Digital Marketing and Web Strategy by Bob Hazlett | One Half Amazing!

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FiveBooks.com is a site that brings together experts on everything from Confucius to football to drug addiction to the economic development and asks each to sift a topic down to five essential titles.  It’s the easiest way to get the heart of a topic and become an instant expert yourself.

Beat

The hottest new band in the city of Memphis is The Magic Kids and they have a new album, appropriately named, Memphis. On Tuesday, August 24, they’re teaming up with the Memphis Symphony Orchestra at the Levitt Shell to throw one killer album release party.  Check out the song that got them rolling – Hey Boy.
The Magic Kids – Hey Boy

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Not for the faint of heart, but definitely well worth it.  Check out @bestworstadvice.

* This is what I hope will be a regular occurance to the blog.  I plan to post my secret blog crushes, a song that has me noddin’ my head and a twitter profile that I’m following this week.  If you’ve got suggestions, add them in the comments or drop me an email.

Blog

Hippy Kitchens – I’m not sure if the whole Hipster Tumblr blog thing is dead or not, but this site shows you how cool it would have been to have dinner with your parents way back when.

Beat

T.I. must have some pent up agression from jail cause all his recent singles are just blowing the windows out of cars.  I’m diggin his Yeah Ya Know.

T.I. – Yeah Ya Know by Atlantic Records

Tweet

It’s been a week since LeBron stomped on his hometown, but his ego ain’t going to let us down.  Follow @lebronjamesego

TweetDeck (v 0.34.1) updated their twitter client last week to include a ton of new features and fixes including Google Buzz & Foursquare integration, the ability to schedule tweets, the option to add video to your tweets (direct webcam too), custom URL shortening services and my favorite, global filters.

With global filters, you can easily filter out a person, tag, keyword or source.  Let’s say you have a good friend who you really don’t want to unfollow, but sometimes they go a little overboard with their so-called ‘sharing’.  Go to your TweetDeck settings, shimmy on down to global filters and either plug in their username or hastag and they are automagically removed from your stream.  It’s very similar to hiding someone on Facebook.  No hurt feelings and you can easily undo any filter once they’ve come down off their high horse.  The offending party never knows you’ve filtered them out. Here’s a peak at how it works.

If you had to choose just one, would you rather give up Facebook or Twitter?  Which one has more value in your life? Which one has more staying power? Discuss.

Taking a screen shot of a tweet and then posting to your site is often tedious and static.  The good chums over at Twitter are here to rescue you though.  Here’s their simple script that allows you to embed a tweet on your own site. It’s pretty straightforward, here’s what you do:

1. Visit http://media.twitter.com/blackbird-pie/
2. Enter the URL of the tweet you wish to emded (e.g. http://twitter.com/onehalfamazing/status/13190756923) and click “Bake It”
3. Copy and paste the resulting code into your web site.  All links, hashtags and account settings become clickable.  The only bad thing, it doesn’t work on Tumblr at the present time.

Here’s a sample

• Facebook “likes” are starting to show up in searches.  Before you know it, Facebook will unleash it’s search engine and “likes” will be the new pagerank.
• Cleaver ways to use Dropbox.  Even use it to host your website.
• Pepsi is launching a location-based loyalty program in mid-May called Pepsi Loot.  Check-in at a restaurant or establishment that serves Pepsi through their mobile app and earn rewards towards free music, behind-the-scenes content and special offers.
• How to add a retweet anywhere button to your WordPress site. *See an example of this below this post.
• RUMOR:  Google could reveal details about their TV project during their I/O conference on May 18.