I was just reading an interesting article on Mercola.com questioning the media/government hype of the swine flu –  Critical Alert: The Swine Flu Pandemic – Fact or Fiction?

It’s an interesting case study on how we perceive things and create our sense of reality. It doesn’t matter that the normal flu kills many more people but swine flu has been labelled a pandemic so it suddently creates far more fear in us.

Drug companies are particularly good at manufacturing fears and insecurities. While Mercola.com is run by a doctor who is clearly against vaccines, it does raise some concerns about how far marketing (especially with the aid of goverments) can go in misrepresenting the facts we need to make good decisions. In the case of flu vaccines, a friend of mine was only telling me this past week that she had visited a young man she knew in hospital struggling to survive after his body reacted badly to nothing more than a flu vaccine. I wonder had he known the risks whether he would now be fighting for his life.

In business, it is far too easy to just treat marketing as a game – where the goal is to sell as much as you can but with no real thought about what it is that you’re selling. I don’t think that pharmaceutical representatives who market drugs that are later found to have unacceptable risks are bad people. I just don’t think they stopped to think what they were selling.

Even if what you’re selling is not something likely to harm anybody any time soon, it’s worth just asking yourself, “What am I selling?” and then “How can I do better for my customer/client? How can I offer better value?”

No I’m not suggesting that you go out and start doing something illegal – I’m talking about how virtual adoption can be a really great idea to connect people with your product or service (and donate funds!)….

If you’d like to read the rest of this post, I have now moved to Web for Small Business and I am slowly moving my posts over there too. If you liked my posts here please consider subscribing to my new blog.

Here is a direct link to this post’s new home: http://www.webforsmallbusiness.com/adoption-as-a-business-model

Do you sometimes have difficulty remembering what life was like without the internet? Without broadband internet? Yet only 15 years ago, most people wouldn’t have even heard of it let alone had it connected in their homes. 

Clare at SoloPortfolio posted this picture:

It’s part of Accenture’s Virtual Corridor. The virtual corridor is an always connected HDTV videoconferencing interface that lets people from different offices, anywhere in the world, interact. Because it is always connected, if you want to have a conversation, you can just drop by and there that person is even though they may be miles away. There is no technology that gets in the way, the person is just there talking to you. There is even a virtual office for those who wish to have private conversations.

While this is cutting edge technology now, how soon will it be until this is commonplace?

I can hardly wait!

Cat

I just went to publish a post in WordPress and it wouldn’t show up in my browser even though the post was cleared published.

Fortunately, I realised that I had the WP Super Cache plugin  installed which makes my blog more static so that it calls on my web hosting’s server less, thus uses less of its resources. If that all sounded like gobbleygook – basically it makes your blog perform faster.

However, you have to remember to delete the old cached copy (which will show the new updated version of your blog) or else your new stuff won’t show.

I went and checked my options (It’s under WP Super Cache Manager in Settings) and sure I found that the “Clear all cache files when a post or page is published” option was unchecked. I checked this and clicked on “Update Status” and any new posts now show up immediately without me having to clear the cache.

Here’s a screenshot of the option which should be ticked:

(CC Licenced image source: Jacob Bøtter)

Today’s giveaway is a Blog Audience Analysis Worksheet. First read the post on why you must know your audience.

Then download a copy of the worksheet for this exercise:

• Blog Audience Analysis Worksheet: Word version
• Blog Audience Analysis Worksheet: PDF version

Knowing your audience is perhaps the most important key to your blog’s audience. Know the audience you have and you’ll know how to serve them better, know the audience you want to target and you’ll know how to attract them. If you don’t know who they are, what chance do you have?

Please feel free to email this worksheet to anyone who might find this useful – such non-commercial sharing is not only authorised, it’s encouraged! Otherwise, if you’d like to share the direct links to the worksheets, please link to this blog post (not the individual file download addresses as these may change when I change hosting).

This is part of our Chinese New Year Giveaway. If you found this post useful, please consider subscribing.

Cat