Emmotional extortion, but for a good cause

This is from outbrain.com a blog rating widget with commercial recommendations.

clipped from www.outbrain.com Yes, donate the proceeds to this charity: International Red Cross Women’s Bean Project Tag a Giant (Save the bluefin tuna) The Hunger Project Children.org ASPCA Make-A-Wish foundation The Alliance for Climate Protection No, I prefer not to raise money for charity by showing sponsored recommendations

Twitter: Personalize == Destroy?

Disclosure: This question is very interesting to us. There's a tangle of delicious and intriguing subtleties here. This is one is a tough nut, with few promising solutions in sight. Even untangling why this is a problem is a challenge... The original post is well worth a read.

If you assign or calculate authority you're dis-empowering your grass roots audience. People tend to dis-like this. Alternatively, it might create an interesting game where good behavior gets you authority. Would you play?

clipped from venturebeat.com Please, please don’t personalize Twitter for me allows companies to share information about each other’s customers would empower them to deliver more serendipitous automatic content to these customers. The concept is called “discovery,” But it worries me to see Twitter CEO Biz Stone quoted and linked in the middle of Sherrets’ story, talking up plans to rank Twitter results by authority — by assigning different levels of importance to different users. That would, Stone says, float the “important” tweets to the top. Biz, that sounds like a great optional feature. But if you replace the current all-tweets-are-equal system with yet another Internet pecking order, you’ll ruin a big part of Twitter’s appeal to the masses, and to me. 1. Too much of the Internet is published by the same few people — We used to call them The 250 on Valleywag. 2. Twitter’s unranked content draws eager participants — People who aren’t already famous or important love Twitter

How many of these are you doing?

clipped from www.entrepreneur.com 9 Free Advertising Solutions When the going gets tough, the tough advertise. By Suzanne Driscoll   |   July 31, 2009 Become the expert Be a great public speaker Professional meeting planners are always looking for presenters and workshop leaders for conferences. Teach an adult education course Reward referrals Send out an e-zine Make the most of (free) public relations Whenever there is an event of any significance in your business, be sure to send a press release or a simple e-mail to all the local newspapers and TV stations. Give back Start a blog or contribute to a forum There are several free blogging sites to get you started, I recommend Blogger, WordPress or Tumblr. Partner up

clipped from www.entrepreneur.com Lessons From The Fall Of Giants 4 lessons to be learned from the crash and burn of industry leaders. By Luke McKinney | July 29, 2009 Avoid Complacency The Lesson: No matter how long you've operated or how much money you've made, the market is always changing; ignoring the problem doesn't help. Know Your Market The Lesson: By success, responsibility or simple experience you will become a different person from your market. Make sure to remember what you customers want, and act accordingly. Move With The Times The Lesson: Adapt with the times or face extinction. It's not enough to know that your product/service works--you have to stay aware of what other people are offering. Accept Responsibility If you can't think of anything that's your fault, you're paranoid. --unknown The Lesson: If you find yourself blaming someone else for your troubles, ask yourself, "What are they doing that I'm not?" The most important thing is learning from mistakes, and nobody says they have to be yours.

What the F**k Is Social Media? Are we there yet? No, it's more like teenage s__

Once in a while, some marketing firm cooks up a self promoting something *designed* to go viral thing actually worth it's ink. This might be one of those times.

http://www.slideshare.net/mzkagan/what-the-fk-is-social-media-one-year-later

So, are they right about the teenage thing?

clipped from mashable.com What the F**k Is Social Media? Here’s an Answer But what do you say to someone who doesn’t get it? Maybe you have a boss who thinks social branding a waste of time or chatted with a friend who doesn’t believe that Twitter can help land her a great job. Maybe they have no clue what social media even is. Last year, marketing director Marta Kagan helped solve this problem with her presentation What the F**k is Social Media?. It was quickly a social media hit for its wit and its very convincing case for the raw power of social media. The next time you need to explain the benefits of social media to someone, just send them this post and make sure they flip through the entire presentation. Here it is:

Talking your boss into the social web.

As we're starting alpha tests within a few organizations this is becoming an interesting point. How do you talk your boss into using something innovative? This can be very difficult depending on industry or department in question.

Sending a well formulated email is a start. What's your take?

clipped from www.deloitte.com Into the Fray: How Should Companies Approach Collaboration Marketing Given the Potential Risks? Deloitte Debates Social networks, blogs and other communication technologies make it possible for almost anyone to influence how other people perceive your brand and products. Some companies have already begun to use these technologies – the practice we call collaboration marketing – while others are actively debating the wisdom of jumping into the fray. How much should you invest? What are the risks? Collaboration marketing allows us and our most loyal customers to influence conversations that affect how people perceive our company and our products. Collaboration marketing is a good way to learn what customers really think and want. We can adapt our products or services by incorporating a formal collaboration feedback loop into our development process.

Top reasons cited against going google. That's GG, check mate :)

Have you run into any complaints when talking about google products? Here's a few I've heard recently.

1 I'm a "pro" office user, I routinely rely on the high level features of MS Office like shortcut keys to the point of mouse-less use. I feel the difference the most in excel.

2 Even if small, the added delay that comes with using a web application is enough to turn me off. The very idea of it wasting a second of my time while updating gives me the hives.

3 I don't want to depend on google, and especially not a cloud hosted solution. And by the way, google gears is a crap shoot, for me it works about half the time, and I can't figure out why/why not.

4 I'm just used to the old way of using outlook etc, too set in my ways to re-learn.

What's your verdict?

clipped from mashable.com Going Google: The Apple Switch Ads for the Web App Era More than 7 years after the launch of the Apple Switch ads, Microsoft once again finds itself the target of an ad campaign that attempts to chip away at its dominant market share. The billboards, which run for a month, will be changed every day to progressively explain the advantages of the Google Apps suite. They’ll appear on the Mass Pike in Boston, San Francisco’s 101, New York’s West Side Highway and The Ike in Chicago, reports eWeek. The ads will push IT managers to the Apps at Work site, which explains: