At the end of the day July 14th, Dennis Phillips holds onto nearly 25% of the chips in play (26,420,000) with 9 players left in the 2008 WSOP Main Event. I have been seated at the table with Dennis many times and his “extremely aggressive” play, as Andrew Feldman at ESPN refers to it, is definitely not out of character.

For the first time in WSOP history, there will be a 4 month break between the 10th player going out and the final table.  Play will resume November 9th & 10th to determine who earns the coveted WSOP Main Event bracelet and the $9,119,338 first prize.  According to the ESPN WSOP broadcast schedule, the final table action will be edited immediately and aired on ESPN November 11th at 8pm (CST).

Good luck Dennis!

A company blog is an important piece of your internet marketing strategy.  Engaging your customers in real conversations allows you to become a valuable resource that can fill a need, instead of focusing solely on the hard-sell.

Here’s a list of 29 benefits you should consider for using a blog on your business’ website:

1. Build an active community around your company & products (subscribers, comments, etc.)
2. Easily generate new content, quickly
3. Search Engine (SEO) benefits from the additional content
4. Humanize your business
5. Create more inbound links to your fresh content
6. Promote your brand
7. Direct communication to your clients & potential customers
8. Reputation Management tool allowing you to respond to any negative comments and address criticism directly
9. Inspire others to use your product/service through real stories of helping your clients succeed
10. Great public relations tool that the media can reference in their articles & reports
11. Become an industry expert & resource
12. Supports & integrates with all of your company’s marketing initiatives
13. Gives your visitors a reason to return to your site
14. Introduce clients & potential customers to your new products and/or services
15. Encourage ‘Word of mouth’ advertising in the online world
16. Network with others in your industry
17. Educate your customer about you, your company and your products / services
18. Evaluate your customers’ opinion of your company / product
19. Earn credibility by sharing your challenges & solutions
20. Increase Search Engine visibility easily by creating a wider variety of content
21. Allow your colleagues to contribute content without technical limitations
22. Blogging is fun
23. Communicate in a more casual/candid way
24. A great recruiting tool
25. A crisis management tool
26. Encourage interactivity within your organization
27. Respond quickly to current events
28. Another excuse to fill your meetings with buzzwords… “Blog”
29. Impress your neighbors

It was a sea of pink t-shirts and fanny packs marching down Market Street Saturday morning (6-21-2008). Over 66 thousand people participated in the race downtown celebrating breast cancer survivors and raising $3.3 million dollars for Susan G. Komen for the Cure. Witnessing the mass of people and tributes to loved ones hit by breast cancer was truly an inspiring experience. The race/walk was about 3 miles long beginning at 15th and Olive Street, up to N. Compton and continued down Market Street to the finish line at Market and 14th Street.

As someone with loved ones who have battled breast cancer (My Mom is 5 years cancer free!), participating in the Race for the Cure imparts a sense of togetherness with so many that have helped friends and family fight breast cancer. For those brave women currently in the battle, I only wish that the Race for the Cure inspires a little hope along their way to being cancer free.

It is estimated that 182,460 women will be diagnosed with breast cancer in 2008.

Visit the Susan G. Komen Race for the Cure St. Louis

As of June 10th, St. Louis’ Street view on Google Maps is live.  It provides a panoramic drive-by view of a large portion of metro St. Louis on both sides of the river.  From clues around town and comments of others, the photos seem to have been captured from late July to early October of 2007.

Here’s the Tower29 office (before it was our office):

View Larger Map

2323 Kazakhs have downloaded the latest release of Mozilla Firefox 3, as of the 21st hour of “Download Day 2008“.

The Firefox team set out on a mission to set a Guinness World Record for the most software downloads in a 24 hour period.  At the time of this writing, they have reported more than 7.22 million downloads worldwide.

If you are still using Internet Explorer, I’m sorry.  I’d highly recommend checking into Firefox, a free, open-source, standards-based web browser that makes life easier for web developers by following the rules.

Congratulations to Amy Fenster Brown, Circulation Manager at Where Magazine (also located in Ludwig Lofts), for winning our St. Louis Cardinals ticket giveaway.

Thank you to everyone who stopped by our office during the Ludwig Lofts Grand Opening ceremony and participated in the drawing.

WELCOME to TOWER29

We’re propping open our doors to welcome all of our friends and neighbors at the LoftWorks Grand Opening event. Press 3W, come on in and snag yourself a bag of goodies. Enjoy some snacks and beverages while you’re here. Watch for the occasional NERF dart.

1006 Olive Street in Downtown St. Louis

Join us for the Grand Opening of the Ludwig Lofts. Mayor Francis Slay and the Downtown St. Louis Partnership cordially invite you to join Craig Heller and LoftWorks as they celebrate the Grand Opening of the Ludwig Lofts. The event will feature Landmarks Association of Saint Louis in the 2008 Preservation Week kick-off. Originally built in 1905 for a music company, this seven-story building has been home to the Ludwig Aeolian piano store for 66 years, from 1920 to 1986.

New commercial spaces and residential display will be open during the Grand Opening event. Commercial tenants include Simply Elegant Bridal, SUDA Architects & Associates, Signature Studio Creative Photography, Meyer Financial Group, Tower29 Marketing Group, Where Magazine – St. Louis, Ebersoldt + Underwood Architecture and Saint Louis Bride Magazine.

If you declare your website complete when the design and content is approved and published, you are wasting an opportunity to grow your business.  A website is only one piece of the broader internet marketing strategy that successful companies like Papa John’s understand.

“It took us seven years to reach our first billion in online sales, and at our current pace and growth rate it will take us less than three years to hit our next billion” — Jim Ensign, VP of Marketing at Papa John’s.

http://www.cnn.com/2008/TECH/biztech/05/08/papa.johns.ap/

The Pizza industry is a great example of a business model that may never have felt the pains of ignoring online ordering.  Their business would have continued as it had pre-2001 — taking phone orders and profiting.  Instead, they took the leap; taking online orders, purchasing hardware for all their locations and dealing with all the unknowns that this system must have introduced.  In 2007, Papa John’s reportedly received $400 million in pizza orders via their online ordering system.

Their business model wasn’t broken, they simply chose to use their website to grow their business, improve customer loyalty and make more money.

Does this situation sound like your website?

We recently redesigned our website and it’s still not bringing in any new business. What should we do?

Having a well designed website to promote your business online is not the finish-line, it just gets your business in the race. Set some meaningful goals and put together a plan of action to reach them.

Your Internet marketing strategy should at a minimum include plans for the following :

• Generating traffic to your new website
• Tracking what visitors actually do on your site
• Fixing the leaks in your site’s sales pitch (from analyzing your visitors’ actions & intent)
• Building customer loyalty & giving visitors a reason to be a return customer
• Supporting website inquiries, orders, content updates, etc.

Take your web presence seriously. Just having a website without a game plan means missing out on the potential revenue that dominating others in your industry could bring.