What drives engagement through Facebook, Twitter and the social channels? When it comes to effective social marketing consumers want to know that companies are committed to a quality relationship and that they care. To avoid “unfan” “unlike” and “unsubscribe” marketers need to realize that the definition of “engaging” and “appropriate” varies by channel. This point couldn’t have enough emphasis given the fact that 50% of consumers stopped following a company when the posts were too frequent and too boring. There couldn’t be a better time than the present to extol the virtues of personalized marketing. Better still, start to implement as part of your social strategy. Here’s an interesting video on current social media statistics and trends.

A gentleman remarked at a recent gathering of the EO Entrepreneurs Organization that an entrepreneur is someone who sees little difference between an obstacle and an opportunity, turning both into advantage.

Winston Churchill said that the point was to “Never, never, never, give up.” Thomas Edison is an example of this. He was quoted as saying: “I have not failed. I have just found 10,000 ways that it won’t work.” He discovered the light bulb on his 10,001th attempt.

This inspiring little video on women entrepreneurs is a nice break from a brainstorming project that has turned my office into a sea of drawings and written work. Sometimes courage is a quiet voice inside that says, “It’s ok, I will try again tomorrow.”

I had previously written about what a game changer the iPad is but this video really proves the point. Enjoy!

Google the undeniable leader in search has just taken the search engine wars up a notch. From initially crawling the web once a month for updates, then every few seconds, to now providing real-time search updates from live news feeds on social sites like Twitter and Facebook, Google is on its way towards delivering information at the speed of light. Google’s “Relevancy Expert” Amit Singhal explained that Google has come up with an algorithm which considers query fluctuation, language modeling, quality of the author, semantics, query hotness, topicality and real-time URL resolution. Searchers can select real-time search on their mobile phone as well as take advantage of the “hot topic” feature. So, if eyeballs were straying to Twitter and Bing they are now firmly back on Google. The lines between SEO and social media have blurred a little too. It will be interesting to see if negative Tweets, for example, could affect click thru rates on Ad Words and hence have a broader affect on organic rankings.

The wrist watch is making a come back with the Kempler and Strauss W Phonewatch. This mobile phone wrist watch comes with a LCD touchscreen, a MP3 player, 640 by 480 camera, 128 by 104 video, bluetooth headset communicator, and 100 hrs of battery life. Now we all can pretend to be 007 or Agent 99 talking to our wrist watch. And the good part is that this nifty gizmo only costs $199 US.