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CRM Daily discusses the business case and inherent need to build strong customer relationships.

If you’re going to make a commitment, live and die by it. If you’re going to miss that commitment for whatever reason, be honest about it.

CRM Daily | Building Strong Customer Relationships

Well, we’re all packed up and ready to go.  Creative Buzz Today is taking a bit of R&R, and will return on Monday, June 29.  We’ll see you all then!

Carson McKee at Direct Contact provides a few examples of why it’s important to rely on social media to stay in contact with your audiences during the off-season.  Focusing on sports, Chris highlights a number of areas the sponsor relationship can be activated even when stadiums aren’t being filled:

Ticket Sales – Do you have a social media angle for marketing tickets?

Contests/Give Aways – Are you giving your market a reason to keep plugged in?

Off Season Drafts/Trades/Personnel Changes – Can you provide perspectives and insight from the source?

Discussion – Can you generate discussion and debate?

Access – Can you provide visibility on team insiders?

Announcements – Can you release info via social networks prior to a press release?

The Offseason: 6 Ways to Stay Plugged In

MarketingVOX takes a look at a retail email study that found horizontal navigation bars, emails with fewer links, HTML coding (vs. images) and special tactics to highlight sales, seasonal specials and featured departments work best in emails.

How-To: Maximize Conversion with Email Design

If you’ve been looking for a way to manage Twitter and facebook without sacrifice your entire online life, you may want to take a look at Seesmic Desktop.  Updates and sharing capabilities are built right into the platform, but don’t take our word for it, check out the video:

Granted, I’m writing this from a Flock browser, but with Seesmic incorporating all of the tools you’re already using, twitpic, twhirl, etc., it’s definitely worth a look.

MarketingProfs takes a look at some studies about marketing in a recession to determine if the following statement is true:

“All the research shows that companies that spend on marketing during a recession come out ahead of the competition as the economy rebounds.”

Based on their findings, you should probably get out your checkbooks.  But if you spend, spend wisely…

Marketing in a Recession: What Do the Studies Really Tell Us?

Have you ever searched tirelessly for an image to use in a blog post?  Or just needed something quick right now that you wouldn’t be slapped for later?  Well, Google and Yahoo! have an answer: Dedicated search for reusable images.

Google has added a Creative Commons filtering capability to its Image Search results, enabling users to query for images specifically labeled for “reuse,” “commercial reuse,” “reuse with modification” or “commercial reuse with modification.”

Ideally, the feature shall enable a broader array of commercially-usable images to users that don’t want to pay a stock photo company for imagery, and don’t want to deal with the copyright headaches associated with “stealing” an unlicensed picture from Image Search.

The option isn’t currently available on the user interface, but you can enable the pilter by adding a certain parameter to your search URL (in this case, just replace “mountains” with whatever you are actually searching for):

• For public domain images — http://images.google.com/images?q=mountains&as_rights=cc_publicdomain
• For images licensed with Creative Commons Attribution (that is, images you can use as long as you attribute the image back to the creator) — http://images.google.com/images?q=mountains&as_rights=cc_attribute
• For images licensed using Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike — http://images.google.com/images?q=mountains&as_rights=cc_sharealike

In May, Yahoo added a Creative Commons license filter to its own Image Search. Other services, such as compfight.com, enable users to seek Creative Commons-licensed work on flickr.

Ok, so it isn’t the cleanest system in the world, but it will deliver the goods, and we’ve made those URL’s into handy-dandy links. So click away, replace your search term, and start reusing images.

Google, Yahoo Add Creative Commons Filtering to Image Search

Acrobat.com is out of beta and ready for you to consume all of its technological goodness.  What?  You didn’t know Adobe’s Acrobat.com has stuff you could use, like web-based document creation/editing, online meetings, web-based pdf creation, file sharing and file storage?  Well, to be honest, neither did we.

A quick breakdown of the five different services and pricing levels:

Adobe Buzzword: Perfect for writing reports, proposals, and anything else you need to access online or work on with others. It looks and behaves like your normal desktop word processor, but it operates inside a web browser on Acrobat.com, so there’s no installation required.

Free: Buzzword remains a 100% free online service
No upgrade options

Adobe ConnectNow: A great way to share ideas, discuss details, and complete work together — all online. Reduce travel costs, save time, and increase productivity with a web conferencing solution that’s easy to access and simple to use.

Free: Participation of up to 3 online participants
Premium Basic: Participation of up to 5 online participants
Premium Plus: Participation of up to 20 online participants

Adobe Create PDF: Easily create Adobe PDF documents from your existing files in Microsoft Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and many other applications. It’s as easy as selecting your file and clicking Create PDF.

Free: Conversion of up to 5 PDF’s
Premium Basic: Conversion of up to 10 PDF’s
Premium Plus: Conversion of unlimited PDF’s

Adobe Share: Load up your files and send URLs instead of e-mailing large attachments, you and your team can access files from any computer in the office or on the road.

Free: Share any files loaded in Adobe My Files – limit 100 downloads/file
Premium Basic: Unlimited file downloads
Premium Plus: Unlimited file downloads

Adobe My Files: Organize all the files you share online, including Microsoft Word documents, Excel spreadsheets, PDF files, and images.

Free: Store 5GB of files with My Files free of charge
No Upgrade Options

That’s about it – good stuff from Adobe.  So, if you need access to the free tools mentioned above, head over to acrobat.com.  And should you need to upgrade, a premium basic membership will cost you $14.99/month or $149/year, while the Premium Plus membership runs $39/month or $390/year.

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Yes, we think this is insane.  What does it mean???  Does anyone get this?  If you do, please explain it in the comments…