Venice Mayor, Giorgio Orsoni, decided the billboard was too risqué for the city and elected a much more conservative photo of Ms Moore fully clothed and modeling Bulgari jewelry.

Is it? To you? Does this billboard exude elegance or does it expose too much sexiness?

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5 Ways to Brand Your Business Online, For Starters
Your organization’s brand shines in your community. Your business is well-established in the Yellow Pages. Now what? Are the people still there?

Well, yes and no. The sharp increase in numbers of online shoppers over the past few years is very well documented. So your business’s brand is just as, if not more, important online as it is out in the community.

Where do you start? What tools are brand managers keeping at their fingertips? Here is a solid list to get you started.

1. Blogging. Our thoughts on blogging are well documented.
2. Video Marketing & Photo Marketing. Visual marketing, exposure, and branding can be the most influential strategy in your toolkit.
3. Microblogging. Twitter and FriendFeed, to be exact.
4. Email Newsletters. There will always be consumers that prefer email.
5. Social Networks. Facebook. Period. Enough said.

Read the full article here >>>

Search Alliance spells out some of the specifics:

How Yahoo! and Microsoft will work together:

• Search ad inventory from Yahoo!, Microsoft and their respective partners will be combined into a new unified search marketplace.
• Microsoft will acquire an exclusive 10-year license to certain Yahoo! search technologies.
• Microsoft will manage the technology platforms that deliver the algorithmic (powered by Bing) and paid (powered by adCenter) search results.
• Full implementation of the terms of the Search Alliance is expected to occur within 24 months following regulatory clearance.
• Yahoo!’s Sales team will exclusively support high volume advertisers, SEO and SEM agencies, and resellers and their clients, and Microsoft will support self-service advertisers. In addition, Microsoft adCenter will be the platform for all search campaigns.

How Yahoo! and Microsoft will compete:

• The Yahoo! and Microsoft Search Alliance does not include each company’s display advertising, web properties and products, email, instant messaging, or any other aspect of the companies’ businesses.
• Each company will maintain its own separate display advertising business and sales force.
• Yahoo! and Microsoft will innovate their own consumer search experiences to compete for search users and search queries.
• Yahoo! and Microsoft will service their respective publishers, also known as affiliate search partners.
• Yahoo! will continue to syndicate its existing search affiliate partnerships.

Thanks Hubspot for the reminder this morning.

Microsoft Corp. plans to spend almost $500 million to create a generation data center in Mecklenburg County, making it the largest private investment in Southern Virginia.

The center, which will be Microsoft’s most advanced data center, will create 50 new jobs. Virginia competed against North Carolina and Texas for the project.

“The company’s search process was long and competitive, and a great team of players came together to show Microsoft that Mecklenburg County was the right fit for its new version of a state-of-the-art data center,” Gov. Bob McDonnell said in a statement.

McDonnell approved a $2.1 million grant from the Governor’s Opportunity Fund to help Mecklenburg with the project. The Virginia Tobacco Indemnification and Community Revitalization Commission approved $4.8 million in incentives.

The Mid-Atlantic Broadband Cooperative’s open-access fiber optic network was a key reason Microsoft selected Southern Virginia. MBC will provide fiber routes for connectivity to major interconnection points in the Eastern U.S. Microsoft also chose Virginia for the low-cost electricity from Virginia Dominion Power.

Creative brainstorming sessions around new advertising campaigns with the marketing team at The Dragas Companies fits that bill!

You can also visit John Manus and his team at their Adver-tees location on Canal Street in Chesapeake. Get directions here, bestdealonshirts.com/contact.htm.