Mircea Baldean

This is a good one… I was trying to get a shipping quote on UPS.com, but it seems like one app server has gone missing - 410 gone that is. And I’ve got this response several days in a row.

I’m happy to report that I’ve already met one of my goals for this year, getting the only Google certification existing out there: the Advertising Professional. Interesting experience, about 120 questions in 90 minutes. Not to mention I had to wake up at 7AM on a Sunday morning because Prometric had a scheduled maintenance at 10AM. It was well worth it at the end of the day! :)

I don’t normally talk about my day job on the blog, but I’m extremely proud about running this web project and the way it came to life: Renaissance Investments “invest well. live better.” Merging web sites without affecting the client experience is not always easy, but it is nice to get a positive feedback in the end. I also want to tip my hat to my team - it was quite a ride!

So, if you are an investor or an adviser, check out Renaissance Investments or Investissements Renaissance. There you go - you got my next step - getting some Google juice to flow.

This week I had the privilege of attending the Google Financial Services Conference here in Toronto and meet cool people like Chantal Rossi, Sabrina Geremia, Paul Botto or Chris O’Neill of Google.

There are five themes re-shaping Marketing today:

• Integration: consumers are hard to find and harder to influence!
• Innovation: today’s buzz word is “video” - online video; “click to play” geo targeted video ads can be delivered depending on your location
• Inclusive: advertise all your assets, not only what you think is popular
• Interactivity: consumers like to get involved; how does it feel to have an extra 10,000 brand managers out there?
• Informed: make the most by measuring your data intelligence!

There you go, the five “I”s of today’s Marketing.

Hey - my blog is one year old! I really enjoy this social media experience.

What’s next though? I have moved my blog under a new domain - mircea.net, trying to add a more personal note to it. More exciting though, I’m ready to move to the next stage - music podcasting. More details about iSPINIT.com soon!

I never thought that even Google’s web servers generate log files that can be used in conjunction with their web analytics. Well, they are ready to anonymize some of the collected data such as IP addresses and cookies, after a period of …18-24 months. Nice move, Google!

Wanna do some co-op work for Google? Try the new Image Labeler for Google and help improving the Image Search tool. Brilliant idea if you’re tired of spending time on MySpace. Challenge your random buddy to pick the same keyword for a radon given image.

What’s in it for you? Oh, yes, you get some Google points.