POPLAR BLUFF, Mo. — Woodstock marked a retreat from Judeo-Christian values within American culture, according to a local cattle rancher and businessman, who is organizing an event he hopes will be of a similar magnitude in Poplar Bluff, but with a different objective. He said he believes it could spark another Great Awakening.

More details here: http://www.techcrunch.com/2010/02/05/facebooks-project-titan-a-full-featured-webmail-product/

U2 - Credit: kurisu on Flickr (CC BY)

Pensacola News Journal’s Rebecca Ross reports the U2charist will include “Where the Streets Have No Name,” “With or Without You,” “One,” and “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For.” Also, “Beautiful Day” is slated to be the opening number for each worship service.

“U2’s music is so deeply spiritual that I think the corporate worship setting is the perfect place for it,” Rev. Geoffrey Lentz told the PNJ, adding later, “It’s exciting for the oldest Protestant church in Pensacola to have a cutting edge worship service.”

Obviously this new ultra modern service is aimed at a younger audience although there are a number of older rockers I know who wouldn’t mind a bit of U2 in their service now and then!

Churches who hold the U2charist do not have to pay licensing fees for using U2’s music on the condition that the church donates any money raised by the service to charities benefiting the Millennium Development Goals, to which Bono is an ambassador.

But unfortunately, President Obama’s speech actually reinforced other dangerous myths about Israel’s history and the true obstacles to peace in the Middle East.

Last Sunday, Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu stepped up to set the record straight. And last week, two Democratic senators—Sen. Harry Reid of Nevada and Sen. Robert Menendez of New Jersey—added their voices to the chorus of correction. Taking on a popular president from your own party is never easy. It is therefore of great significance that these two Democrats felt the need to clarify that when it comes to the specifics of the Arab-Israeli conflict, the president does not speak for the party.

Nearly two weeks ago, Democratic Majority Leader Sen. Reid, sent a letter to President Obama. Reid politely reminded the president of the real threats to peace in the Middle East. In Cairo, President Obama glossed over the long history of Palestinian rejection of Israel’s right to exist. Sen. Reid wrote, “I believe that negotiations will be successful only with a renewed commitment from the Palestinians to be a true partner for peace.”

In Cairo, President Obama largely ignored the leading role of Iran in fueling the conflict with Israel. Sen. Reid wrote that the peace process must not “take away from your commitment to deal with the ongoing threat from Iran. Iran has continued to call for Israel’s destruction while repeatedly defying the international community with its nuclear program.”

The following day, Sen. Menendez went to the floor of the Senate to deliver a 13-minute speech on Israel. While not mentioning President Obama by name, he issued a powerful rebuttal of the myths that the president seemed to embrace. In Cairo, the president suggested that Israel’s right to exist is based upon Jewish suffering in the Holocaust.

In response, Sen. Menendez walked through the over 3,500-year-old connection between the Jewish people and the Land of Israel. “Let’s be very clear,” Menendez stated, “the Holocaust is not the main justification for Israel’s existence.”

While in Cairo, President Obama stated that Palestinian “dislocation” was a result of “Israel’s founding.” Sen. Menendez noted that, “the more than 700,000 Palestinians who left Israel were refugees of a war instigated by Arab governments bent on seizing more land for themselves. ” Sen. Menendez also mentioned that 750,000 Jewish refugees from Arab countries were absorbed by Israel, a fact absent from the president’s speech.

While the president downplayed the threat from Iran, Menendez highlighted it. Iran, he stressed, is not a just a “potential threat” to Israel’s existence—it is a present threat to Israel’s existence though its arming and funding of Hamas and Hezbollah. Sen. Menendez was clear that “under no circumstances whatsoever can we allow that conventional threat to become a nuclear one.”

We live in a time when Israel’s enemies are aggressively seeking to delegitimize her by rewriting both the history of the Jewish people and the history of the Arab-Israeli conflict. In such a climate, even people sympathetic to Israel are sometimes swayed. It is thus good indeed to see Israel’s friends on both sides of the aisle step up and correct the record. Thank you, Sen. Reid and Sen. Menendez, for your leadership and your friendship on this issue. Your services to the truth and to Israel are deeply appreciated.

To watch the video of Sen. Menendez’s compelling speech on Capitol Hill, click below.

Resources:
David Brog
Charisma

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This is the first direct public statement by the Obama administration that it will seek ratification of the UN CRC.

If the United States Senate were to ratify the UN CRC, then under Article VI of our Constitution, that treaty would become “the supreme law of the land,” essentially self-executing. In a nation of laws such as ours, we would be obligated to implement every part of it in very short order. But the world doesn’t understand why we would “stand with Somalia” in refusing to pass all those restrictive laws in one broad stroke.

Standing with Somalia, incidentally, is not at all what we are doing. Somalia has no formal government, else they would probably have ratified the treaty themselves before now. Somalia is not taking any stand, and they are not with us. As has happened so often in history, and usually to our credit rather than shame, the United States is standing alone.

But are the 192 nations of the “choir” doing what they would ask us to commit ourselves to? Certainly not. In every case, they have chosen to exempt themselves from some aspect or other of this exhaustive “agreement.” Ironically, it seems to be an agreement to which no one can quite agree.

Like in World War I trench warfare, our opponents have “sent up a balloon” to see if it will draw fire. If things remain quiet, they will proceed with their plans to push for ratification of the CRC in the U.S. Senate.

To discourage them from doing so, we need to make sure that our voices are heard with unmistakable clarity. We must let the Obama administration know that we oppose this anti-family, anti-American treaty.

Here’s what we need you all to do:

1. Call the White House comments line at 202-456-1111. Tell them you heard the administration wants to ratify the CRC, and you strongly oppose this giving away of U.S. sovereignty to the UN. Also keep in mind that this treaty gives the government jurisdiction to override any decision made by any parent if the government thinks that a better decision can be made—even if there is no proof of any harm.

2. Call Ambassador Susan Rice’s office at the United Nations. Tell her that you want her to represent the United States to the world rather than trying to get the United States to go along with international law initiated by the UN. The US Mission at the United Nations can be reached at 212-415-4000 (press 6 to leave your message). This number has been disconnected through our efforts. You can also contact the Public Diplomacy Office at 212-415-4050. We are no longer urging calls to the U.S. office at the United Nations.

3. Contact your Senators and urge them to oppose ratification of this treaty. (Find your Senators’ contact information by typing your zip code into the box here.) Ask them also to defeat it once and for all by cosponsoring SJRes 16 – the Parental Rights Amendment.

Take action friends and lets see the bill get amended before we lose the right altogether.

Communication
However one of the important things to remember is that Social Media is all about communication. People are interested in what you are doing and planning just as much as what you are selling. Provide interesting content that keeps people informed, updated as well as providing opportunity for followers to spread the news globally from their social platforms.

Give content away
The easier that your content is found the easier it will be distributed by your followers! One way to provide easy to follow media is on youtube and any other media sites where you can provide video updates. One advantage of youtube is that they already provide the source code for others to embed your video on to blogs, other sites, im’s etc. Another aspect of distribution is making it free! You want to let people come and take the code to embed it in their site – we want people to hear and see what you are doing. Last year David Meerman Scott new book World Wide Rave spoke about the importance of being able to freely give away information, white paper, video for the purpose of letting your social media go global.
This year on March 30th 2009 Adam Wallace with David Meerman Scott was part of the opening bell ceremony at the Nasdaq. It is the first ever “Tweet-Up” to open the stock market with 30 guests tweeting the opening.

The next Generation
Today’s youth are already into digital media, gaming, video, iPhone and Blackberry apps, they look for the usual coffee houses know where all the local free areas are beside the usual Panera Bread stores! They are intense uses of the internet from IM, blogs and twitter to making video replies to youtube videos. This is the next audience.

But wait lets stop and examine the logic here!
Has the value of the widget or our product changed, No. But we are concerned that the perception we get from the client has.

Basically people buy things for three reasons. They “need” them regularly, like food. We all go to the supermarket still. Or we buy things because we “want” something, the latest phone, or plasma screen, or car? Thirdly we are “sold” a product by sales-people.

So going back to our value principle what can we do to change the customers perceived idea of the value of what we are selling.

Instead of reducing the price of our product – why not increase the Value of the product. If we are reacting to people because we think they only care about cost, we are missing a very big opportunity to show the client that the value of our product is greater than the competitions and therefore we can justify being slightly higher priced.

By increasing the quality and even the quantity of the product, the customer feels that they are getting a better deal from you (getting more stuff for their money) than from another vender who has reduced just his price.

A vender reducing the price in the down time now has to increase the price for the same widget when the economy changes. You maintained the status quo. Your prices didn’t change but your perceived value did.

As an example; recently we were working on a project for a client and followed the logic above. In adding perceived value we offered to actually do more for the client – providing greater service but for the same cost.

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Sharing the latest trends and styles not only of indoor and outdoor decor and designs, but also different strategies and plans for the future of the event industry. plus someone is bound to be talking about twitter and twittering the conference so everyone else will hear about the new trends too!

make a date in you calendar now for June 11th in Los Angeles and click on bizbashlaexpo for further details and registration.

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When I wrote Permission Marketing, people thought I was some sort of crackpot (some people still do, fortunately). One author wrote that I was “delusional” and skeptical marketers were sort of amazed that the idea caught on. The Direct Marketing Association viewed the very concept as a threat to their future.

The best ideas are like that. The book published on May 6, 1999, which feels like six lifetimes ago.

Ten years later, ethical email marketing is a billion dollar industry. Many companies have been built on the foundation of this simple idea, and some of them are quite profitable. Daily Candy sold to Comcast for more than $120 million and it is nothing but a permission marketing engine. More important, I think, the attitude of anticipated, personal and relevant messaging is changing the way organizations come to market.

A  search on the term shows a bazillion matches, though I wish spammers would quit using the term to pretend that they are actually doing something worthwhile. It delights me to see my neologism enter the language, used by people who didn’t even know that it came from a book that’s only ten years old.

The biggest impact of Permission Marketing isn’t that there is less spam. In fact, there’s more, because it’s so cheap. No, the biggest measurable impact is the growth of truly opt in marketing, from close to zero to a number big enough that we’ve all seen it and are part of it. Not just email lists, of course, but RSS feeds and yes, Google AdWords.

Some lessons about accidental success:

   1. Fred Hills, the editor who worked with me at Simon & Schuster, had worked on books by Nabokov and others. The fact that he didn’t do a lot of business books gave me the freedom to write the book I wanted to write. Thankfully, he largely left me alone to make my own mistakes.

   2. Because I got a small advance and wasn’t a key book on their list, I had a lot of freedom. They let me art direct the cover, which ended up being a big win for the book and for my brand.

   3. Brian Smale, who took the cover photo, was one of the new breed of magazine photographers who worked hard not to take boring photos. In those days, that was a revolutionary idea.

   4. This was the first book where I started my tradition of using the ideas in the book to market the book. In this case, a simple permission offer: if you visit permission.com, I’ll send you the first four chapters of the book for free. And you’ll never get another note from me as a result. The only reason my publisher approved this idea is that they believed it would never work. Ten years later, I have no idea how many millions of people have written to that address, but it’s a lot. (Yes, it still works).

   5. I didn’t have a grand organized promotional plan. I didn’t orchestrate a movement. I just wrote a book and talked about it and tried to take my own advice.

There’s a lot of updating that the book could use, because when I wrote it there was no Google, Facebook, Twitter, universal email access, widespread high bandwidth connectivity, browsers that rarely crashed or iPhones. But I’m going to let it stand as is, because keeping it up to date is a never ending task. I hope the general concepts stand the test of time. The biggest thing I’d change is the emphasis on games and prizes over promises and connection and information. I think the latter end up scaling better and are more universal and reliable.

Short version: Don’t be selfish. You’re not in charge. Make promises and keep them. It’s like dating. It’s an asset, it’s expensive and it’s worth it.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/04/06/obama-us-not-a-christian_n_183772.html

At a press conference in Turkey, President Obama casually rebuked the old chestnut that the United States is a Judeo-Christian nation.

“One of the great strengths of the United States,” the President said, “is … we have a very large Christian population — we do not consider ourselves a Christian nation or a Jewish nation or a Muslim nation. We consider ourselves a nation of citizens who are bound by ideals and a set of values.”

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