If you own a site or business and you think that branding is your logo, business cards and letter head alone then you really need this book.

Branding is about creating a memorable product that does well in a world full of interruptions. This book provides 2 separate sections. One section with 22 laws of real world branding and the other section for Internet branding with it’s own 11 laws.

The book is very easy to read with 235 pages and chalked full of examples, stories and stats.

The 22 laws are very clear and easy to follow. As an exercise we went over a few of the book suggestions here on our blog…

The Law of the Word
The Law of Credentials

These are just 2 of the 22 laws and found the entire book a great way to fully understand what branding is. The online section I found to be dated information and to basic. I do not blame the writer for that though as the Internet changes on a daily basis and writing anything about the Internet almost needs to be a living document like a wiki.

You can pick up a copy of the book at Amazon.

I have previously posted that one of the key to success is to have a Business Plan. If you do not have one then start building one today. An online tool I have recently found for writing a business plan is PlanHQ.

PlanHQ walks you through creating a powerful business plan for your business. There are tons of free business plan tools out there for you to choose from but PlanHQ has some very unique features that other business plan builders lack.

One of the features a business will find useful is that you can have multiple users who you can attach to a business plan. This means that you can write a business plan and build actionable items into it. The actionable items can be assigned to members or employees who can then login and update their status on that actionable item. Imagine a unified company all working towards a focused business goal.  I know you would think aren’t all businesses built to work that way? Sadly enough they aren’t. Most businesses owners fail to create a business plan and if they do they fail to share it with everyone in the company.

Another feature that separates PlanHQ from others is the built in nag feature. Most business owners that create a business plan make it and then don’t look at it until they need to update it the next year. What PlanHQ does is sends out notices to the team based on actionable items to find out what the status of that item is. This means that you are constantly reminded what step needs to achieve your goals.

I also like the fact that PlanHQ are bloggers. To test out PlanHQ they have a free 30 day trial that you can sign-up for.

If you have ever been in business I am sure you know if your service, product or brand is either great or average. A lot of businesses try to make their business average and then struggle to keep sales at a stagnant level.

The Dip written by Seth Godin covers this exact topic. Knowing when to stick with your business or when to get out.

The book itself is very easy to read and in traditional Godin fashion is chalked full of useful information.

I feel BlueFur is definitely a great business with an excellent brand, how do I know? Our sales and growth reflect that.

One of the other things I like about Godin and his books is that he has a blog setup dedicated to the topic of his books. The Dip has it’s own blog that you can subscribe to.

Now if I could only convince Seth to allow comments.

Sorry I did not get to post my review of Massive 2007 yesterday. Things were a little busy for me.

So this year I was not as impressed with Massive as I have been in the past.  It felt like Massive picked up right where Comdex left off.  As a potential exhibitor for 2008, I’m not sure if the venue is worth the $1k+ it costs to attend the show.

The event itself was full. There were countless rows of exhibitors giving away lots and lots of pens. There was only a single booth that really engaged you as a user and drew you in and that was the Yahoo booth.  They had a section designated as a Think Tank round table. The only problem was, there was no structure nor experts to lead the round table discussions.

For these shows to be successful and be a break down of business networking and encourage techs to get to know each other, then it needs to add an element of excitment or some sort of enticing event that would appeal to techs.

Did you go? If so what did you think?

I have recently heard some great things about the brain child site of Seth Godin called Squidoo. If you have not seen it, I do suggest you spend a bit of time there reading some of the lenses.

Squidoo is a social network (yes another one) that is built around the idea of people sharing and exchanging their ideas on business and various other topics. It is a good tool if you are just starting out your business as a visitor.

After going through though, I ask myself why would anyone want to create an account and produce lenses. There is no way to monetize it for your time and there is no link love for you to post. So you are posting content for them so they can make money from your content.

So with that in mind I ask myself why would anyone want to contribute to Squidoo? If you are really helpful and like to provide advice why not start a blog? If you have used Squidoo let me know if I am missing something here.

I am working on a project to make our regular BlueFur.com site into an RSS feed. That way you can subscribe to it and any time something changes you can be notified. This is also a test to see how the search engines will like RSS for a non-blog site.

The first tool I tested which was free is XML:Wrench. The tool looks like most code editors when you open it. You can use it as a code editor. I downloaded this for main reason to convert pages from HTML/PHP to XML. After opening a page I got stuck. The option to convert was greyed out and no documentation as to why.

I would not recommend this tool. I am still seeking for a scrapper that will allow me to convert our site into an RSS feed. If you know of any good tools post it the comments.