“Twitter has an enormous advantage over Facebook in one key area: while people on Facebook tend to friend their friends, people on Twitter tend to follow their interests. The social graph that makes up Twitter is worth far more on a per-account basis because it is directly monetizable in a way that Facebook’s generally isn’t – you can show prophylactic advertisements to Twitter users based solely on the people they follow, and probably get a much higher rate of interest. Compared to other social display ads, Twitter ads, it is rumored, work extremely well.”
—Black Widow | Dustin Curtis (via tomszekeres)
August 2012
3 posts
Listen
Minority sport on TV, Liz Murdoch’s big speech, TV on the second screen | The Media Show BBC Podcast
June 2012
1 post
“people will share if you give them a way to”
—Blippy’s Philip Kaplan at Dachis Social Business Summit 2011
May 2012
5 posts
“The quality of your UX shows how much you respect or disrespect your customers.”
—Alexis Ohanian (Reddit) http://the99percent.com/articles/7173/99-Conference-2012-Key-Takeaways-On-Making-Ideas-Happen
“People don’t tend to come back to homes they’ve already abandoned.”
—How Yahoo Killed Flickr and Lost the Internet | Mat Honan Gizmodo
“Insights for Search sits on top of all of Google’s organic search data from around the world. I believe it is one of the best possible ways to measure what humanity is thinking, and telling us via the queries they run on Google.”
—
Excellent Analytics Tips #20: Measuring Digital “Brand Strength” | Occam’s Razor by Avinash Kaushik
Takeaways….
Increase unaided brand recall by:
> creating great products
> delivering fantastic service
> advertising
Protip: use Google Insights for search (or compete.com) to measure brand strength and find actionable insights
Missives for Developers & Founders: Freemium is a Money Burning Business Model, Cheapium is Better →
jaredbrown.me
I want to talk about freemium for a moment. The freemium business model, for those not familiar, works by offering basic features for free while charging a premium for access to advanced features. It creates a low barrier to entry, offering free sign ups, so that users have no reason to not create…
“Who does brainstorming for new psychological locks and keys? Not very many people do that, and that’s something worth thinking about.”
—
Super Mario, cub reporter: Carnegie Mellon University Professor Jesse Schell on what the game industry could teach the news industry | Nieman Journalism Lab
Notes from Schell’s presentation:
> touches on micro-transactions, lead generation vs. direct payments in Farmville
> overview of all the unexpected successes of the games industry (Wii, Webkinz, Mafia Wars etc)
> the thing the unexpected successes have in common is the use of psychological tricks (e.g. the elastic velvet rope, rationalization…)
> spilling over into actual reality…
> quotes Gilmore and Pine’s Authenticity; there’s a real hunger for reality. So, for example, you don’t just want vegetables at the supermarket, you want real organic vegetables.
> technological convergence isn’t how it’s going to be… technology diverges it doesn’t converge (iphones are the exceptions to the rule; but only because it’s the swiss army knife that needs to fit in your pocket)
> games have crept out everywhere. Examples: weight watchers, Simpsons scavenger hunt, virtual ‘pet’ plant in your car to change your fuel consumption behaviour, new education gaming structures to increase attendance etc
> future: connected objects, points for brushing your teeth for long enough :), points for getting to work on time, tricks to make you pay more attention to ads etc etc
One warning is the potential for an ad-saturated future. However, we could also look forward to the benefits that living within a digital panopticon could bring; will the awareness of our legacy and data trail motivate us to be better people?
April 2012
4 posts
“Usability is always the bit you should perfect *first*. With good usability, all your advertising will work even better. With really bad usability, even genius advertising will fail.”
—
Rory Sutherland comment on Profile: Ogilvy’s Rory Sutherland on human behaviour and innovation | Econsultancy
> major consideration for all comms, not just advertising
“
Nelson believes that top companies have changed in three ways:
> from compliance to a more strategic focus on resource efficiency and value creation;
> from individual action to collective action; and
> from sparring with government and non-governmental organizations to working more cooperatively across the three sectors to solve complex problems.
“Now it is true that with sufficient analytical skills, time, patience and God’s direct blessing to you, it might be possible to do complete multi-channel attribution analysis where the multi-channel includes multiple online ad channels, behavior of the person across devices and the impact online and offline. Sadly that is incredibly hard to do as a whole. And when I say incredibly hard, I mean almost impossible.”
—Multi-Channel Attribution: Definitions, Models and a Reality Check (MCA-O2S, MCA-AMS or MCA-ADC?) | Occam’s Razor - Avinash Kaushik
March 2012
14 posts
Play
“Hacks make the world fun”
—Watch 1 Windows Phone Control Bing Maps On A Screen Comprised Of 28 Phones | Techcrunch
“To have a conversation, you have to be comfortable being human — acknowledging you don’t have all the answers, being eager to learn from someone else and to build new ideas together.”
—The Cluetrain Manifesto ch. 5 The Hyperlinked Organization | David Weinberger
“Stories play a large part in the success of organizations.”
—The Cluetrain Manifesto ch. 3 Talk is Cheap | Rick Levine
“Companies currently have a lot of motivation to get serious. And to get really serious, they first have to get a sense of humor and relax — yet another pretzel-logic paradox. They need to relax to break the obsessive-compulsive control habit. They need to understand that employees already know how to do the work far better than the company could ever hope to dictate. Corporate intranets could unleash the potential energy of the corporation, but to nourish and grow that potential, companies have to relinquish their addiction to management. Zen master Suzuki Roshi once said, “To control your cow, give it a bigger pasture.”
—The Cluetrain Manifesto - ch. 1 Internet Apocalypso | Levine, Locke, Searls & Weinberger (1999)
“One day I will find the right words, and they will be simple.”
—Jack Kerouac, Dharma Bums (via taylorlorenz)
