The Pitfalls, and Potential, of Corporate Social Networks – Baseline, Dec. 21, 2007
Daily reading 12/24/2007
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Daily reading 12/20/2007
Top 5 viral video advertisements of 2007 – FT.com, Dec. 11, 2007
A Beginner’s Guide to Social News Websites – Dosh Dosh
- Sound advice on how to build your reputation and traffic via social news sites. Key takeaways: focus on one or two sites, build relationships with key influencers and contribute regularly. The payoff can be big, but it takes time to build the necessary trust with the community.
– post by pgillin
FCC gives media conglomerates an early gift – Newspaper Death Watch
- My own commentary on the FCC’s rather incredible decision to grant media conglomerates and exemption to the commission’s own anti-monopoly rules in some major markets.
– post by pgillin
10 Year Anniversary of Blogs: Time Flies When One’s Overwhelmed! – Consumer Generated Media
- Peter Blackshaw celebrates the 10th anniversary of blogging by (what else?) blogging about it.
– post by pgillin
Striking writers in talks to launch Web start-ups – Los Angeles Times, Dec. 17, 2007
- Possibly a distant mirror for the formation of United Artists eight decades ago.
– post by pgillin
Daily reading 12/17/2007
- Here’s a great list of resources and tips for marketers trying to unravel the secrets of Facebook. It’s a detailed guide to Facebook features with advice on how to leverage each specifically for social campaigns.
– post by pgillin
Daily reading 12/14/2007
16 Things To Do After Starting A New WordPress Blog – JohnTP.com
- Here are some great tips for building traffic to your WordPress blog. Many relate to registering the site with various services and installing code to make sure you’re picked up by search engines.
– post by pgillin
- New research rebuts the commonly held belief that the key to successful viral marketing is to reach a small number of influencers. “‘We find that trying to track down key influencers, people who have
extremely large social networks, is typically unnecessary and, more
importantly, can actually limit a campaign or advertisement’s viral
potential,’ says the author of the soon-to-be-published research.
‘Instead, marketers need to realize that the majority of their audience, not just the well-connected few, is eager and willing to pass along well-designed and relevant messages.'” – post by pgillin
To wiki or not to wiki – iMedia Connection, Dec. 12, 2007
- The CEO of WetPaint counters five common objections to public wikis. These sound a lot like the five most common objections to corporate blogs!
– post by pgillin
Online customers: how we are failing them – iMedia Connection, Dec. 12, 2007
- CRM mistakes online. Wal-Mart continues to flounder in understanding the online consumer.
– post by pgillin
Daily reading 12/09/2007
Here Comes Another Bubble – The Richter Scales – YouTube
- I don’t personally believe this bubble will ever be anything like the last one, but this video is hilarious nonetheless.
– post by pgillin
Daily reading 12/08/2007
We Are Smarter Than Me: How the Wisdom of Crowds Can Help Businesses Succeed – Knowledge@Wharton Annotated
- Online communities can change the way businesses create and sell their products, often dramatically. In this collection of mini-case studies, the author of a new book shows how the wisdom of crowds can help organizations solve problems and innovate. I love the example of P&G’s print-on-a-potato-chip problem!
Twitter's unique appeal
Laura Fitton is a Twitter master, and she gave me a whole new perspective on this service, which I had initially dismissed as silly when I saw it last March.
Laura (twitter.com/pistachio) is an independent consultant whose two very young children create some lifestyle choices. Basically, she has to work mostly from home. Twitter has been her business network and support group. Without really trying, she has collected an entourage of nearly 900 followers, and that has led to business, speaking invitations and personal relationships.
Laura Twitters constantly, describing professional and life experiences in 140-character bursts. She supplements her text posts with videos from Seesmic.com, an instant video messaging service that’s still in test phase. It’s a type of journaling called moblogging (mobile blogging) and it has an appeal all its own.
For active mobloggers (Twitter is the preferred medium) blogs are a collection of short bursts that spark mini-conversations. The structured thesis of the type that you’re reading now doesn’t fit this model. Blog entries are a sequence of miniature thoughts and observations, each expressed in the charmingly succinct language of a space-limited medium. People cover hour-long conference keynote speeches as a sequence of Twitter messages. There’s even an emerging style of Twitter language that prompts the greatest possible response. I can’t say I understand it, but it’s a great topic for a follow-up article.
Back to Laura. The other day, she was pondering what to make for breakfast. She Twittered “pancakes or waffles?” to her followers and within two minutes had 10 responses. Today she recorded me talking about my proposal for how Starbucks should be the next great media power (e-mail me for more on this). She posted the video using Seesmic and, within 20 minutes, had a half-dozen comments. Conventional bloggers should be so lucky.
I spent the lunch hour today at a table full of Twitter enthusiasts. It struck me that they are exhilarated by the idea of making connections. To them, Twitter is a lifeline to people they’d never otherwise meet or stay in contact with, and that serendipity is one of the service’s principal attractions.
The chance to find out information provided by those connections is another appeal. One Twitterer proposed that the service is actually a corollary to daily newspapers. In the same sense that newspapers provide guided discovery to information identified by editors, moblogs offer discovery of information identified by trusted sources of any kind. The two approaches fulfill a similar need. They just do it in different ways.
Daily reading 12/06/2007
The Potential of Enterprise 2.0 – Six Lessons for Success – Trends in the Living Networks
- Six excellent points on how and why to adopt Web 2.0 tools to enterprise applications. Too often businesses install tools without having any idea why they’re needed. Those projects usually die on the vine. In this short blog entry, the author advises putting business value before technology.
– post by pgillin
Daily reading 12/05/2007
poll.pdf (application/pdf Object)
- Com.motion, a new social media boutique agency in Canada, has released the results of a survey of 444 business professionals and 1,821 consumers about social media. It’s worth reading. Note that top managers and junior employees largely agree on the importance of social media in the communications landscape. However, the survey also pointedly illustrates the generation gap. For example, 68% of 18-34-year-olds say social networks are important for “developing, maintaining and nurturing friendships” compared to 35% of respondents over 55.
– post by pgillin
Daily reading 12/04/2007
Adults E-Mail, Teens IM – eMarketer, Dec. 3, 2007
- Here’s an interesting data point: teens use instant messaging more than twice as much as marketers. That means that if your teen-oriented campaign is built around e-mail, you’re using the wrong medium. Many businesspeople find IM to be instrusive and disruptive, but teens don’t agree. It’s increasingly their preferred mode of communication. The rules of IM marketing are very different that those of e-mail marketing, so learn the landscape before using this tool.
– post by pgillin