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For all the attention New Orleans has received, from us and other media, the Katrina 5th anniversary coverage (just about all of it) was short on the Mississippi story of recovery. The storm made landfall there. What we saw during our various trips to Biloxi and Waveland was breathtaking—absolutely horrifying. New Orleans received most of the coverage for a lot of reasons: its size and standing as an American city, the engineering failure following the storm, the depth of the human suffering at the hands of their government, and the sheer mass of humanity abandoned and needing rescue.

Kathleen Koch, a correspondent for CNN, has written a book about the loss of her family home in Bay St. Louis, Mississippi. She was kind enough to send me a copy—it’s a compelling story, which I could not follow on the air at the time because we were so busy with our own coverage. In an interview today, Kathleen said friends of hers in Mississippi were angry that President Obama didn't stop in their state as part of the 5th anniversary remembrance. Her request of the national media is this: "Give us an 'atta-boy'—give us some credit for what we have done." The folks in Mississippi who have battled back from this storm deserve credit indeed, along with our continued attention.

It’s been a nasty day of beach erosion along my beloved New Jersey Shore. Other folks are having a tough time in what is left of Earl. We'll cover it tonight. We hope you will join us.

What we're following:

- Hurricane Earl swipes Carolina coast and eyes Northeast

- Private employers add more jobs than expected in August

- BP says drilling limits would imperil spill payouts

And did you see...

- Employers pass on more of health care costs to workers

- Snakes on a Plane! Man busted with 95 boas in his luggage

- Would you like fries with that? Burger King sold in a whopper of a deal

Check out Nightly's most popular video on our website

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Publishing content online is simple; maybe too simple. When you click publish, share or tweet, do you instantly forget about the information you just shared? In a social media culture where the hunt for the next big trend constantly exists, putting aside published content to move on to the next topic is a natural reaction. This mode of thinking makes all of us online publishers often forget one very important thing: Online content is forever.

A notebook can get thrown in the trash, and a digital document can sit in a crowded folder and be ignored forever. Blog posts, tweets, ebooks, Facebook updates, and all other content published online, however, doesn’t go away. It continuously reappears in search results across different sites. Even if you delete content that was previously published online, odds are that it is still cached somewhere on the web or has been copied by someone and placed on another site. While this may seem a little scary to some, it is also one of the key factors that has helped level the marketing playing field.

Why Forever Is Great for Marketers

With traditional marketing like direct mail and print ads, your content was disposable. Once the next trade magazine issue came out, your message was in the trash. Because of this, the only way to keep a constant flow of messages in the marketplace was to keep spending money. This gave the power to large companies with bigger budgets. In online marketing, it is much less about marketing budgets or company size; the main success factor has become agility. In online marketing, you have to be able to create content your customers want and publish it quickly.

This gives the leverage to companies that are agile. If your business takes a month to approve a tweet, then a smaller startup can easily compete in the world of online marketing due to their ability to create content and engage with customers more frequently. Because content is forever, the effect of being able to create high-quality content regularly quickly snowballs and creates more and more leverage as each month ticks by.

3 Steps for Leveraging Forever

When you are a marketer, forever is your friend. The fact that content is forever helps you build a vault of online content that new and existing competitors won’t be able to overcome. Whether you are a marketer who is new to online marketing or a veteran who is looking to squeeze out every ounce of your marketing investment, then consider these three pieces of advice.

1. Conduct a Hard Drive Audit - Set aside some time and look at the documents, videos, and other types of content that are filling up your hard drive or that might be hiding in a marketing folder on a server somewhere. As you are looking through content, think about which items could be posted online that could help you target keywords, generate search traffic, or help answer prospect and customer questions. Odds are, you have at least a few items that can help with this but have never made their way onto the web. Work to add them to your blog or corporate website.

2. Make PDFs Friendly - Marketing departments are PDF-creating machines. The problem is, while PDFs provide some search engine opportunity value, the same content presented in a different way would have a much stronger, long-term benefit. Use content that is in PDF form when possible and move it to an HTML page where you can have control over the page title, headers, and other factors that can improve on-page SEO. You don’t need to do this with all PDFs. For example, if you have a PDF download behind a landing page for lead generation, that is fine. However, if you have a PDF of a product manual, that content would work much harder for your marketing team if it was no longer in PDF form.

3. Promote Past Content - Content that is old to you isn’t necessarily old to a prospect just learning about your company for the first time. We have explained some best practices for promoting evergreen content in the past, but it is worth revisiting the issue. If you write 50 blog articles a year, it is likely that many of them aren't time-sensitive. Take this evergreen content and reintroduce it to social media subscribers who may have only begun following you in the months following the publication date of that blog post. Promoting existing content is a great way to improve thought leadership and leader generation without dedicating the time needed to write a new article.

How do you leverage forever?

Photo Credit: TheFriendlyFiend

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Online marketing is unique for each business. For large businesses that rely on channel partners to sell and distribute products, the online marketing process can be a challenge. With many channel partners across multiple locations, how can a business make sure that partners have the leads they need to help grow the business?

In a recent conversation with a channel marketing manager I was asked, “What can I do now to get my partners and resellers found?” As with many channel marketing managers, their time is very constrained, but the need to do more lead generation for their resellers is ever present. Additionally, they often talk about how their resellers do a great job once someone is introduced to them, but often their own websites are not helping them bring in new leads. After asking me that question, she said, “I wish I could just give them a few tips to get them started in Inbound Marketing and getting website traction”

5 Tips For Channel Partner Lead Generation

1. Identify Longtail Keywords -  Find 10 keywords that are in the longtail for your services or products and provide them to your resellers and partners to use.  Keywords need to be used in a consistent way on each webpage in the page title, the URL, the page headers and text. By doing the background research and providing a starting point, your partners or resellers can quickly optimize their pages.

2. Provide Partners with Lead Generation Offers -  Create an offer such as a ebook or webinar that can be downloaded or accessed from each partner’s website. Maybe your company provides security software and you have a tool that does a quick, free sweep of their network to test for vulnerability. Another option would be to offer a free assessment that will help prospect better understand which product offering best fits their needs. By creating these downloads, you are giving your reseller network an offer they can give visitors that come to their websites.

3. Create a Landing Page Template - Create a standard landing page that every reseller can put on their main page of their website to both capture lead data, and provide an offer. 70% of visitors to a website are in the “early stage” of buying. They are not ready to purchase, but are starting to investigate. Instead of having them visit your site and then “drive on”, give them an offer in exchange for collecting some of their information, even if it is just an email address. This will allow you to stay in touch with them via email offers or turn over the lead to your sales team for qualification and follow up.

4.  Develop An Email Template and Campaign - Email is an important part of the lead generation mix. Create a great email marketing campaign with an offer that each partner can send to new leads. Maybe it is a free assessment of a website, or an opportunity to attend a free consulting session. This campaign is to help move leads further down the funnel and to help increase a partners lead-to-customer percentages. Often channel managers have the ability to give marketing funds for offers, so why not provide them the email message to use as well.

5. Share Partner Successes -   If one of your partners is finding an offer is converting leads well or a free assessment is leading to more business in the door, let the network know! Inbound marketing may be new, but closing a deal is well understood and anything that drives more business to one partner will help the overall brand and network as well. Share the success!

What have you done to help improve inbound marketing for your channel partners?

Photo Credit: brackenb

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What we're following:

- Evacuation orders grow as Hurricane Earl strengthens

- Live Hurricane Tracker

- President Obama tries to rekindle Mideast peace talks

- Police clear the Discovery building after hostage standoff

And did you see...

- Brawl breaks out at a Washington Nationals/Florida Marlins game

- Gulf well cap set to be removed today

- Trapped miners in Chile receive first hot meal in 26 days

Check out Nightly's most popular video on our website

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

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Here at HubSpot, we get a lot of questions around website redesigns. When should they be done, how should they be done and what mistakes not to make. In this three part series, we’ll examine some of the common pitfalls you might fall into and ways to avoid them.

One thing that all of our partners agreed upon, is that before embarking on any redesigns, companies should truly understand their goals and their customers. Without these necessary prep steps, you’ll wind up designing a website in a vacuum and wasting money. Here are just a few of the key questions that you should ask yourself before you change one pixel:

What Are Your Goals?

We also heard from HubSpot Partner Kelly Ward, of Digital K, who believes that “it’s important to take a top-level view of the website. [Figure out] what are you trying to ACHIEVE with your website? Are you trying to attract new customers? Service existing customers? Portray a new image for your company?”

What Are You Currently Doing Right?

HubSpot partner Keith Moehring of PR 20/20 echoes just these sentiments. He says that “Prior to doing any type of redesign … a company needs to look at what keywords are driving traffic and to which pages, and what pages have incoming links...Another area that needs to be evaluated thoroughly is who is coming to the site and what is drawing them in.”

Are You Doing This For the Right Reasons?

Top Line Results’ Todd Hockenberry feels that sometimes website redesigns happen for the wrong reasons. First, there’s the “redesign as part of new management.” He writes “Not having a clear, strategic reason why they are redesigning is one I see regularly. Companies still look internally for that answer way too often - new manager, new logo, re-organization, don't like the design.”

Todd also thinks that sometimes, companies build a site as a means of fixing all their business issues, without looking deeper at their true problems. He says, “We deal with a lot of small to medium sized manufacturers and there are many who think a new website will be a field of dreams.”

So, What are the “Right” Answers?

This last question is actually a trick question. There is no one right answer to these questions; every company has different motivations and goals with a redesign. However, take the time before starting to make sure that you’re investing your time and money wisely. To ensure that you are being true to your company’s needs & goals, really analyze if a redesign is necessary and what you want to accomplish.

Photo Credit: zhurnaly

Free Webinar: Website Redesign for 2010

Learn how to redesign your website with an internet marketing strategy in mind with Mike Volpe, HubSpot's VP of Marketing. Download the Webinar Nowand learn how to turn your website into an internet marketing machine.

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Hurricane Earl is just shy of the strength of Hurricane Katrina at the moment it came on shore. And here is the path prognosis to watch carefully: a series of events may result in the storm taking an "S" curve back toward New England (likely on Saturday) after brushing -- or hitting the East coast. This will be very close to a combined metropolitan population of 30 million, give or take -- and this is a storm to take seriously and watch very closely. That's exactly what we're doing.

We hope you can join us tonight.

 

Stephanie Himango writes: Last autumn, members of the Iowa Army National Guard received word that the year 2010 would bring a large-scale deployment to Afghanistan.

As seasons changed from winter to spring to summer, soldiers of the 2nd Brigade Combat Team, 34th Infantry Division (2/34 BCT) and their families prepared for deployment -- the largest for the state since World War II. "It's almost painful, knowing so far in advance," said Lieutenant William Speicher, A Troop, 1-113th Cavalry, who is deploying for the fourth time. "I'd rather know a week before we go."

But for the married father of two, he agrees that the long notice does have its advantages. "For the families, the longer notice is better. It gives them more time to prepare and get things in order for us to leave," he said.

And along with families, Iowa community members and employers have also geared up for one year of life without some of their citizens and employees. Together, they plan to help families whose soldiers are away by lending a hand. That is manifest in many forms -- from mowing the lawn, to transporting children to and from after-school activities, to shoveling the driveway.

Sergeant Major Matt Strasser knows the value of an employer who cares. This will be his third time to deploy, and all the while he has worked at Augustine and Sons Farm in rural Iowa. Matt and his wife Jessica have two young boys, and the help the Augustine's are able to provide is something the Strasser's appreciate. But for employer Dan Augustine, he says it's the least he can do. "He's actually making a sacrifice to serve his country," said Augustine. "How that affects us is almost irrelevant to how it affects his family."

The 2/34 BCT is comprised of about 2,800 soldiers from Iowa, 350 from Nebraska, and about 100 from other states. While sendoff ceremonies for the soldiers took place last month in Iowa, they are still on U.S. soil, currently training at Camp Shelby in Mississippi until they leave for the National Training Center in California later this month. By Thanksgiving, all of the soldiers in the brigade will be in Afghanistan for their year-long deployment.

Regular readers of this blog know that I’m a long-time admirer of Seth Godin.  He’s one of those “big thinkers” that has the added talent of being able to articulate high-level concepts in an immensely approachable way.  That’s a very rare, and dare I say remarkable intersection of abilities.

The following is a list of short, pithy insights that I’ve been collecting from Seth’s Blog over the past few months.  They were not all written specifically for startups, but I found them to be particularly relevant for entrepreneurs.  I, like many, think Seth's ideas deserve to be spread.

Enjoy.

If you find any of these particularly resonant, there’s a convenient link to tweet it. 

23 Tweetable Startup Insights From Seth Godin

1) Reliance on the tried and true can backfire. [tweet]

2) Sell the problem. No business buys a solution for a problem they don't have. [tweet]

3) Every activity worth doing has a learning curve. [tweet]

4) As the world gets faster, the glacial changes of years and decades are more important, not less. [tweet]

5) Cultural shifts create long terms evolutionary changes. [tweet]

6) Being 1st helps in the short run. Being a little more right pays off in the long run. Last is the worst. [tweet]

7) Build in virality. [tweet]

8) Subscriptions beat one-off sales. [tweet]

9) Treat different customers differently. [tweet]

10) Generate joy. Don't just satisfy a need for a commodity. [tweet]

11) Plan on remarkable experiences, not remarkable ads. [tweet]

12) Don't build a fortress of secrets, bet on open. [tweet]

13) You can get even more done if you give away credit, relentlessly [tweet]

14) Create scarcity but act with abundance. [tweet]

15) Competition validates you. It creates a category. It permits the sale to be this or that, not yes or no. [tweet]

16) There are lots of good reasons to abandon a project. Having a little competition is not one of them. [tweet]

17) It's not who can benefit from what you sell. It's about choosing the customers you'd like to have. [tweet]

18) The customers you fire and those you pay attention to all send signals to the rest of the group. [tweet]

19) 100 people doing something at the same time has far more power than 300 people doing it over time. [tweet]

20) Are you chasing or being chased? Are you leading or following? Are you fleeing or climbing? [tweet]

21) Get it right for ten people before you rush around scaling up to a thousand. [tweet]

22) Highlighting what's working helps you make that happen more often. [tweet]

23) Perfect is overrated. Perfect doesn't scale, either. [tweet]

Which is your favorite?  Any that I missed that you have in your secret stash?

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Looking for other startup fanatics?  Request access to the OnStartups LinkedIn Group.  130,000+ members and growing daily.

Oh, and by the way, you should follow me on twitter: @dharmesh.

The four most important social media channels to marketers are Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and YouTube (See the 2010 State of Inbound Marketing for data). But which one(s) are the most active for your industry? HubSpot recently analyzed 33 industries to find out. An overview of data from our new ebook, the Online Marketing Opportunity Report is displayed below:

So what does this data mean for your business? To begin with, low activity doesn’t necessarily equate to low opportunity; it may just mean that you need to adjust your strategy for that channel.

HubSpot put together a comprehensive guide to applying this type of data to your business, along with a more detailed analysis of all 33 industries. Download our free eBook to read more.

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