Curated Stories Mar. 9, 2010

Why Word of Mouth Doesn’t HappenThis 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 and ma…

26,985 books are currently available as apps in the iPhone App Store. This is the first time the number of books available has exceeded the number of games (25,348).
Of course, this is far less than Amazon and…

Modplan alerts us to a developer at Wolfire games who wrote a blog post claiming that DRM can be “effective,” and giving the example of StarForce’s DRM on Splinter Cell 3: Chaos Theory, which supposedly took ov…

If you’re looking to run a successful developer program, you should probably pay attention to Mathys van Abbe. He’s the founder of Mobypicture, which has just celebrated its 500th developer (our Mobypicture…

The recession and weak ad market have led many well regarded businesses to ask their customers to reach into their pockets and pay a little (or more) money to their cause. But guilting users into opening their…

The annoying aspect of Twitter is it’s really difficult to follow conversations. There’s nothing inherent to Twitter that makes it easy for you to backtrack a conversation. What many peopl…

Econsultancy’s Digital Cream event in London last week was a great place to announce our plans for a new piece of research about the impact of digital on a range of business functions including marketing, cus…

Do you have a clear picture of your organization’s strengths and weaknesses, and of the opportunities and threats in the marketplace? Is your position vis-à-vis your competitors clear and compelling? Does anyo…

You already know that a dashboard is an essential tool for improving (and proving) marketing effectiveness. These five steps will help you and your marketing team get started on the road to creating a dashboard…

I recently read some interesting survey research done by the venerable MarketingSherpa around what types of things B2B prospects would find “most useful” in emails sent about product and service offerings. If…

Foursquare will give 900 businesses access to a new set of analytics tools over the next few weeks, the NYT’s Nick Bilton reports.
The new tools give business owners a detailed look at the check-in activity of…

So, as I asked yesterday, what happens if every object has a status message?

You never again leave the oven on– it sends you a message when it’s on with nothing on/inside it.
You never get up to go to the…

While we may not all agree on the “rules” when it comes to marketing, we can all agree that marketing has changed considerably in recent years, largely due to social media. “Inbound Marketing: Get Found U…

If the public wants online privacy it had better fight now for laws to protect it because businesses won’t and individuals don’t have the clout, security expert Bruce Schneier told RSA Conference. Facebook’s Ne…

Cisco has announced a new routing system that it says is going to speed up the Internet in a big way. According to the company, Cisco CRS-3 — currently being tested by ATT — is three times faster than it…

We’ve been having a robust discussion around the idea of social capital over the past few days, and as the thread now contains over 100 great, thorough comments, I just want to create the opportunity to keep…

Who Does the Work? Who Benefits?

I’ve been a freelance writer, an online publisher, and a strategic consultant. I’ve handled a multi-state whole sale consumer products accounts, selling to big c…

Technology and society: Is it really helpful to talk about a new generation of “digital natives” who have grown up with the internet?
Economist, March 4, 2010 — THEY are variously known as the Net Gene…

When you think of successful consumer brands in the social media space, names like Dell, Zappos and Pepsi come to mind. Another is Ford. Last year the Ford Fiesta movement generated tremendous amount of awaren…

While I get many questions from bloggers asking for advice on ‘how to blog‘ perhaps one of the biggest questions a new blogger needs to ask themselves before they move on to the HOW to blog question is ‘W…

Anyone who’s been involved in web development for any length of time has likely encountered the Developers VS Users situation. It’s a mistake that can often lead to expensive problems down the road. So wha…

Every new car has a manual in its glove compartment. Software applications have a help link when you get stuck or want to learn more about a feature. User assistance is part of our web and so is Twitter. How ca…

The catch cry of personal branding experts is “authenticity!” But sometimes it can be hard to know how much information is too much — when authenticity gets a little too true-to-life — in your personal…

I was reading a blog entry by Corey Harlock directed at recruiters when this sentence stopped me dead in my tracks:

A resume in no way, shape or form is an indication of the person who created it.

The point o…

Note: I wrote this article back in 1995. But while the wow factor of technology has become routine in the advertising world today, the idea this article presents is still as relevant as ever.
After more than tw…

It looks like advertising via social media is about to grow up. New guidelines for advertising on services like Facebook and Twitter are …

After having nearly destroyed one of the world’s most recognizable and successful brands, Tiger Woods got one thing right in his extraordinary mea culpa: “My real apology,” he said, “will come from my behavior…

Whether a website sells off your email address or forces you to install some pop-up plagued toolbar just to get 10% off your next online purchase, searching for online coupons can involve treading in dangerous…

Social media is grand, and yes, it’s proving to be valuable for customer service in some scenarios.
But it’s exposing a big disconnect: the companies embracing using things like Twitter or blogs aren’t ne…

The biggest problem with today’s push for electronic medical records is an archaic user interface.
Physician Alexander Friedman, writing a scathing essay in The Wall Street Journal, agrees.

Today’s electro…

Apple’s HTC lawsuit is the first public manifestation of a series of private warnings Apple has been issuing to handset makers for a while now, says Yair Reiner of Oppenheimer in a note for clients, picked up b…

Albert Einstein has long been considered a genius by the masses. He was a theoretical physicist, philosopher, author, and is perhaps the most influential scientists to ever live.Einstein has made great contribu…

Former CBS News anchor Dan Rather is in a spot of bother after he said in an interview that he didn’t believe President Obama could sell watermelons.
On his appearance on The Chris Matthews Show, Rather said…

Epic lol

We have conditioned ourselves to a certain style of thinking and a certain style of communication. We have overpopulated our collateral with jargon, strangled it with acronyms and leeched any remaining meaning…

The competitor to be feared is one who never bothers about you at all, but goes on making his own business better all the time.
—Henry Ford

Diane Mermigas submits:Although the shifting economics of TV are treacherous, there are five reasons why Walt Disney (DIS) felt empowered to yank its New York WABC-TV signal and live Oscars telecast during s…

Why is a hotel always full while the next door one is empty, although they offer the same services at comparable prices? Why does a certain video game convince millions to play it, while others…

I love Tom Peters. He’s gotten me in trouble for years. Well, his books have. I finally got to have lunch with him, and then see him keynote. The affair just grows and grows. And now, Tom’s done the whole �…

Few people understand Microsoft better than Tandy Trower, who worked at the company from 1981-2009. Trower was the product manager who ultimately shipped Windows 1.0, an endeavor that some advised him was a pat…

So Jamie scooped me, but yes, we did present our session on Truth and Authenticity in the Digital Age at ASAE’s Great Ideas conference yesterday (Monday) at 3 pm (Colorado time).

Here’s the p…

Old time factories had a linear layout, because there was just one steam engine driving one drive shaft. Every machine in the shop had to line up under the shaft (connected by a pulley) in order to get power….

I stumbled across this very interesting list of 18 firsts on the Internet. It’s a good way to look at things. You could argue who invented what first, and you often get nowhere that way, because “invention” is…

Are you treating social media like a checklist?A recent study by Econsultancy called “The Value of Social Media” shows that companies are overwhelmingly using the “Big 4″ of Facebook, Twitter, YouTube,…

With digital media and search, you need to think about a whole new set of considerations when you write content if you want to appeal to buyers who are researching and evaluating products or services. Its not…

… at SAP AG (NYSE: SAP), the report cites SAP® Community Network as illustrating perhaps the most extensive use to date of social media by a corporation. …

It may be a little early to say this, but to me it seems like Microsoft took all the disappointment and fear resulting from Apple’s dominance of the mobile devices category over its own products through the y…

Few people understand Microsoft better than Tandy Trower, who worked at the company from 1981-2009. Trower was the product manager who ultimately shipped Windows 1.0, an endeavor that some advised him was a pat…

How are Fortune’s Most Admired Companies different? They invest in people and keep them employed — even in a downturn.

We frequently worry (or point out the negative consequences) of technologically illiterate politicians passing laws that impact technology. It goes beyond just laws, however, into other investigations. Frank…

Last week the New York Historical Society opened the first large-scale exhibit of material from the Grateful Dead Archive. The archive will be managed by the University of Santa Cruz with special access to four…

Mark Hedrickson is 24 years old. He grew up in Menlo Park, California, down the street from Stanford, raised by a high-tech marketer Dad and a Mom in banking. Then he went to college and studied Nietzsche. H…

The privacy furor stirred up over the past couple of weeks by the launch of Google’s social tool, Buzz, caused the search giant to make some fairly radical changes to the service. It also threw the issue…

While social sites drive an increasing portion of traffic to content publishers compared to long-time referral giant Google, one sharing service reminds us today that email is still a major source of shared lin…

Some additional images and video of Courier, Microsoft’s tablet PC that may or may not be the purest vaporware, leaked late last week–Engadget started it off with some nifty photos of what’s purported to be th…

Giving away an e-book seems to lead to at least a spike in sales of the print version, Researchers at Brigham Young University have found, especially for fiction.
In research that monitored the sales of 41 pri…

comScore just posted its monthly report on online video viewership, and the total number of videos viewed in January slipped slightly as compared with December.In December, 179 million people watched 33.2 bill…

Apple’s iPad commercial during the Oscars generated a decent spike in buzz on Twitter for the company, but it was less than when the company put out a press release announcing the iPad’s official sales date.
Tr…