August 2009
A recent statistic caught us off guard. The following are the top five countries in the world by population:
1. China — 1.33 billion
2. India — 1.17 billion
3. United States — 307 million
4. Indonesia — 230 million
5. Brazil — 191 million
If Facebook were a country, it would be No. 4 in this list. The wunderkind of social networking has topped 250 million users worldwide. Nearly half of those users log on to the Web site every day.
And to think that Facebook barely existed five years ago.
And to think that Facebook still hasn’t figured out how to make much money yet.
August 2009
The newspaper industry has struggled with the Internet. Its challenges have included readers’ expectation of free content online, the erosion of print classifieds to free listings like Craigslist, and competing with the hyperlocal coverage that social media allows.
One thing that chafes editors and publishers are the news aggregation sites, such as The Daily Beast and Newser, that are popular with online users. Aggregators often summarize the content and then link to the original article. Newspapers claim these sites are stealing their ad revenue and using their content without having to pay the production costs of reporters and editors.
A growing movement among newspaper editors and publishers seeks to protect their business from this latest Internet challenge with changes to federal copyright law. One proposal would bar aggregators from using newspapers’ content for the first 24 hours after stories are posted.
Right now, the future of newspapers appears shaky. Fighting the Internet (and the referral traffic) is probably not the best business strategy to get them back in the game.
This is definitely a story worth following.
August 2009
Next time you want to direct people to an exact spot in a YouTube video, try adding the timestamp in the link. To jump to 1:32 in the clip,
add #t=1m32s to the end of the URL.
For example, during the July 28 House press briefing, reporters questioned Press Secretary Robert Gibbs about the meeting among President
Obama, Harvard professor Henry Gates, and police officer James Crowley.
This link takes you to the start of the YouTube clip:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rDtOKodLdhE&feature=PlayList&p=42029F03573BDA18&index=0
By adding #t=17m42s to the end, you direct users to a humorous exchange between Gibbs and reporters that starts at 17:42 of the clip.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rDtOKodLdhE&feature=PlayList&p=42029F03573BDA18&index=0#t=17m42s
August 2009
Read through six traits of CEOs likely to have enduring greatness. Then score yourself on each question using a scale of 1 = Strongly Disagree to 5 = Strongly Agree.
| |
|
YOUR SCORE
|
| The possibility mindset |
I am committed to being great and wildly successful. I focus on the positive. |
|
| Action-oriented |
I am a doer — not just a thinker and a talker. |
|
| Personal change agent |
I embrace the need to change and take risks. |
|
| Foot in the present with an eye on the future |
I have an unwavering focus and commitment to make the vision a reality. I use that vision as a context for decisions. |
|
| Star-crazed |
I understand that a great leader needs to invest in “stars” and not tolerate “average.” |
|
| Standards of excellence |
I set the standards and meet organization standards — externally and internally. |
|
| TOTAL SCORE |
|
How are your chances for leading enduring greatness? Add up all of your scores and compare them to the chart below.
| 27 – 30 |
Very likely |
| 22 – 26 |
Possible |
| 18 – 22 |
Unlikely |
| Below 18 |
Very unlikely |
August 2009
http://www.forrester.com/Groundswell/profile_tool.html
It’s essential to understand your target audience when developing a social media campaign. Where are they online? How active are they? Forrester’s Consumer Profile Tool is a good place to start.
Forrester’s Social Technographics® classifies consumers into six overlapping levels of participation: creators, critics, collectors, joiners, spectators, and inactives. The Consumer Profile Tool allows you to analyze your intended audience by age range, country, and gender to see what percentages our your target demographic is in each group. The site also offers an explanation for each of the groups.
August 2009
by Chris Anderson
Chris Anderson is the editor of Wired and author of the The Long Tail, a best-seller about the Internet economy.
Free! is his exploration of the past, present, and future of free as a business model. Anderson provides a retrospective of free, including King Gillette’s marketing revelation to give away razors in order to sell disposable blades, and the rise of advertising to support free media. Anderson also delves into Google’s business model and explains how the search-engine giant can afford to give away applications, virtually unlimited e-mail, free 411 services, etc. to improve its ad sales.
Sticking with his theme, Anderson has made the entire book available for free as a downloadable audiobook.
(The complete book is available as a free e-book on scribd.com, but scribd was having technical difficulties at the time of distribution.)
Read more about Free! on publishing veteran Rex Hammock’s
blog.
