In one of the more interesting campaigns to come out of Ogilvy PR's Digital Influence team yet, we (Ogilvy PR) are helping Intel to launch a stunt during the Digital Life event which will place one of the top builders from Second Life, Versu Richelieu, in a storefront window in Manhattan (on 39th and 5th) for 72 hours.  We are working with Millions of Us to pull this together. We will be creating a real time event where Versu will be building something (it's still a mystery) in the virtual world and have a live feed so people can watch her doing it, either in the virtual world or the real world.  You can view the live feed at www.nyclivewindow.com starting Thursday.  At the end of the 72 hours will be a great twist and along the way she will be collaborating with other builders (including Robbie Dingo), Second Life residents, and anyone else who decides to stop by.

Note: This post originally appeared on my blog, Influential Interactive Marketing. My bio can be viewed here.

The first time I learned about Verizon's new FiOS service, I was not online (though they have a great site), but at a festival event near where I live in Virginia.  At the event they had the typical basketball games to win a prize, balloons, and an internet connection to let people find out if the Verizon FiOS network is available in their area.  Unfortunately for me, my home is not in their range yet - but like many cable consumers I would gladly switch if I could.  With a large percentage of US consumers feeling trapped in a cable monopoly with no alternatives, anyone offering the possibility of a choice is likely to be welcomed into the community.  For a company like Verizon which has had to deal with the defection of their telephone customers who are ditching their landlines to switch to VOIP - this welcome from the community must be particularly sweet.

For years now, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) for websites has been honed into a fine art with entire companies devoting considerable effort to defining best practices and touting the value of SEO for raising a site's performance on organic search listings.  While I believe in the power of SEO, there is a new offering we have started providing to clients which we call Social Media Optimization (SMO).  The concept behind SMO is simple: implement changes to optimize a site so that it is more easily linked to, more highly visible in social media searches on custom search engines (such as Technorati), and more frequently included in relevant posts on blogs, podcasts and vlogs.  Here are 5 rules we use to help guide our thinking with conducting an SMO for a client's website: