenly want to jump to a new format or do you force yourself to change it up to keep it interesting?

Having worked in city and regional magazines for most of my life, I’m used to genre-jumping. One month you’re working on a business story, the next month you’re doing a celebrity profile. I’m comfortable with that.

When it comes to books, half of my work is commissioned by the publishers. They have an idea for a book and they come to me to develop and execute it. Since I have no control over the core idea then, voila, I’ve got another oddball item on my resume. (My response when an editor asks me “Do you know anything about ‘blank’?” is something all freelancers should learn: “I wouldn’t pass myself off as an expert, but I think I could ask the right questions.”)

As to my self-generated stuff, I am very open to letting a work take the form that it wants. For instance, a screenplay that I worked on way back when didn’t sell. I took the core idea and developed it, with a co-writer, into a very different sort of novel. That didn’t sell either. In rewriting the novel, a play emerged. That play, “Midwestern Hemisphere,” is getting a world premiere in April of this year. The story finally told me what shape it wanted to take. (Any theater producers out there interested in reading it, jot me a note at This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it Or come out to Indianapolis and see it.)

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How do you stay ahead of it all?
Every month we will feature a guru, forward thinker and visionary change agent. Someone who covers what’s happening before many even think about it, someone who writes about cool stuff or has some opinionated conviction on the subject of tomorrow. Also check out the links to some very insightful resources. If you have a suggestion for a feature guru or trend, This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it .

This month’s guru: Julie Anixter

Julie Anixter is the strategic director of laga/degrippes-gobe, one of the world’s leading brand design and innovation firms. She has developed products with Roger Schank, Seth Godin and Tom Peters, and helped organizations use design and innovation to grow their brands. She is a contributing author of Beyond Branding and the best-selling The Big Moo. She is also the co-founder of Remarkabalize.com.

Julie took time out of her busy schedule to have a conversation with us, a conversation that included the terms “choiceful,” “borg-ish” and “bully pulpit,” spoke to the point of chocolate Swoops and, in which, without prompting, the interviewee talks about scratching itches: Read the rest of this entry »

Keith Sawyer is a professor of psychology and education at Washington University and the author of ten books including “Creativity and Development,” “Social Emergence” and “Creativity in Performance.” His latest book is “Group Genius: The Creative Power of Collaboration”

One of your first jobs after graduating from M.I.T. was designing videogames for Atari. Too bad you didn’t get to work on Dig Dug. Anyway, how much geek cred does this get you with today’s Halo3 generation? Also, WTF was up with naming a game “Montezuma’s Revenge?” Shouldn’t that have been a very differently “themed” game?

One of my colleagues working a couple of feet away designed Dig Dug! With my company’s profit-sharing plan, I always regretted that I didn’t work on a bigger hit, like Ms. Pacman or Asteroids.

We were way geekier than any of today’s designers, and they’d probably agree that programming in 6052 assembler code, counting how many bytes each line of code would occupy in the limited ROM we had available, is hard core. [Huh? - Ed.] I have a lot of respect for today’s designers; they are much more sophisticated artistically and develop much better storylines. The business today is a bigger business than the Hollywood movie industry, and geekiness isn’t as common (or as tolerated) as it used to be.

My company, General Computer, didn’t do Montezuma’s Revenge; that was Parker Brothers.

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Nedra Kline Weinreich is the president and founder of Weinreich Communications and is one of the foremost experts in social marketing.

A frequent speaker, Nedra teaches social marketing at UCLA’s School of Public Health and was adjunct faculty at Georgetown University. She is the author of Hands-On Social Marketing: A Step-by-Step Guide and a prominent blogger on social marketing issues at the Spare Change blog.

Ok, so, real simple for those of us who went to public school, what is social marketing?
Hey, I went to public school too, so it can’t be too hard to understand. Basically, it’s using a marketing approach to promoting health and social issues. In social marketing, our bottom line is not profits, but behavior change. So, when organizations like nonprofits or public agencies want to bring about health or social change, they are turning more and more to the same kinds of methods used by companies like Apple or Nike. The field of social marketing has been around since the 1970s, but it’s only recently that awareness and use of it has trickled down to the community level.

Some people have recently starting lumping together things like social media marketing or social network marketing under the term social marketing. It’s becoming awfully confusing because now when I talk about social marketing for the first time with a new person, I have to clarify to make sure we are both using the same definition. I often feel alone on my semantic crusade.

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Article courtesy Billy Roberts
www.billyrobertsdesign.com

There it was. I was at Starbucks getting my daily Chai Latte and staring back at me was this little sock puppet owl. It had a feeling of yesteryear and grand mom sewing it up just for me. I realized the owl a bit ‘odd’ having nothing to do with coffee, so I wondered what was going on? Starbucks is keeping up with the trends in American culture. Not unlike Madonna attaching her image literally to the likes of Brittany Spears to keep up with the younger generation. Starbucks is keeping pace with cultural trends to stay current and fresh. This is a great example of a trend becoming interwoven into fashion, art and interior design.

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Josh Spear is the managing director of the eponymous agency Spear Creative Group, a unique team of seasoned strategists, cutting edge designers, and proven trend spotters dedicated to supporting companies to effectively evolve to the next level of visibility, efficiency and excellence.

A Brand Intuitive, Josh is currently touring a presentation nation- (and world-) wide called Brand Utopia, sharing his rules and best practices for the future of advertising, branding, publicity. He calls it brandvertisingmarkablicity

Josh still contributes to the site that he made that made him, www.joshspear.com, and is perversely younger than you.

1. Seeing as you’re the Allan Quatermain of trends, what are a few of the things you’re interested in the next couple years?
That’s flattering, comparing me to any character played by Sean Connery is a compliment! I’m really interested in companies that are enabling some type of positive change and standing for something. I’d like to think the days are over where companies’ ‘values’ can simply be their product. I’m passionate to see brands building resources, getting involved in more than just their own industry and taking chances. I’m also excited to see all the places art and technology are merging.

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Innovation is dying. Please discuss.
Too many people equate innovation with change alone. Our firm, 2thinknow, looks at innovation as positive change, we’ve even been known to define it as a change for the good of humanity in our wilder moments.

So technological change whirs along, but is a new technology really innovative? Does it allow humans to do more things than they have done before? Are the things technology allows overwhelmingly positive and helpful for most people? Email was a positive innovation, as was the phone. I dislike cell phones, but I think we can agree they have had positive effects.

But does 10-dozen varieties of chemically flavoured burgers or a new variety of fried chicken equal innovation? Does it have positive effects? Our answer is a resounding NO. It’s inane to call a new flavour of chicken, or a new burger, innovative. One of the burger chains in Australia famously deep fried it’s grilled chicken burger, and had a roller to paint on the grill marks. Was that innovative? No.

I might as well bring it up now; can you explain, in simple terms, exactly what “fried chicken innovation” is and why it’s bad?
I have coined a name for pointless, useless change, Fried Chicken innovation. Fried Chicken can be often recognized in large organizations by a free coffee cup, polo shirt and a training session attached to it.

In cities Fried Chicken Innovation is one of those change programs where no one has really thought about the benefit in human terms: new ticketing systems, pointless studies instead of fixing public transport, more expensive services that deliver less functionality than equivalent cities globally.

I was struck by the observation especially in all my years of government and corporate work, especially for State governments and large corporations. But really pointless useless change, and stupid ideas can happen anywhere, but small businesses and individuals with stupid ideas are eradicated quickly!

So I created a website www.friedchickeninnovation.com where time by time I will be posting stories of stupid pointless change stories.

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Marian Salzman is EVP, JWT Worldwide, and co-author and author of lots of books about modern culture including Next Now, published in December 2006 by Palgrave.

She’s flown hundreds of thousands of miles, met hundreds of hundreds of people via market research exercises, and reads numerous newspapers electronically in a given week. In fact, we caught Marian for this interview on a Sunday morning after she’d just been through Las Vegas, Los Angeles, London, and Barcelona.

At the time of the interview her baggage was lost. Probably in Iberia.

1. Did you consciously set out to become the market economy answer to Nostradamus or did it slowly develop along the way?
If only I was Nostradamus I’d be able to figure out the winning lottery ticket and would call it a day, giving most of my take to environmental charities once I had myself well launched in an ideas tank someplace in the Caribbean, or maybe near Savannah. In all seriousness, my aptitude for predictions has increased as I have grown older, which is ironic since we typically think trend-spotting is the domain of youth. But, since my emphasis is on social shifts, and marketing opportunities which develop thanks to unseen consumer need, middle age is a good thing. I have seen more, noted what happens, formed a better world view, and become more highly tuned into the geo-political shifts which seem to scream risk or opportunity. Also having traveled considerably and seen, touched and been places like Chindia, and the Middle East, and South Africa in the late 1990s, where the changes are most dramatic, has helped reshape my sensors for what will matter and how manifestations might impact consumption.

If there was one defining moment for me, it was moving to Amsterdam in the mid-1990s. There I experienced for a second round the beginning of Internet mania, and also lived first-hand the implications of a unified Europe and the arrival of the euro. Because I was a super proficient sender of instant messages, I found myself a phenomenon in Holland: the Internet girl. Who knew that chatting via AOL with people clustered behind me watching a computer ping could make a strategic planner a celebrity? That’s what led to the publication of Next, a book I co-authored for publication in Dutch (first) in 1997. That was really the public beginning of my life as a trendpicker on the global stage.

The private beginning was a few years sooner, over wiggers; that was very American, and that round was packaged as the exception, versus a new entry into a field dominated by Alvin Toffler, John Naisbitt, and Faith Popcorn. Then, and now, I still am different, since my formal occupation is marketer versus trends analyst.

Back to plans, and whether I set out to be a forecaster of anything. Nope. Never. Couldn’t have considered it since I wasn’t trendy, just on the fringes of the popular crowd, and marginally in the know, but always too exhausted working to think beyond coffee the next morning.

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