The new online “market me” tool VisualCV is addicting. I keep adding and tweaking. It’s just fantastic. I’ve added the VisualCV badge at the top of my blog sidebar (and copied it below for easy clicking). Take a look. Give me feedback. Start one of your own!

Guy wrote a post pointing to other examples. See here.

Use it as your online resume, a marketing tool for your consulting service, an announcement for an event, or well, anything you can think of.

Popularity: 100% [?]

The WSJ ran a story today on LoudounExtra.com, a local news website owned by The Washington Post Company covering Loudoun County, Virginia and its 270,000 residents. The site offers hyper-local news, events, and commentary and employs a great deal of new media (blogs, feeds, video, etc.). In fact, it’s exactly what you would expect to be a huge success, but apparently traffic has been abysmal. Russell Adam’s story attempts to dissect the problems.

However, the problem isn’t the people who built the site, or their knowledge of the community. The problem is simple. You can’t just build a site and hope people come. Sure that works sometimes, but that can’t be your marketing plan. LoudonExtra.com is a great site and I think a few marketing ideas might get it going.

1. Do a better job pulling people at real-world events to the site and people on the site to real-world events. You have to be in the community creating buzz, handing out t-shirts (think more like a radio station).

2. Turn your staff writers into personalities. Make sure they blog, quickly return comments from readers, and make themselves visible at local events (think Anderson Cooper/CNN). And post prominent pictures of them on the site. And while you’re at it, do the same thing for local bloggers.

3. Build a little more community into the site so that readers can talk to each other and build databases of information that are valuable to everyone else (comments on local services, local politics, fun for kids). Then run a promotion targeted solely to getting lots of people registered, reading the site, and commenting. American Airlines is currently running a Beijing promotion designed to create community. You can enter to win a free trip if you register on their site and post a travel tip (and every post is an additional contest entry). Good idea.

4. Set up a loyalty program where visitors can earn points towards small gifts (tickets to shows, free restaurant meals, etc.) if they bring others to the site, comment on blogs, or post tips. Make it a little more fun and interactive on the site.

5. Add more video and more pictures. Let people upload their videos and pictures of local events. Let them vote about what they think is the most important or interesting news or pictures.

6. Make it about the PEOPLE not just the events. Hyper-local actually means hyper-personal. Everyone in the community wants to see their name, picture, event or company highlighted. Make it so that people come to the site just to see if they made it in the news because they attended the event or blogged about it or sent in a video clip!

Popularity: 95% [?]

I’ve always considered myself pragmatic, logical, and clearly even-keeled. Then, Ori Brafman sent me his (and brother Rom’s) book Sway: The Irresistible Pull of Irrational Behavior. It’s a magnetic read and I zipped through it in 2 quick sittings.

I rather like books that make me think twice about truths I hold self-evident. And Sway certainly made me think. Did I pre-judge my employees based on what others had said about them, or their previous jobs? Do I make rash (and possibly dangerous or stupid) choices when I’m committed to a certain plan of action and feel any diversion would be a loss? I certainly look for fairness in my business and personal transactions. But is fairness the key metric? Maybe not.

The book has opened my eyes and mind to new ways of approaching my business activities and relationships and family interactions. Hopefully I will recognize in advance a moment where I might act rash or choose the wrong — irrational — path and think again about my choices.

Popularity: 80% [?]

It likely won’t surprise you that the most visited Web sites are Google, Yahoo and Microsoft (in that order). Google took the top spot for the first time last month with 141M visits supported by good viewer growth on YouTube according to comScore. Rounding out the top 10 are AOL, Fox Interactive, eBay, Wikipedia sites, Amazon, Ask, and Time Warner. The traditional media sites can’t seem to break into the top 10 (except for Fox). Media properties such as The New York Times, Viacom, CBS and Disney are in the top 30. NBC Universal and ABC are number 49 and 50.

More at Marketing Charts.

Popularity: 64% [?]

eBay’s CEO John Donahoe on the negative response from the community regarding the changes he’s making at eBay:

For example, in February sellers who viewed a recent change to eBay’s payment structure as a fee increase organized an attention-grabbing boycott of the site. In an interview after the quarterly earnings report on Wednesday, Mr. Donahoe, who officially succeeded Meg Whitman in March, said he was not fazed by the attention. “The good news is Meg prepared me well for this,” he said. “I will say at one point in the first quarter I got an e-mail from my mother that said, ‘John, eBay sellers may not love you, but your mother does.’ ” (more)

The quote gave me a chuckle and reminded me that we’re all human after all. And most of the time, the community calms down and accepts change.

Popularity: 46% [?]