Posterous is an amazing tool with capabilities yet to be realized.

After my test of Posterous, I must say it is an amazing tool and very well designed with ease of use and lack of painful configuration elements. This Website overall has a wonderful design, great usability and a potential factor I have not seen since Facebook. I would highly recommend going to http://www.posterous.com/ and check it all out. Posting content to one or multiple websites has never been easier. While I am not qualified to explain or realize all the potentially ground breaking elements of Posterous, my good friend Shannon Clark who turned me on to the site would be a good person to talk to if you need more info than the site offers.
Did I mention the word FREE! Get in now before the rush...

A Test Drive of Posterous.....Buckle Up...Let the content find its way.

This is my first post via Posterous, a newer online application that helps one to post content to many places at once with a single action of either sending an email or using an online utility. This message is being posted via the web function. I have prepared for this test by signing up to Posterous and linking all of my Blogging accounts to Posterous. I will be amazed If this works, so lets give it a try. Here she goes...I will follow up with a report on my results. - Shane

Inside AdSense: Avoiding accidental clicks Pt. 1: Keeping the righ...

Inside AdSense: Avoiding accidental clicks Pt. 1: Keeping the righ...: "In the past, we've talked about ad placements that are prone to generate invalid clicks. In a past post, for example, Mike noted that publis..."

Patented Business Method Helps Corporations to turn a 300,000,000.00 expense into a $250,000,000.00 profit.

“Corporations can leverage existing data stored within the company’s HR Portals and Plan Sponsorship benefit Portal databases. For one corporation, it was like finding $250 Million under a couch cushion.”

United States Patent 7406441:

Inventors – Sr. Consultant and Manager of eBusiness Operations: Shane J. Hopkins and Principal/Global Practice Leader: Eddy Kimura of an undisclosed fortune 500 company. Patent is now owned by ACS A Xerox Company.

Summary of Patent Claim and Business Method for Online HR Portal Access and Wireless Access to HR and Benefits Applications.

Use the data kept on employees to drive revenue generating life event triggers within the workplace. Leverage the large number of employees by forming a buying pool that is driven by life event triggers inside the HR and Benefit environments. A foundation of participating vendors will offer deep discounts to those who need to purchase items due to a life changing event.

When changing your address utilizing a self-service utility inside an HR application, you may be reminded of an upcoming personal event such as a predicted delivery date of your first child. With this life event trigger a series of offers are conveniently placed on your portal screen and may include the purchase of a stroller and infant supplies, maybe some booklets or guides to a healthy delivery. A one click purchase is offered for the ½ price stroller with a portion of the funds going to your company for letting the vendor have access to this buying pool of 175,000 employees. The annual cost to have you work in your office for the HR department is between $1800 to $3,200 per year. With a buying pool driven by life event triggers, the cost is driven down to $200 in the first year and should turn a respectable profit per employee by year two. Dusty data living inside outdated mainframes if used properly and ethically can be worth millions of dollars in just market research alone. All data is used anonymously and can help to provide actuarial data that companies will pay millions for as it helps them to predict risk, trends, profits and upcoming profiting opportunities.

This technology and business method  includes the use of PCs, laptops, PDAs, Smart Phones and any hand-held devices as a tool to access an employer’s HR Intranet/Extranet Portal to administer certain aspects of their job benefits account within the employers Human Capital Management System. The integration of self-service modules for employees and managers along with life-event triggers inside the portal environment will offer the opportunity for the employee to complete tasks usually needed to be handled outside of the workplace. In doing so, the selected providing vendors, merchants and service providers are connected with the employee though highly strategic, low impact event trigger offering a convenient solution to a needed action by the employee. Example: Jane Doe is pregnant and has her due date on file in the company’s HR database utility to help in the planning of insurance needs, maternity leave, hiring temp. help and not to mention the endless work on the employees part with endless purchases of products, supplies and planning in preparation for the birth of her child. Dynamic personalized email and dynamically generated portal content provides a series of triggered content offerings making it easier to accomplish related tasks with a single click of the mouse inside the HR Portal weather at work or logged in remotely. A significant buying pool made up from a base of 175,000 employees (in this case) allows the vendors to provide deep discounts and the ability to pay a fee to the employer for being included in the buying pool environment or, even kick back a commission on a per purchase basis to the company as compensation. In the end, each employee which normally would cost a medium sized to large sized company $3,200.00 to $1,800.00 per year in HR Administration costs could be reduced to just $200 in the first year and actually turn an estimated profit of $180.00 per employee by year number 2.

The phrase coined here is “E-HR to Free-HR”.

The math is overwhelming: 175,000 employees at a cost of $1,800.00 each = a cost of $315,000,000.00 per year. Compare this to 175,000 employees at a profit of $180.00 each = a profit of $31,500,000.00 of pure profit and a savings of$283,500,000.00 less the cost of the technology. With ongoing maintenance, the company can pocket in excess of $250,000,000.00 per year directly out of the HR budget. The cost of developing and operating this integrated work/life system is further offset by the amount of time employees spend shopping online and leaving work to accomplish life event tasks outside the workplace at a higher expense to them and the employer.

Allowing an employee access to his or her 401K plan through wireless access or LAN (included in this process) allows more control, convenience and empowerment to the employee which in turn creates loyalty, retention and lock-in. It’s simply more convenient for the employee to stay at their current position due to deep administrative “rooting”, convenience and a sense of well being knowing their employer invested in making their lives easier to manage. This is a rare trait of any company in today’s dark economic climate.

Indirect benefits also result from use of such technology without the e-commerce element even coming into play. With life event trigger integration into the everyday workplace, programs for health, fitness, ethics and overall awareness in non-job related subject matter seep in with low or no impact and lessen the burden of counselors, HR enforcement, and disciplinary enforcement proceedings which all result in less time off the job for any employee and creating a healthier work environment for the entire workforce. This is not a new methodology; companies have offered company discounts on products and services for decades. This new business process and method simply takes it to a higher, efficient, logical level.

For this project, we set up a large scale portal that could handle the amount of users and data we already were managing. A mass effort to partner with 1,100 vendors was established. All plan sponsorship websites were enhanced to provide access from Sprint PCS phones, Palm VII PDA running the Palm OS and any device with a browser capable of reading HTML cards, the standard wireless programming technology for wireless access at the time of this efforts development.

The once or twice a year allowance of changing your 401k allocations and health plan options (open enrollment) was changed to 4 times per day for the 401k element. At the height of the tech boom, the day trading of your 401k plan could prove quite profitable. BenefitsWeb, a proprietary plan sponsorship portal owned then by PricewaterhouseCoopers was the first DB/DC/Healthcare Portal to offer wireless access to the backend HR system. We were able to login to the Benefits Portal, view balances and also adjust allocations throughout the day, multiple times if needed.

Data stored in existing HR systems is a priceless wealth of knowledge if used properly. Add in the habits, opinions, behaviors and actions taken by a large collective group can be worth ten times the first mentioned group. With careful handling and legal compliance, this data can be worth more than the 376 million at steak by implementing this method. Stored data on large groups of people including buying habits, decision making and many other data

Element statistics, when used anonymously, provide an entire new revenue stream with offerings of industry survey data all companies rely on to predict inventory needs, resource allocation, and early detection of market trends. Some business service providers will take such data and produce valuable white papers and survey information as a paid offering to their clients at a nice profit. All of this can be done without disclosing any single element of personal information. The possibilities of leveraging the workforce are endless and benefit all involved. Smaller methodologies can be implemented for smaller entities with the same results. Leveraging your existing resources that would otherwise sit dormant is the key to maximizing your potential to succeed and more importantly, create profits beyond projections with existing resources. Start slow, measure success and stay flexible with your approach without changing your plans or goals.

As the co-inventor of this technology, I was let go 2 days after the patent office awarded the patent. I worked on the patent claims daily for 7 years. I was not aware the patent was awarded until 23 months later just as the statute of limitations ran out on any possible repercussions.

See the Patent in its entirety with illustrations here: http://www.freepatentsonline.com/7406441.pdf

Author:  Shane J. Hopkins

October 19, 2010

My First success in creating a viral Social Media Marketing Campaign

This should bring back some memories for the real veterans out there. Most of today's gurus were only 4 or 5 when this went down.

I have been playing around with technology since  the early 90s when I obtained an actual map of something called the Internet. At that time the Internet was mostly made up of computer networks between government and educational entities. I studied it and dreamed of the possibilities for learning, communications, marketing, and having global influence from my own computer room inside my little house.

I began to explore libraries, databases, public records, personal websites of every shape and size, noted how early innovators were already tapping into banner ads, affiliate programs, traffic driving and then, the big idea hit me, The Funnel. My "funnel" is a set of high exposure traffic signs, fish net utilities, subliminal nudging, hyperlinks, emails, new stories and anything else that directs people to go to a certain place and the allow them to do certain things that make you money. I learned if you could funnel enough people to one spot (your controlled environment), you create unlimited opportunity.

Since I had no one to mimic in my exploration of Internet monitization (at that time). I came up with an idea of my own. AOL just announced a new application called Virtual Places which was a very ahead-of-it's-time application where one could have an icon or picture of themselves and surf the Internet at will just as you do today but your pic or avatar would go with you and show up on every page you went to. You could also see others who were on the same pages as you and you had the ability to chat with bubble text and emotions like a comic book theme. there was a main menu for the Virtual Places application that listed the top 25 or so sites that VPers were on or visiting and this list was the starting point of your VP experience, much like the chat room lists. I also found out I could get a vehicle, like a bus and actually load it up with other users and drag them all around the Internet where ever I browsed. The websites listed in the VP Main Menu were high traffic due to the listing being the jump-in point for users and was posted front and center of most advanced social media application of its time. I thought If I could get my website on that list that I could create a funnel of traffic by utilizing this social media experiment being offered all for free by AOL at the time.

Here is what I did to become the number one visited site in the Virtual Places Application. Created my Avatar, a really good one, interesting yet slightly mysterious. Got to know the top players and users and studied the sites they wood hang out in. Most sites were bar themes or coffee shops, selling what little there was available back then mostly amazon products.

I then created a website which I had no content or ideas for. I grasped on to an idea  of something that intrigued me on the net at the time which was Live Web Cams. Not the pornographic type, but the type that showed sunsets, famous eateries, beaches, schools, landmarks, peoples offices, just any type of web cam I could find, I made list of these cams, categorized them and hyperlinked them all with nice descriptions. So that was my site, a compilation of already created content put into a one stop shop for spying on just about everything, I think I had 300 or so live webcam links.

Next I created a single banner ad that met the requirement of a free banner exchange program (I think it was called BannerExchange). This banner was the key. I needed to create uncontrollable curiosity, a viral compulsion to click. It needed a name and a simple image that would absolutely grab you away from you current online task. I created a photo of an old wrinkly man's head with one eye shut and the other eye peeking through a hole in the wooden sign that made up the banner. Then added the text "The Peephole - You will be Amazed". The banner was put into circulation through the banner program and I began my new job as the driver of that virtual bus we mentioned earlier and I started dumping loads of users on the Peephole website. I did this for 2-3 days and on day 3 I cam home and looked at my counter and had reached 21,000 visits that day alone, an absolutely unheard of traffic drive for a non-porn website at that time.
My site stayed on the VP Top sites list in the VP gateway for months. I now had created my first successful traffic funnel and had no idea what to do with it! The story goes down hill from here with a $2,300.00 bill from AOL for hourly charges. I had to keep my avatar on my site 24/7 so I would never log off. AOL retracted these big bills after class action suit but was enough for me to pull the plug on my operation at that time. I needed a more cost effective means of access to the internet and with more bandwidth etc. Still a good story that helped me to understand how quickly something can take of if you have just a few nibblets of unique methodologies and can get right in the game to try 'em out. AOLs Virtual Places was eventually bought out or shelved, standard chat became the standard replacement for VP for the next two decades. MySpace and FaceBook then came about in their due time and you see what happens to those who focus and take action.