PurposeDrivenPromotion Search Marketing Articles

SharingHope.TV Provides a Place for People to Share Cancer Stories

Feb 28th, 2008 - The American Cancer Society is launching a new Web community that will help connect cancer survivors, their friends and family members through the sharing of user-generated videos, photos, music and artwork. SharingHope.tv allows users to create an account and upload video, audio, photos and artwork in order to tell their stories of cancer in ways that work best for them. Visitors to the site can view the content, share what they like with others, or find hope and inspiration for their own fight against cancer.

Cancer survivors and their loved ones are already avid users of online community Web sites, and with SharingHope.tv, the American Cancer Society hopes to engage new and existing users of online media. "Many people share their stories of cancer on Web sites like You Tube, Flickr, and personal blogs. Now they have a chance to come together in a single online community, with an organization and an audience that really cares about cancer," said David Neff, American Cancer Society High Plains Division director of web and interactive strategy.

The new video community is innovative for a non-profit organization because it relies almost completely on people outside of the organization to create its content. "This site is not about the American Cancer Society - it's about the people cancer affects. We are providing a forum for people to share their stories, their heartbreaks, their triumphs and joys," Neff said.

For individuals who have never uploaded a video, SharingHope.tv walks them through the steps with its own user-friendly instructional videos. The online community has other unique features, like free background music for videos, created by independent artists. "No one knows more about cancer than the people living with it. We want to make it easy and even fun for that knowledge to be shared." Neff said.

SharingHope.tv can be found at www.sharinghope.tv.

About the American Cancer Society

The American Cancer Society is dedicated to eliminating cancer as a major health problem by saving lives, diminishing suffering and preventing cancer through research, education, advocacy and service. The Society has 13 regional Divisions and local offices in 3,400 communities, involving millions of volunteers across the United States. For more information anytime, call toll free 1-800-ACS-2345 or visit www.cancer.org.

For more information on SharingHope.TV visit our news room at http://www.sharinghope.tv/newsroom

Yahoo Local Search recently re-launched with a host of new features, improved functionality and a new look.

And while these new features add to an already functional local service one must wonder if these changes are "worth it"?

After all, who uses local search anyways? Why do a local search when you can just do a regular search, hoping for local results?

The truth is, local search is beginning to play a larger part in how we search. While we may not notice it, local search is slowly becoming integrated into the regular search results.

As such we have to be aware of local search and its options. Therefore in this article we will review the new Yahoo local search.

Continue reading "Yahoo Local Gets an Upgrade" »

I recently read an interesting article which compared YouTube (a popular video sharing site) traffic to Google. In it, YouTube was more popular than Google, at least according to web measurement firm Alexa.

And that struck a chord with me. I've dealt with Alexa before so I know it's shortcomings.

In this article we look at why Alexa data is flawed and how you need to be aware of that.

Continue reading "Why You Should Not Rely Solely On Alexa For Your Competitive Intelligence" »

A recent study published by The American Customer Satisfaction Index indicates that Yahoo is actually the most satisfying search engine in the US.

The results follow a study which measures overall satisfaction in many industries based on consumer interviews.

In addition to Yahoo being considered the most satisfying, Google dropped by almost 4%. But despite this drop, Google continues to be the most used search engine.

So the question becomes: Why is Google the most used engine? If people are more satisfied with Yahoo shouldn't that translate into increased usage?

Continue reading "Yahoo More Satisfying than Google? It Appears So" »

Recently, Google announced a "groundbreaking" change to the way it serves search results. Essentially from this day forward, Google was going to serve results from all their properties which may match a search query, and not just results from it's search index.

In other words, a search for a Canon digital camera may not only return results from the main search index, but also shopping results, news results, and video results (among others).

In fact, Google has been doing this for some time, however they explain that the results will become more noticeable as time goes on.

But Google isn't the only one jumping into the "Universal search" field. Ask has been doing this for some time, and recently Yahoo updated it's search results with similar universal results.

So who is most effective at this new type of search?

Continue reading "Universal Search - Is Google The Best At It?" »

As you may have noticed, this website has undergone some changes. And while it looks different than before, the biggest changes actually happened in the backend, where you can't see them.

Up until now, Purposedrivenpromotion.com has been hosted on the open source CMS Mambo. We chose it because it was relatively easy to set up (and of course free to use :) ).

But Mambo is one of those systems that, unless you have a lot of resources to manage it, it can become unruly.

That is what we found when using it - because we are a smaller company, we don't have the time or resources to expend on a large CMS. We found Mambo just too big for us.

That's why, after just over a year, we changed to a much smaller, more familiar CMS. One that you may not immediately consider using for website content management.

Continue reading "CMS SEO - 3 Tips For Optimizing Movable Type" »