Have you seen your house? A fun exercise is to street view all of your previous addresses over the years; I’m sad that my birth house is now a parking lot.

A bold new way to tackle tough business problems even if you draw like a second grader. When Herb Kelleher was brainstorming about how to beat the traditional hub-and-spoke airlines, he grabbed a bar napkin and a pen. Three dots to represent Dallas, Houston, and San Antonio. Three arrows to show direct flights. Problem solved, and the picture made it easy to sell Southwest Airlines to investors and customers. Used properly, a simple drawing on a humble napkin is more powerful than Excel or PowerPoint. It can help crystallize ideas, think outside the box, and communicate in a way that people simply get. In this book Dan Roam argues that everyone is born with a talent for visual thinking, even those who swear they can’t draw.

Here’s a sample excerpt from The Back of the Napkin: Solving Problems and Selling Ideas with Pictures, by Dan Roam.

If you’re interested in learning more about visual thinking, download the PDF of The 10 1/2 Commandments of Visual Thinking: The “Lost Chapter” from The Back of the Napkin” from ChangeThis.com.

* Everybody is a visual learner as Dan Roam insists: “you [are] able to walk in [a] room without falling down…”

“If You Build It, They Won’t Come. What happened to the early days? You built a baseball stadium, a store, a web app, and people flocked to it… now what? We are suspicious of marketing. We don’t trust strangers as willingly. Buzz is suspect. It can be bought. Instead, consumers and business people alike are looking towards trust. We want our friends to tell us it’s good. We want someone we know to say we should look into it. Marketing spend might start at awareness, but in the Trust Economy, communities are king, and ROI stands for Return on Influence.”

Download the PDF manifesto at ChangeThis.com

Here is a long and pretty detailed list of questions that a website owner should asked himself about his own website. If the answer to every question that follows below was answered with yes, you can be very pleased with yourself and consider yourself the top of the crop, because most websites have flaws for a number of different reasons, mostly related to the limitation of resources and sacrifices that must be made as a direct result of the shortage.

Consider Carsten’s questions in the various categories:

Accessibility Is content structurally separate from navigational elements?

Navigation Are links labeled with anchor text that provides a clear indication of where they lead.

Design Are the color choices visually accessible? (For example high enough in contrast to assist the colorblind and visually impaired in reading the site appropriately)

Content Do you update the content regularly and don’t live by the phrase “set it and forget it”?

Security Is customer data stored online? If so, is this database appropriately safeguarded against external access?

Other Technical Considerations Does the site load quickly – even for dialup users?

Other Marketing Considerations Is the website properly optimized for search engines (essential text emphasized, title tags relevant, title text presented in H1, outbound links reliable and contextually related, etc)

Legal Stuff/Re-Assurance/Legitimization Privacy Policy up (especially if you collect data, email, names, and web analytics tracking cookies)?

Review the reset of Carsten Cumbrowski’s article, “50 Questions to Evaluate the Quality of Your Website”. It’s worth a bookmark.

Andy Beal proposes seven steps to identify, respond to, and repair an online attack:

1. Check the facts. There are two sides to every story.

2. Determine the impact and if the online attack deserve a response. If an important detractor started the attack, or the conversation gets big and spreads widely, or influential online writers chime in, then it’s time to act.

3. Bring together trusted counsel. The response should come from the top (a senior, transparent and humble voice) before deploying an attorney or the public relations team.

4. Understand your detractor. Whether it’s a first time customer who had a bad experience or a disgruntled ex- employee, it’s important to identify the root cause of their motivation.

5. Decide on the appropriate response. If the report is false or defamatory, one does have the right to make contact and request a retraction. However, if the screw-up was on your end, then it’s time to fess up. Three keys: Sincerity, Transparency, and Consistency.

6. Host the conversation on your web channels. Steve Jobs wrote an open letter addressing the price drop of the iPhone, which was widely disseminated via the Internet. One speaker termed Apple as “empathy arrogant” towards providing a great customer experience.

7. After the dust has settled, seek online supporters for promoting your reparations. Monitoring your brand name and adding positive content to the web via influential bloggers, forum moderators, and social network owners will help. Of course, you can search the Internet via Google! Stepping up a search engine optimization campaign and creating a presence in multiple different services like LinkedIn, Facebook, Flickr, YouTube, and MySpace can help control your message on the first page of keyword results.

There’s a Free Online Reputation Management Beginner’s Guide available for download at Marketing Pilgrim.

During the three days of the conference, I attended sessions on blended search, using video for high impact for local businesses, understanding consumers using persona models, managing an online reputation, social media, and multiple strategies for search engine optimization.

The reoccurring message I kept hearing was that the greatest opportunity for visibility (and subsequent revenue) for local businesses lies in creating an online presence with maps, user reviews, and use of video. Local businesses must start integrating the use of search engines to tailor a favorable experience upon arrival. A restaurant should post a full menu, while offering incentives such as discount coupons to encourage traffic. Also describing the “around location” is helpful, by leveraging landmarks such as “located near Best Buy in the Nashville West Shopping Center”.

As more businesses understand the use of the Internet as part of their overall marketing strategy, the traditional brick and mortar store without an intentional web presence will get left behind. As the old adage goes, “A business without a sign is a sign of no business.”

Create an Album Cover

1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random The first article title on the page is the name of your band.

2. http://www.quotationspage.com/random.php3 The last four words of the very last quote is the title of your album.

3. http://www.flickr.com/explore/interesting/7days/ The third picture, no matter what it is, will be your album cover.

You then take the pic and add text to it, then post your pic.

In fact, tag your photo “centresource_2008″ for Flickr and we’ll create a group to showcase your work.

From AndrewB:

From HannahM:

Hat Tip to: http://lumpley.com/comment.php?entry=338

“em are the best tools I ever did see for op-mazaytin’ a website I ever did see, ahtayuWUT!” sez Kerry to Hannah.

Take a read for thirteen more nuggets at Seth’s blog. (and go vote!)