Curated Stories Mar. 19, 2010

Researching topics such as health, diet, and (especially) the effectiveness of dietary supplements can be hard and time-consuming. Obscured by thousands of marketing tricks, finding the truth takes days, if no…

Do you know the Page Rank of your Twitter Home Page? You may be surprised to find it is a lot higher than you think it is – and you probably achieved it without even thinking about it.

For ex…

Cleaning LPs with a bottle of wood glue is hardly an intuitive way to get more mileage out of that bottle of glue in your workshop or clean a beloved LP. The r…

Steve Myers at Poynter gathers some thoughts from journalists about the most important lessons they learned at SXSW:
Michael Donohoe, developer, The New York Times: Use competitive and gamelike scenarios to kee…

Everyone’s been talking about the “real-time web” for quite some time, but it’s easy to focus on speed while forgetting real-time is dependent on trust.
When things move faster, trust matters more….

Pain: Social Media Teams Are Challenged To Respond To the Distributed Conversations
I’m starting to get a few briefings and client requests about new technologies that enable social marketers to quickly manag…

If you want to get some new business, here are three quick tips that may help you boost your customer-list fast…
1. Make A List. Check It Twice.
Look through all of your contacts and review the people you�…

Hertz is hoping to make an emotional connection with consumers in a new campaign that centers on personal journeys.
Brandweek, March 19, 2010 — Dubbed Journey On, the effort includes TV, print, and online…

Macmillan CEO John Sargent:

Starting at the end of March, we will move from the “retail
model” of selling e-books (publishers sell to retailers, who
then sell to readers at a price that the retailer…

Small businesses flocked to social media in 2009, with their adoption of the technology doubling from 12 percent to 24 percent, says a new University of Maryland/Network Solutions study.
The Small Business Succ…

As a start-up, it’s often your dream to see yourself in the press (especially if it’s good things they are saying).
And so you cultivate reporters, hoping to become that next darling like Twitter, or like Fours…

You’ve heard it a thousand times: the money’s in the list. If you’re serious about getting results online, you need to build a list of people who are paying attention to you, typically an email list.
So…

Amazon is turning up the heat on small publishers to keep them out of Apple’s iBookstore.
According to a report in Publishers Marketplace (via Daring Fireball) Amazon is telling smaller publishers it will stop…

As @tonyrcollins reports, a confidential report currently in preparation on the NHS Summary Care Records (SCR) database will reveal serious flaws in a massively expensive database (Computer Weekly, March 2010)….

The USPTO just granted Apple a patent for iGroups, a mobile social networking application that could have immense value in this arena, especially if the relevant features are released as part of a p…

The interview is a little rough in spots but people — like Lagerfeld — who have strong opinions but don’t try to push them on others are always interesting to listen to, even if you disagree.

The whole cultu…

Twitter appears set to tweak search results to return the most popular tweets first — instead of the most recent — for any given search query.This according to Twitter Developer Advocate Taylor Singletary,…

Important thoughts on striking the right balance between eye candy bare bones UI – http://bit.ly/d4Mz9W (via @konigi) #UX

5 important e-commerce trends everyone should be paying attention to – http://bit.ly/9xFqdq (via @carsonified)

Have you ever been the lucky recipient of a #followfriday or #ff from a friend on Twitter?
It’s a great feeling when someone goes out of their way to recognize you as a resource for great insight and connecti…

Image by Scoobymoo via Flickr
A lot of people are excited about social media and think it could have a hugely positive impact on their brand, their marketing and communications, the insight they get…

Apple is a serious control freak when it comes to its iPad.
Douglas MacMillan at BusinessWeek reports on the stringent demands Apple makes on developers that want an early crack at the iPad:
Read the rest of t…

This week was the last week of classes for me and my students. They are off on field placement now for the next 6 weeks, then they graduate. For me, it’s the end of the school year, and it means seeing off a…

When you hear the word ‘marketing’ what do you think about? Most people will think of marketing to new or existing customers. Simply, they will think of marketing as an externally-focused busine…

Over the last few years, the popularity of social channels – for professionals, teens, grandmas and everyone in between – has skyrocketed. Consider the recent numbers:

Twitter experienced an annual growth…

Ok, so you’ve decided to start using the Internet to promote your business more actively and most people you talk to who know about the web tell you the same thing … you need to redesign your website. The p…

Thanks to Frank Walton of RFBinder for his contributions to this post. He and I had dinner after the IPRRC wrapped up and his take was that it was the research on crisis communications was perhaps the most impo…

I met a new addition to the family the other day. She was eleven days old.

It was the warmest day of her whole life the day I was there. And she had just eaten her biggest meal ever.

Firsts are fun and ex…

Like this: RT @armano: Deceptively simple post and visual from @alizasherman on social media strategy http://bit.ly/dpoZs6 #fb

The world’s second Internet of Things Conference is scheduled to take place at the end of November in Tokyo. The deadline for papers was just extended to June 1 – which gave us an idea. Conference planners have…

Ellen Brown submits: As the states’ credit crisis deepens, four states have initiated bills for state-owned banks, and candidates in seven states have now included that solution in their platforms. Lansing Ma…

Around February, my commute home starts to give me a knot in my stomach. That’s because my bus passes a tax-preparation shop where, as tax season draws nearer, a woman stands outside wearing a Lady Liberty co…

Bruce Everiss submits: There are many ways you can view Google (GOOG). First, there is this large group of people sitting on a campus, each with a brain the size of a planet coming up with amazing ideas that…

Jealousy, the only vice that doesn’t give pleasure.

Michael Scott points us to a rather surprising (given the source) piece in Ad Age asking if copyright is “the buggy whip of the digital age.” Of course, most regular Techdirt readers will not be surprised to f…

Google will soon offer a browser plug-in that will let you opt out of being tracked by Google Analytics, the Analytics team said in a blog post.
This is important because, as a free and powerful analytics app,…

A while back one of our readers, the delightfully named citykittyphd, asked where the title of this blog came from and what it means. Now in his very first post Kaze had offered up his account of how we got to…

Six years ago I had the opportunity to work on an ambitious social project that set out to socialize the living room. Keep in mind, this was before the popularization of social networking as it exists today. I…

I’ve noticed, as you may have too, that we love absolutes, especially online. On Wednesday there was an opinion piece on the Globe and Mail site that said bloggers are male. Women who blog must have struggled…

It was a beautiful sunny spring day and I had just taken my nine-month-old son on a walk in his stroller. He was a chubby, healthy, happy baby and I loved to make him giggle and gurgle. He was just getting o…

The recent explosion of the numbers of users on social networks and using social media has proven to …

The article eludes to how complicated it is to calculate ROI from Social Media and the author is absolutely correct at this point it is next to impossible …

When you really think about it, collaboration is at the very heart of every business on the planet. It’s very rare that you find someone that is isolated from the rest of the company. Most people are a pa…

A recent survey from the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS) found that more than 60% of shoppers are less likely to return goods bought online.
This is partly due to a lack of awareness fr…

Google Analytics is one of the most popular analytics services for online publishers, especially smaller publishers. And for good reason: it has most of what the average publisher needs, and it’s free.
But Goog…

You ever wonder why Apple cant get a proper deal done with the TV Networks to put their content online? Do you know who they are really dealing with? From the Viacom vs. Youtube lawsuit:
For years, Viacom…

Yelp, one of the most popular Web sites that let people post opinions about restaurants, shops and local services, is being sued by several small businesses that claim they’ve been pressured to advertise on the…

Everywhere you turn, there is tons of talk from people telling others what they should be doing in Social Media. Then, there are those that are just doing it.

Cutting through the hyperbole is not easy. Just th…

A company’s reputation is only as good as the customer service it provides. Please a customer, and your client base will swell with relatives and neighbors who catch wind of your top-notch representatives. But…

Every year has a startup battle, and in 2010 the king of those battles appears to be in location sharing, with Texas startup Gowalla taking on San Francisco’s Four Square. We’re betting that Gowalla is goi…

The rise of personal brands online and offline has been a phenomenon of the last decade with personalities and sports stars such as Paris Hilton and Tiger Woods generating a lot of press and buzz. Recently…