Cameron Olthuis

All you business and website owners listen up and listen well. Avante Gardens, an Anaheim Florist, is going to school you on building loyal customers, links, and positive buzz all in one shot….

So how many of you remember my story about FTD Sucks and how they screwed me over on Valentine’s Day? If you don’t the click over and read it really quick so you can be up to speed.

So, there is this super bad-ass floral shop up in Anaheim that took notice of my post and decided they’d use my bad experience to their advantage to win over a new customer, me. Shortly after I checked into my hotel for SMX I got a knock on my door. It was a room service dude that had a bouquet of flowers for me. At first I thought maybe I had a secret admirer that wanted some lovin’ or maybe the SMX crew was just going the extra mile for their speakers. Nope, I was wrong. The following note was included in the flowers…

Dear Cameron, After reading your plight with FTD during Valentine’s Day, I just want to put in a plug for local florists. I’m looking forward to your presentation.

Wow! My heart melted. I was in love. I thought this was one of the coolest things ever and couldn’t believe someone remembered and cared about little ol’ me.

I just snapped that pic of me with the flowers. The ladies tell me that’s a super nice bouquet. Huge thank you to Avante, you effin rock and I love you.

Hope you all learned something. This would have been a great opportunity for FTD to step to the plate and make good with me… they didn’t and now they can kiss my badonkadonk. I will never order from that piece of crap company again and have told as many people as possible not to as well. They obviously don’t care about their customers. Now, on the flip-side - you all know a good florist.

I meant to post this a couple days ago when my buddy Brent broke the news. I was at SMX though and didn’t get around to it. Pretty cool stuff though that Brent was able to scoop this story. Reddit has been long overdue for an update on features and their UI. So check out the new Reddit UI and features… then make sure you tell your friends that Brent the pimp broke the news.

So I’ve been using Twitter now for a couple weeks and to be honest with you, I can’t say that it has provided any real value. Actually, that’s not totally true. I did get an intro to someone that ended up interviewing me about 5ones for a blog. Other than that though it’s been a pretty big time waste so far. Maybe I just need to stop checking it so much. I’m going to give it a couple more weeks before I make a decision to stick with it or drop it. If you’re on Twitter you can follow me, my name is @Factive. I also have one setup for 5ones.

I can see how it would provide tremendous value if you have 10,000+ followers, like Mr. Calacanis. But lets face it, I’m just not quite as popular as Jason which is evident by my 50 followers compared to his 10k+.

If you’re a Twitter user I’d love to hear why you use it and what value you find in it? Also, drop me your name and I can add you to my follow list if I’m not already.

Andy Greenberg from Forbes wrote a great article about the power of Digg. Andy was in attendance at the conference yesterday and it’s obvious from his article that he paid a great deal of attention to what was being said. I think it also goes without saying that all the presenters did a great job of getting that info through. I am fortunate enough to be one of the speakers mentioned in the article.

“Who wouldn’t want to rank fourth for a search term like ‘life insurance’?” Olthuis asked the audience of search marketers assembled at Tuesday’s Search Marketing Expo. “That’s huge.”

Congrats goes to the others who were also included: Chris Winfield, Brent Csutoras, Neil Patel, and Tamar Weinberg.

My good friends over at 97th Floor have released a new Firefox extension called Social Media for Firefox. The tool is designed to help you build up a power account (or maintain a current one) by saving you time submitting stories to the social news sites.

Don’t you hate it when you waste 5 minutes trying to submit something to Digg only to find out that it’s already been submitted? Me too. This tool will actually tell you which social media sites a URL has been submitted to when you’re on the actual URL. This way if it’s already been submitted you won’t waste time.

The tool also has a feature where you scan social news sites to find stories that haven’t been submitted to others. For example, I can scan the Reddit popular page to find stories that haven’t yet been submitted to Digg. I can then submit those stories to Digg and have a pretty decent chance of making the popular page since people on other communities have already validated the content. However, not everything that the community finds interesting on Reddit will work on Digg, and vice versa.

I was fortunate enough to test this tool and to be honest I didn’t want the guys to publicly release it. Maybe that’s just me being selfish but I had a huge advantage with having exclusive access. The tool rocks and I recommend it for anyone serious about social media marketing.

BTW - The guys at 97th Floor do really good SEO work and would highly recommend them anytime.