Minneapolis and St. Paul cable TV show Around Town is currently featuring Five Technology’s web design services on their current episode.

Host Carla Beaurline features various businesses from the Twin Cities area on the show. Five is the web host and CMS provider of the Around Town website and is currently redesigning the website for 2010.

You can view the full current episode here.

Everyone in our office had a great time with the shoot. It’s fun to talk about what we do on a daily basis for clients.

The Big Omaha Conference roared to a start Thursday night in downtown Omaha, Nebraska.  I tip my hat to the minds that pulled together a great new web, creative and entrepreneur conference in the Midwest and sold out it’s 300 attendee spots. Those great and creative minds are Jeff Slobotski and Dusty Davidson.

You are missing out if you’re not in Omaha. I made the voyage down from Minneapolis to check it all out. I’m a big fan of people taking ideas and working them to reality like Jeff and Dusty did.  That’s real inspiration to me.

Local web talent What Cheer and marketing mix Secret Penguin hosted an open house that got the evening started.  Things shifted around the corner at 7:30pm to Slowdown, where Gary Vaynerchuk got things up another level by doing his Wine Library TV episode LIVE to a packed house.  Gary will be presenting Friday at Big Omaha as well.

Here are a few photos and video to give you a taste of the night.

Gary Vaynerchuk doing his Wine Library show LIVE at Big Omaha

Big Omaha Conference Kick-off With Gary Vaynerchuk from Five Technology on Vimeo.

Big Omaha co-creator Jeff Slobotski at the kick-off event with me

Badges?  You better believe Big Omaha has some stinkin’ badges!

It was a great night to catch up with some great web design and marketing minds I have connected with in person and online. Drinks and dialogue with Eric Downs, Steve Gordon Jr., Jeff Slobotski,  Robert Murphy, Michael Kelley, Brad Wisler, Chris Burns, Nathan T. Wright and a slew of others.

Things get even better tomorrow with a line-up of great speakers.  I’m pretty excited to hear from Matt Mullenweg of WordPress fame.

If you’re not here in Omaha, you can tune it to the chatter  http://twitter.bigomaha.com.  Holler at me tomorrow if you are here and I’ll be recapping Friday and the whole weekend next week.

Great Internet marketing blog posts are always on my radar and I have four I’m highlighting here that can provide some great education, examples and ideas for any business working to succeed on the web.

Each one has some great takeaways you can plug into your business strategy online. Better fundamentals, better content, better use and better marketing.  Great reads!

+ The SEO Pyramid Fundamentals
SEOmoz and the fabulous Whiteboard Friday video’s are a must for any beginner/intermediate in the SEO world. I keep waiting for them to put their SEO video series out on DVD so that small business owners can rent it at Blockbuster or Netflix. This video covers the fundamentals and needed areas of SEO in a way that makes sense to us all, a pyramid. Watch it and you can’t help but understand the importance of valuable content that is beneficial to the user, accessible by search engines and worthy of inbound links.

Speaking of content …

+ The Discipline of Content Strategy
Minneapolis’s own Kristina Halvorson writes a great article on web content strategy that appears on the A List Apart blog. Her breakdown of website content disciplines is darn near a step by step guide to success with content strategy for both your users and SEO. It’s not a bad idea to keep an eye on her staff’s musings on the Brain Traffic blog as well.

Speaking of a vision …

+ Pancheros Gets Twitter … Kinda
The always entertaining and idea factory Ted Murphy throws out his visions for burrito chain Pancheros on their current use of Twitter and how they can deepen their use of the social media tool. Ted gives great examples and photos on how the restaurant chain can take their Twitter marketing use to a whole new level by bleeding it down to each location and employee. First read the post, then follow @pancheros and then go eat at Pancheros.

Speaking of what to do first …

+ 73% Of Business Owners Would Do Taxes Themselves Before Search Marketing
Yikes! What is the fear? This article surveyed 400 business owners and found that 73% of them preferred taxes to search marketing. Is paid search marketing really a great unknown to fear? I guess so. The article highlights the following as reasons why:

• Nearly nine in 10 (89 percent) feared keywords may become too expensive.
• Eighty-one percent questioned if paid search marketing is the best use of their marketing budgets.
• One quarter of respondents believe paid search marketing is too complex.
• Twenty-one percent thought it would be too time-consuming.
• Thirty-five percent felt they would need an agency to help set up a search marketing campaign.

I can’t disagree with the last bullet.  I think engaging a SEM professional is a good idea to maximize your goals and budget. From the right keywords, to the right landing page, a pro can really make a difference.  Having an expert as a service partner also alleviates many of the other fears listed.  Funny how that works.

It’s fun to see glimpses of where things are heading for how we consume video.  Last night was a reminder of this for me.  The Thursday night NFL game was only on the NFL Network and as a cable subscriber I was out of luck to watch it.  But where TV failed me, the Internet and my phone came to the rescue.

I was able to watch the Broncos come back on the Browns for a victory online as well as my phone.  Just a fun glimpse into the future of more media consumption online and mobile … with the TV fading away.  Think it won’t?

The only bad news was that Broncos QB Jake Cutler had a monster night in Fantasy Football … and of course I’m playing the team in my league that has him at QB.

Do you have anything to share on your transition to web or mobile from the tube?

USA Today’s Jefferson Graham recently did a video segment on Google by interviewing Google’s Matt Cutts for their Tech Talk section. The video is great to get a base understanding of Google’s search results and and search engine optimization basics.

The biggest takeaways I found:

+ It’s tough to be found for a term being searched if that text isn’t on your website somehere, listen to Matt’s example for a San Diego Chiropractor.

+ The importance of title tags and meta desciption tags, not only for Google in understanding the page, but for users deciding on what search results to click on.

+ Blogs! Blogs are a great way to acquire inbound links and put out engaging and valuable content. Hello small businesses!?!?!

+ Submit your site map, or have your web person or firm do it for you. It’s an easy way to get Google to crawl your site and index pages.

Make sure you check out the video.

Side note to USA Today Tech Talk: Put your videos into a player that others can embed to better promote you on their blogs and websites. Be a bit more social!