Curated Stories Mar. 11, 2010

Dear Lifehacker,I find myself time and again getting bad customer service from companies over the phone, and Id like to record these calls so I have proof, but…

This post might not be a wise move but I never claimed to have a perfect batting average in the wisdom department. David probably shouldn’t tick off Goliath in general. In this case, when it comes t…

If youre in the market for a netbook — the gimpy kittens of the laptop jungle — know this first: on the inside, theyre all basically the same. Making the little differences all the more important! And yes,…

“If you had to choose social media* or 100% engaged employees for your brand, which would you choose?”
I recently asked that on Twitter and the responses were pretty interesting. The question for…

Perhaps you’ve heard that social media is an important, somewhat new way for online users to engage the news. …

The contrary is the case: Twitter users are by far more active than the average social media users or rather lurkers. In case you are serious about your web …

When I was a young consultant, my first (and at the time, only) client was a fledgling Toyota, which had only recently entered the American market in a big way. Back in the mid-1970’s, in the wake of the first…

A one-of-a-kind killer whale population appears to be threatened by human appetites for Antarctic toothfish, better known to restaurant-goers as Chilean Sea Bass.
As fishing fleets patrol their waters, catchin…

American workers are ill-prepared for retirement.

Last week, I wrote a post about exiting a conversation gracefully that generated some buzz. Beyond commenting on the strategies and tips to help you get out of those awkward moments, many of you rightfully poin…

Earlier in the week we looked at the importance of ‘niches’ when it comes to building profitable blogs. Today I want to extend the topic and gives the process that I tend to use when working out if I want t…

Magazine publisher Condé Nast said it wont turn to pay walls to help deflect its 2009 $1 billion loss in ad revenue, despite the fact that one of its magazines, The New Yorker, currently hides its article arc…

Mark Zuckerberg’s hacking of email accounts and user profiles in 2004 could be felonies under Federal and state law, according to privacy lawyers.
As we described last week, Mark used login data of early Facebo…

Hey. Take five minutes (it took me three), drop by this site and give $10 or so to send 300 autistic kids to summer camp. Think about it. Two lattes worth of cash and you can send 300 kids to summer camp.
We�…

Great read – interesting thoughts on strategy how to use it effectively – http://bit.ly/cRafKU (via @carsonified)

37signals Answers (recently launched) is our first new app built with 37signals ID integration. That means everyone involved is using real names and avatars.

And wow, what a difference it makes. Trading anon…

Most hosted blogging platforms offer their customers a set of standard templates with relatively few options for customizing these sites. Starting today, however, bloggers on Google’s Blogger platform will be a…

The public relations industry is fortunate to have women as a large percentage of the work force, many of whom are in leadership or ownership positions at their firms. Other industries, specifically financial…

In “The Power of Who: You Already Know Everyone You Need to Know,” author Bob Beaudine attests that we already know everyone we need to know to succeed. I’m coming to believe that more and more the lon…

*The following is the guest post by Emily Thompson*
The Google Local Listing has grown in importance more and more in recent time. In many instances, the local 7-pack, consisting on local listings, is appeari…

According to recent data analysis from mobile analytics firm Localytics, iPhone application usage peaks in the evenings and on weekends and is much lower during the hours of a typical business day. From this, t…

Last week we talked about managing split teams with Danny Wong of Blank Label, a site for creating custom men’s dress shirts and a startup in the growing field of co-creation. These types of startups, which hav…

Tim Phillips’s analysis of press releases on Factiva shows a worrying trend. The number of press releases that contain the words ‘significant’, ‘substantial’, ‘meaningful’ and ‘unique’ in the…

Justin Bachman explains why he and others were alarmed that a JFK air-traffic controller let kids talk to pilots

Taking responsibility for something one is incapable of doing has never been a particularly good idea. Politicians get in trouble for promising their electorates that they can fix the economy when they can’t. M…

This post originally appeared on the American Express OPEN Forum, where Mashable regularly contributes articles about leveraging social media and technology in small business.One of the most powerful aspects o…

“We must all hang together,Or assuredly, we shall hang separately.”Benjamin Franklin, 1706-1790For the solo doctor, who make up 30% of America’s practitioners, success often depends on teamwork with you…

MediaPost Publications, March 10, 2010 — General Motors is launching a pair of experiential marketing programs this year for its core Chevrolet brand that extends its corporate May the Best Car Win mantra…

We’ve Got Too Much Sizzle in the System Right Now
Advertising Age, March 10, 2010 — Warning: This column may put you to sleep. Yes, this is a pattern. Early last year I called for a “slow marketing” moment…

Earlier this week, Econsultancy’s UK Research Director explored the increasingly apparent permeation of digital within different organisational disciplines.
Following a recent roundtable event held by Econsu…

With health reform possibly passing within the next few months, attention now turns to the primary care doctor shortage.
Regular readers of this blog know that there are not enough primary care doctors currentl…

One of the top AM radio stations that’s still cooking is Chicago’s WGN-AM, owned by the Tribune Company. (“WGN” stands for “World’s Greatest Newspaper.”) It’s a mixture of news, talk, and Chicago Cubs broadcas…

I’m heading off this week to SXSW Interactive, the annual geekfest that remains the only place where I have actually danced with robots to the music of theremins. Isn’t that exactly how you imagine that geeks p…

I have a shiny new toy and its been whirring away in the corner for a few days now and it’s time to take it out for a global brand spin across the social media universe. I had fired up my Social Media monit…

That didn’t take long. Leave it to marketers to find a way to use any innovative new web service to promote their own ends. The latest example? A Chatroulette contest launched by international clothing brand Fr…

When we tweet something, a thought, a piece of information, we expect two things: starting a few conversations and getting retweets. Both are valuable, but while the first goal implies our comm…

Dennis Byron submits:

Salesforce.com’s (CRM) CEO Marc Benioff is back on the blogosphere with a reprise of his claim that companies should do more Facebook. Unlike two weeks ago, this post is more an outright…

Worldwide smartphone shipments stormed back last quarter with 37.2 percent in growth, and Apple’s iPhone led the way with a 97.9 percent year-over-year surge in shipments. But the real coming battle in the mobi…

Apple this summer will go a long way towards silencing critics and catering to one of the most prevalent demands of its iPhone user base, when it introduces a multitasking solution through the handset’s 4.0 sof…

Andy Kessler has one of his standard thought-provoking opinion pieces discussing the economy of the past decade, suggesting that the real lesson learned from the past decade is the dangers of bad gov’t policies…

While the guidelines encourage Reuters journalists to use social media and stress that it is a powerful new tool, Reuters journalists are asked to get in …

For many publishers — both online and off — content runs their business strategy. As Rupert Murdoch recently said, “Content is not just king. It is the emperor of all things electronic.” But a good poin…

Sentiment analysis is something very new and immature. Sentiment analysis allows you to identify general attitudes towards your brand (or a product).
The goal of sentiment analysis is to assign a given social…

Adweek, March 11, 2010 — Forget about advertising, forget about new media, forget about social media. The real action is going to be in customer service. Customer service? You mean those exotic sounding p…

OK, it’s not actually an accessory, but it’s something I know I’d love to have in my home.iPhone app magnets!!They’re $12.99. And you get 18 magnets.Check them out here – I may end up getting them. If I do, I’l…

As we’ve seen in the previous two parts of this series (covering characterization and plot), using storytelling techniques to help communicate your personal brand can make for clearer, more consistent, more c…

While Facebook already provides a page insights tool for Page administrators to track traffic to their page, there is still a lot of information which is unknown. So how can administrators determine how well t…

[#3 in the Content that Works series.]
One of the ways you can measure the importance our culture places on different kinds of content is by observing the awards associated with them. For example, film and vide…

If social media is about levelling the playing field between businesses and consumers, then you would think that the largest businesses – the Fortune 100 – would be steering well clear. However, this infogr…

Provocative post on how potentially ineffective #socialmedia campaigns can return positive results – http://bit.ly/bDPIQc (via @benkunz)

Well if you don’t track twitter then you would not have heard this story of Conan O’Brien following a random girl from the twitter neighborhood named Sarah Killen. Sarah Killen had just 3 followers before C…

The possibilities are endless. The question is, how much more manipulation do we want to accept?

That was one of the topics of Luther Lowe’s presentation Tuesday at the annual SearchFest conference in Portland. Lowe — Yelp’s Manager of Business Outreach — gave a generally clear description of what…

For most of us, resumes are updated with great irregularity – usually just before leaving one job, and just after arriving at another. These resumes also are much more focused on our pasts than our future – hig…

I have been thinking for some time about writing a book on leadership. I initially wanted to call it Leadership 2.0, based on a popular blog post I had written. In fact, I often speak on this topic. The basic t…

It’s no surprise that the increasingly social web have enabled customers to be heard while helping to improve the very products and services they’ve purchased. As millions of people continue to sear…

Do you remember to the days of college, when you were required to sort through your curriculum and career goals with your designated college advisor? Education startup MyEdu aims to replace this by helping stu…

Here’s a question for all the folks who say that brand and reputation are important. How do you value brand? How do you value reputation? How do you know when your efforts at branding and reputation are payin…

I wrote a while back about social media and culture shift. I continue to believe that the biggest obstacle to social media adoption and integration is a culture shift, not an operational one.
B…

Make it very useful, then make it portable and spreadable. Package it in as many ways as you can think of, build it out, extend it with participation, give it away for free, give it away for leads, give it awa…

I don’t care if you have 5 employees or 500 employees, if your company isn’t blogging, you’re missing a HUGE opportunity to:

Build awareness for what you do and what you sell
Attract an…

ADOTAS – There have been a lot of stories about using social media to increase brand awareness and customer retention, but little attention has been paid to …

A local news and media company is getting into the social media consulting business. You heard me right. They’re trying to augment sagging revenues from traditional advertising by leveraging their enormo…

Yet, I work for the largest private Public Relations firm in the world, Edelman. Luckily however, I was hired on the Digital team which doesn’t require a whole buncha’ public relations knowledge. And, to be…

This post is part of Make A Referral Week – an innovative project from John Jantsch at Duct Tape Marketing to generate 1000 referred leads to 1000 deserving small businesses. If I were to ask you what the secr…

Companies are gradually becoming more sophisticated in their email marketing efforts, with greater use of personalisation and segmentation in their campaigns.
The Econsultancy / Adestra Email Census 2010 also…

ShareHow To Use Surprise To Generate Word Of MouthThis content from: Duct Tape Marketing
This post is a special Make a Referral Week guest post featuring education on the subject of referrals and word of mouth…

ShareWord of Mouth Versus Key InfluencersThis content from: Duct Tape Marketing
This post is a special Make a Referral Week guest post featuring education on the subject of referrals and word of mouth marketing…

Twitter may be a fast-growing social network, but most of its 50 million accounts merely follow other users rather than posting their own messages.

63% of mobile web consumption is performed on Apple’s iPhone.
Still, Googles Android OS is starting to gain share after a couple years of lagging far behind Apple. Googles share increased about 8% in February…