That’s one of the implications of this look at the state of online social media from The Economist. Comparing Microsoft’s acquisition of Hotmail years ago, and AOL’s recent purchase of Bebo, they write:
Both deals, in their respective decades, illustrate a great paradox of the internet in that the premise underlying them is precisely half [...]
David Murray wrote about his initial Twitter experiences. He’s even more skeptical than I was about it.
There are some good insights there. As I’ve said before, if your reaction to Twitter is “Why? Why?” the best thing to do is to dive in and experience t. Even if you never bother with it again, you’ll [...]
Geoff Livingston at the Buzz Bin asks a good question:
The brochure approach doesn’t work. We know that. So blogs, podcasts and new social content has been added to the conventional web site, but the conversation is usually buried on sites as a simple link. Why bother? Why not reverse things and make [...]
Debbie Weil argues that we shouldn’t be talking about the ROI of social media, but rather the return on influence. Why? She says:
Short answer: because the return is soft. The benefits of incorporating social media strategies into your marketing are real (and can no longer be ignored) but they’re not normally measured in dollars. [...]
One of the fears that keeps some would-be business bloggers from getting started is writing ability - specifically, fear that one’s writing isn’t good enough for regular blogging. It’s true that there are a lot of people who aren’t great writers in the business world, but who nonetheless have something interesting to say that’s useful [...]
That’s the question in the headline of this piece from the Times of London by Bernhard Warner.
There has been much fuss of late over the loss of productivity brought on by employees multi-tasking between actual work and social networking. One estimate puts the cost to British industry at £6.5 billion per annum in lost productivity [...]
Jason Preston at Blog Business Summit says yes. I say “no.”
I think nearly every business could benefit from a blog. Of course, nearly every business could benefit from giving everyone in the US a free sample of their product, running an ad during the Super Bowl, or hiring 10,000 direct sales reps. But, unless you [...]
And you’d better not forget it. Consider this tale of some people treated fairly shabbily at a new Houston nightclub; after paying $8 for valet parking, they were turned away for apparently being insufficiently cool looking.
(A side note: I realize that this is not uncommon at nightspots in many big cities, but this is Houston, [...]
If your name is at all known, you should stake out your Twitter territory now. This is why.
Just saying…
As most Americans now, our consumer broadband market is basically a duopoly: we get to pick between our local telephone company (AT&T or Verizon for most of the country) or our local cable operator (Comcast, Time Warner, and Cox are the big players there). And as is often the case when two companies control a [...]