This is a great opportunity to meet other local professionals.

The cruise will be from 4:30 to 6:30 PM – please arrive by 4:00 so you don’t miss the boat.

Remember, we have 6 other event sites with RSVP lists… so Reserve your spot shortly. You can book on the Meetup site for $30 including dinner, or if you do not want dinner, please book on BigD Cats website for $20.
CLICK HERE TO PURCHASE YOUR TICKET AND RESERVE YOUR SPOT… LIMITED SEATS AVAILABLE.

So, call your friends and invite them to join you for an afternoon on the lake! This is the most relaxing networking event you will have ever attended… dress comfortable!

Barry Layne, “America’s Career Maker,” has helped hundreds of people retool their images and market themselves to receive the positions they deserve. Global Marketing Services Inc and Compliments International, two DFW-area businesses, redesigned Barry Layne’s website to help increase awareness of his recipe for success.  The new site, where job hunters will find tips and insights from Barry Layne about the career search process, launched XX, 2009.  Check out all three of these organizations at the following web addresses: www.barrylayne.com; www.gmsi-inc.com; and www.complimentsinternational.com.

Weekly Public Events

Corporate Events & Unique Business Meetings

Private Parties & Charter Packages

Wedding Cruise

Gift Certificates

Tickets & Event Schedule

Captain Mike:  469-879-8885

Capt.Mike@BigDCats.com

www.bigdcats.com

Sail Chamonix II on Lake Lewisville in the Dallas/Ft. Worth TX area.  Plan your next Corporate Event or Team Building Meeting on our spacious 70 foot sailing Catamaran!  The largest sailing vessel in the D/FW metroplex entertains 105 people on board with plenty of space for guests to dine, dance, party and a large sun deck area.  Chamonix II is perfect for Sales Meetings, Team Training, or an unusual getaway for a unique Planning Meeting!

Celebrate your Private Party with a night sail.  Have it catered or bring your own food. Chamonix II is a BYOB sailboat. If you wish to consume alcoholic beverages on board, please bring your own.   Charter Chamonix II for Private Parties. Have an uncommon children’s birthday party or family event!  Our charter packages provide a cruise unique to your needs.

Treasure romantic memories with a sailboat Wedding Cruise.   Our wedding photo gallery demonstrates our spacious accommodations for your memorable day or evening!

Join us on a Sunday Brunch or Sunset Dinner Cruise to check us out while planning your event or just bring your family for a short cruise!

Individual ticket sales available!

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Look Who’s Talking Now: Plan to Parlay Real-Time Advantage Into Revenue

by Michael Learmonth

Published: March 02, 2009

NEW YORK (AdAge.com) — When twitter closed on a $35 million round of venture capital, in addition to the $20 million it had already raised, the messaging service signaled that it intends to be a very big business.

Like its 6 million users, corporations have embraced the service. Its ability to take the measure of what is being said at a given time about brands is a potential gold mine for marketers, and it is the first place Twitter will look to generate revenue.

Colton Perry, NetPlus senior VP-technology

“There are companies and brands depending on it more and more and finding the insights valuable in how they make decisions,” said co-founder Biz Stone. “What further can we do to help them?”

But selling services to corporate America isn’t the kind of Google-scale business Twitter’s founders and backers are banking on. What is? Well, maybe search. Last summer, Twitter bought search engine Summize and has recently started integrating search into certain user accounts.

Federated Media CEO John Battelle likens Twitter to YouTube, in that Google thought it was buying a video platform, but YouTube’s real value may be that it has become the second-largest source of search queries. The difference is Twitter enables a search of real-time sentiment and conversation.

“Twitter owns its own search, which is more valuable than Twitter itself,” said Howard Lindzon, an entrepreneur who launched one of a proliferating ecosystem of Twitter-based businesses, StockTwits.

‘No rush’
At this point, all ideas are still at a whiteboard stage. Twitter hired its first business-development exec in January, and Twitter’s new funders — Benchmark Capital and Institutional Venture Partners — want Twitter to continue to focus on growth before revenue. “It is a big, emerging media property growing at a phenomenal rate,” said IVP General Partner Todd Chaffee. “Frankly, I’m in no rush to resolve these issues.”

One thing Twitter isn’t pursuing is traditional advertising. “We’re just not looking at it right now,” Mr. Stone said, “not just because we don’t know how it would be received, but it would require a team we just don’t have.”

In a sense, Twitter faces the Facebook problem in that it has created an ecosystem of Twitter-based businesses from which it does not profit, and marketers don’t need to pay to use the service. Benchmark General Partner Peter Fenton said that’s really not a problem. “The more applications built on top of Twitter, the more valuable Twitter is,” he said.

Of all the ideas now under discussion, the one that seems a no-brainer to Twitter and its backers is the idea of “verified” accounts. That would allow users to pay to reserve a Twitter handle and certify that they are representing a corporation or an individual. “That is a great concept, because one of the challenges with social media is ‘Who is real?’” said Frank Eliason, director-digital care at cable giant Comcast.

Comcast has an entire team that interacts with Twitter, including Mr. Eliason, who tweets as @ComcastCares, but also staffers such as @ComcastBill, @ComcastGeorge and @ComcastBonnie. But there’s nothing stopping anyone from registering their own “Comcast” handles, which is why Shaquille O’Neal tweets as @TheRealShaq.

Similarly, corporations could pay for their own secure, private Twitter to communicate with employees or fans of their brands.

Overheard conversations
The other idea that seems obvious to Twitter and its backers is offering paying customers real-time data on who is saying what about a brand. “What struck us is it gives you an immediate view into what people are thinking or saying about your brand right now,” Mr. Fenton said. “There is any number of revenue models that could emerge from that.”

Scott Monty, global digital communications manager for Ford Motor Co., said the automaker would be interested in, say, age and geographic overlays atop metrics. “It would be great to know who we are talking to on Twitter,” he said.

When Ford brings the new Ford Fiesta from Europe to the U.S. next spring, it will pitch the car to millennials. Twitter’s average age is well in Gen-X territory, and Mr. Monty said Ford would communicate differently with younger buyers in that demographic.

While Twitter professes to be in no hurry, the band is being beaten to market by others building marketing services around Twitter. One example is Philadelphia-based digital agency NetPlus Marketing, which has its own Twitter-management software, Platform T, that allows marketers to manage multiple accounts, a Twitter scanner and a scheduler that lets them send scheduled tweets. NetPlus doesn’t charge for the service but requires users to apply for an account. “We are trying to make Twitter easier and more manageable for our clients,” said Colton Perry, NetPlus senior VP-technology.

Search could be valuable for Twitter, or whoever ends up owning Twitter. Mr. Battelle argued that Google and Yahoo haven’t added Twitter search because they don’t want to make Twitter any more valuable than it already is. But the question is how to turn it into revenue without turning off users in the process.

Now that the funding is in the bank, Mr. Stone said Twitter’s first order of business is to increase staff, probably to 60 in the coming year, and then start conversations with brands about the kinds of services they’d be willing to pay for. “We are growing like crazy and kind of shockingly low on employees,” Mr. Stone said. “At the same time, there is so much work to do that it’s scary.”

Site’s Coming Changes Can Be Beneficial to Marketers if They Take Active Role in Keeping Their Pages Fresh

by Abbey Klaassen

Published: March 09, 2009

NEW YORK (AdAge.com) — For the last several months, social-media pundits have busied themselves debating whether Twitter was the new Facebook. But last week Mark Zuckerberg & Co. hoped to change that dialogue, launching a pair of modifications that had people asking if Facebook was the new Twitter.

For marketers, the changes mean more freedom on Facebook; for users, the moves mean they’re going to get more information about each other, faster.

Your job: Updates must provide ‘value to the page’s fans,’ said 360i’s Berkowitz.

First, Facebook will move brands from pages specifically designed for marketing and promotion to pages that look and feel a lot more like an individual Facebook user’s page, which will let them interact with their Facebook “friends” much more frequently through status updates, links and questions.

The second move is meant to change how Facebook users share and follow information, creating a new home page that will show users what their networks have been up to and make those exchanges more current — newsfeeds will now update in near real time, vs. every 10 minutes.

That means when a user visits his or her Facebook page, they’ll see a long list of actions and messages from their friends, which can be filtered by family, closest friends or friends in a local network. The idea is to get people to share more and share more often, while giving them better control over what kind of information they see.

‘Participate in the stream’
When people share more, said Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg in his blog, “the pace of updates accelerates. This creates a continuous stream of information that delivers a deeper understanding for everyone participating in it. As this happens, people will no longer come to Facebook to consume a particular piece or type of content, but to consume and participate in the stream itself.”

It’s for good reason that the “stream” sounds like Twitter. Mr. Zuckerberg acknowledged that Twitter has done interesting things to accelerate the pace of information that gets shared among networks. And by letting brands act in the same way as users, they’ll be part of the stream as well.

The moves are a “concerted response to the rise of Twitter as a real-time message broadcasting system that goes beyond members’ personal circle of friends,” wrote Erick Schonfeld on TechCrunch. “Facebook doesn’t want Twitter to become the way large companies and public figures connect to fans.”

There would almost certainly be a backlash as users get used to more information coming at them faster, so Facebook launched a number of filters. Users can choose to only see updates from their friends, their families or their closest contacts. Or they choose whose activities not to follow, like that friend from high school who’s not really a friend anymore.

Every “page” will be converted to the new “profile” format automatically on March 11.

Updates with value
So what do brands need to know as they convert their Facebook pages to regular profiles in the next few days?

First, they should make sure the key messages are present on the main page, and upload video and other important images regularly so they continue to appear high on the wall, said David Berkowitz, director of emerging media at 360i, on Ad Age’s DigitalNext blog. Anyone already active on Twitter might take some of what they’ve learned there and apply it to Facebook. “Marketers who take the most active role in keeping their pages fresh with regular updates will benefit the most,” he said, but added a caveat: Every update must provide “some sort of value to the page’s fans.”

Indeed, with great power comes great responsibility, said Ian Schafer, CEO of Deep Focus, on DigitalNext. “You will have the power to (and responsibility of) publishing directly to people’s home pages. … But can brands be trusted to respect social (network) etiquette? And can a few brands that abuse their power ruin it for the rest of us?”

Will Search-Marketing Dollars Also Shift to Social Media?

by Michael Learmonth

Published: March 09, 2009

NEW YORK (AdAge.com) — Marketers spend billions to attract search traffic from Google, but late last year Facebook started becoming a bigger source of traffic for some large websites, according to analytics firm Hitwise.

It seems inevitable that, given Facebook’s sheer scale (180 million registered users and counting), it would at some point start referring a lot of users to some sites, but the development is surprising. Web users go to Google to figure out where to go next; they go to Facebook to, well, hang out.

Facebook gets a little more than a third of Google’s unique visitors in the U.S. (50 million vs. 149 million in January, per ComScore); since last summer, registered users have been growing at a double-digit rate.

Where they’re going
But since the beginning of the year, Facebook has become a bigger referring site than Google to a number of sites, including gossip sites PerezHilton.com and Dlisted, mom site CafeMom, Evite, video site Tagged.com, and, yes, Twitter.

There are good reasons for some of this: CafeMom has a Facebook fan page, which no doubt helps drive traffic, and users can synchronize updates with Facebook and Twitter.

It’s hard to know why two gossip sites are on the list, aside from the fact that they tend to be places people spend a lot of time. Since the beginning of 2009, gossip site PerezHilton.com has received 8.7% of its visitors from Facebook, compared with 7.6% from Google, according to Hitwise. The same didn’t hold true, however, for gossip site TMZ, which got 12.2% of its traffic from Google, compared with 3.8% from Facebook.

Big source for video sites
As NewTeeVee points out, Facebook has also become a big source of referrals for video sites as users post and share clips. Traffic from Facebook accounted for 3.3% of visits to video sites in February, according to Hitwise, up from less than 2% in February of last year.

It all points to the growing power of content sharing; the question is how to harness that and what it means for the future of “search” marketing. Companies spent $12.2 billion in 2008 on search optimization and marketing to get traffic from Google, according to eMarketer.

But Peter Yared, CEO of marketing firm iWidgets, said he thinks some of that spending is going to shift to where the viewers, and the traffic, increasingly are. “Soon the [search-engine marketing and search-engine optimization] spend will start to follow the eyeballs and transition from Google to social media,” he said.

We have an exciting event for everyone and hope you can make it! This Friday – Friday the 13th, we will have an exciting Business Blitz event for all! We are asking that members from all chapters attend. RSVP’s are required as seating is limited – first come, first serve. Please have your guests register on www.meetup.com/businessblitz.

Announcing March 13, 2009 Compliments International with Huddle Productions presents:

Fusion Marketing

Seven time Emmy Award winning Huddle Productions will be filming, Compliments International’s The Fusion of Marketing at the weekly Addison Business Blitz Strategic Introduction meeting to be held at The Egg & I in Addison. (The Egg & I – 15203 Knoll Trail Drive #103, Dallas, TX 75248 – Arapaho & N. Dallas Tollway area)

Huddle Productions produces for networks like ABC, CBS, NBC, Fox Sports Network and CNBC. Co-founders Jim Knox and Chris Yates will be on hand along with Compliments International’s CEO Jennifer Bagley-Buckles with marketing success systems.

Knox will be conducting interviews with our members and clients, and Jennifer will speak on How the fusion of old school marketing, effective professional networking and new age technologies will crush traditional advertising. Social Media will rule the world, where are you in the mix?

Please join us and bring a couple guests. This is a great opportunity to get filmed at the event and learn some amazing information to grow your business in a new age.

When: Friday, March 13, 2009
Time: 12:00 Noon – arrive early for networking
What: Weekly Addison Business Blitz Strategic Networking Meeting
Location: This week only The Egg & I – 15203 Knoll Trail Drive #103, Dallas, TX 75248 – Arapaho & N. Dallas Tollway area
Meeting fee: $15 for members and $25 for non-members – includes lunch
Dress – Professional

R.S.V.P. www.meetup.com/businessblitz limited seating is limited!

Business Blitz

RSVP for Training: KW-Preston Road

“I make my business work for me, I don’t work for my business!”

Keller Williams Preston Road Training Registration

You are invited to a powerful training!  Kick start 2009 with the right strategies, systems and tools to:

• Generate New Customers!
• Create Loyal Customers!
• Turn Existing Customers into your Sales Force!
• Build a team of strategic referral partners!
• Take your efforts directly TO THE BANK!!!

We will teach you how to make your business work for you, not you work for your business!!!

We will be giving away $300 in gas rebates ($25 per month for 12 months) to every attendee!!!  Class size is limited to 40… first come, first serve.  RSVP by completing the registration form below.