Welcome to Connect-O-Rama! You may be asking yourself, “Ethel, what the heck is Connect-O-Rama?” Well, if you must pry…Connect-O-Rama is the place to connect. It is news. It is fluff. It is information. Essentially, it is a few words about being self-employed, sports, working in the new economy, small business, social media, living and working in Kansas City, Mo., fly fishing, cool apps, music, film or whatever. Our intention is to make a connection. So, fix yourself a cuppa. Take what you want and go on your merry way or sit back and stay awhile.

Last night I had an SEO dream. No kidding. It was strange, and when I woke up in the middle of the night I just had to remember to jot it down.

I have been doing a lot of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) lately – researching keywords, building the keyword matrix, competitive analysis, writing meta titles and page descriptions, and on-page copy. But the dream specifically focused on writing the page description for a client who doesn’t exist in an industry which I can’t recall. What I do remember is that I kept rearranging the words so that my Scribe Content Optimizer would give me a good score.

Doing Web Marketing SEO is like solving a puzzle or playing a video game where you try to make your way through a maze. When I was a teenager, I used to play a lot of arcade games. But the game I played the most – hands down – was Ms. Pac-Man. I’m still pretty good because I figured out patterns for each level. Back then (1980′s), I played so much Ms. Pac-Man that I would dream about the patterns (go left here, get the peach, turn right, avoid blinky).

I’m doing a lot of SEO for clients at the moment, so I wonder if I will start to have SEO dreams  more regularly now. [Reminder, I need to do some SEO for ourselves. Sometimes, you get so busy that you forget to market your own business.]

Have you had SEO dreams? Details please…

I don’t need a blog schedule, or an editorial calendar. The fact is no one is waiting for my next post. I’m not a journalist. I don’t have a regular column with deadlines. I am a PR person. An independent social media and SEO consultant, which reminds me of the days before blogging. When I worked at a big PR agency back in the day, we advised against oversaturating with press releases and e-mail newsletters. You don’t have to announce to everyone “hey, we’re still here! We haven’t gone out of business. Don’t forget about us.”

Like many of you out there, we here at Concera Media are busy doing work. We can’t be “social” all the time or we wouldn’t get anything done. [stay tuned for a blog post about socializing online].

So, don’t expect regular posts – I know you’re not. But expect Scott and me to start posting more regularly about a variety of topics, which may not include social media or facebook strategies. Maybe it’s about how Sloan is an underrated Canadian pop band. Or which spots are best for fly fishing. And then Google won’t know what to do with us.

Anyway, I’ll blog whenever I feel like it. And now that monkey is off my back.

Can I post with my iPod classic?

My favorite albums of 2010

C’mon man, everybody does it! Well, maybe some people do it. As the year comes to a close, many record-collecting folks provide their top 10 or top 20 lists. Me? I just regret not taking notes as the year went along. You would think that after so many years of collecting records that I would jot down my favorites with a few descriptive sentences about why it moved me. But no. Like many other folks, I have to stop and think about all the records I purchased during the last twelve months. And, were these records even released this year? Anyway, here are my favorite records…the records I listened to repeatedly…they may not be the best of 2010 but I really enjoyed them.

In no particular order

1. Broken Bells – Broken Bells
2. Ariel Pink’s Haunted Graffiti – Before Today
3. Erland & the Carnival – self-titled
4. Tracey Thorn – Love and its Opposite
5. Teenage Fanclub – Shadows
6. Apples in Stereo – Travellers in Space
7. Radio Dept. – Clinging to a Scheme
8. Beach House – Teen Dream
9. Tame Impala – Innerspeaker
10. Local Natives – Gorilla Manor
11. The Walkmen – Lisbon
12. Wavves – King of the Beach
13. Deerhunter – Halcyon Digest
14. The Bird and the Bee – Interpreting the Masters Vol. 1: A Tribute to Hall & Oates
15. Junip – Fields
16. The Coral – Butterfly House
17. The Fall – Your Future Our Clutter
18. Blonde Redhead – Penny Sparkle
19. Arcade Fire – The Suburbs
20. Ari Buffalo – Ari Buffalo

Favorite Reissues from 2010

Orange Juice – Coals to Newcastle
Pavement – Quarantine the Past
Black Tambourine – Black Tambourine
Elliott Smith – An Introduction
Walter Gibbons – Jungle Music
The Cure – Disintegration
Saint Etienne – Tiger Bay/Finisterre
The Rolling Stones – Exile on Main Street

So, what did I miss? What are your favorite albums from 2010?

It’s the time of year for punditry and predictions. A pastime that I generally avoid given my lousy record at both. But, sometimes you can just feel you’ve got it right (and the fact that everyone else is writing about it doesn’t hurt either).

I admit that I’m only a sporadic user of Foursquare, but I get it, and I’m even compelled at times to compete with my office mates for the mayorship of our little cave in the Crossroads. But I can’t help but think that Foursquare is in the crosshairs of Facebook. And I don’t see how they can survive.

“But they have 5 million or more users and growing Fast!” you say, with a deft bit of emphasis and a fist pump of a conquering hero.

Well, here in our corner of the midwest, only the digerati, twitterati  and other annoying marketing-ati’s are using it (moi included). There are probably several 100k soccer moms, college students, brick layers and barristas in KC alone who are on FB every day, reading and posting to their network. If just a small percentage of them decide to post their location (and they will, they post everything else don’t they?), FB will soon dwarf foursquare in users.

More importantly, FB has a gameplan, not a game. FB is all over targeted advertising; they have the infrastructure and know how to start delivering geo-targeted ads directly to your phone (or they will buy or partner with companies who will do it).

Next Christmas, we may all be monitoring our smartphones for alerts that those chartreuse corduroys your office mate has been pining for are on sale now at the store you just passed. On second thought, this may not be such a good idea.

This is a test of the membership plugin. If you’re reading this, it isn’t working. : )