Daily Reading 05/09/2008

Daily Reading 05/08/2008

Daily Reading 04/27/2008

  • Influencer marketing is moving into the mainstream, with seven of 10 respondents to a recent study indicating that they’ll target influentials in the coming year. The trend is most pronounced among marketers the researchers classified as “leaders,” of those who use the most sophisticated tactics and tools.

    tags: influencers, marketing, daily_reading, social_media_research

  • Google’s vice president of search quality gives rare insight into how the top-secret search algorithm works in an interview with Popular Mechanics. of all things.

    tags: daily_reading

  • The US is a nation of online voyeurs, according to the author of a study on international online usage. A little over 60 percent of Internet users in the U.S. said they read blogs, but just 26 percent had created one, compared to over 70 percent of Internet users who blog in South Korea and China. There are more good stats in the article

    tags: daily_reading

  • The CEO of ThisNext describes the concept of the “product graph,” in which influential early adopters help other people discover products they didn’t previously know existed.

    tags: daily_reading

Daily Reading 4/24/08

  • How-to videos are becoming a huge new Web 2.0 category, with lots of start-up activity and millions of views for top productions. Some instructors are making good money, too.

    tags: daily_reading, video

  • A new class of social media aggregation tools is enabling people to tie together their activities in blogs, social networks, Twitter and other forums. The resulting feed is called a “lifestream.” Dosh Dosh digs into FriendFeed, which is the current market leader.

    tags: daily_reading, social_networks

  • Dell’s chief blogger compares Twitter to Facebook and tells why he likes Twitter better. Lionel Menchaca’s bulleted list of the pros and cons of each service will have a lot of people nodding in agreement. The comments are useful, too.

    tags: daily_reading

  • Menchaca points to this instructive video that explains the appeal of Twitter in 2 1/2 minutes. I think there’s a lot more to Twitter than this, but for those people who just don’t get the appeal, this video is a nice summary.

    tags: daily_reading, twitter

  • EMarketer says user-generated content isn’t a fad any more: “The number of user-generated content creators will rise from 77 million in 2007 to 108 million in 2012. The number of consumers of user-generated content will increase from 94 million in 2007 to 130 million in 2012.” The similarity of these numbers would indicate that the majority of people who are consuming user-generated content are the ones creating it. Still, eMarketer sees ad revenues for the category exceeding $800 million by 2012.

    tags: daily_reading, consumer_generated_media

  • Ted Mininni comments on Chrysler’s new Customer Advisory Board, which aims to bring 2,000 customers and prospects into a dialog about the company’s products. He asks what took Chrysler so long.

    tags: daily_reading

American Airlines Quietly Launches the World's Worst Corporate Blog

You can spend months analyzing, planning and choreographing your company’s entry into the blogosphere – or you can do it because there’s a gun to your head. Looks like American Airlines is taking the latter approach. Under pressure because of massive flight delays and cancellations due to equipment problems, the carrier has launched a simple Blogger blog to tell its side of the story. The lack of comments indicates that it hasn’t told anyone about it. Given how bad it is, that’s probably a good thing. Thanks to Shel Holtz for the heads-up.

The AAConversation blog does nearly everything wrong. See my next post for a list. It’s a revealing look at how buttoned-down corporations can stumble and fumble when seized by naked panic. This is AA unplugged and very unpackaged.