The first version was ugly, and consequently never added to the WordPress Plugin Repository. Aesthetics were not the only issue: you could only run one instant of it per page, there were two different places where settings had to be configured, did I mention it was ugly?

The rotator comes with three transitions: Linear, Loop, and Fade. Linear will scroll the images horizontally across it’s container. Once a linear rotator has reached the end of the images, it will bounce back and scroll the opposite way. Loop rotators are circular: when the last image is reached, the first image in the list will appear next, and the loop starts over. Fade will fade each image in and each image out.

These transitions weren’t our biggest issue though. It was the settings. That was the ugly part, but this time we made something elegant.

To the right you see the Image Rotator Widget’s setting pane. We knew that the process of adding images to the rotator needed to be simple. A plain “+” button will invoke WordPress’ Media dialog. From there, users may chose to upload a new image, or to select a previously uploaded image from their Media Library, just like they would if they were inserting an image into a post. After the image has finished uploading or the user has selected an image, they must press the “Send to Image Rotator” button. Once all of the desired images have been uploaded, they’re really easy to manage.

Hovering over an image name will display a tooltip that contains the image. We didn’t want to clutter the widget settings, so we decided that loading all of the images into the settings container was not an option. Our decision to put the images into a tooltip preview paid off two-fold: users don’t have to wait for images to load before than can edit, reorder, etc…; and it kept our interface clean, which makes for easy sorting and deletion.

Sorting is as easy as clicking on empty space within the image list item and dragging it to the desired position. Imagine how choppy this would have been had we loaded the images(all with different proportions) straight into the settings container.

To delete an image from the widget, press the “-” button that is next to the image you want to remove. Keep in mind that you must click “Save” or none of these changes will take place.

For a more visual overview of the widget settings, we’ve made a screencast:

If you give this plugin a run, please feel free to leave any comments, bugs, or feedback in the WordPress support forums(we monitor these) or by contacting us directly.

The Image Rotator Widget can be downloaded from the WordPress plugin repository.

Marketing sets the expectations, sales affirms them and collects the commission, the client signs and is immediately let down. The problem simply rolls downhill to the account management and customer services teams. Those teams have retention as one of their key performance indicators… so when the companies leave or don’t renew, the account management and customer service teams are held accountable. Accountable for something totally outside their control.

Is it the right thing to do? I don’t think misrepresenting your product is ever the right thing to do. However, some of the companies that do it tend to grow rapidly. By growing rapidly, they are able to win market share, win investment, and reinvest to catch up to the image they’ve portrayed. When some of these companies are making tens or hundreds of millions of dollars, it’s difficult for me to say that it’s a bad tactic. It’s just something I don’t like. I don’t like companies that do it. And I don’t like recommending those companies to my clients.

We are happy to announce that we will be having Jason Falls of Social Media Explorer and Erik Deckers of Professional Blog Service on our Marketing Tech Blog Radio Show this Friday, August 19, at 3 p.m. EST. On our show, we will be talking about why more businesses don’t use social media, who should be in charge of a company’s social media efforts, and why they picked the name of No Bullshit Social Media for their new book, which will be released in mid-October.

Jason Falls is a consultant, speaker, strategist, and thinker in the world of digital marketing and social media. He is the owner of Social Media Explorer, a social media consulting service, as well as Exploring Social Media, a learning community. He works with corporate clients, developing and managing their social media and PR strategies. He is a highly sought-after speaker, traveling around the country to speak to various trade associations, conferences, and corporate groups. No Bullshit Social Media is his first book.

Erik Deckers is the co-owner and vice president of creative services of Professional Blog Service, a ghost blogging and social media agency. His company works with both small businesses and large corporations. Erik has been blogging since 1997 and he speaks widely on social media topics for personal branding, business, crisis communication, and citizen journalism. He is the co-author of Branding Yourself, and helped write Twitter Marketing for Dummies. No Bullshit Social Media is his latest book.

You can also join us in the DK New Media office on Friday for the show by registering here. We are offering 12 tickets, so get your ticket before it is too late!

As an example, I try to do this on a daily basis with the blog. When I notice that their are a lot of Facebook likes but not a lot of Twitter retweets, I’ll push it out there again. If I see a ton of reaction via Twitter and Facebook, I’ll push it to StumbleUpon. When I see the topic grow significantly, I’ll write more about that topic, perhaps schedule a Marketing Tech Radio show about it, or even plan a video.

One tactic that I’ve seen really work on the blog is the addition of a variety of marketing infographics. The site has grown between 10% and 15% over the last couple months with the additional feature. As a result, we’ve got alerts set up for them and we’re now engaging graphic designers to develop our own. The latest one on how mobile is impacting ecommerce was an idea I had after reading a whitepaper… so we didn’t even have to do the research!

Momentum is key to a lot of cross-channel marketing, so the longer your can prolong a popular strategy, the better the overall results of your campaigns. We don’t just see this online, we see it off-line as well. If a commercial resonates with the audience… like Flo, the Progressive Lady, we see a series of commercials with the Progressive Lady.

It’s not just in marketing, either. It’s a fact of life that we need to cut the bad and prolong the good. I need to cut my eating habits and learn how to prolong my exercise. In work, I need to cut clients who aren’t listening to us or getting results, and work harder on prolonging the relationship with the companies who do listen and are successful.

Back to marketing.

Many companies are so familiar and comfortable with some marketing efforts that they simply don’t cut them… even when they’re failing. I think it’s a natural mechanism by marketers who become very comfortable with the medium. Their minds are simply closed to alternatives. Email marketers lean on email, search marketers lean on search, paid advertising marketers lean on ads… it’s a vicious circle that inevitably ends up in failed campaigns and lots of lost revenue.

On the contrary, many marketers don’t pay attention to analytics and don’t even realize what’s working or what’s not. They don’t prolong any of their efforts across channels. Each campaign starts from scratch without a care in the world. This makes them unable to capitalize on the momentum they already had put in place.

Social media offers us a means of prolonging every campaign. As David Murdico I spoke about video marketing strategies on the last radio show, we spoke about how incredible it is to already have a set of fans and followers in place. As you grow your social network of fans and followers, you’re investing in the success of your next campaign and your overall marketing strategy.

In essence, that investment in a social following is prolonging your next campaign… before you ever planned it’s execution! If you have 100,000 followers in place that are listening and have provided you with permission to contact them, how would that change your next marketing campaign? I hope it’s something you’re thinking about.

As a personal and professional blogger, I have trouble pumping out a blog post every day due to my work load and other time constraints. But if you want to be successful as a blogger, whether it be personally or professionally, you have to encompass three things: timeliness, relevance. To incorporate each of these elements, it is imperative that you have a plan. Here are 3 quick tips to helping you blog more efficiently:

1. Create a content schedule.

Decide which days you want to post on your blog and keep producing content on these days. When readers know when to expect content, they will be more likely to read your posts on those days. Also, try to post at least three times during the week. It keeps your business top of mind, and it helps with SEO, marketing and brand development.

2. Create a content plan.

Most of the time, the problem is trying to figure out what you want to blog about. Look at your calendar – if you’re going to a relevant event soon, plan to write about it the next day. Having a plan of what to write about makes it easier for you to complete your blogging task for that day.

3. Timing is important.

Write about things that are timely and promote your posts in a timely manner. If you’re writing about a hot topic, make sure you share when it is most advantageous from an SEO and marketing perspective.

Taking the time to plan your blog for the next month or next week will save you time in the long run. But don’t forget to improvise when necessary!

When we’re marketing, a lot of times, we think solely about the results. I want to convert this many prospects, we want people to be aware of Product X, I want this many retweets/shares, etc. Don’t get me wrong, it is definitely important to track these things in order to know if our marketing message are working. However, I have found that when I haven’t had a specific purpose in my marketing messages, I have had the most engagement or results.

Think about it: have you written a post that was more like a rant or an opinion-based blog as opposed to “10 Steps on How to Optimize Your Blog”? What was the feedback/engagement level on that post? I am willing to bet that it was a bit more than the standard “value-add” post about inserting meta tags.

Next time you have something to say that might be more opinion-based than value-add, write it. Give your opinion. Even if people don’t agree, you can still start a meaningful conversation that people will enjoy and share.

Chris consults and speaks professionally with Fortune 100 and 500 companies like PepsiCo, General Motors, Microsoft, and more, on the future of business communications, and social software technologies. He is a New York Times bestselling co-author of Trust Agents, and a featured monthly columnist at Entrepreneur Magazine. Chris’s blog, ChrisBrogan.com, is in the Top 5 of the Advertising Age Power150. He has over 11 years experience in online community, social media, and related technologies.

Tune in on Friday for a great show!

So… time for one of my rants.

Being a blogger, speaker, or even a so-called “expert” – a subject matter expert – is easy. We get to walk around and point fingers at everyone and tell them what they’re doing wrong. It’s easy work… and work that I truly love. If you have a very good understanding of the industry, you can help a lot of companies without really digging too deep. But it’s always easy to tell folks what they’re doing wrong when you don’t actually have the responsibility to execute and accountability to get the results.

Being an employee is not easy. Being a marketer is even more challenging. While most jobs have simplified themselves over the years, we’ve added ridiculous amounts of channels and mediums to our marketers’ plates. At one time, being a marketer just meant testing an ad or two on television, the radio or in the newspaper.

Not anymore… we’ve got countless mediums in social media alone – never mind traditional and online marketing. Heck, we’ve got EIGHT methods of marketing just on a mobile phone… SMS, MMS, IVR, Email, Content, Mobile Advertising, Mobile Applications and Bluetooth.

At the same time that we’ve exponentially increased the number of mediums, the methods of monitoring and analyzing them, and the means on how to optimize and improve each… as well as getting one medium to feed the other, we’ve been reducing the resources internally that marketers have typically had in the past.

Today, I was on the phone with an international logistics company that has 4 different websites in 4 different countries and a team of 1… himself. He’s expected to continue to optimize each site regionally and grow their inbound marketing – without a budget and without a content management system that is search-engine friendly.

Subject matter experts don’t have meetings, office politics, reviews, budget constraints, technology limitations, resource shortages, layers of management, lack of training resources, and schedule restrictions to obstruct their progress with like a marketer does. The next time you decide to call a marketer lazy, take a few minutes and analyze their environment… could you achieve what they have?

I work with some companies where it requires months of planning just to make a small edit to the theme of a website… months! And it requires countless meetings and layers of uneducated managers that need to evaluate and approve the process. What some marketers are able to pull off is nothing short of a miracle nowadays given the challenges and resources.

You are focusing on your website, your finances, your employees, your customers, and your brand and hoping you can make good decisions every time.

Unfortunately, with all the directions small business owners are pulled, it can be difficult to put enough time and attention into branding. However, branding is one of the most important aspects or your business and can have a great deal to do with the first impression you give your prospective customers.

A big component of a first impression is how you answer the phone when a prospect calls your business. Many small businesses try to get by on the cheap with a less-than-professional phone system and unfortunately this can damage first impressions. Here are some things I see a lot that can be problematic.

1. Using your cell phone number as your business phone number. Even if you are a solopreneur, this is not a good idea. Everybody can tell when they are calling a cell phone, especially when it goes to voice mail and gives a standard mobile voicemail greeting. It gives an amateurish impression to callers and signals that you are a one-man shop. There is nothing wrong with being a one-man shop but drawing attention to it in this way is not ideal.

2. Answering the phone with “hello?” and nothing else. If I’m calling a business, I expect the person answering the phone to say the business name followed by a professional greeting. If I’m calling a direct line or have just been transferred, it’s fine to leave out the business name but I would expect to hear the person answer by name. It’s professional courtesy and helps set the right tone for a business conversation.

3. A “general” voice mail box. When you call a business and no one answers, do you sometimes get a “general” voice mail box and no other options? Do you trust that leaving a message will result in a response? Neither do I. First off, get a receptionist (or a good virtual receptionist service). The best case scenario is that callers will get a real person every time. If you don’t have a receptionist, at least offer an auto-attendant that will let the caller find the right person to leave a message for.

4. A line that does not accept voice mail. This is even worse than the “general” voice mail box. Occasionally when I call a business and no one answers, I will be sent to a greeting that tells me not to leave a voice mail because it will not be checked. Really? This is just plain rude. Everyone is busy and if I have to make time to call back in hopes of reaching someone, I’m likely to move on. I’ve found that medical offices are frequently guilty of this.

5. A cheap VoIP service. Voice over IP is great and has come a long way. However, it can still cause some issues in voice quality and can create a noticeable delay in two-way conversation, as well. For this reason, it’s not ideal to rely on Skype, Google Voice, or other free services for primary business lines. If you’re going to go the VoIP route, it’s better to invest in a professional VoIP solution that will give you clear audio and reliability. Few things are more frustrating than trying to close a business deal while struggling to communicate with your customer over unreliable phone lines.

It doesn’t take much effort to create a professional phone experience for your callers but it can make a big impact on the first impressions they have when calling. At SpinWeb, we’ve found that a great team of receptionists + iPhones works well for us. It pays to think about how professional your business sounds when someone calls.

However, one of the most difficult aspects of blogging can be getting ideas. Blog ideas can come from many sources, including customer interactions, current events, and industry news. However, another great way to get blog ideas is to simply use Google’s new instant results feature.

The way to use this is to start typing in keywords that are related to your industry, and then see what Google fills in for you. For example, lets say you run a food blog and you are looking for ideas. Here are some examples of searches you could do:

By simply typing “eating out” on the search box, you are presented with some long tail keyword options that could turn into blog topics. Here is another example:

By simply starting your search with “food”, you get some instant ideas that can turn into great titles. For example:

• “Food network recipes: what they don’t tell you on TV”
• “Food pyramid guidelines: an interview with three local nutrition experts”

By starting your blog title with these search terms, you are aligning your blog topic with phrases that people are actually searching on, which increases your chances of being found via a Google search.

If you get stuck and can’t come up with a topic for your next blog, head over to Google and throw some words at it that are related to your industry. You may find some great ideas that could also improve your SEO.

First they have started warning users who have not provided a mobile phone number that their Facebook security is low, and the first step to increasing their security is to provide that mobile number. This does boost security, as people tend to have only one mobile phone number, and a number can only be associated with one Facebook account. As a result, Facebook will have the the most detailed information available on every person who uses SMS messaging and web-enabled mobile phones.

The second move is a more recent change where they have removed the “suggest to friends” feature on pages, and replaced it with a “subscribe via sms” selection. This limits the ways business pages can be shared virally. No longer can a brand suggest to their fans that they share the page with their friends to build audience. As a result, more brands are pushed toward other forms of Facebook marketing like advertising, which typically has an abysmal click-through rate unless you offer something appealing for every click.

This change also encourages interest in alternative ways to reach the massive Facebook audience. Nothing encourages an appetite like having your dinner taken away. While online marketers are still trying to figure out ways to drive audiences to their Facebook pages, Facebook is cooking up an opt-in mobile marketing platform that dwarfs every other platform in both size and segmentation.

Facebook is constantly tweaking and experimenting with their user experience, and I can’t tell you with any certainty where this is leading. Only Mark Zuckerberg know’s that, and he’s not talking. But these changes indicate that Facebook is very interested in connecting your mobile number to your other account information. It also serves as a poignant reminder to businesses that use Facebook as a marketing platform that when we’re playing in their sandbox, Facebook can change the rules whenever and however they want.

The CMS Expo, held in the Chicago area, is a fantastic conference for web and marketing professionals that focuses on Content Management Systems, as well as online marketing strategies. The two audiences that typically attend are:

1. Website design and development professionals
2. Marketing/communications professionals who want to learn more about online marketing

Because of this great mix of technology pros and business people, it is called a “Learning and Business” conference. In my experience, it is just the right mix of both.

The CMS Expo features tracks centered around many of the leading open source CMS systems, like Drupal, Plone, and Joomla. Additionally, there will be some new faces at this year’s conference, including my friends from Accrisoft who represent my favorite CMS: Accrisoft Freedom.

In addition to the technology tracks focused on the various CMS systems, other business-related tracks focus on social media, SEO, blogging, usability, design, and more.

The event is full of great people, and a perfect mix of business and fun. Whether you want to further your skills in your particular area of expertise or you want to learn more about Content Management Systems or online marketing, the CMS Expo has something for everyone. The early bird discount ends February 1.

I hope to see many great folks from Indiana there! Give me a shout if you are going.