Over the past decade, recommendation engines have become quietly ubiquitous. At the appropriate moment — generally when you're about to consummate a retail purchase — they appear at your shoulder, whispering suggestively in your ear. Amazon was the pioneer of automated recommendations, but Netflix, Apple, YouTube and TiVo have them too. A good recommendation engine is worth a lot of money. According to a report by industry analyst Forrester, one-third of customers who notice recommendations on an e-commerce site wind up buying something based on them.
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May 31, 2010
The 5 Most Overused Expressions On The Internet
As someone who has been moderating comments for over two years (and using the internet for about 17), I've seen a lot of internet slang fads come and go. But there are some phrases, it seems, that just won't die:
The 5 Most Overused Expressions On The Internet
The 5 Most Overused Expressions On The Internet
May 29, 2010
What is Adding Value and How Does it Apply to Social Networking?
As a social media advocate I often discuss adding value to the conversations, to the communities or to the relationships. I guess I assumed everyone already knew what the term means and how it applies to them until I started to get questions from people.
So what exactly is adding value and how? Is it just an over-used marketing jargon? An illusion of a feel-good emotion? The more I use the term “value” the more I feel like it’s loosing its soul (I’m guilty as charge at times).
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So what exactly is adding value and how? Is it just an over-used marketing jargon? An illusion of a feel-good emotion? The more I use the term “value” the more I feel like it’s loosing its soul (I’m guilty as charge at times).
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May 28, 2010
What Surprising Number Will Change Your Business? - Bill Taylor - Harvard Business Review
Numbers are the universal language of business. We use them to attract investors for our startup ideas, to win approval for product introductions, to make the case for expanding into new markets or entering new categories. In other words, numbers, when used well, tell a compelling story. So why is it that so many of the numbers we encounter in business — from endless Excel spreadsheets to bloodless calculations in business plans — make our eyes glaze over rather than set our minds racing?
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Huge Gap Remains Between Mainstream Media and the Social Web [REPORT]
The top stories in the mainstream press are markedly different than those that lead on social media platforms, a recent study by the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism revealed.
Furthermore, what is popular on one social network rarely proves popular on another. In the 29 weeks that the Center tracked news items on blogs, TwitterTwitterTwitter and YouTubeYouTubeYouTube, the three platforms only shared the same top story once — the week of June 15-19, 2009, when Iranian citizens flocked to the streets to contest the results of the presidential election.
Huge Gap Remains Between Mainstream Media and the Social Web [REPORT]
Furthermore, what is popular on one social network rarely proves popular on another. In the 29 weeks that the Center tracked news items on blogs, TwitterTwitterTwitter and YouTubeYouTubeYouTube, the three platforms only shared the same top story once — the week of June 15-19, 2009, when Iranian citizens flocked to the streets to contest the results of the presidential election.
Huge Gap Remains Between Mainstream Media and the Social Web [REPORT]
The lethal self-complacency of advertising
Is advertising the next casualty of the on-going digital tsunami’s? For now, advertising looks like the patient who developed an asymptomatic form of cancer without realizing how sick he is. Such behavior usually results from excessive confidence in one’s body past performance, mixed with a state of permanent denial and a deep sense of superiority, all aided by a complacent environment. The digital graveyard is filled with the carcasses of utterly confident people who all shared this sense of invincibility. The music industry or, to some extent, the news business built large mausoleums for themselves. Today, the advertising industry is working on its own funeral monument. Same mistakes….
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Do Facebook's New Privacy Settings Really Protect Your Privacy?
While the settings do address the main concerns that have been so widely discussed and publicized since the launch of Facebook's Open Graph/instant personalization initiative, no privacy settings are truly going to protect people's privacy on Facebook - and that's not Facebook's fault. I would blame a combination of human nature and technology.
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May 26, 2010
Two-Thirds of Web Users to Visit Social Nets in 2014
Usage of social networking sites rose sharply in 2009, thanks to the ever-increasing popularity of Facebook. eMarketer estimates that 57.5% of Internet users, or 127 million people, will use a social network at least once a month in 2010.
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Social Media Ad Spending Lags
Social media use is exploding, but ad spending in the sector continues to be a blip on the radar for most brands.
Razorfish, one of the largest digital ad spenders, compiled data on its 2009 digital ad spending. It found that social media display advertising made up just 3 percent of its clients' budgets. Non-display in social media accounted for another 1 percent. The figures pale in comparison to the time spent online. According to comScore, U.S. Internet users spent 11 percent of their time online in 2011 on social media sites.
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Razorfish, one of the largest digital ad spenders, compiled data on its 2009 digital ad spending. It found that social media display advertising made up just 3 percent of its clients' budgets. Non-display in social media accounted for another 1 percent. The figures pale in comparison to the time spent online. According to comScore, U.S. Internet users spent 11 percent of their time online in 2011 on social media sites.
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May 25, 2010
Self-Conception And Social Networks
In a recent essay, entrepreneur and author Ben Casnocha, wonders about how young people’s self images are affected by their social network profiles. Ben says filling out the open-ended sections of profiles, especially ‘bio’ boxes may not be a bad thing if it leads to teens introspecting and trying to understand themselves better, but the other more tightly-defined sections of the profile may result in them developing a rigid mindset.
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Has Digital Media Come of Age? -- by Manish Agarwal
This question is neither being asked for the first time nor is going to be the last time. This question has been raised ad nauseum in every forum since 2001 and replies of experts and research reports can give a run to a classic Bollywood potboiler which oscillates between hope and despair.
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How Data is Redefining Business Relationships
The business world still runs on relationships, and data is as much at home at a cocktail hour or on a conference call as it is in a slide deck. The game has not changed much at all. The difference is that today’s business data has put everything in stark relief, at very high resolution. Opportunities and risks have been amplified.
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May 24, 2010
20 cool things you didn't know Twitter could do
Twitter isn't just about telling the world what you had for lunch, any more than the phone is just a way of calling Mum.
It's a communications platform in its own right now, and you can do amazing things with those 140 characters – automatically generating content, serving up data on demand, sharing photos and much more.
But what if you're not feeling inspired? We've gathered together some projects people have put together through the medium of Twitter. Some are funny, some are useful and some are plain odd – but all are more interesting than a simple status update.
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It's a communications platform in its own right now, and you can do amazing things with those 140 characters – automatically generating content, serving up data on demand, sharing photos and much more.
But what if you're not feeling inspired? We've gathered together some projects people have put together through the medium of Twitter. Some are funny, some are useful and some are plain odd – but all are more interesting than a simple status update.
More here...
May 22, 2010
Measuring Digital Creative Impact
In the evolving digital advertising model, the effectiveness of "brand" creative will be measurable. Not only will there be ways to measure how impactful creative is, but there will be a number of metrics that can be used to measure different marketer objectives for their advertising creative. Here are a few.
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May 15, 2010
What’s next? The future of Social Media
We all know there is no such thing as a crystal ball, which makes predicting the future a rather daunting task. Such is the case in speculating on the future of the current social networking boom. Many “futurists” often use the past as a guide, as history tends to repeat itself in cyclical patterns of more or less seven years. At the risk of dating myself, I can say that I have lived and worked through the evolution of the internet and watched it follow those socio-economic cycles. These suggest a pattern of sorts and here are a few recurring themes that may shed some light on what to expect:
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May 14, 2010
6 Ways to Integrate Social Media Into Your Email Acquisition and Retention Efforts
A great way to integrate social media into your overall digital marketing mix is to introduce it into your existing email marketing acquisition and retention efforts. To establish a natural synergy and ongoing connection between the two channels, there are six basic things you should do.
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"Kill Your Facebook Page" Backlash Gains Speed
Calls for people to delete their Facebook accounts are gathering momentum. Critics cite privacy concerns and plummeting trust in the company and its leader, Mark Zuckerberg.
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A ‘private’ alternative to Facebook takes shape
Four New York University students have decided people should be able to communicate online without surrendering their privacy to a big business.
How angry is the world at Facebook for devouring every morsel of personal information we are willing to feed it?
A few months ago, four geeky college students, living on pizza in a computer lab downtown on Mercer Street, decided to build a social network that wouldn’t force people to surrender their privacy to a big business. It would take three or four months to write the code, and they would need a few thousand dollars each to live on.
How angry is the world at Facebook for devouring every morsel of personal information we are willing to feed it?
A few months ago, four geeky college students, living on pizza in a computer lab downtown on Mercer Street, decided to build a social network that wouldn’t force people to surrender their privacy to a big business. It would take three or four months to write the code, and they would need a few thousand dollars each to live on.
May 8, 2010
How Google Got Its New Look
Every day 268 million people use Google to search for something. The query goes in, the company's software delivers back the most relevant links. The interaction is so simple—and the hidden calculation behind the results so complex—that it's no wonder people tend not to notice much about the process. Who bothers to ask the ingredients of a magic formula?
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May 5, 2010
What Do Consumers Think? Don’t Even Bother Asking
In a recent article on the Brandweek website, Mr. Sellers of Grey Matter Research & Consulting wrote, "In at least a third of the advertising-related focus groups I've moderated, the client has insisted we ask a question such as: 'What would be the best media to advertise our product?' The inevitable answer is television. But that's just because TV is what people tend to envision when they think of advertising. It's not because consumers actually have deep insight that a TV buy would suit the marketplace goals of the brand in question."
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5 Differences Between Social Media and Social Networking
The differences between social media and social networking are just about as vast as night and day. There are some key differences and knowing what they are can help you gain a better understanding on how to leverage them for your brand and business.
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May 4, 2010
Social Enterprise: 5 Tips for Getting Execs on Board
Even though there are now a plenitude of enterprise social media success stories, we know that driving home the business necessity of social media in the board room can be a daunting task.
What follows are expert tips and strategies for moving from talk to action, and advice to help you secure the ever elusive executive buy-in.
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What follows are expert tips and strategies for moving from talk to action, and advice to help you secure the ever elusive executive buy-in.
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May 3, 2010
6 Steps to Protect Your Facebook Privacy - PCWorld
Whether you're a committed telephone addict, a tabloid aficionado, or a web surfer extraordinaire, we're sure you can't help but notice that every couple of days seems to bring another security scare. Scare stories make for good headlines, of course, but some affect you more than others. Such is the case with privacy -- something we're increasingly expected to manage for ourselves.
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May 1, 2010
5 Things You Can Learn From Professional Spammers
Spammers today, like effective bank robbers, always stay one step ahead of the curve, introducing new technology and honing copy to entice people to buy. They do research on colors that drive attention, subject lines, copy length and even personalization. So why doesn’t anyone study spam emails to see what new best practices our standard market should employ? I decided to take a look at a sample of 1,422 spam emails recently sent to see what I could learn. This is what I found:
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Steve Jobs - Thoughts on Flash
In an open letter published on the Apple site this week, Steve Jobs provided some feedback and explanation about why his company will not be changing its stance on Flash anytime soon. Listing Flash’s proprietary status, expendability due to newer and better tools and its impact on mobile battery life as tenable reasons to not perform an about-face, Jobs makes a great argument for why Apple is moving on without Flash and you should too.
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