To prevail in the global economy, marketing information is the currency of the 21st century.  Knowing what type of market research instrument to use is quite important.      

As a product strategy consultant to a wireless startup, I prefer the mixed use of questioning and observation.    

In terms of questioning, I use qualitative marketing research techniques where I focused on a small number of respondents.      
When using an observation instrument, I prefer to focus on observing the social phenomena in a certain marketing niche where I use product-use analysis to get my answers.      

To the newbie, one book that I recommend is “Marketing Research: An Applied Orientation 2006 (5th Edition) by Naresh Malhotra. (ISBN 0132221179).   This book is essential read for marketing researchers.  

I setup a blog earlier today to protest Michael Vick’s continued presence in the NFL at SackVick.net.  I used the ModernPaper Theme from Performancing.

Along the way I wanted to add a digg button, but hadn’t done this with this theme before.  It turned out to be a little trickier than I suspected so I thought I’d share my experience and code example in case it would save someone else 20 minutes of trial and error.

Here is the final outcome of the button.  Its not bad, but I prefer to have it hover to the right inside the actual content.

Here is the code that I used to achieve this result (its a snap shot, but a short amount of code also)

I basically put the Digg script in the index.php file floating left just below the title.

The Script

<div style=”float:left”>
<script src=”http://digg.com/tools/diggthis.js” type=”text/javascript”></script>
</div>

 I found an excellent little plugin that allows you to individually install videos in your sidebar.

Nothing to see here… » WordPress YouTube Sidebar Video Plugin

I was looking for this as I set up a site for a protest campaign to Sack Michael Vick from the Falcons and the NFL at SackVick.net.

There is a great video that I found on YouTube that is called Dogs in the Kennel and its a song with slide show set to the tune of Kats in the Cradle.  Now the original song is a bit of a tear jerker, and this parody is almost as much if not more of a tear jerker.

Regardless of my protest, I highly recommend the program even though it will require a little manual PHP coding in your sidebar file after you install the plugin.  But it dos work and looks great.

Here’s the code that I used for my image:

The plugin creator gives the code excerpts, all you have to do is put the PHP tags around the code calls.  That wasn’t terribly clear in the instructions, but I’m not complaining!

Note I went with a small image as it was going in just one column of the sidebar so the image is about the size of a Gameboy or PSP as opposed to a full screen or something that you might see on a PS2 or something. I already knew how to do large screen sizes for videos, but when I attempted to just embed the code from you tube into my sidebar, I received a message that I needed a plugin and that no plugins were available for firefox.