As the semester has flown by, Social Media & Management has had a great lineup of guest speakers. @cammicam recently graced the class with her presence and has a great writeup at her blog.
Selected by chrismoody
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Marketing + Branding + Design
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Update on the Social Media Class at NC State by @cammicam
5 Nov 2009 | 1:09 pm -
Social Networks, Media, and Marketing – Evolution: a Prezi by Brent Ward
26 Oct 2009 | 5:53 pmBrent Ward's innovative take on social networks and their evolution. -
Social media and its impact on basketball recruiting
23 Oct 2009 | 7:48 amKyrie Irving (@kyrieirving) has been one of the most sought after point guards in the country for several years. Recruiting has traditionally been a bit mysterious and the only way to follow along was listening to rumors, inside sources, and following reputable blogs and journalists...that is changing quickly. Over the last few years, there have been more press conferences, hat donning, and even a few fake announcements. The recruitment of @kyrieirving has been interesting to watch for two reasons: 1) he is very active on Twitter, and 2) one of the universities recruiting Irving has… -
The power of well used typography in a music video by Eric Hutchinson
18 Sep 2009 | 1:01 pmIt is amazing to me that @erichutchinson isn't huge by now. -
How to ACE Social Media: Alignment, Control, and Engagement
18 Sep 2009 | 8:44 amRemember ACE: Align your efforts, Control your message, Engage your community.
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ProductMarketing.com
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Friday fun: Google pricing
20 Nov 2009 | 4:40 amNotice anything about the "new cost" pricing for Google apps? For more on pricing, read Don't just roll the dice - a usefully short guide to software pricing and Camels and Rubber Duckies. -
Product Camp Minnesota
19 Nov 2009 | 4:39 amI've been asked to offer the keynote at Product Camp Minnesota. Will you be there? -
Survey: has your job changed?
18 Nov 2009 | 4:25 am"Have you seen your job change in the last two years? If so, how" Want to add your comments? Take Pragmatic Marketing's Product Management and Marketing Benchmark Survey for 2009-2010. (image courtesy of Wordle) -
Let's play "Req or Spec": initiate diagnostic routines
17 Nov 2009 | 5:17 amThere's often confusion about what is a requirement and what is a specification. Let's play "Req or Spec." Is this a requirements or a specification? Which is this? How would you improve it? Add your comment below. See On Reqs and Specs for more. -
The Pragmatic Marketer Volume 7 Issue 5
17 Nov 2009 | 4:46 amSome notable articles are featured in the new issue of The Pragmatic Marketer including Updating the Pragmatic Marketing Framework™ written with Jim Foxworthy and an update on our popular article on The Product Management Triad. Also Top 10 Tools to Measure User Experience and The Strategic Product Manager and the CFO. Read more in The Pragmatic Marketer Volume 7 Issue 5.
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Holy Kaw!
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World AIDS Day: making awareness sexy
20 Nov 2009 | 6:06 pmWorld AIDS Day is coming up on December first—and awareness is sexy. So, take a few moments to read this great post by Sheryl Lee Ralph. She brings up great points that will really challenge the way you feel about the awful disease that killed more than 3,000,000 last year alone. To put that into perspective, Swine Flu has only killed 1000 people to date. Don’t get me wrong, that’s terrible too, but if those numbers can spark a media frenzy—surely HIV and AIDS are deserving of some discussion time too. Be sure to read the article, and maybe share it with those you… -
How to buy the Twilight: New Moon house
20 Nov 2009 | 5:59 pmYou can own the Twilight: New Moon house. It’s for sale for $3.3 million. If you hurry, you can close escrow in time for the Winter Olympics because it’s in West Vancouver. Total Twilight coverage. Permalink | Leave a comment » -
Stuff Brazilians like
20 Nov 2009 | 5:03 pmTotal news coverage of Brasil and soccer. Permalink | Leave a comment » -
Why the right fertilizer can cut greenhouse gases
20 Nov 2009 | 4:32 pmIn a stinky Science development, researchers have discovered that using alternative types of fertilizers can cut back on greenhouse gas emissions, at least in one part of the US. Nitrogen fetilizers are often necessary to yielding sufficient crops, but their use leads to the release of nitrous oxide, a major atmosphere enemy. Fertilizer use is one reason an estimated seventy-eight percent of America’s nitrous oxide emissions come from agriculture. But scientists have compared those emissions with newly developed fertilizers formulated with “controlled release” polymer-coated… -
Capturing water in sloooow mooootion
20 Nov 2009 | 3:12 pmSome things just look cooler in slow motion. Jell-O? Totally better. A punch to the face? Way more awesome. Photographer Martin Waugh spends his day watching single droplets of water, capturing the tiny and beautiful splashes with super slo-mo video. Check out the video from Discovery and you’ll definitely never look at a leaky sink the same way again. Science geekiness galore. Permalink | Leave a comment »
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Rocket Watcher
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I'm the #1 PM Blogger!
19 Nov 2009 | 10:26 amThe Association of International Product Marketing and Management (AIPMM) held their educational conference this week and hosted a "Battle of the Product Management Bloggers" contest which I was happy to be asked to take part in. At short notice my travel plans changed and when I let them know I couldn't make it, they invited me to do my presentation remotely over Skype. Trying to be entertaining without being able to see or hear the audience is goofy! People walking past my office would have seen me flapping my arms "presenting" at my computer and likely thought I'd done one too many… -
The Heretech Podcast with Me
18 Nov 2009 | 6:21 amMy mother always said I had a face for radio and lately I'm doing a lot of podcasts. Here's a conversation I had with Tom Grant a Sr. Analyst with Forrester Research and the creator of the excellent Heretech podcast. He calls me a lot of names at the beginning like "ebullient" and "irrepressible" but I don't hold that against him :)Click here and have a listen.Subscribe to this blog or follow me on Twitter or Friendfeed -
Trafcom News Podcast: Product Management and Social Media
9 Nov 2009 | 7:17 pmAt ProductCamp Toronto a few weeks back I got a chance to sit down with Donna Papacosta of the Trafcom News Podcast. Donna does a high quality podcast that's a must-listen for communications, PR or Marketing folks. In our conversation we touched on the subject of how Product Managers should be using social media and talked a bit about how Product Managers should work with PR/Communications to get to "Communications Utopia".Go ahead, click on the link to have a listen. It's not every day you get to hear my awe-inspiring Canadian accent in all its glory.Subscribe to this blog or follow me… -
Marketing Lessons from Foursquare
5 Nov 2009 | 5:00 amFoursquare is a location-based social networking application that's been described "Twitter for locations." It lets users subscribe to each other and the information shared is about where you are rather than what you are doing. It's been rolling out on a city by city basis over the past few months. I finally got a chance to try it and I think there are some interesting things that marketers can learn from foursquare. Winning is Fun - unlike Twitter, foursquare has been designed as a game. Users earn points for checking in and foursquare publishes a leaderboard for your friends… -
Can B2B Products be "Social Objects"?
3 Nov 2009 | 1:26 pmA couple of weeks back I attended MeshMarketing and Hugh MacLeod of Gapingvoid was the keynote speaker. In his talk he discussed "social objects". By his definition a "social object" can be a thing a person or an idea that people talk about. Hugh talked about working at an ad agency where customers would ask them to get people talking about products like it was as easy thing to do. His comment was (I'm paraphrasing) "Getting people talking is magic! They were asking us to perform magic but their perception was that we were just pulling a lever." His described how people talk about…
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Tyner Blain
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Can You Write Website Requirements Without a Product Manager?
16 Nov 2009 | 9:35 pmA couple weeks ago, our article on writing design-free requirements triggered some great discussion around requirements and design (also known as “reqs and specs”). What happens when you’re dealing with a website? There are many stakeholders, who are clear about their own goals. Who then turns them into requirements? A Website Requirements Scenario Consider the following situation. Your company has a website, and through that website you sell hats- it is an eCommerce haberdashery. You have at least three stakeholders that are important in this scenario: Customers… -
SEO Product Management
10 Nov 2009 | 7:36 amSEO, Search Engine Optimization, is an area that every online website needs to think about. The idea is that the more traffic you can get to your website, the more products you’ll sell. Just because you can lead a horse to water doesn’t mean you can make him drink. What a great opportunity to product manage your website and ask why about SEO. SEO When you’re building a website, you have four primary channels by which you get traffic (visitors) to your site: Direct Traffic – people who type in the URL (address) of a page on your website directly into their… -
Design-Free Requirements
3 Nov 2009 | 8:16 amDesign-Free requirements are important for two reasons, and hard for two other reasons. Design-free requirements are hard because you “know what you want” when you should be documenting “why you want it.” Writing design-free requirements can be hard when you don’t trust your development team to “do the right thing” even though it is not your job to design the solution. Design-Free Requirements – Revisiting It has been three years since I wrote Writing Design-Free Requirements as part of The Big Ten Rules of Writing Requirements. In that… -
Foundation Series: Cross-Selling and Upselling
28 Oct 2009 | 9:40 pmYou have an eCommerce site. You sell products online. Do you cross-sell additional products? Do you upsell to better products? This article explains the difference between cross-sell and upsell, and looks at some real-world data about the effectiveness of both. Cross-Sell and Upsell – What Are They? Cross-selling and upselling are marketing techniques that are applied during the sales process to increase the value of the transaction to both the buyer and the seller. Technically, they only increase the value to the seller – but they should also be increasing the value to… -
Agile Prioritization: Which Widget?
19 Oct 2009 | 8:54 pmYour company is building out a toolkit to support third-party developers. You’ll need a bunch of different types of widgets – combo-boxes, text entry fields, domain-specific controls, etc. You’ve got a long list of desired controls from your customers. You’re agile. What do you build first? Agile In A Soundbite Being agile is about delivering incremental value, quickly, getting feedback, and then delivering more incremental value. Repeat until “done.” Good agile adds a qualifier – do the most valuable thing quickly, get feedback, do the…
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On Product Management
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Vote For Us! ComputerWeekly IT Blog Awards
19 Nov 2009 | 4:28 pmIt must be that time of year. We have been nominated (for the second year running) for the ComputerWeekly IT Blog awards. And just like last year, you can vote for us in 3 easy steps. 1. Click the “VOTE FOR ME” image on the right (or click here). 2. Scroll down to the IT Project Management category (#7) and select our blog ( On Product Management ) from the list. 3. Scroll down a bit further and press Done. That’s it. One more thing. Don’t let the fact that this is a ProJECT Management category fool you. There are other ProDUCT management blogs listed, and one of the criteria… -
Canadians take top spots at PMEC Battle of the bloggers
17 Nov 2009 | 9:11 pmCongratulations to April Dunford of RocketWatcher, and our own Ethan Henry for coming in first and second respectively at the PMEC Battle of the Bloggers in San Jose, CA today. There was stiff competition from a number of prominent bloggers including Michael Ray Hopkin, Tom Grant, Ivan Chalif, and the team from Brainmates in Australia. Here are a few tweets about April’s and Ethan’s performances. And here are the official results. Congrats also to Tom Grant, Ivan Chalif and Ivan Lybbert. Posted in Admin, PMEC, Product Management, Product Marketing -
Surprise us: Seeking examples of SURPRISING positioning statements
10 Nov 2009 | 10:37 amWe write a lot here, and we hope that it helps you. Now I’m looking for your input. Can you help? If you do, I will feature you on our blog. But I need the responses within 1 day! The request I am looking for examples of positioning that takes the buyer by surprise. The classic example of this is AVIS, as told and retold by Ries and Trout in their classic books on marketing and positioning. AVIS was not the leader in its category, so it claimed a different position: “We are only #2, but we try harder.” Very few companies would be willing to admit that they have a #2… -
Battlin’ Bloggers
8 Nov 2009 | 12:10 pmOn behalf of Saeed, Alan and myself, I’ll be speaking on November 17th at the 2009 AIPMM Product Management Educational Conference in the Battle of the Bloggers. Come and see me prove that three heads are better than one when it comes to Product Management blogging. (The full conference runs Nov 16th & 17th) Posted in Ethan, PMEC, Product Management Blogs -
Taking the “mess” out of Messaging (part 4)
4 Nov 2009 | 8:31 pmThis is part 4 of the series. Here are links to Part 1, Part 2 and Part 3. In this part, I’ll take a look at whether the industry can get out of the mess it’s in. Looking back Before looking forward, let’s take a look back at some ads from a couple of decades ago. Click each image to enlarge. Notice something about these ads? They all look rather similar. Pictures of (similar looking) computers and lots of text! Check out those headlines. “A new way of personal-professional computation”???? What’s that all about? Is it a personal computer or a professional…
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Write That Down
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Product Management Open House
5 Nov 2009 | 7:02 amThere is an open house tomorrow at Forrester being hosted by Tom Grant of the Heretech fame. It starts at 5:30pm, and is happening in order to host lively discussion on, what else, product management and product marketing issues. Specifically for this first session, there will be a focus on how social media is changing product roles within all types and sizes of organizations. If you are in the bay area, be sure to stop by and say hi to Tom! -
reBlog from avc.com: A VC
28 Oct 2009 | 7:00 amI found this fascinating quote today: If you look at our portfolio, you’ll see quite a few startups created by young visionaries and quite a few startups created by serial entrepreneurs who are swinging for the fences. There isn’t much else to be honest.avc.com, A VC, Oct 2009 You should read the whole article. -
Competitive Analysis – Gathering Marketing Data
11 Sep 2009 | 8:45 amThe last component I’ll discuss of the competitive analysis process is culling marketing and sales collateral from your list of identified competitors. Why do this? You want to be acquainted with what they are putting out there. It should give you a sense of how their products are being positioned (however poorly or not). In turn, that should give you a sense of a) how strong your own positioning is and b) positioning around that competitor as a result. These materials can also be used as a quick way to give others in your organization an idea of the lay of the land. It’s better… -
Competitive Analysis Series – Pricing
9 Sep 2009 | 8:45 amOne of the regular questions I (and I’m sure others) face when it comes to competitive analysis is, “what are they charging?” This is an especially tricky question to answer accurately. I’ve gone about this in a couple of different ways – obviously, when you are dealing with B2C companies that publicize their prices, it’s simple. But before getting in to potential methods for gathering this data, I wanted to bring up a point as to why this is important information to acquire. The first is sales. When you are assisting your sales team, it’s beneficial… -
Great Companies
4 Sep 2009 | 10:06 pmHow I missed this one yesterday I don’t know. But whatever you do, be sure to read through Fred Wilson’s post Ten Characteristics of Great Companies. Awesome stuff, and well worth the time to check out.
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Forrester: Product Management
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Next PM open house: Agile in tech companies
18 Nov 2009 | 7:55 pmSince our first Forrester open house for product managers and product marketers was a success, we're going to start scheduling them regularly. Like, say, once a month. The topic that has received the most votes in our topic survey is, How does Agile affect the company, outside the development team? Other leading topics include: What's the state of the art in requirements? How are other companies structuring their PM teams? How do companies make a successful transition to a new business model? How do other teams handle sales support? What are some strategies for handling the product… -
The Heretech, episode 28: April Dunford on product marketing
16 Nov 2009 | 11:46 pmApril Dunford, who writes the blog Rocket Watcher, explains the product marketing challenges in the tech industry, and the special problems facing startups. We also talk about how PMs can embrace social media without a huge hit to their schedule. Plus, a juicy tidbit from the upcoming research document on requirements. (c) 2009 Tom Grant -
Remember the KISS principle?
13 Nov 2009 | 2:52 pmThis morning, I had a briefing with McObject, a tech vendor that specializes in embeddable databases. From cars to set-top boxes to web sites, there's a near-universal need to put data somewhere, retrieve it, and manage it. In these use cases, the simplest database technology is the best. Their product strategy is interesting to the readers of this blog for at least a couple of reasons. First, there's an unstated assumption in many technology companies that complexity is inescapable. If you want to keep pace with your competitors, you have to keep pace with their feature set. Keeping… -
Sometimes, you measure commitment by the hour
13 Nov 2009 | 12:58 pmDuring a breakfast meeting this morning, someone asked a very sharp question: Are businesses really operating differently because of social media? I then jumped in the car, drove from San Francisco back to our Foster City office, and heard how Cisco has used social media to change product launches. The obvious change, of course, is lowering the cost, if you're not renting out the Moscone Center for a big launch party. Slightly less obvious changes include the ability to reach more people in more countries. , the virtual launch also makes it possible to reach more people, in more… -
The Heretech, episode 27: Rob Koplowitz on SharePoint adoption
10 Nov 2009 | 5:23 pmForrester's Rob Koplowitz tells us how organizations adopt SharePoint, and the lessons learned for other technology vendors. But first, a recap of last week's open house on "social product management," and some musings on the product strategy for Google Wave. (c) 2009 Tom Grant.
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The Accidental Product Manager
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Why ROI Is The WRONG Way To Measure Your Product’s Marketing Program
17 Nov 2009 | 8:01 pmImage Credit Marketing Programs Require More Important Things Than Just Money To Be Measured Ah the world of product marketing – it’s where artists dream up brightly colored logos and put together viral YouTube videos that nobody really understands but everyone has to watch and send to their friends. Well, as a product manager you may think that that is what goes on in the world of marketing, but in the end you really don’t care. What you want is results, in other words more sales of your product. Let’s reign in the magic unicorns that live in marketing and try to come up with a way… -
How To Market Your Product In 2010
15 Nov 2009 | 8:01 pm2010 Is Almost Here -- Do You Know What Your Customers Are Thinking? 2009 is dead, long live 2009. Ok, so it’s not quite dead yet; however, even as your sales teams are running around trying to close the year out on a high note you as a product manager need to start to set your sights on what you’re going to do to get ready for next year. Got a plan? Uncertainty Rules No matter what happens with the global economy, things aren’t going to get better overnight. This means that your customers are going to be living in a land of uncertainty next year also. As a product manager… -
AccPM Poll Results: Who gets more respect where you work Product Managers or Project Managers?
15 Nov 2009 | 9:27 amNote: There is a poll embedded within this post, please visit the site to participate in this post's poll. The question this past week was “Who gets more respect where you work Product Managers or Project Managers?“ It was a light week and in the end, it ended up being a dead heat. However, there’s something to be learned here: this clearly is not a hot topic. I must confess to being just a little surprised by this. As a working product manager, I can confess to always having been just a bit jealous of my project management brothers and sisters. They seem to have their act… -
Is Your Marketing Message Missing The Point?
10 Nov 2009 | 8:01 pmImage Credit Your Marketing Message Has To Be Aligned With Your Customer's Needs If you were going fishing, how much luck catching fish do you think that you would have if you didn’t use any bait on your hook? Sure, there are probably some either dumb or near-sighted fish that might still bite, but you’re going to be doing a lot of sitting around waiting. Is it possible that as a product manger you are fishing for customers for your product without bait? The Problem With Market Assumptions As a product manager you work hard to create a product that meets what you think the… -
Learn To Read Your Customer’s Mind In 3 Simple Steps
8 Nov 2009 | 8:01 pmImage Credit Teach Your Sales Teams How To Get In Their Customer's Heads... Just shut-up and buy my product! In fact, while you are at it, buy a lot of my product. If only we could really tell our potential customers this then life would be so much simpler. However, try this little verbal outburst just once and then you’ll have a chance to sit back and spend some time polishing your resume as you look for your next product manager job. If you really want people to buy more of your product, then do what I’ve done – learn how to read minds… How Most Product Mangers…
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Product Management Tips
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6 “bootstrapping” tools for software product managers
19 Nov 2009 | 4:41 amYou are a software product manager trying to start a software company on your own. Or you work for a startup or a small software company and don’t have much money to spend. But you still need to design a good user experience, do early usability testing with your prospects, do a quick show and [...] -
Customer Visit: 2 creative ways to get a budget
8 Nov 2009 | 7:06 pmTimes are tough, budgets are being cut, there is a travel ban in companies, so as a product manager, how do you get a travel budget so that you can get out of your office for on-site customer visits? It is hard, but here are two creative ways you can make it work. 1) Think local [...] -
What is product simplicity?
3 Nov 2009 | 4:39 amThe KISS principle – Keep it simple stupid – something all of us as software product managers have heard one time or another. But when it comes to products, what exactly is product simplicity? Product usability and simplicity typically falls into three different categories, in my perspective. This perspective is based on my 13 year [...] -
Death by a thousand paper cuts ….
26 Oct 2009 | 7:48 pmIn my last post, I discussed the benefits of doing an on-site customer visit where you get to observe customers/prospects use your product or competitive products to get their job done. In my experience doing these visits, I often discover what I call “death by a thousand paper cuts” issues. These issues are essentially annoyances [...] -
Five reasons customer visits beat other requirements gathering techniques
7 Oct 2009 | 3:15 pmI am a big fan of customer visits – ones where you visit customers on-site and observe them using your or competitor’s product. Now why do this? What are the benefits of doing this over talking to the same customer/prospect over the phone, while at a conference/trade show or doing a survey etc. Here are [...]
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Guy Kawasaki
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The 19 bloggers Inc. thinks you should read
6 Nov 2009 | 6:20 pmInc. named 19 bloggers that you should read. We’ve aggregated them all in one place: Inc19.alltop. -
How to Get Found
4 Nov 2009 | 3:29 pmThe reality is that people and technology is getting better and better a blocking out unwanted interruptions—aka, “marketing.” Brian Halligan is the CEO of HubSpot, and he explains in my post on the American Express Open Forum “how to get found.” It’s all about creating great stuff and letting Google et al do what they do: find great stuff. -
How I tweet
2 Nov 2009 | 8:47 amBy popular demand (and some complaints), I’ve done a FAQ with myself about how I tweet. Hope this helps you use Twitter for your business too. I explain how I use ghostwriters and why I repeat my tweets among other “unusual” practices. -
Current Twitter Demo Script
28 Oct 2009 | 2:26 amThis is the set of links that I used to demo Twitter by going down through this list to show why Twitter is such a valuable marketing tool. Introduction Home page Profile page Monitor Search Guy Kawasaki or Alltop Starbucks VIA introduction Search for “Prius” or “Civic” Sell Dell Outlet Kogi BBQ Support Comcast Cares Engage JetBlue Virgin America Fandango Prospect Camaro Camaro near Palo Alto Advanced searches Surfing or skateboarding (shows how to eliminate extraneous results such as “surfing the web” How I Tweet - Find Alltop MyAlltop helped me find this. -
How to Avoid Twitter Cluelessness
26 Oct 2009 | 4:24 pmOver at the American Express Open Forum blog, I explain how to not look clueless on Twitter. The first five ways are: Don’t tell other people how to tweet. Don’t tell the world that you unfollowed someone. Don’t ask people why they unfollowed you. Don’t constantly tweet mundane updates and babble. Don’t use a small picture for an avatar. To read all ten and why they impugn your intelligence, click here.
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Church of the Customer Blog
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New company, new history
18 Nov 2009 | 1:14 amWhen Jackie Huba and I decided eight years ago to start a company, we envisioned it as a consulting firm that would help clients create customer evangelists. It was March 2001. We'd both just left the web development company we had worked at for three years. Online advertising was king then, but we wanted to explore why some brands experienced strong word of mouth while others didn't. We wanted to understand what fueled the evangelism, how it happened, and how could we help others do the same. We started with a website and an email newsletter in an era that could only be described as Before… -
Advertising without advertising
12 Nov 2009 | 12:16 pmSometimes a movie quote is the best way to capture what you're all about. -
Kicking out unwanted customers
30 Oct 2009 | 10:35 am"Don't talk during the movie or we will take your ass out." If you've been to an Alamo Drafthouse, the movie theater chain in Austin, Texas, then you've seen that semi-serious warning couched in a fun "public service announcement" before a movie showing. Theater founder Tim League knows that talkers mar the movie-watching experience for everyone else, and he does not tolerate them -- even if they punch the windshield of his car.See, Tim was a customer recently at one of his theaters. A nearby loud-talker was asked by a theater waiter to keep it down. The customer protested, loudly, demanding… -
Twitter: the killer app for customer service
22 Oct 2009 | 10:31 am"Hello, this is Sam Kaufman from the AT&T Internet Executive Office, and I am calling about your tweets."That's what I heard yesterday after posting a few tweets about my less-than-stellar customer service experience with an AT&T DSL technical support rep. The rep was trying to diagnose my DSL problems and after telling me to stay on the line for 10 minutes, he never returned after 30 minutes. I hung up. He never called back.With a few hours of my AT&T tweet, @ATTJohnathon, a customer care rep on Twitter contacted me, asking if he could help. I DM'ed him my account number as he… -
Fees are penalties. Always.
19 Oct 2009 | 1:24 pmIt's a wonder why some businesses can't grasp this. Consider the U.S. airlines last month: Southwest reported an 8.8% increase in revenue passenger miles. Its load factor, the percentage of seats that were filled, increased 11% from a year ago, to 74.7% — a big increase for a month in which schools reopen and summer vacation travels stop. JetBlue saw a 9.8% jump in passenger miles. Its load factor rose about 1% from the prior year, to 77.6%. Compare those numbers to other airlines. Delta: Down 5% on its mainline operation. It also cut capacity by 5%. American: Down 2.6% domestically. It cut…
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MarketingProfs - Smart thinking ... pass it on.
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Start Smart: A 10-Step Social Media Guide for B2B Marketers
17 Nov 2009 | 8:00 amThere's no escaping it, marketers: Amid a flurry of headlines, bestsellers, and reports documenting social media's meteoric rise... the future has arrived. But for a B2B executive tasked with making sense of it all, wouldn't it be nice if the future came with a road map? Follow this 10-step guide. -
Yes, Facebook Is a Business Tool
17 Nov 2009 | 8:00 amIs Facebook really a tool for business? Paul Chaney says yes. Much the same way a power company connects homes and businesses with electricity, Facebook is a "social utility" designed to facilitate connections between people as well as businesses. Accordingly, it can be highly useful as a business tool. This article ... -
Mobile Coupons: Your Message on the Move
17 Nov 2009 | 8:00 amAsk most US consumers whether they want to receive mobile-marketing messages on their cell phones, and they will usually answer with a resounding "No." Consumers worry they'll start receiving unwanted Viagra ads and messages from a prince in Kenya. Nothing could be further from the truth. -
Write From Your Reader's Perspective
17 Nov 2009 | 8:00 amWhen potential customers arrive at your website or look over your marketing materials, they immediately want to know what's in it for them. If that's not obvious, chances are they will move on quickly. By using the word "you," you begin to establish a connection with readers because you address their ... -
The Surprising Evolution of Online Marketing in Software Sales
17 Nov 2009 | 8:00 amOnline marketing is nothing new for software marketers. It's only natural that the software industry and computer-software users migrated to the Internet early on. So although the idea of online marketing isn't new, how software is marketed online continues to evolve.
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Social Media Marketing Strategy, Tactics, and Tools
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The Social Business Process
20 Nov 2009 | 12:02 amOver at Chess Media Group we’ve brainstorming steps that companies and consultancies need to take together in order to really be able to create a social business. We’ve developed what we consider to be a pretty solid social business process that is broken down into three key areas: strategy, creativity, and results. The steps we have outline are obviously not set in stone but they should serve as a good foundation or framework for most organizations. Here is what we developed: I’ve broken down all of the ten steps into high level bullet points to make them easy to… -
My Presentation on Social Media ROI
19 Nov 2009 | 12:09 amIf you missed my keynote presentation on social media ROI from this afternoon during social media tools week, I put it up on slideshare. It’s also embedded below: Social Media ROI Presentation -
The Players Vs the Game
18 Nov 2009 | 1:34 pmWe’ve all heard the saying right? “Don’t hate the player, hate the game.” Usually this phrase in uttered in a different context (I hope you know what I’m talking about) but just work with me on this. Try to look at this from a social business standpoint and ask yourself what’s more important, the players or the game? The players are the users of the various social business tools and applications and the “game” refers to the platforms and tools themselves. The “game” gives us unique opportunities to connect with people and… -
Doing a Keynote on Social Media ROI for Tools Week
17 Nov 2009 | 12:02 amFrom November 16-21st the folks over at the social media academy are hosting an online conference called “tools week.” The conference is bringing together folks from various aspects of the social media space to address things such as best practices, strategies, and measurement. The entire event takes place online so you have no excuse not to join! Speakers include folks such as: Bob Thompson of Customer Think Frank Eliason from Comcast Connie Bensen from Techrigy Margaret Francis from Scout Labs and many more On Wednesday November 18th I’m going to be delivering the… -
2009 Interactive Budgets are Under 30 Million
16 Nov 2009 | 4:17 pmRecently Forrester released a report estimating the 2009 interactive budgets for various industries, the estimate puts the total interactive budget at under $30 million. Take a moment to look at the graph below. There are a few things to note form this graph: Consumer goods companies are spending the most on social media Financial services companies are spending the least amount on social media Display advertising spend is still strong across all of the industries in the report, I suspect we will see this change in 2010 The travel and hospitality industry is spending the most on mobile…
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The Marketing Minute
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A creativity whack for your head...and your iPhone!
19 Nov 2009 | 4:57 pmRoger von Oech is responsible for whacking me upside the head more times than I can count. 20+ years ago, he created a fantastic creativity tool called A Creative Whack Pack. It's an illustrated deck of 64 creative thinking strategies that will whack you out of habitual thought patterns and enable you to look at your life and actions in a fresh way. It's an awesome way to think different, to see something fresh and to get yourself unstuck. Well, it's 2009 and so of course Roger has created an iPhone/iTouch app for thiscreativity powerhouse. And...he's… -
You can put a dash of brand just about anywhere
15 Nov 2009 | 2:51 pmThere's nothing less interesting or more standard than a bar code, right? Not according to the people at Design Barcode, where the status quo is anything but!Check out these jazzed up bar codes. (click on the images to see a full-size image in a pop up window) Lest you think this is a new idea, apparently Rick Tharp was doing it (see his version) way back in 1986. (Hat tips to Beverly Koehn and Beth Wampler for sharing this Fast Company article on the bar code designs) -
Calling all art directors, designers and logo creators - win $250
13 Nov 2009 | 5:24 amI will try to make this brief. Last spring, I was approached by a company in the UK called Logo Inn who creates logos and identity packages online. They wanted to do a contest, demonstrating their services.So I did a series of posts on logo design and offered one organization a chance to win a free logo....as long as the entire process could unfold here on the blog, so we could all learn from it.The series looked like this:. We talked about 5 tips for designing a new logo Announced the contest and gave the rules Shared a creative brief, with questions you should ask yourself… -
Turn your sales letters into workhorses!
11 Nov 2009 | 10:24 pmNeil Sawers, a 25+ year corporate writing veteran can show you how. In his new book, How to Write Proposals, Sales Letters and Reports, he spells it out in easy to understand, follow and learn examples and guidelines.But don't take my word for it. Listen to what the Midwest Book Review (one of the most respected reviewers out there) had to say:"Examples, recommendations of common tools to organize one’s thoughts, and a sprinkling of solid business advice fill out this superb, easy-to-use guidebook recommended for business writers of all skill and experience… -
5 ways to promote internal training and events
10 Nov 2009 | 11:18 amI had a meeting with a client this morning and one of the topics on the agenda was how could they better promote an internal training event that was optional for the employees.When I asked how they would normally promote it, they said...we'd make up a flier with all the information and attach it to an e-mail. We'd send it out to everyone. We might send it out a couple times or ask their supervisors to also send it out.There's nothing wrong with what they're doing. But, there's not enough right. You've got to toss a lot of messages and media into…
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Andy Beard - Niche Marketing
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Fairly Useless Feedburner Google Analytics Update
13 Nov 2009 | 1:25 pmFeedburner apparently has integrated analytics with Google Analytics… woopie dooI suppose it makes things simpler for people who weren’t already doing something similar for feeds, and at least they are segregating clicks between email and RSS, something their competitors for RSS > Email such as Aweber, Feedblitz, Mailchimp etc have been able to do for a long time.What they can’t do is track RSS signups as a goal, and until they can do that from a marketing perspective RSS is fairly useless.Google Reader is also still misbehaving – even if you use a 307 temporary… -
Friday 13th – A Very Bad Day for Comment Spammers
13 Nov 2009 | 11:59 amNice search engine friendly links are a great way to reward valuable members of the community of any blog, but they are certainly not a right, and still find myself deleting 50+ worthless comments every day.Most disturbing of all though are the SEO consultants and agencies who I have caught commenting on behalf of their clients, or as themselves with a link through to a client’s site. Some of them are totally dumb about it.I now have a new comments policy in force though most of it is just a clearer interpretation of what has been in place for the last 3+ years.Comment Policy Update:… -
Why Tweetglide Matters – seriously
27 Oct 2009 | 9:45 pmWhen Mike Filsaime first mentioned Tweetglide, I signed up to his notification list but I wasn’t really that interested in the concept. I thought it had a few flaws in the business model he was proposing, and there were already enough Adobe Air Twitter applications on the market.I am saying this as someone who even considered hiring some developers to make an app, or picking up a dying project and adding some viral life to it. There are ways to leverage the Twitter application market that will be attractive.Before Mike really started selling information products, he had a huge amount of… -
Value Trojans & Free Training Webinar (Wednesday 10/28/09 10:45 PST)
26 Oct 2009 | 4:09 pmI was meaning to get a post out on this most of last week but I was tied up helping lots of people big & small.Mike Hill is the only guy I know that teaches this stuff, but you will find Value Trojans all over the place when you realise the simplicity and powerful concept behind it.I also mentioned when I offered my bonus for Stompernet that I had plans to add some kind of Value Trojan to this site.Mike goes into incredible detail in his free promotional videos for his launch of sales tsunami and normally charges $25000/day to teach this stuff as a consultant, so it is well worth taking… -
Product Launch Manager Bonus & Video CDNs
23 Oct 2009 | 7:51 amIf you have been following the theme of Jeff Walkers Product Launch Manager launch, a large chunk of it is that online marketers often have far more knowledge than they think they do – they just have to go out there and sell it.So my bonus is along those lines and will reveal a lot more of my long term plans, which I even hinted at long ago in a comment on Jeff Walker’s blog when he first launched PLF over 3 years ago.Best Existing Solution By FarThe other day I felt compelled to write about Quansite because it is the closest service to what I want to achieve.If you are looking…
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Branding Strategy Insider
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How To Be A Good Advertising Client
16 Nov 2009 | 9:10 pmThe wisdom of David Ogilvy lives on in this reminder to client side marketers... How To Be A Good Client: 1. Emancipate your agency from fear. 2. Select the right agency in the first place. 3. Brief your agency very thoroughly indeed. 4. Do not compete with your agency in the creative area. 5. Coddle the goose who lays the golden egg. (provide enough time and resources to do the job well.) 6. Don’t strain your advertising through too many layers. 7. Make sure your agency makes a profit. 8. Don’t haggle with your agency. 9. Be candid and encourage… -
The Anti-laws of Luxury Marketing #18
15 Nov 2009 | 9:10 pm18. Don’t relocate your factoriesReducing cost prices is vital in the mass consumer markets, and this often means relocating factories. Luxury management does not apply this strategy. When someone buys a luxury item, they are buying a product steeped in a culture or in a country. Having local roots increases the perceived value of the luxury item. BMW, which is successfully pursuing a luxury strategy, builds all of its automobiles in Germany – apart from the entry line: the 3 Series – and is keeping production of the Mini in the United Kingdom. Keeping production of its models and… -
Brand Naming and Acronyms
14 Nov 2009 | 9:10 pmAn acronym is a pronounceable word formed from the initial letters of a name (WAC, for Women's Army Corps), or formed by combining the first parts of a series of words (RADAR, from Radio Detecting and Ranging).As these examples suggest, once an acronym becomes embedded in the language, most people forget -- or never bother to learn -- the underlying words. Just ask someone what "laser" actually stands for. (Ready? It's "Light Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation.")Naming a product or service with an acronym is like an Olympic diving competition. The best efforts carry a high… -
The Language Of Brand Names
13 Nov 2009 | 9:10 pmNames not just "are," they "do." As a part of language, names identify a business or brand, but also subtly suggest certain types of action.To explain, we must wade into the pond of language. Scholars have pointed out that every utterance has three functions:# The locutionary function involves what the expression denotes.# The illocutionary entails how it functions as a speech act, which philosophers of language define as an utterance considered as an action.# Perlocutionary functions include all the effects an utterance has on the receiver.Brand names, like other words, use all three… -
Social Media Not The Answer For Weak Brands
12 Nov 2009 | 9:10 pmIf you were a first-time visitor from Mars and you happened to drop into a marketing meeting somewhere in the United States, you might assume that marketing people do nothing but talk about "TGIF."That's Twitter, Google, the internet and Facebook.There's no question these four revolutionary developments have forever changed the marketing function. Word-of-mouth has now become word of finger.A key difference: Word-of-mouth leaves an invisible trail in the ether. Word-of-finger leaves an electronic trail on the internet.In the past, nobody paid much attention to word of mouth, even though by…
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Wallpaper.com
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United Nude flagship store, Amsterdam
20 Nov 2009 | 5:28 amSince its launch in 2003, United Nude has created one iconic shoe design after another, from the moulded aluminium Eamz model to the carbon fibre-looped Mobius heel. Architecture buffs might also know them for their connection to the architecture world: the company�s co-owner and co-designer Rem D. Koolhaas is the nephew of renowned OMA starchitect, Rem Koolhaas, with whom… -
Mercedes E500
20 Nov 2009 | 2:41 amMercedes-Benz brought the concept of the big elegant coup� into the world. Although the chauffeured saloon has never lost its lustre as the ultimate aspirational mode of transport, and the supercar continues to snap heads and command attention, big, powerful coup�s are the stealthy choice; not ostentatious enough to incur unwanted attention, but discreetly stylish all the same.… -
Forge Arts by Burd Haward Architects, London
20 Nov 2009 | 2:25 amIn an effort to recreate the intimate and calm context for which chamber music was originally composed - only this time in the heart of one of London�s busiest neighbourhoods - the Forge Arts venue opened recently in Camden Town. See more of Forge Arts Designed by Burd Haward Architects, the venue was a commission by owners Adam and Charlotte Caird, who dreamed of creating… -
Ursula Schulz-Dornburg at The Lichfield Studios
19 Nov 2009 | 4:00 pmThe photographs of British aristocrat Patrick Lichfield and Dusseldorf-based Ursula Schulz-Dornburg couldn�t be more different; the former immortalized sixties glamour with his pictures of models, royalty and pop stars, while the latter epitomizes the intellectual, landscape-focused German school, spearheaded by the likes of Hilla and Bernd Becher and their water towers. But… -
First Works architecture exhibition, AA Gallery
18 Nov 2009 | 4:00 pmHadid, Piano, Rogers, Foster and many of the fellow-60s and 70s generation of architects may today pride themselves to be among the world�s most celebrated, respected mega-practices; but rewind 4 decades back and all today�s starchitects were just taking their first baby steps into the architectural realm, marking an age of imaginative experimentation, innovation and visionary…
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TREND HUNTER - The Latest Trends
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Sketched Wardrobes - Disneyrollergirl Collection Dazzles With Siimplicity (GALLERY)
20 Nov 2009 | 6:40 pm(TrendHunter.com) The Trompe L'Oeil collection for Oasis is made by designer Roasalind Keep is called Disneyrollergirl and it is truly a breath of fresh air from what we are seeing in fashion. The pieces in the collection… -
Beard Cages - The National Beard and Mustache Championships in Tacoma Have Hairy Results (VIDEO)
20 Nov 2009 | 6:30 pm(TrendHunter.com) The National Beard and Mustache Championships in Tacoma have brought us many facial hair discoveries, but none as important as the beard cage seen in the video above. Not only is it unbelievable in theory… -
Meta Memes - Know Your Meme Describes the Balloon Boy Phenomenon in Detail (VIDEO)
20 Nov 2009 | 6:20 pm(TrendHunter.com) The boy named Falcon Heene will go down as being one of the most entertaining memes of 2009. Better known by his nickname Balloon Boy, Heene started off a Internet and media frenzy when it was reported… -
20 Computerized Home Decorations - From Computer Branded Toilets to Computer-Cut Kitchen Marquetry (CLUSTER)
20 Nov 2009 | 6:10 pm(TrendHunter.com) Computers have become such a necessity that we are now furnishing and decorating our living spaces with computerized home decor. There are so many interior home innovations that embracing the tech-crazy… -
19 Sluggish Innovations - From Animated Snail Tales to Snail-Shaped Music Halls (CLUSTER)
20 Nov 2009 | 6:00 pm(TrendHunter.com) Although snails are innately slimy creatures, apparently people find them endearing. They can be rather adorable (especially in animation) and they represent a slower way of life. Perhaps that’s why designers,…
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Customized Marketing
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Massive Collection of Over 1,300 Free Icon Sets
19 Nov 2009 | 8:20 pmOkay, I admit it. I am a compulsive collector of free icons (and some paid ones). Just always have to have one more set for the arsenal, and I have been known to stockpile. What you have here is a list of some beautiful icon sets and many posts that have collections of icons for social media, web functions and applications. All told there are over 1300 sets of free icons for you to bookmark or download. Some of the compilations repeat sets, but I didn’t eliminate them if they had some unique sets that were worth noting. Think of these sets as a good excuse to download a few… -
Recommendation
12 Nov 2009 | 9:10 pm“I have worked personally with Customized Marketing on two separate websites now (Joggers Life & Letters to My Body) and she has also helped me with side projects along the way. We’ve been working together for about a year at this point. I have been nothing but amazed by her dedication, timeliness, and genuine care for my needs and goals. She always has great input for me that goes well beyond just the site design. She is very helpful with ways to improve my sites, and has always been able to provide me with resources outside of my own knowledge base. She even… -
Deals and Steals (Coupons and Sales)
24 Oct 2009 | 1:46 pmToday appears to be a good day for great savings on some of our favorite things. Great deal on Woo Themes. As usual, get 2 wordpress themes for the price of 1. Now you can also get 25% off using coupon code “ROCKSTAR” FREE Shoemoneyx course! The best way to learn about blogging, monetizing, etc. Only available until 10/30/09, then access is discontinued. Be sure to sign up now. Brand New iMacs at $100 off. They sure are beautiful and the new specs are awesome! Enjoy! -
Obsessed With Circa
11 Oct 2009 | 7:50 pmI am so addicted to Circa notebooks. Levenger’s Circa series lets you totally customize your notebook in letter, junior and compact sizes. You can order a $40 sampler set which gives you a letter size setup and more plus a $40 gift card to pick the products you like (so the sampler is free). A suggestion is to use the card to get the compact grid 300 page refill for $9.95 (regularly $38) and starter kits in all sizes. Try these coupons. If you are fortunate enough to live near a Levenger Store, they have workshops that show you how to assemble and they give you a free sample. I… -
50% Off WordPress Videos – Limited Time Offer
22 Sep 2009 | 6:04 amLIMITED TIME OFFER!!!! 50% OFF The Wordpress Video Series with 46 videos is now available here only for 50% off using the orange button. This is a limited time offer. Nearly 5 HOURS of step-by-step video training! And don’t worry, no geeky tech talk! Just simple guided videos. 46 WordPress training videos, including: - Registering a domain name, getting web hosting and changing nameservers. - Using FileZilla FTP. - Installing WordPress manually and automatically. - How to create new content, add images etc. - How to install and manage plugins and themes. - How to Use WordPress Widgets…
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Building43
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The Gillmor Gang
20 Nov 2009 | 3:00 pmWelcome to The Gillmor Gang – now with video! Join the Real Time conversation on FriendFeed in the sidebar to the right. This will allow your comments to show in the sidebar here. Use the hashtag #gillmorgang and we’ll aggregate that content here, over time. -
TechCrunch Live Feed – The Real Time CrunchUp
20 Nov 2009 | 7:18 amWatch here for the real time feed from the Real Time CrunchUp. 9am – 5:45pm Pacific. 20NOV09. -
Special Gillmor Gang – Friday 20 NOV 2009
19 Nov 2009 | 12:29 pmThere will not be a live show today. Instead, a live show will air tomorrow following the Techcrunch Real Time CrunchUp. Real Time CrunchUp -
Rrripple offers flashy UI and security for group media sharing
19 Nov 2009 | 10:19 amIt might seem that Flickr, the photo sharing site, has wrapped it all up, right? Not yet. The creators of an app now in beta called Rrripple have developed what they say is a more secure, more flexible and easier-to-use approach to sharing a variety of media. In this building43 video interview, Heather Hiles, co-founder and CEO, discusses Rrripple’s philosophy and emphasis on security. Hiles also shows off a flashy new user interface that makes sharing photos and other media (spreadsheets, PDFs, videos) with groups of people easier and simpler. While Rrripple’s target audience… -
Libcloud joins Apache Software Foundation Incubator
18 Nov 2009 | 11:10 amWe are excited to announce that libcloud will be joining the Apache Software Foundation (ASF) Incubator. Libcloud has been very fortunate to grow as a community and as a open source project. We hope that by joining the ASF libcloud will continue to gain momentum. The success of libcloud directly adds to the success of cloud interoperability. Here are some quick stats about the current state of libcloud: * First development release on July 23, 2009 * 11 contributors * 2300 lines of python * 7 supported hosting providers * 17 forks, 119 watchers on github Moving forward we will be moving all…
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ReadWriteWeb
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An iPhone Visualization App That Syncs with the Cloud
20 Nov 2009 | 3:50 pmRoambi announced a pro version of its iPhone application this week that syncs with Salesforce.com and other cloud-based services or on-premsie sales environments. It's a visualization application, providing mobile workers with a pretty cool way to see sales information. Integration is by far one of the most significant trends we are seeing in the enterprise space. It's a wave, really, marked this week by Salesforce.com and its move to turn the Force.com development platform into a service that makes all of its applications social. Sponsor A good example of this trend are small companies like… -
Three Great Light Blogging Tools Compared
20 Nov 2009 | 3:35 pmOnce the service for those serious enough to pay for the privilege to post, TypePad recently released a free "Micro" service. The company made the decision to offer a free product realizing the demand for a platform more formal than Twitter and less formal than Wordpress or Typepad's original product. ReadWriteWeb compared TypePad's Micro against 2 other leading light blogging tools. Below are our thoughts: Sponsor TypePad Micro: In addition to being able to blog via email, iPhone app, "Blog It" bookmarklet and the general WYSIWYG dashboard, this tool also allows users to cross post to… -
8tracks to Launch Playback API and Developer Program
20 Nov 2009 | 12:00 pmIt appears that the time for freemium music services in the US has passed. Earlier this week streaming music site Imeem sold to MySpace for under $10 million dollars while laying off a large number of staff. For a company with all four major record labels signed, more than 15 million uniques a month and well over 5 million tracks in its catalogue, it came as a sobering blow to the industry. While many companies move to a subscription model, 8tracks continues to forge along in what some describe as a convenient loophole. As of this weekend the company is publicly launching its API for Boston's… -
Memento: Protocol-Based Time Travel for the Web
20 Nov 2009 | 11:45 amThe Web constantly changes and evolves. That, of course, is what makes the Internet so exciting, but it also means that finding older versions of a website is hard. The current push towards the real-time web is making this problem even more apparent. Memento, a project based at Old Dominion University, wants to make it easier to access older versions of a web page without having to go to the Internet Archive. To do this, the project is using a relatively obscure feature of the hypertext transfer protocol (HTTP). Sponsor The Memento project wants to give browsers a 'time-travel' mode. -
The Future Is All About Context: The Pragmatic Web
20 Nov 2009 | 11:14 amThe semantic Web has long been heralded as the future of the Web. Proponents have said that Web experiences will some day become more meaningful and relevant based on the AI-esque computational power of natural-language processing (NLP) and structured data that is understandable by machines for interpretation. However, with the rise of the social Web, we see that what truly makes our online experiences meaningful is not necessarily the Web's ability to approximate human language or to return search results with syntactical exactness. The value of the semantic Web will take time because the…
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Mashable!
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Droid Does: A Price Drop
20 Nov 2009 | 4:04 pmWhen it was released earlier this month, the retail price for the Motorola Droid was $200 for new activations on Verizon. Although Verizon is staying firm with that price point for now, it appears that some of its retailers are not. Specifically, Amazon and Dell have both cut prices on the smartphone to $150 and $120, respectively. The news comes just one day after news broke of price cuts by online retailers on other devices not named iPhone: the Palm Pre and Pixi. Of course, the device cost shouldn’t really play a huge role in consumer’s decision given the total costs of ownership for… -
Top 10 News Readers Judged by Mashable Readers
20 Nov 2009 | 3:47 pmEach Friday we choose a Lunchtime Poll topic to get a sense of how Mashable readers feel about the chosen topic of the week. Below are the results from last Friday’s poll, where we asked for your favorite news reader. Is your favorite app or service not represented in the list? Let us know in the comments! And to make sure your vote counts next time, be sure to vote in this week’s Lunchtime Poll, where we want to know your favorite video-sharing service. A surprising number of readers in the top 10 were Mac apps, and enough of you said you’d switched to using Twitter as your… -
HOW TO: Use Social Media to Find Black Friday Deals
20 Nov 2009 | 1:33 pmSusan Payton is the Managing Partner of Egg Marketing & Public Relations, an internet marketing firm. She blogs at The Marketing Eggspert Blog, and teaches marketing courses at Marketing EggSchool. Follow her on Twitter @eggmarketing. We’re a week away from Black Friday and just a few years ago, if you wanted to find the best deals, you had to wait for the sales flyers to hit your newspaper or mailbox. You’d make a list of what you wanted and get your game plan together. But that’s all changed because of social media. Tools like iPhone apps, blogs, Twitter, and Facebook… -
LUNCHTIME POLL: What’s Your Favorite Video Sharing Service?
20 Nov 2009 | 12:58 pmIt’s Friday, people, which means that not only is it Follow Friday, it’s also time for the Lunchtime Poll! Last week we wanted to know about your favorite news reader (or whether you use RSS at all). We’ll have the results for you later today, but let’s get a head start on the new poll: what’s your favorite video sharing service? We’ll start off with some responses from the staff here at Mashable, and let you fine folks have at it in the comments. Be sure to let us know along with your vote why you chose it as your favorite. We’ll post the results… -
Thanks to Mashable’s Socially Savvy Supporters
20 Nov 2009 | 12:57 pmThanks to this week’s advertisers and partners for enabling us to bring you the latest social media news and resources. Mashable’s sponsors are as social media savvy as our readers! Advertise with us and get noticed. Help us to help you. Mashable is seeking out site sponsors for our large, diverse audience — social media users, venture capitalists, early adopters, developers, bloggers, and many more. You’ll receive hundreds of thousands of views a day in addition to weekly recognition to thank you as our premium sponsors. Are you interested? Contact us for more information…
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TechCrunch
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Gmail Creator Thinks Email Will Last Forever. And Hasn’t Tried Google Wave.
20 Nov 2009 | 5:30 pm“Email is not going to disappear. Possibly ever. Until the robots kill us all.” – Paul Buchheit, creator of Gmail, co-founder of FriendFeed, currently doing vague infrastructure things at Facebook. Today, at our RealTime CrunchUp event in San Francisco, Buchheit and Threadsy founder Rob Goldman sat down for a chat with our own Steve Gillmor and Erick Schonfeld. The topic was: Can We Kill Email Already? All Aboard The Micro-Message Bus. So can we kill email? Well if Buchheit’s quote didn’t tip you off, the consensus was “no.” Though there are some… -
RealTime CrunchUp: Where’s The Money In RealTime?
20 Nov 2009 | 5:15 pmFor our last discussion at the RealTime CrunchUp, we’ve got a panel on actually generating revenue from these services. Participating in the discussion are some of the Valley’s top VCs and veterans of the space. Brian Singerman — Founders Fund Ron Conway — Angel Investor Dan’l Lewin — Corporate VP for Strategic and Emerging Business Development at Microsoft George Zachary — Charles River Ventures Paul Buchheit — Facebook/FriendFeed Andrew Braccia — Accel Partners Michael Arrington — Editor and Founder, TechCrunch Moderated by Steve Gillmor and Erick… -
RealTime CrunchUp: The Rise Of Geo Streams
20 Nov 2009 | 4:36 pmToday at the RealTime CrunchUp, representatives from some of the top companies involved in location based services came together to talk about the current state and future of geo-based services. Participating in the panel were: Matt Galligan, co-Founder of SimpleGeo Ryan Sarver, Director of Platform at Twitter Tristan Walker, VP of Business Development at Foursquare Steve Lee, Group Product Manager Google Maps for Mobile and Google Latitude Justin Shaffer, Founder of Hot Potato Elad Gil, CEO of Mixer Labs Moderators were our own Erick Schonfeld and MG Siegler. Video by Ustream Early in the… -
Rippol’s Video Discovery Engine Launches To The Public
20 Nov 2009 | 3:22 pmRippol, the video discovery site that combines both complex algorithms with user suggestions to surface interesting content, has launched to the public at today’s RealTime CrunchUp. We recently took an in-depth look at the service, but for those who haven’t seen it yet, here’s a recap: Rippol looks at your video watching activity on the site, as well as that of your friends and people in your demographic. It then looks at meta data from video content ingested from sites like YouTube and Hulu, and uses machine learning to identify videos it thinks you’ll like. From… -
RealTime CrunchUp: Media Streams As The Ultimate Marketing Vehicle
20 Nov 2009 | 3:13 pmAt our Real-Time CrunchUp today in San Francisco, we are hosting a panel titles “Media Streams: Are These The Utlimate Marketing Vehicle?” Panelists include Sean Rad, CEO of Ad.ly; Ryan Amos, co-founder of DailyBooth; Jesse Engle, CEO of CoTweet; Robin Bechtel, a celebrity agent and Philip Nelson, SVP of strategic development for NewTek. Below find my live notes (paraphrased): ES: What are celebrities doing to leverage the social streams? RB: I oversee Britney Spears’ digital properties and we are using Twitter to build up buzz around her concerts. Using Twitter, we were…
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Social Media Today
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BCS launches an ill-advised Twitter account
20 Nov 2009 | 5:56 pmAn employee for one of my clients tweeted me yesterday, pointing me to “what happens when you jump into social media unprepared.” He was talking about the launch of a new Twitter account by BCS—the ... -
Do Gen Y'ers Hold the Keys to Social Media?
20 Nov 2009 | 3:19 pmI promise. This is my last report for a while from the field of social media dreams. Today, I had the pleasure of participating in PR Camp New York. The use of the word "camp" in a social media con... -
Forget Traits--4 DSM Diagnoses of Social Media Mavens
20 Nov 2009 | 2:02 pmSocial media people love them some lists. 5 Qualities of a Good Social Media Manager. 3 Qualities to Look for When Hiring a Community Manager. Social Media Folks to Watch in 2010. Twitter lists...for ... -
Writing makes us free
20 Nov 2009 | 7:48 amNESTA hosted a lovely panel discussion yesterday with Stephen Fry, Twitter co-founder Biz Stone and LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman, who discussed Twitter as a force for good - see a video of the even... -
On Twitter and Social Networks, Brands Benefit from Conversations
20 Nov 2009 | 3:40 amSource: Shutterstock A recent study revealed 20 percent of tweets published are actually invitations for product information, answers or responses from peers or directly by brand representatives. ...
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ProBlogger Blog Tips
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Speech Recognition for Bloggers – The Ultimate Guide
20 Nov 2009 | 5:45 amSpeech recognition technology has come a long way in the last few years – in this in depth, informative and inspiring video which Jon Morrow (Associate Editor of Copyblogger and Co-founder of Partnering Profits) shares his first hand insights into speech recognition for bloggers. Jon does all of his blogging via speech recognition so he seemed like the logical guy to ask to cover the topic – in the video (I’m glad he agreed). In the video Jon makes recommendations of software, hardware (the hardware is key) and even demonstrates how he uses them in his everyday blogging. The… -
Review This Blog – Man vs Debt
19 Nov 2009 | 5:46 amLast month here on ProBlogger we ran a community review on a reader’s blog. I posted a link to a blog with some comments from the blogger and then opened it up for readers of ProBlogger to review it. The response from the post was great. 120+ comments were left including some great advice. I also had a lot of emails from readers saying that they learned a lot by reading the suggestions of others – many wanted to see these reviews done regularly. As a result I’m going to try to do these reviews on a monthly basis – today we have another one. As a little bonus to… -
Warning: Watching This Video May Lead to Work! [But It'll Also Improve Your Blog]
18 Nov 2009 | 5:55 amWhat’s your blogging Vice? Most bloggers that I know have at least one – whether it be compulsively checking blog stats, constantly tweaking template designs, obsessing over plugins and widgets, spending hour after hour ‘networking’ on Twitter, becoming preoccupied with SEO and… even allowing ourselves to become consumed by learning about blogging…. and not doing much of it. The reality is that as bloggers there are many tasks that compete for our attention. Many of them are important and can bring a lot of life to our blogs but most of them can also become… -
13 Ways I Get Back into Blogging after a Vacation
17 Nov 2009 | 5:49 amYesterday was my first day back at blogging after a 10 day vacation with my family and on Twitter I commented that I was finding it a little hard to get my brain back into blogging mode. @Mikeachim responded by suggesting I write a post on the daily rituals that I use to get my mind into gear. I thought I’d take his suggestion and jot down a few notes – both as a way of getting my head back into blogging but also because looking at the tweets I received this morning it’s a problem many bloggers face. As my head is a little scattered today (as I readjust) I’m going to… -
Email Marketing is Not Dead
16 Nov 2009 | 10:07 amWhile at Blog World Expo recently I recorded this video interview with Abby Johnson from Web Pro News. We covered a variety of topics including why email marketing is not dead – internet marketing for smart people – the new FTC regulations and touched on a new project I’m working on with Brian Clark and Chris Brogan. Read other recent email marketing posts on ProBlogger: 6 Reasons Why You Need to Consider Email as a Communication Strategy on Your Blog How I Use Email Newsletters to Drive Traffic and Make Money Post from: Blog Tips at ProBlogger. Email Marketing is Not Dead…
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chrisbrogan.com
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The Serendipity Engine – Web 2 Expo Speech
20 Nov 2009 | 1:33 pmThis is my favorite keynote speech yet. It’s just 10 minutes long, and I feel pretty good about it. You’ll recognize bits of my storytelling from the last several conferences tucked into here in a new way, I hope. Enjoy this video. (Can’t see it? Click here) -
How Much Time Should I Spend On Social Media
20 Nov 2009 | 5:33 amHow much time should you spend on social media? In some ways, the answer is: “how long is a piece of string?” And yet, you can set up some simple guidelines. They might be a bit different than you think. By the way, I’m writing these from a business perspective, but remember that I think of religion and nonprofits and all kinds of other applications as business-related, too. Here’s how I look at it: Social Media Time Management The way I’d do it is to break it up into 4 chunks, and then you decide the amount of hours to devote (2 hours a day is a minimum for MOST… -
Start a Moving Business – Overnight Success
18 Nov 2009 | 7:30 pmIn this episode of the Overnight Success series, I’ve got an idea about what makes one successful: moving. But it’s not what you think. If you can’t see the video, click here. What do you think? -
Stop Humping My Leg
18 Nov 2009 | 9:13 amDear people trying to sell me on something new: stop humping my leg. You know what I mean. You’ve seen dogs do this, right? That’s what it feels like when you jump on me breathlessly to share your new product or service when you don’t really much know whether I’m the right guy for your services. I was recently leg-humped at Web 2.0 Expo, by someone I like, and who I think is smart and has a lot of good potential. The thing is, I politely declined a demo, and he persisted. Immediately, I shifted to my back foot. I felt defensive. I rolled up my interest and tucked it… -
Prioritize Your Social Media Efforts
17 Nov 2009 | 10:00 pmThere aren’t enough hours in the day for all the chores that social media puts in front of us. The best writing I’ve found on how to manage your time in social media is via Amber Naslund’s social media time management series. Her efforts in crafting this should become a little ebook that you hand around to everyone. If you skipped over that link, go back, click it to open a new tab/window, and then read it when you’re done with this (or skip mine and read Amber’s- it’s that good). If you’re still with me, here’s what I want to say on the matter.
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JasonKeath.com
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The Democratization of Advertising
20 Nov 2009 | 8:26 amThe Democratization of Advertising Presentation Transcript The Democratization of Advertising JasonKeath.com Santa Claus is Real YES Kids Love Santa. Mostly YES Adults Love Santa. EVEN Dogs Love Santa. Just One Problem NOW Everybody is Santa. HOW Does the Original Santa Keep Up? Psst. Santa = Advertising Just go with it. Santa needs A New Sleigh Maybe even a New Suit OK Enough Bad Metaphors WHAT Does All This Social Media Crap Mean for Advertising? Long Story Short… Advertising MUST CHANGE The Audience is Bored They are Sheep No More It is Now About Community They Want Innovation They Want… -
Topless Photos Only
14 Nov 2009 | 10:15 amIt is hard to beat simple, creative ideas. That is what a sign read over a chair at the first local beach bar we stopped at in Cozumel, Mexico today. We were the first ones there and every group of tourists that happened upon this little reggae bar spent time talking about or taking photos in front of the sign. As photo pops go, mission accomplished. I am currently on the Social Fresh Cruise with a great group of folks (more on that later). Our stop in Cozumel has been amazing and filled with simple pleasures. The water, beaches, and event the guacamole are amazing. This little island is… -
Simply Remember to Take It Offline
14 Oct 2009 | 12:34 pmWe all know real world relationships are the goal of our networking. We talk to people a world away online. We form relationships with people all over the country on Twitter. But the real tangible benefit of these relationships, personal and business, happens offline. It is important to not get stuck inside of social networks and the virtual interactions they make so easy. Take the conversation to email, call someone, meet them for coffee. When you go to conferences or visit other cities, look for people from your online networks there. Experiences within social media are most engaging when… -
Social Media: The Bad and The Ugly
11 Oct 2009 | 9:09 pmIn response to Patrick O’Keefe’s ManagingCommunities.com post on his BlogWorld Expo Panel “Social Media: The Bad and the Ugly”. My ugly social media is simply the knee jerk attack responses that I seem to see more and more of each day. I try not to be negative at all online outside of customer service complaints. But especially when a more constructive response or the offering of a solution would be a better response. I hope more people will decide to stay positive when reacting to individuals and companies that are making a strong effort to enter the social media… -
4 Free Tickets to Social Media Business Forum
8 Oct 2009 | 8:55 pmSocial Media History Trivia October 9th, 1pm EST Follow @jakrose for questions Random draw from the first 5 correct answers wins a ticket for each question 4 Questions 4 Free Tickets to Social Media Business Forum (October 23rd – Durham, NC)
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Logic+Emotion
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KeepVid: Download videos from Google, Youtube, iFilm, Putfile, Metacafe, DailyMotion! [del.icio.us]
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Tweeting at the Speed of Scale
15 Nov 2009 | 7:59 pmOriginally posted on the CollaboratoryFrom a holistic perspective, we talk about the need for organizations to become more socially calibrated—able to adapt and respond to changes both externally and internally. The three areas where emergent outcomes can manifest are, participation with your customers, collaboration between your employees and optimization in the interactions/transactions between your business and its partners. Digging into customer participation, it’s clear that in a networked economy customers demand engagement, information, support and ultimately, value and ecosystems… -
Overcoming The Obstacles To Social Business
13 Nov 2009 | 8:06 amOriginally published on Harvard BusinessWhile social media often commands favorable media attention, the less often told story is that successful initiatives are rare to come by and that there are still a number of organizational roadblocks that managers need to overcome in order to make progress. Still, we are seeing signs of progress in the form of new efficiencies, more direct ways to connect with customers, and ways to make products and services better. From my experience working and talking with people in large, complex organizations, here are a small sample of obstacles to look for with… -
7 Visualization Groups On Flickr to Find Inspiration | FlowingData [del.icio.us]
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How Google Helped Save A Life
9 Nov 2009 | 3:00 amWhen my eight-year-old (Max) complained that he wasn't feeling well, we kept him home. On the next afternoon, when he complained about stomach pains, I told him to lie down. Later that day, when the stomach pains persisted and I had left the house—Belinda turned to Google for help. Mother's intuition told her to search for information—specifically where the appendix is located. And after doing so she went up to Max's room and pressed down on the right side of his abdomen. When he winced in pain, she decided to call the doctor. The doctor said go to the emergency room. The ER said, get a…
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Small Business Marketing Blog from Duct Tape Marketing
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QuickBooks 2010 Expends Beyond Accounting
20 Nov 2009 | 8:59 amQuickBooks 2010 Expends Beyond AccountingThis content from: Duct Tape Marketing The latest version of QuickBooks is a big step outside the box for the leading small business accounting software. Building on Intuit’s Connected Services Strategy announced last year, QuickBooks connects to several new online services that enable small businesses to extend the power of their information already in QuickBooks QuickBooks Pro and Premier 2010 feature the all-new Intuit App Center, providing users access to scalable, Software-as-a-Service business applications directly from within QuickBooks. -
What the Heck is Integrated Marketing Anyway?
18 Nov 2009 | 7:07 amWhat the Heck is Integrated Marketing Anyway?This content from: Duct Tape Marketing When I first started my business, several decades ago, I was determined to tell people that, mine was an integrated marketing firm. To which, I generally received polite nods and the occasional more truthful – “What the heck is integrated marketing anyway?” Well, c’mon I would mutter, “everyone knows it’s a management strategy and meta-discipline focused on the organization-wide optimization of unique value for stakeholders[1].” Right, see the problem with the term was… -
Is Social Media Changing Selling?
17 Nov 2009 | 8:44 amIs Social Media Changing Selling?This content from: Duct Tape Marketing Marketing podcast with Mike McLaughlin (Click to listen, right click and Save As to download – subscribe now via iTunes Social media has certainly changed marketing, but few people are addressing just how dramatically it’s changed sales. In this interview we hit that subject pretty head on. My guest for this episode of the Duct Tape Marketing podcast is Mike McLaughlin. He’s the author of Winning the Professional Services Sale, which offers professional service providers, business development managers, and… -
3 Tools to Make Twitter Lists Even More Useful
16 Nov 2009 | 7:37 am3 Tools to Make Twitter Lists Even More UsefulThis content from: Duct Tape Marketing I’m a big fan of the newish Twitter List function. I wrote about it last week – 5 Reasons to Use the New Twitter Lists Feature Now that I’ve you pumped up about using lists, I want to talk about a few tools that I think can make the feature even more useful. Twitter List Widget - (example above) this is a homegrown Twitter feature that’s pretty well hidden. Scroll to the bottom of your Twitter homepage and look for the link called Goodies. Then click Widgets, MyWebiste, ListWidget. -
Winner of the Social Media Library
15 Nov 2009 | 6:02 amWinner of the Social Media LibraryThis content from: Duct Tape Marketing In case you missed my post on Friday I offered one signed copy of One these seven books: Trust Agents by Chris Brogan and Julien Smith, New Community Rules by Tamar Weinberg, Six Pixels of Separation by Mitch Joel, Web Analytics 2.0 by Avinash Kaushik, Duct Tape Marketing by well, me, Whuffle Factor by Tara Hunt and CrushIt by Gary Vaynerchuk to the person that most creatively answers the following: I get the biggest return for my business using social media when I [fill in the blank] – Here’s the original…
