Here’s an interesting tool from the folks over at FutureNow - the “Customer Focus Calculator“.

This tool counts certain words on your site and pairs that against how many times your name or company name is mentioned. Research suggests that talking in a customer-centric voice will greatly impact your conversions and website effectiveness.

Give it a try and see how you score. I ran the calculator on my company’s homepage and here are my results:

These are the Customer Focus Calculator results:

For the url: http://www.linearmill.com

Your Customer Focus Rate: 43.48%
You have 10 instances of customer-focused words.

Your Self Focus Rate: 56.52%
You have 10 instances of self-focused words.
You have 3 instances of the Company Name.

You speak about yourself almost as often as you speak about your customers.
Might you improve that?

Original length of Page (including all HTML)= 5,037 bytes
Content length after stripping HTML = 2,587 bytes
Total word count: 360

Looks like I have a little tweaking to do myself.

I’m a big Dan Patrick Fan - I especially loved his ESPNRadio show. And, when he decided to call it quits back in August; I wondered what he would end up doing. So, on a whim, I typed in DanPatrick.com one day and….

Check out my latest PodCast for more….

On a side note, I’d love some feedback on the PodCasts - drop me a comment below - Thanks, cg

This is a fabulous article: How to Launch a Successful Blogger-Outreach Program in One Day

It expands on my observation that I wrote about yesterday: Tagging: The New Killer App. It also demonstrates that something like Technorati is the online version of a traditional clipping service. If people are discussing you or your company and they are tagging that content - then it’s gonna show up on Technorati. So, you need to throw this into your bag of tricks when it comes to marketing. And, the above article is a great example of how to get the Blogging world on your side.

I believe that we have entered into a new realm around the Internet. It seems like we can finally - I don’t want to use the word “trust” … but something close - come to terms with the fact that the tagging of content is working the way it’s supposed to.

If you’re not familiar with this idea, check out this article: Wikipedia: Tag (metadata)

Traditionally we have relied on things like search engines to scan the web and make a determination as to what it was ingesting - and that still happens. But, there is now a concerted effort for user generated tags for every kind of content out there. Check out the bottom of this post and you’ll see a set of links next to “Technorati” - those are tags. I have determined that there are some keywords that I would like to have associated with this article - by listing them I have “tagged” my content.

Here’s a great example of a best practice for tagging. At BarCamp Nashville, one of the first things that they asked everyone to do was tag there content with the phrase “barcampnashville”. Now when everyone submitted their content to thinks like Technorati, Flickr, Twitter, Wordpress and others - those tags would all show up and everyone would have access to content from that event. Just look at Technorati and see how much content is there with this tag: barcampnashville.

Now why would this be a killer app?

I think that’s easy to answer. Traditionally we all have been subject to metatag spam from websites all over the net. You’ve, I’m sure, searched for a phrase over at Google and it returned a bunch of irrelevant junk. In the early days of the net website operators used a bunch of covert techniques to make this happen. I believe that this phase of the web is nearly over, mainly because of tagging. Users are passively policing content and making the web better for all of us.

I’ve been toying with an idea for a while. I have been wondering if there is a way for both a personal and professional blog to co-exist. Is there a way to successfully create a personal “brand” that embodies your personality, abilities, thoughts and other qualities? So, we’ll see.

I recently attended BarCamp Nashville where Mitch Joel (Six Pixels of Separation) gave a fantastic presentation on participating in the online culture. So, I posed the question to him:

Mitch,

We met here in Nashville and I meant to ask you a question. Is there a model for having both a personal and a professional blog that coexist on one site. I’m currently running two blogs - my personal blog at www.dylogy.com and my professional blog at www.conversion-funnel.com. Can I/should I consolidate them? Or should they be separate?

Thanks again for the great presentation at BarCamp Nashville. I appreciate any feedback and insight you might have.

All the Best,
Chip Gallent

To which he responded:

Say on one, how many Blogs do you want?

You see… no rules. Your call.

Mitch Joel

Yes, that is the perfect response and I guess you could call it the mantra of participating in the online world … no rules. So - here it goes. Beginning now, I’m switching over to ChipGallent.com from now on. Everything will be there.