Good morning!

It’s an amazing day here in Chicago. It’s Sunday May 1st and I’m decompressing from a terrific SOBcon this past weekend. SOBCon stands for Successful Online Business Conference. It’s hosted by the incomparable Liz Strauss and Terry Starbucker. Amazing energy and ulifting stories shared by some of the biggest and most authentic names on the web.

I wanted to share one story in particular with you that happened to a dear friend of mine Angela Maiers (it’s funny to say that because we only just met in real life this weekend, but I know I speak for us both when I say we were dear friends long before that). When I first heard the story unfold I asked Angela if she’d be willing to share it with me on video, and thankfully she agreed to a brief interview.

Happy Monday morning everyone! I hope you had an incredible weekend!

This past Friday I had an opportunity to sit down and chat a bit with Daniel Newman, the CEO of United Global Comm which provides a hosted tele-presence solution to small and medium businesses. United Global Comm is a new business in start up mode, but its an off-shoot of a well established 60+ year old company called United Visual (which Dan also leads as CEO).

I woke to my usual routine this past Sunday morning. I got out of bed, threw on my slippers, shuffled downstairs, grabbed a cup of coffee, turned on the flat screen and turned on Sunday Morning. The show led off with an interesting piece about the history of taxes in America. An interesting piece actually.

And by the time it was over, it hit me. Being an SEO is darn near an exact parallel to being a good tax accountant:

There’s an interesting new business in Chicago called Pegmo.  Just over two weeks old, Pegmo is putting a new spin on an old concept – customer loyalty – by layering in a healthy dose of social media, user generated content and gamification.

The concept is really pretty cool. A business signs up for Pegmo and creates actions they want customers to take in order to win a badge (called a peg in the service – hence the name). Businesses can also create rewards for specific actions as well. The neat thing is that Pegmo is tightly integrated with both Facebook and Twitter – meaning a business can set the task of “liking” their facebook page or following them on twitter and Pegmo automatically recognizes when that act has been completed and notifies the user.

If you know me at all, then you know that one of my passions is connecting with people. In fact, one of the stated purposes of this blog is to highlight local Chicago people and businesses doing great work in the Internet marketing space.

With that in mind, I present to you Kathy Steele who is a managing partner and co-founder of Desert Rose Design. I stumbled across Kathy on twitter several months ago and noticed her suburban Chicago location (Snap Twitter Tip – PLEASE to be sure to include your location your twitter bio). Because we were located nearby one another, and because we had similar interests, Kathy and I agreed to get together at some point in the future.

Have you thought about your avatar lately?

You should!

Your avatar, that image of you that is associated with your Twitter account (and other accounts too) is a representation of you (or in some cases, your brand). But it is so much more than that.

To everyone that interacts with you on twitter, your avatar actually IS you in many respects. It is the visual queue that I’m dealing with you, the same you I’ve been communicating – or the same you I may be interested in learning more about and connecting with in the future. I’m pretty amazed at the lackadaisical attitude many in the twittersphere take towards selecting an avatar, especially considering how many of my connections are working in social media right now. Given all that, here are 5 things I believe you should be doing to optimize your avatar, presented in order of importance.

Ever since reading Mark W. Schaefer’s excellent post on the importance of managing your followers on Twitter, I’ve been more and more aggressively blocking and reporting spammers as they attempt to follow me. This past week I had a a twitter conversation with Sandy Hubbard, Mary Lower, Jenny Weigle, and Beth Granger about how exactly to identify spam accounts on twitter. We went back and forth with our suggestions on how to ID a spam account, and I thought I’d capture the core of the discussion as a blog post. Hopefully you’ll find this a good resource.

Without further ado, here’s a list of X ways you to know YOU MIGHT BE A SPAMMER: