Recession Marketing........... on TV

Months, perhaps years, after I first mentioned Recession/Gloom/Depression/Dooms Day Marketing on this blog....it appears to have found it's way to the Nightly News. Seems that Savvy(sic) Marketing folks have dreamed up this concept recently. Bad times can make money...well duh!

If I had a dollar for every idea I thought of first I would have a lest $10...or $500,000,000. After the "blind eyed optimists" and folks wearing "Rose Colored Goggles " loose steam, they get all excited and adopt the concept that Pessimism, like Greed....is good. Uh huh. Where you nimrods been sleeping?

I predict they will be teaching this in college MBA classes someday..because we will never, ever get out of this miss. A 500 point gain in the stock market is trivial when you see how much the DIA falls when the first Nuke detonates on London, Tel Aviv, or NYC.

Reputation Management: How to Manage Your Reputation Online

Here is a repost of an interesting article. I recently became a member of Twitter and Multiply.

If you've ever Googled your name, you know how important managing your reputation online can be. Each day, thousands of individuals are searching online for information about others simply by searching on Google or other leading search engines. With information being so readily available, managing your reputation is more important than ever.

How to Manage Your Reputation Online
Fortunately, managing your reputation online isn't all that difficult, but it does take work. Here are 7 basic steps you can take to ensure that your reputation doesn't become negatively impacted by what's being said about you online.

1. See where you stand. Start your reputation management initiative by Googling your name. Try it with quotes and with out (first and last name together). Look through each of your results on page one and page two of Google. Are there any there are are negative or you wish to remove?

2. Set up a Google alert. Visit Google and set up an alert for your name. After setting up the alert Google will send you and email to confirm that you wish to receive the updates. Accept the alert and each time your name is published to the Web, you'll know about it.

3. Contact website owners for name removal. If there are sites that include your name and commentary that is less than desirable, contact the appropriate websites requesting that the information be removed. More often than not, website owners will agree to remove your name and/or inappropriate information.

4. Purchase a domain with your name. Add sites and webpages associated with your name and watch negative search results get pushed lower on Google rankings. Visit GoDaddy or another provider of website URLs and hosting, and purchase a domain that contains your name. Even if your name is rather common, experiment with variations until your name can be established in the form of a dot com. Once you own a domain, publish a webpage with your personal profile.

5. Start a blog under your name. Blogger is a great tool for setting up your own blog which can be used to publish information about yourself. Popular blog sites are often picked up by Google and you can control the content. Be sure to sign up for Technorati after your blog has been published. Submit your blog for review and its popularity will increase, improving search rankings and continuing to push down negative search results.

6. Free press release. Use free-press-release.com or a similar free press release site to publish favorable information about your and your reputation. This form of reputation management is easy and costs nothing. Be sure to use your name throughout the release and in the release title.

7. Author articles in your field. Publish article relative to a particular topic or area in which you've done some work or have experience. Use article distribution serivces to build online references to your content. Make sure your articles contain an about the author section that links back to your main website.

There are a variety of strategies you can use to manage online references about you, your family, or others that need to manage their reputation online. Other online sites like Facebook, MySpace, Flickr, YouTube, and Squidoo, offer ample opportunity to deliver favorable search results that can push unfavorable results down in search engine rankings. The key is to start today - proactively manage your reputation and put yourself in a favorable light.



About the Author
Michael Fleischner is an Internet marketing expert and founder of MarketingScoop.com. He has more than 13 years of marketing experience and has appeared on the TODAY Show, Bloomberg Radio, and other major media. Michael is also the author of SEO Made Simple: Strategies for Dominating the World's Largest Search Engine and The Webmasters Book of Secrets: Improve Search Engine Rankings.

How to Invest in a Depression

Reprint from CNN Money

How to Invest in a Depression
Posted by Two Cents Editors
March 6, 2009 10:09 am
The Dow Jones Industrial Average seems to be on a permanent downward track. The nation’s GDP has plunged into negative territory. And something once considered unthinkable—a depression—is now a real possibility. That’s the finding of Harvard economists Robert Barro and Jose Ursua, who studied the long-term data for stock market crashes and depressions from 25 countries, including the U.S. In a recently published paper, the economists conclude there’s a 20% chance that U.S. GDP and consumption will fall by 10% or more, something not seen since the early 1930s—in other words, a depression.

Of course, that would mean there’s an 80% chance a depression won’t happen. (I know which outcome I’ll be rooting for.) Still, for investors who want to prepare for the worst, you have options. “If you invest like it was the 1930s again, you can still make money,” says Lou Stanasolovich, CEO of Legend Financial Advisors, who shifted to a defensive strategy last fall. Stanasolovich’s moderate low-volatility portfolio, for example, invests two-thirds of its assets in hedge-style funds that counterbalance their exposure to stocks, such as Caldwell and Orkin Market Opportunity, Diamond Hill Focus Long Short and Rydex Managed Futures. Another 30% of the portfolio is stashed in high-quality fixed-income funds for additional safety. Since October this asset mix has generally delivered small but positive returns.

For nervous investors who don’t have enough assets to spread among a large number of funds, a simple alternative would be to shift a portion of your portfolio to safe accounts, such as bank CDs or money market funds. Granted, you will probably have to settle for yields of 2% or less these days. But inflation is also relatively low, so those yields actually give you decent real returns. And as Stanasolovich points out, “In times like these, where we are looking at deflation rather than inflation, even a 0% yield is a positive return.”

Still, a defensive allocation, while ideal for a Grapes of Wrath scenario, makes for a poor long-term investing strategy. You won’t get the growth you need to rebuild your nest egg. And sooner or later inflation is bound to spike again—some forecasters even worry that the ballooning government debt will eventually spark hyperinflation. If that were to happen, Stanasolovich says, your best strategy would be a heavy allocation to commodity funds and other inflation-beating assets. So if you do decide to revisit the 1930s, be prepared to shift your portfolio back to the future, or at least the 1970s.

Depressions have occurred about once every generation and it is complete arrogance to think it can’t happen in our time. The pattern speaks volumes about human behavior and our tendency to expect something for nothing. We are a bit overdue for the current adjustment that is upon us.

http://moneyfeatures.blogs.money.cnn.com/2009/03/06/how-to-invest-in-a-depression/