"One of the main principles of permaculture is that ‘the problem is the solution.’

ShareThis

Image via Wikipedia

• 11 Top Open-source Resources for Cloud Computing
  This is a good list but beware; open source isn’t always cheaper. Many companies underestimate the cost of supporting open source. And don’t forget, many of these are fledgling orgs or early stage companies. If they cease to exist, your IP may go down with them.
   
• Enterprise 2.0: The Barrier To Exit
  In other words, it can help companies retain valuable knowledge workers by weaving social bonds into the fabric of the workplace.

  "People think twice about leaving and giving up all that," said Art Fritzson of Booz Allen Hamilton

  

• Twittering To Keep Current
  More analysis from Media Post on the recent Pew Internet & American Life Project Survey, (Nov-Dec ‘08, Aug-Sep ‘09), October 2009
   
• Fortune 500 Business Blogging Wiki

   

ShareThis

Image by dpstyles™ via Flickr

• 6 Innovative Ways Businesses are Capitalizing on Foursquare
  Simple ways to stimulate market conversations and engagement.
  (tags: foursquare marketing business advertising ecommerce)

ShareThis

You’ve got to start with the customer experience and work back toward
the technology–not the other way around"

The other interesting tidbit so far is the title of Chapter 4, "Create
Twitter-Like Headlines."

Posted via email from George Dearing dot com

ShareThis

Image via CrunchBase

• How Online Advertising Works: Whither The Click? – comScore, Inc
  Gian Fulgoni on "Empirical Generalizations in Advertising"
  (tags: advertising research interactive analytics comScore measurement)

ShareThis

Image via CrunchBase

• Three Ways to Thrive in the Age of Streams – The Steve Rubel Lifestream
  3) Embracing a hub and spoke approach – it’s difficult to expect anyone to come to you. This is why I like Posterous. I can start something here and engage with it everywhere via their auto-posting feature
  (tags: tips streams blogging microblogging content)

ShareThis

But more importantly, we tried to hone in on how social networks can stimulate online conversations. One of the things I’ve noticed is the relationship between forums and things like Twitter. I grabbed the screenshot from TreeHugger to show how they’re using Twitter to “lubricate” content that exists within some of their other online properties.

I put lubricate in quotations because it’s a word that Twitter’s Ev Williams uses to describe how Twitter excels at delivering multiple pathways to existing information. In that context, I don’t think  there’s a better way to describe it.

As far as my client work, the way I articulated it was to package your experts and present them online as visibly as possible. It’s not just about linking to your existing content, it’s also important to catalyze the opportunities to engage with your customers. Many describe that last piece as market conversations.

As I mentioned to my client, what better way to have your expertise on demand than having a Twitter List or widget displaying one of your brand’s experts ready to respond to forum posts or FAQs? It’s really a matter of augmenting what you’re already doing with your forums. Forum MVPs or purists will always stay close to some of their old habits, but increasingly users’ methods of interacting with you (and your content) is more free-form. In other words, your customers’ clicks aren’t always tied to your core brand content.

Today it wouldn’t be unusual for one of your customers to visit your site and quickly be whisked away to one of your employee’s Twitter accounts.
If that’s such an increasing use case, why not bring that closer to where your brand’s conversations originate? In a sense, I think this points to an increasing expectation on companies to have some level of curation expertise.

I’d even go a step further. Is it that far-fetched to hear that one of the deciding factors in selecting a vendor was how many of its employees were deemed as industry influencers or luminaries? Of course not, it happens all the time. But nowadays, the variables for how our customers come up with their observations are much more visible. With things like Twitter Lists, blogs and Facebook fan pages, expertise has never been on such public display.

A big part of my argument in citing the “Forums” use case has a lot to do with curation. What fascinates me the most is bringing curation closer to the business. It seems like Forums are one of the obvious candidates.

ShareThis

Image via CrunchBase

• The Right Way For Media Companies to Create Social Media Policies [PBS // MediaShift]
  I like the analysis of the "Wrong Approach" — "The idea that journalists not comment in any manner on stories or their news organization is too sweeping. It runs against the grain of social media and its love of collaboration and transparency."
  (tags: policy media social+media PBS)

  

• CNN Now in "Horse Race" with Huffington Post and Daily Beast [Beet.TV]
  "CNN.com has taken notice of the Huffington Post and the Daily Beast as "opinion destinations" and wants to be a "horse in that race," CNN.com General Manager KC Estenson told me last night, after the industry introduction of the revamped CNN.com site."
  (tags: beet+TV media online+media publishers blogs news+sites news journalism)

  

• The New Facebook News Feed and What It Means
  "The real-time flow of social activity data is very exciting, but many people have cautioned that it will be a net-negative for users’ experience of the web as we’re flooded with an overwhelming quantity of low-quality information. Confronting this issue is an obvious next step for social software."
  (tags: social+networking social+streams activity+streams facebook)

ShareThis

Image by Steve Rhodes via Flickr

• 5 Ways Design Thinking Can Raise the Collective IQ of Your Business | Cannell | Fast Company
  Be stupid often, but early. — Executives often harbor the unrealistic ambition of being right 100% of the time. A few stupid mistakes can actually make you smarter, in the same way that physical exertion rounds you into shape. For obvious reasons, mistakes are less costly if they’re committed early in the process.
  (tags: business strategy innovation design thinking)

ShareThis

Image via CrunchBase

• Mob Rule! How Users Took Over Twitter | Wired Magazine
  "He was astonished to hear Barry Diller and John Malone, two pillars of the pre-Internet world, proclaiming that Twitter would never make much money. “I didn’t argue my case,” Williams says. “But all the Internet guys there were laughing at those media guys. Are you kidding? Do you understand how money flows to the Internet? When you know that Twitter is a vehicle for directing information and traffic to large audiences, you realize there’s obviously a huge business.”
  (tags: twitter socialmedia microblogging trends wired)

ShareThis

via gigaom.com

 

ShareThis

ShareThis

 
via wired.com

ShareThis

Posted via web from George Dearing dot com

ShareThis

Posted via web from George Dearing dot com

ShareThis

Image via CrunchBase

• Success Factors for Brands on Facebook [ADWEEK]
  "There’s no media cost to setting up on Facebook, but brands often find the quickest way to build a sizable following is through — you guessed it — paid advertising.

  Take Little Debbie. Nearly six months ago the snack food brand set up shop on Facebook with a standard fan page. It posted updates, uploaded old TV spots and waited. Crickets. Then, last Thursday, it rolled out an engagement ad "reach block" that messaged 21-49-year-olds touting a sweepstakes for a Smart car with the option to become a fan. Within 12 hours, Little Debbie’s fan base went from 5,000 to over 125,000. It welcomed people with a message asking their favorite Little Debbie snack. It got over 6,000 comments." (tags: facebook brands social+media social+networks)

• M-Commerce’s Big Moment [BusinessWeek]
  "Yet, m-commerce may finally be hitting its stride. And some analysts who in recent years became more conservative in their forecasts are now having to make upward revisions. In January, consultant ABI Research projected North American sales of physical goods ordered via cell phone would reach $544 million this year, up from $346 million in 2008. Now, Mark Beccue, senior analyst at ABI, is considering updating his 2009 forecast to $800 million. "I thought hockey-stick growth was going to come in 2010, but it looks like it’s already a hockey stick," Beccue says. "Next year, it will double again."
  (tags: retail iphone mobile m-commerce mobile2.0)

ShareThis

"Peerset scrapes data from millions of sites, profiles and status messages and compiles a series of word clusters. While seemingly unrelated, Grey’s Anatomy, John Mayer and Starbucks coffee are clustered together simply because a large number of users have expressed interest in all three topics."

The time it would take to pull together this type of data would seem to easily justify the expenditure. You could hire an analytics or media services firm to try and aggregate this type of data but in the end you still have to make sense of it — which brings you back to algorithms, metadata and other analytical tools. That’s a big reason I like Peerset’s approach.

ShareThis

I like 3rdWhale President Ron Williams’ idea of simply adding a "sustainability" tag to the iTunes store and homepage. And with Apple’s recent Green push, you’d think they’d be all over the opportunity to boost firms with a green gene.

What this also shows is how much opportunity there is for brands and content providers. If I were a media company or brand I’d be looking to cut content and licensing deals that put my company front and center alongside these niche providers. Not to mention iPhone apps are the gateway interface to other brand touches and interactions. And guess what — a lot of those interactions will ultimately be tied to transactions. Think M-Commerce.

via treehugger.com

ShareThis

Sent from my iPhone
—————————-
m: 214.536.7072
georgedearing.com

Posted via email from George Dearing dot com

ShareThis

And according to Nielsen and Interpret Research, gamers have a recall rate of more than 70% for in-game ads.

"Market researcher Screen Digest estimates the global in-game advertising market will reach $1 billion by 2014. The rationale is that people are watching less TV and so advertisers are trying to reach them via new media, including video games. While the recession has hurt game sales, Massive contends people are spending more time playing games. (That means gamers are playing the games they buy for a longer time and are consuming less traditional media). Massive says it can reach 40 million Xbox 360 and PC gamers in 31 countries."

Posted via web from George Dearing dot com

ShareThis