Curated Stories May 10, 2010

Offering incentives, goals, and prizes to users through game mechanics is hardly new. Most of us have long been accumulating points towards rewards with various frequent flyer plans, for example.

But perhaps…

Lulu has added the iBookstore to a collection of self-publishing options. As a service, the company can now automatically list titles at the iBookstore, give them ISBN numbers, and deliver automatic sales repo…

It’s a lot more fun when the winds are blowing your way. You get that feeling when you go to a SaaS users conference like the one today for SuccessFactors.

SuccessFactors is a company that has established its…

John Herrman / Gizmodo:
The Real Story Behind Twitter’s Ridiculous Follow Bug — For a while today, Twitter would let you force anyone to follow you. It was a hilariously simple trick, and equally biza…

Facebook doesn’t make it easy to delete your account, but a growing number of people appear to be turning to Google to find out how to do just that. Google Suggest, the drop-down box that offers suggested sear…

If you’ve ever struggled to make sense of terms like “semantic web,” we’ve got a fascinating, entertaining and informative video for you.The Internet currently holds about as much information as 1,700…

It’s all about the real estate. Google results pages have historically been about simplicity. Any search “options” have been such a little part of the UI that, let’s be honest, hardly anyone knew…

Be careful what you say on the Internet, unless you want to find yourself with a criminal record and a bill for $1,500 – at least that’s the lesson a British man may be learning today after a court found him gu…

It can be tough to hammer a nail into a hard surface without bending the nail. Lifehacker reader Simoniz points out that a cork can easily help you avoid bent…

Business software company Intuit has announced the acquisition of healthcare communications software company Medfusion. The cash transaction is valued at approximately $91 million. The transaction is expected t…

Michael Nutt and Benny Wong have created a fun realtime web analytics product called Hummingbird. It comes with awesome buzzwords too! Node! Canvas! Web Sockets! MongoDB!
To add tracking, you simple sprinkle i…

Every day I see seminars, books, podcasts, white papers given by social media “experts” and I wonder – what’s makes them an expert? When I examine said expert’s creds – I typically find this formu…..

Twitter is one of the social media tools that can be used as tool for your agency’s social media marketing strategy to generate online traffic and a pipeline for new business leads. Over the p…

Over four years ago, I wrote this post about the importance of companies understanding their customers. I wanted to focus on this section:What happens when you better understand your customers is that…

The huge variety of addons is the main reason why I am a stubborn FireFox adopter. It is fun to watch how Google Chrome is quickly catching up in that respect.
This week I am looking at a cool SEO extension f…

Want to confuse someone? Start talking about the importance of geotargeting, user profiles and predictive data modeling.

Now ask them if they’ve checked into Foursquare yet.

Geolocat…

It’s no exaggeration to say I’ve been overwhelmed by the response to my post on why you should quit Facebook.
To those of you who shared your stories about leaving, or took the time to clarify some of the reaso…

I’ve written a lot about SEO copywriting over the last 4+ years. And it’s still the topic that seems to generate the most questions and confusion.
That makes sense, since the modern practice of SEO copywri…

Leonardo Da Vinci once wrote, “simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.” Kelly Johnson modernized that philosophy with an alternate twist, KISS, Keep it Simple and Stupid a.k.a. Keep it Short an…

This series is supported by Gillette. Learn more about Gillette and its products at Gillette.com. Whether you’re new to Twitter or are a veteran Tweeter, chances are you give more thought to the content of…

As reported by Ad Age, Facebook is preparing to launch functionality that allows people to instantly broadcast their present locations and whereabouts in addition to their status updates, and latitude and longi…

Alexander B. Howard is the Government 2.0 Washington Correspondent for O’Reilly Media, where he reports on technology, open government and online civics. He’ll be reporting live from the upcoming Gov2.0 Ex…

Back when I was a greenhorn graduate, and the web wasn’t widely available in businesses, let alone in homes, finding good market research involved leafing through musty industry research tomes that resided in…

[Also See - REVEALED: How Today’s Twitter Bug Was First Discovered]Twitter has an embarrassing bug on its hands – one that allows users to make anyone follow them. Mashable reader Ozan Yılmaz emailed us…

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We’re used to buzz around Apple, and in particular, we’re quite used to buzz about how Apple goes to market. CEO Steve Jobs is widely considered the greatest marketer alive, and nearly every marketer…

It’s the Work We Do that Adds Value

The Internet is fast being filled with people with skills and talent for hire. Some have worked online and off for years to attain experience and expertise. Some are u…

You might have noticed that your number of Twitter followers has suddenly dropped to zero today. Twitter is currently undergoing maintenance to fix a bug, and as part of that process follower/following counts h…

Somewhat regularly, I hear practitioners espouse the idea that storytelling must be a required skill for businesspeople. Among the champions of this notion are Lori Silverman, Karen Dietz, and Gary Vaynerchuk….

Golf Channel sportscaster Win McMurry mistakenly talks about Woods’ “bulging dick.” It’s funny because he likes to share his dangle!

The future is already here — its just unevenly distributed. So says sci-fi writer William Gibson. Nowhere is that more true than in health care, which exhibits both pockets of stunning innovation and ghettos…

Here, I review my friend Stever Robbins’ book, Get-It-Done Guy’s 9 Steps to Work Less and Do More (Quick Dirty Tips). I recorded the video for this fairly late at night, so please forgive how tired and fro…

Brian Casel is a web designer and owner of ThemeJam WordPress Themes and CasJam Media. You can follow Brian on his blog at briancasel.com or on Twitter @CasJam.WordPress has long been known as a dedicated bl…

Immediately after the DOW plunged 999 points last Thursday, explanations started coming fast and furious.
It was a fat finger error!. Some idiot typed billion into a sell order when he meant million!
Then, wh…

Liz Gannes / GigaOM:
Google Seeks to Hire “Head of Social” — Google says its willing to accept its shortcomings on the social web and bring in a “Head of Social” to set it on the right course. …

Consumption is up, dollars are down. In traditional media channels it’s the same lament time and time again: audiences are rising, but advertising continues to plummet.
Gourmet, Cookie, Modern Bride, Portfoli…

Poor Microsoft PowerPoint, it’s in a branding hell. The business tool looks to be the goat for much of the troubles of the world. Even Microsoft admits that it may not be the best tool for every job; the comp…

A “rough” estimate of sales of the iWork suite of applications for the iPad predicts that Apple could reach more than $40 million a year in sales of its mobile office software.

Is Apple the most powerful mobile technology company? Or is it Google?

Lucas123 writes “Businesses in highly regulated industries are trying to strike a balance between workers who use social networking sites such as Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn to communicate, and trying to sa…

I’m a long-time Kathy Sierra fan. Her talk at the Business of Software 2009 was amazing, even though, in retrospect, I realize now that she had a slide making fun of Stack Overflow’s terrific new VC-backed…

When I first experienced social media what started to become very apparent was its power to influence through its inherent features and design. The ability to be able to create an impression and influence many…

The old rules of professional networking translate to the online world as well. I’m sure you’ve heard the phrase “build your network before you need it.” Every single job search success…

Thank you to my friend Jacob Morgan for this guest post.
Social CRM is a very interesting topic but since the “space” is still relatively undefined, it can be somewhat of a challenge to address. The goal…

When Social Media became the Shiny Object of the marketing world, it blew up some common conceptions about “who does what.” As I’ve written before, we now see PR agencies backing into digital and digital/…

Kipp Bodnar of Hubspot and Kyle Flaherty of Breaking Point presented their thoughts on the power of social media to drive leads for B2B companies. The main takeaways from this session were that you need to crea…

Today, I spoke to John Jantsch, who is a marketing and digital technology coach, award winning social media publisher and author Duct Tape Marketing and his new book called The Referral Engin…

Today is my birthday. Lucky number 37.

As part of my birthday celebration, Im committing to blogging more. Junta42 was started as a blog (this post is proof from April, 2007) and I still believe it is…

As social media use skyrockets for both businesses and consumers, digital marketing professionals are finding that there is more to the platform than being …

From Kim Krause-Berg’s post asking where are the skilled, generous SEOs to Amber Naslund’s post on Finding Your Greener Grass, I’ve been left to think a lot lately about how I learn. Or, more appropriatel…

While Twitter has nearly equaled Facebook in awareness among Americans — 87 percent now know of it, compared with 26 percent last year — it still lags behind in use.
New York Times, May 10, 2010 — In a…

Microsoft Producer allows you to take an existing presentation file, capture and synchronize video and audio narration, add additional media content, and produce a unified set of content ready for viewing in a…

Branding as a strategy means little if the customer experience is not
there. If your story doesn’t align with what you do, all of the clever
tactics you can come up with to follow your lofty goal will…

Good.iWare has hit a home run with this iPad version of the file importer and viewer. The app works as easily and smoothly as the iPhone version, and it has a few extra tricks up its sleeve for good measure.

Calling Apple’s Pages a word processor is a misnomer. Words are only a small part of what this software is designed to process. The application combines desktop publishing with text entry — and on the iPad…

Leonardo Da Vinci once wrote, “simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.” Kelly Johnson modernized that philosophy with an alternate twist, KISS, Keep it Simple, Stupid a.k.a. Keep it Short and Simple.
In…

A lot get said about the economic value of API’s but few have illustrated it as well as Sam Ramji did last week at Web 2.0 in San Francisco.

Ramji, vice president of strategy at Sonoa Systems, used his present…

Spotlight on Search Interview with Maile Ohye, Developer Programs Tech Lead at Google
Spotlight on Search is an interview series that shines a light on search marketing professionals to learn more about the na…

Life Planning permeates every aspect of human existence – while you were young and building your dreams, up to the moment you achieve them and retire from work. For a lot of people, retirement is supposed to…

A couple of weeks ago I received a worried call from a friend working in PR for a large company. Her opening question went something like:
“What the heck are Community Pages on Facebook, and…

If you want to do online marketing well, you
need to get the basics right, and few things are more important than writing
effective landing pages.For those new to marketing themselves through the internet,
le…

Wireless Gigabit will be fast, it will be big, and version 1 of the new high-speed WiFi spec was introduced this morning. It promises a world without wires for any device.Announced this weekend by the WiFi All…

Why you must bet the farm on mobile and social media
Mitch Joel’s keynote at MarketingProfs (which is a neat evolution of a talk I saw him give at PodCamp Toronto years ago) sparked an idea in my head about h…

If you post a lot of your blogs content onto Facebook, you really need to include a picture with your blog posts to make it look good, stand out and not look like everything else you post on yo…

We all know Twitter is a great tool for connecting and sharing information. But using it to find the right audience for your business can be a bit difficult, especially in the B2B environment. So how do you go…

I heard a loud voice, it said a few words.
It said, “You gotta take a chance and you gotta pay, boy.
You cannot win if you do not play.”
– Steve Forbert –
Just because you get something out there into t…

Facebook is now an essential unifying force in many people’s social lives — it helps friends arrange events, wish each other “happy birthday,” solidify communities and social bonds, and share recent me…

Can Facebook spontaneously recover from incompetence?

Facebook – Social network – Online Communities – Mark Zuckerberg – Google

As I said earlier tonight, code doesn’t lie. Facebook has now confirmed their location-based feature, which is apparently due to launch shortly if the code found on their touch.facebook.com site is any indica…

I Want to Talk About Affiliate Marketing
Mostly, I want to talk to you about affiliate marketing for your own benefit, because I think it can be helpful to you, especially in this down economy.
Affiliate market…

Seth Godin: marketer, entrepreneur and, most importantly, catalyst. He’s inspired me to talk about how ideas get discovered with his recent post.
Ideas are a dime a dozen, to paraphrase…

In recent weeks two friends of mine lost their beloved animals. Susan lost her dog, Abby. Cheryl lost her horse, Shaman. Neither they nor I could put their grief into words.Which takes me somewhere I’d been i…

Three months ago I wrote about farming and hunting. It seems, though, that the growth industry of our generation is surfing.Talk to surfers and they’ll explain that the entire sport comes down to the hunt for t…

The official Toy Story 3 website, as seen on the iPad.

The May 3, 2010 BtoB story on Microsoft’s marketing reorganization earlier this year struck me a bit odd. Microsoft is executing a new, more holistic approach with its agencies by working hor…

Episode #201 of Six Pixels of Separation – The Twist Image Podcast is now live and ready for you to listen to.

There are only a few authors out there who I feel compelled to read, consume, ingest and meditate…

One of the major features of the WordPress blogging platform that makes it as a widely used and very popular CMS is its simplicity and functionality. Even sweeter is the fact that WordPress has a very distinct…

Asking too many questions can actually distance you from your listener. Think of how you react to people who ask a lot of questions, versus how you respond to individuals who demonstrate a sincere…

Eckoff also had a reply for anyone who might think it’s crazy to enter this social media market against giants like Facebook and Twitter. …

A few months ago I highlighted five folks in the Social CRM space that I have been learning from and following and today I want to highlight five more (to round out my top 10 list). I’ve had the privilege o…

I was recently asked about the apparent confusion in the digital design community about who does what. I mainly talk about usability and user experience as I believe these best encapsulate what matters to users…

Despite the fact that paid content and premium services are back in
fashion today, a significant number of online publishers still rely
wholly or partially on advertising revenue.Yet many of them shoot themse…

Text2Give, Twitter and Facebook social networking campaigns are helping save and rehabilitate the wildlife impacted by the catastrophic BP oil spill. …

So, say your agency offers you the services of an E-commerce Strategist –
sounds like spending money to be told the obvious: “Matty says having a
new website will make us richer and improve our sex life…

InfoWorld – The fight between Apple and Adobe over Flash on the iPhone OS has all the trappings of a major industry rift. No one doubts at this point that Apple is on a mission to kill Flash. After many long ye…

However, with the unstructured proliferation of social media within many organizations, the brand style guide is seemingly disregarded in favor of …

Earlier this week during a keynote presentation at Web 2.0, Lili Cheng, head of Microsoft’s Future Social Experiences Labs (FUSE) group, unveiled their latest research project: Spindex, a ‘social personal i…

My friend, Brian Clark, has released a new free report in relationship with his Scribe SEO (affiliate link) plug-in for WordPress. In the report, he shares a lot of information about how writing great content…

We all know that Facebook has been making privacy changes over the past few years which supposedly reflects society’s trends toward becoming more open. A new infographic produced by Matt McKeon effectively i…

Last night Betty White appeared on Saturday Night Live following an organized movement to get the 88-year-old celebrity on the show, starting back in February. The program started off with White’s opening mo…

Norma Davis was 55 when she opened an indoor children’s gym that specializes in bouncy houses and birthday parties. John Olson spent 11 years working his way up in grocery store management before quitting to tu…