AccuQuote, a leader in providing term life insurance quotes, leverages blogs, online videos, podcasts, and tweets to generate leads and revenue.

In the video below, the company’s VP of marketing and business development, Sean Cheyney, offers examples of how the company uses social medial and measures success.

The following are some key takeaways:

• Life Insurance Education – Give something of value to the community, try to avoid posts that contain a “call to action” message
• Recruiting – Use social media to recruit and connect, save money over traditional channels
• Strategic Partnerships – Use social media to drive strategic partnerships, use an integrated approach
• PR – Use Twitter, follow reporters that typically cover the company and industry and allow them to follow you
• Tools – Use tools like TweetDeck and Twitter Search to help manage your social media efforts. Applications like SiteCatalyst from Omniture help track and measure success.

Social Media for the Analytic Marketer, by Sean Cheyney; presented by GasPedal and the Social Media Business Council from GasPedal on Vimeo.

Additional interesting information:

• The company has been blogging for 4-5 years
• Company bloggers currently post 5-7 educational articles each week
• The CEO contributes several posts each week
• An estimated 2% of all leads are a result of organic traffic because of their blogging efforts
• Within 1.5 years of the blog’s launch, leads resulted in mid-six figures in revenue

Do you use multiple Google products (e.g. Gmail, Google Voice, Google Latitude, etc.) and wonder what information Google is storing in your account?

Google Dashboard now provides an account summary of all the data stored in each of the Google products you use.

The Dashboard also provides direct account links to help you manage data settings for each account.

Visit http://www.google.com/dashboard for more information.

Gizmodo provides an in depth look at the new Microsoft Courier user interface and it looks incredible.

The new XPERIA X10 looks pretty awesome.  Its camera even has smile detection!

Specifications include:

• Google Android OS
• 8.1 megapixel camera with face recognition and smile detection
• 4-inch touch display, 450×854 pixels wide
• 1 GHz Snapdragon CPU
• 1 GB onboard memory and 8 GB microSD memory card included
• All the other standard stuff…

An interactive, collaborative music and spoken word project conceived by Darren Solomon from Science for Girls, and developed with contributions from users.

Check out the site here

Dealing with too much email? Below are some simple email protocols to help gain some efficiency and become more productive.

1. Use the SUBJECT Line! Sending an email with a blank subject line often leads to the message being ignored.
2. Can you fit your entire message in the subject line? Use the subject line coupled with EOM. If you can convey the entire message in less than 160 characters or so, put the whole message in the subject line and end with [EOM]. This keeps the recipient from having to actually open an e-mail (especially useful on Blackberry and other mobile devices). Example: Please note that the conference call today at 3 p.m. is in the main conference room [EOM]
3. Is no reply required? Use NRR. Example: Notes from the conference call are attached. [NRR]
4. Is an action required? Use AR. Example: Need a decision on invites for the lunch meeting. [AR]
5. Is your message simply an FYI? Use FYI in the subject line so that the recipient knows they can review the email at their convenience. This can be useful when forwarding emails. Example: [FYI] FW: Proposal for ABC Corp

Imagine my surprise to find an incoming link from experts-exchange.com.

I finally decided to fix the synchronization error I’ve been getting on my new Dell Laptop.

I work with offline files in Windows XP when out of the office and sychronize with a network copy when I return.

Well, at least in theory…  Instead of synchronizing my offline work when I return to the office, I would receive an “Access Denied” error message.

After some googling, I learned that a factory-installed program called Embassy Trust Suite by Wave Systems somehow interfers with the Windows XP offline synch process.

After an uninstall of Embassy Trust Suite, the problem was solved!

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