After a conference call with a client the other day, I realized that many of the tools I use day in and day out, I take for granted. A lot of people out there don’t know they exist. I might as well face it – a year ago, I didn’t know they existed! To give everyone some insight into my new habits, I thought I’d share some of my favorites:

1. Firefox – This may seem like getting back to basics to some people but when I started at SEER Interactive, I didn’t know what Firefox was – which was a complete shock to the rest of the team. Now, I can’t understand how my husband can live with Internet Explorer 6 – yes, 6 (he hasn’t upgraded to IE7). That means he surfs the Internet with multiple windows – and without tabbed browsing and awesome user-friendly extensions – which I can no longer remember how to do.

2. Multiple Homepages – Now that I’ve got tabbed browsing down, it’s great to be able to set Firefox to open multiple homepages every time it runs. There are two ways to accomplish this: 1) open the pages you want set as your homepages in separate tabs, then go to “Tools,” “Options,” click on “General” and then click “Use Current Pages;” or 2) Under “Tools,” “Options,” “General” tab, type each of the URLs in the “Location(s)” box separated by a “|” (that’s SHIFT + \). Hit “OK” and that should save your settings for the next time you open Firefox!

3. Numbered Google & MSN Results – Thank you, Greasemonkey! I have always loved Yahoo! for numbering their search results – they make it so easy to know that your term is #6 instead of having to count results down the page. I never understood why Google or MSN couldn’t do the same thing. After discovering tool #1, I discovered Greasemonkey and then scripts that number Google and MSN results. Oh, so wonderful!!! I have to practice counting from one to ten some other way now!

4. Mouse Gestures – This might be an “oldie but goodie.” Mouse Gestures may have existed for a while, but I never knew about them. Since installing this extension, I don’t know when the last time I actually visited the back button was. I LOVE my right mouse button now! And I can’t stand it when I am working on a computer that doesn’t have Mouse Gestures. On any computer I sit down at, by default, I drag my right mouse button to the left to try to go back a page.

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How a deal might be struck (continued from part one)
Assuming there is a certain level of trust between the buyer and seller, there are a few ways a deal can be made and a few questions to be addressed before the transfer is made. Will the buyer maintain the seller’s identity after purchase? To what extent is the buyer allowed to act as the seller when they acquire the account? Consider:

• Display name
• Personal pictures
• Existing blogs
• Existing comments
• A list of friends exempt of being solicited personally

An agreement between a buyer and seller can be structured in any way. The possibilities are really up to the parties’ imaginations. Here are some other facts and ideas to be kept in mind when arriving at an agreement.

1. Keeping a seller’s pictures up can help to ensure that friends don’t delete the account after the transfer. It is common behavior to aggregate existing friends and not pay much attention to minor profile changes when the potential “deleter” has a long friend list and only interacts with a few people with regularity. As a buyer, don’t raise any flags by putting up an unlikely photo or doing anything else that might be suspect behavior, like bulletin spam.

2. The seller can change their account email address. They’ll no longer be found if someone searches based on email. It may, however, take weeks for the email to be removed from the search results.

3. One can enable an away message thus disabling new incoming messages if desired.

4. One can require a last name to add you as a friend (which can be changed to something not obviously guessable) if the seller does not want new real life friends finding this profile and becoming a friend.

5. A buyer may want to require comment approval. If the account purchase is publicized, it should not be made known on your page. If people know that a profile is being used for marketing purposes they’re less likely to keep it as a friend.

Finally, I have listed some scenarios where a buyer and seller may have their biggest concerns.

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Have you accidentally become addicted to myspace?
If myspace is the first and last thing you check in a normal day, then you have probably considered deleting your account to return to reality. Depending on your reasons for wanting to stop using myspace, there might be more to be gained than a confirmation email stating that your account is gone forever.

A myspace account is a valuable web resource for online marketers
From a marketer’s perspective, by identifying a single person that falls within your target demographic you can market to their network of online friends with the assumption that they are like-minded people.
Take a sample profile as an example:

• 23 year old female
• Philadelphia resident
• Interested in independent music
• Aspiring vocal artist
• Strong interest in health & diet

Who do you think this person is friends with online? Her friends click on links in her bulletins and messages all the time, just like any other profile. They probably click on links on her page too. Now, as a marketer, if you are targeting other young people interested in independent music, or people interested in health foods in the Philadelphia area, enlisting this young woman as an ad conduit could be instrumental to a campaign. To be more clear, what I am describing here, is how myspace is a vehicle for marketing with a more transparent audience. All you need is a good definition of what your target demographic is, and the users will tell you who and where they are. There are clues, or more obvious facts about the people volunteered in their profiles. I hope the new market frontier I’m describing is giving you some ideas.

Is this really a new frontier?
Wawa already has a myspace profile. There’s even a profile for Wawa iced tea. Yes, lots of people add these nonsensical profiles as their friends, and if Wawa employees are the profile owners and maintainers, kudos to them. I would be more impressed if Wawa had purchased a few choice myspace profiles belonging to real users, and began putting iced tea coupons into bulletins.

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You know what I can’t stand!?!? Companies that have online reservation forms that don’t work. The whole point of filling out an online reservation form for a service is that I don’t want to have to follow up with you! I want you to contact me regarding my reservation. I don’t want to have to wonder whether you received my reservation submission, and I certainly don’t want to have to come back to the site and look up the phone number and CALL to make a reservation. If I wanted to do that, I would have done that in the first place.

Oh, and don’t tell me you didn’t receive the reservation form – like I don’t know how to operate a five-field form and press the submit button with my left click button. Let’s just come clean and admit that your form is broken.

But… I guess that’s what I get for submitting an online reservation for a service to a website that doesn’t even rank well for its own brand name. I had to get to the website by clicking on the 4^th result, which was a Citysearch page, and then clicking on the website link. Oy vey!

The site I had issues with today – and other reservation sites out there – can take some notes from my favorite reservation system out there: OpenTable. I can select restaurants by region & neighborhood and then by date, time and party size. I can find out what reservation times are available in 15 minute increments, and I get immediate email confirmations of my reservations. I also receive email reminders before my dining date. Additionally, I get reward points for booking reservations online and dining at the restaurant. My personal favorite – the OpenTable representatives are accessible and helpful. When I had a question about a restaurant’s participation in a special event after I had made the reservation, the OpenTable representative took care of contacting the restaurant (by phone), getting an answer, and emailing me back promptly.

The moral of the story: if you’re going to have an online reservation form, be ready for fulfillment. Potential customers may not follow up with a phone call when they don’t hear from you. In a competitive space, they might just go to the next result down.