June 26, 2007, Vol 1, Issue 17

As you’ve hopefully figured out, we’ve been trying to have a theme for each newsletter. Whether it’s better ways to search, new ways to aggregate information or efficient methods of tracking trends.

But today’s theme is a non-theme. More like a catch-as-catch-can. (Love that term. And I hardly ever can find a way to work it in to my writing!)

So, this issue of “research redux” is kind of all over the place. Some of this, a little of that. You get the picture. But it’s all great, useful stuff, of course. (At least we think so!)

Talk back.

Want to start some chatter about something? Your cause, your company, your hat?

Reactee is a service that creates t-shirts with your message and with a keyword for others to text.

So let’s say you’re in that hat business. What if people wearing your hats and these t-shirts were hanging around town. The t-shirts say, text whatahat if you want to learn more about my hat. Or something like that. Or perhaps you’d like to increase interest in a product or your client’s cause. Best part is, anyone who texts gets a response by Reactee with the message you designate.

It’s a fun new way to do word of mouth marketing, if you ask us.

Intermission.

Let’s all go to the lobby, let’s all go to the lobby….

Take a hike! No, we’re not trying to get rid of you, silly. We have some hiking resources to share!

One Day Hikes is a great site and you can check out the American Hiking Society, too. Find events, volunteer opportunities and more.

And if you are serious (and willing to pony up a modest fee after the trial), go to Trails.com. There are no charge links and info here, too.

So what’s stopping you?

Org wiki.

CogMap is the Wikipedia of organization charts. It’s a collection of organization charts online that anyone can edit, add to, and help maintain. CogMap is a tool for sales people, entrepreneurs, and recruiters to understand organizations and keep information up to date. If you are like us, you had some of these things happen to you: * Worked at a company without a published organization chart and had no idea who worked for anyone else * Tried to figure out who to call at a company and come up empty * Bought a list of people to call and had all the information be wrong * Met people that all had different titles and been unable to tell who was the decision-maker in the room!

We are amazed at how much information is available here and how well it’s organized. So go with the flow and follow your chart. (HA!)

Video channel.

Remember those old MTV commercials where 80’s rock starts would shout, “I want my MTV!” Well, now you can have your own video channel on your website. (With or without Billy Idol.) And it’s easy!

Magnify.net is a new video startup that is different from the rest of the crowd and it might be just the ticket.

It isn’t focused on building a portal around user-uploaded videos. Instead, you create a video channel, and populate it with videos from other sites (like YouTube, Revver, Google Videos, etc.) that allow embedding.

I can see some great ways to incorporate user generated content on client sites. Maybe a video of your CEO doing a karaoke version of “99 Red Balloons.” Hmmm…

Stump the Researcher.

A loyal reader asks: I have been looking for resources on Functional Exercise lately. Sure I’ve found some. But most of them make me sign up for stuff or lead me to other sites. It’s annoying. Help!

For those, like me, who don’t know the term Functional Exercise, Go Animal defines it like this:

Technically speaking, a functional exercise is multi-joint and multi-plane; this is the definition favored by physical therapists. More broadly, a functional exercise is one that is relevant to real-world challenges. An exercise is considered functional when it prepares us for some movement challenge that we are actually likely to encounter.

And submit your own question – send an email!
Click here for the answer. It’ll just take a minute.

So, there you have it. It wasn’t so bad, was it? The main thing is that all of the sites we shared, we have tested and found to be useful. Or we wouldn’t have shared them with you!

We won’t be mailing the week of July 4th (you probably won’t be there anyway!). So…

See you in three weeks!