gzWorks

Innovating Through Recession

noreply@blogger.com (gz) — Sat, 22 Nov 2008 22:34:00 +0000

Innovating Through Recession (Andrew Razeghi, Kellogg School of Management)

Get your own at Scribd or explore others: Government Business marketing web

Marketing Your Way Through a Recession

noreply@blogger.com (gz) — Mon, 08 Sep 2008 18:26:00 +0000

Marketing Your Way Through a Recession

Published:	March 3, 2008
Author:	John Quelch

Executive Summary:

In a recession, consumers become value oriented, distributors are concerned about cash, and employees worry about their jobs. But a downturn is no time to stop spending on marketing. The key, says professor John Quelch, is to understand how the needs of your customers and partners change, and adapt your strategies to the new reality. Key concepts include:

Brands that increase advertising during a downturn can improve market share and return on investment.
Early-buy allowances, extended financing, and generous return policies motivate distributors to stock your full product line.
In tough times, price cuts attract more consumer support than promotions.
CEOs must spend more time with customers and employees.

The signs of an imminent recession are all around us. The spillover from the subprime mortgage crisis is weakening both consumer confidence and the consumer spending—much of it on credit—that has been buoying the U.S. economy.

Companies should bear eight factors in mind when making their marketing plans for 2008 and 2009:

1. Research the customer. Instead of cutting the market research budget, you need to know more than ever how consumers are redefining value and responding to the recession. Price elasticity curves are changing. Consumers take more time searching for durable goods and negotiate harder at the point of sale. They are more willing to postpone purchases, trade down, or buy less. Must-have features of yesterday are today's can-live-withouts. Trusted brands are especially valued and they can still launch new products successfully, but interest in new brands and new categories fades. Conspicuous consumption becomes less prevalent.

2. Focus on family values. When economic hard times loom, we tend to retreat to our village. Look for cozy hearth-and-home family scenes in advertising to replace images of extreme sports, adventure, and rugged individualism. Zany humor and appeals on the basis of fear are out. Greeting card sales, telephone use, and discretionary spending on home furnishings and home entertainment will hold up well, as uncertainty prompts us to stay at home but also stay connected with family and friends.

Now may be the time to drop your weaker distributors and upgrade your sales force.

3. Maintain marketing spending. This is not the time to cut advertising. It is well documented that brands that increase advertising during a recession, when competitors are cutting back, can improve market share and return on investment at lower cost than during good economic times. Uncertain consumers need the reassurance of known brands, and more consumers at home watching television can deliver higher than expected audiences at lower cost-per-thousand impressions. Brands with deep pockets may be able to negotiate favorable advertising rates and lock them in for several years. If you have to cut marketing spending, try to maintain the frequency of advertisements by shifting from 30-second to 15-second advertisements, substituting radio for television advertising, or increasing the use of direct marketing, which gives more immediate sales impact.

4. Adjust product portfolios. Marketers must reforecast demand for each item in their product lines as consumers trade down to models that stress good value, such as cars with fewer options. Tough times favor multi-purpose goods over specialized products, and weaker items in product lines should be pruned. In grocery-products categories, good-quality own-brands gain at the expense of national brands. Industrial customers prefer to see products and services unbundled and priced separately. Gimmicks are out; reliability, durability, safety, and performance are in. New products, especially those that address the new consumer reality and thereby put pressure on competitors, should still be introduced, but advertising should stress superior price performance, not corporate image.

When economic hard times loom, we tend to retreat to our village.

5. Support distributors. In uncertain times, no one wants to tie up working capital in excess inventories. Early-buy allowances, extended financing, and generous return policies motivate distributors to stock your full product line. This is particularly true with unproven new products. Be careful about expanding distribution to lower-priced channels; doing so can jeopardize existing relationships and your brand image. However, now may be the time to drop your weaker distributors and upgrade your sales force by recruiting those sacked by other companies.

6. Adjust pricing tactics. Customers will be shopping around for the best deals. You do not necessarily have to cut list prices, but you may need to offer more temporary price promotions, reduce thresholds for quantity discounts, extend credit to long-standing customers, and price smaller pack sizes more aggressively. In tough times, price cuts attract more consumer support than promotions such as sweepstakes and mail-in offers.

7. Stress market share. In all but a few technology categories where growth prospects are strong, companies are in a battle for market share and, in some cases, survival. Knowing your cost structure can ensure that any cuts or consolidation initiatives will save the most money with minimum customer impact. Companies such as Wal-Mart and Southwest Airlines, with strong positions and the most productive cost structures in their industries, can expect to gain market share. Other companies with healthy balance sheets can do so by acquiring weak competitors.

8. Emphasize core values. Although most companies are making employees redundant, chief executives can cement the loyalty of those who remain by assuring employees that the company has survived difficult times before, maintaining quality rather than cutting corners, and servicing existing customers rather than trying to be all things to all people. CEOs must spend more time with customers and employees. Economic recession can elevate the importance of the finance director's balance sheet over the marketing manager's income statement. Managing working capital can easily dominate managing customer relationships. CEOs must counter this. Successful companies do not abandon their marketing strategies in a recession; they adapt them.

Join the discussion on Harvard Business Online.

This post is based on an article by John Quelch that appeared in The Financial Times of London on February 19, 2008. Reproduced by permission.

About the author

John Quelch is Senior Associate Dean and Lincoln Filene Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School.

Keywords:	Marketing Strategy

New Recommendation System = 40 Percent More Diggs

noreply@blogger.com (gz) — Fri, 01 Aug 2008 17:41:00 +0000

New Recommendation System = 40 Percent More Diggs

Posted: 31 Jul 2008 03:28 PM CDT

One month after launching its new recommendation system, Digg is already reporting positive results. Digg recommends stories based on other members with similar voting patterns and interests. Chief scientist Anton Kast writes on the Digg Blog:

- Digging activity is up significantly: the total number of Diggs increased 40% after launch.

- The Recommendation Engine is running strong: at any given point in time, the system is generating over 54 Million Recommendations, with the average Digger having nearly 200 Recommendations from an average of 34 “Diggers like you”.

- Friend activity/friends added is up 24%.

- Commenting is up 11% since launch.

Digg’s recommendation engine takes a Last.fm approach to finding people’s whose tastes overlap with yours and then suggesting stories they’ve Dugg up but that you’ve missed. It is collaborative filtering for news.

As Digg becomes more mainstream, it needs technologies such as this to bring it back to its glory days when everybody was interested in the same niche categories. Social recommendations work best when they are extracted from niche communities who are obsessive about one or two topics. Digg started out as a haven for hardcore techies, but has branched out.

The recommendation system is designed to, in effect, help Diggers carve out their own niche communities again. If you happen to like tech industry news, you will see stories from other like-minded Diggers. If you prefer politics or sports, you’ll get those stories. And if you like a combination, the system will grab recommendations from each appropriate bucket.

At least, that is how it is supposed to work in theory. The recommendations seem decent. But I personally haven’t noticed anything that really strikes home. Over time, it should get better.

Courtesy: TechCrunch

Nike Courage

noreply@blogger.com (gz) — Thu, 31 Jul 2008 22:57:00 +0000

Six Reasons Why People Flip Over the Flip

noreply@blogger.com (gz) — Thu, 31 Jul 2008 19:04:00 +0000

Business Week: Tech Beat

Six Reasons Why People Flip Over the Flip

Posted by: Rob Hof on July 30

Like more than 1 million other people, I’m a fan of the Flip, the little camcorder that, on paper, looks like it should suck. It has almost no advanced features that tech-obsessed folks think they need. Some of them, in fact, are downright livid about why people would prefer fewer functions.

No matter. Market watcher NPD Research just announced that the Flip is the best-selling camcorder in the U.S. as of June.

Here’s why—and I think this list provides useful lessons to purveyors of tech gear, who nonetheless will probably continue to ignore them in their endless quest to one-up each other.

1. It’s cheap. Starting at about $100, it’s affordable to almost anyone who’s at all inclined to shoot video in the first place.

2. It’s easy. Three buttons: Record, play back, erase. That’s it. No manual necessary. And uploading to YouTube is a snap, or actually a flip—press a release button and out springs the USB connector. The software installs automatically.

3. The video’s more than good enough. It won’t match a regular camcorder’s, but it looks just fine on a standard TV. And the Flip works surprisingly well in low light—better, notes one commenter below, than camcorders costing much more. This is really important, more than most people realize.

4. It’s small. It fits in just about any pocket. Maybe just as important, it’s unobtrusive, unlike most camcorders, which look kind of like miniature satellites spying on you.

5. It uses regular, AA batteries. Easy to replace and, even more important, no brick for recharging. (Except the new, smaller Mino, which uses an internal battery.)

6. It’s fun!

I don’t mean this to be an ad for the Flip. It’s far from perfect (optical zoom is something I’d pay extra for, and the new Mino model is getting a little pricey for what it is). But it’s refreshing when you run across a device that just works with no fuss. You’d think more tech companies would figure this out after all these years watching Apple eat their lunch.

Google A-Go-Go

noreply@blogger.com (gz) — Thu, 31 Jul 2008 17:39:00 +0000

Google Acquires Video Editing Service For YouTube
TechCrunch
In a rare acquisition, Google's YouTube acquired startup Omnisio, a service that lets users edit videos.

Omnisio lets users extract sections of video clips found on YouTube, Google Video or Blip.tv and then mash them up to form their own embeddable video clips. According to TechCrunch, the all-cash deal is worth $15 million.

Omnisio, which was founded by Australian trio Ryan Junee, Julian Frumar and Simon Ratner, has only been around since March 2008; TechCrunch points out that the sale is another win for owner Y Combinator, which invests small amounts of capital in companies at the idea stage. Reddit, acquired in 2006, TextPayMe, bought by Amazon in 2007, and Auctomatic and Anywhere.FM, acquired earlier this year, are other former Y Combinator companies. - Read the whole story...

Google To Open VC Unit
The Wall Street Journal
The Wall Street Journal reports that Google is planning to start its own venture capital unit. The venture will be lead by David Drummond, Google's SVP of corporate development and chief legal officer, and William Maris, a 33-year-old former entrepreneur. But details, such as how the group will be structured and what sorts of investments it will pursue, remain murky. In fact, the plans could still fall through.

Google would join such tech and media giants as Intel Corp., Motorola, Comcast, Amazon and Walt Disney in setting up its own formal venture capital arm. Their respective investment records have been spotty at best, in part because corporate venture capital units face different challenges from traditional VCs, which invest in private startups at an early phase in hopes of a big payout when the company is sold or goes public.

Startups, meanwhile, are sometimes wary of taking corporate money because the agreements often come with requirements like a buyout clause if the company becomes successful. These funds also don't usually allow senior employees to invest their own money, whereas VC firms typically do. According to PricewaterhouseCoopers, corporate funds' share of the overall VC market fell to 7% in the first half of 2008 from 8.4% in 2007. - Read the whole story...

Google Reveals Search Targeting Practices
The New York Times
We know that Google gathers lots of data about its users, but we've never known how the search giant uses it to filter individual search results. However, earlier this week, the company decided to shine a little light on that process, explaining how it customizes search results in a blog post. In short, Google uses search data to guess where you are and what you're most likely searching for.

Now, a small note in the upper-right-hand corner of the results page will alert users when this is happening. For example, the note could read, "customized for the San Francisco metro area." The text may also provide a link to a page that has additional information. There, Google displays the IP address it used to determine that the search came from San Francisco. It also identifies the search terms it has taken into account to determine this. Not only that, but the page also includes a link to the search results that would have come up if Google hadn't taken into account the user information. This way, Google is allowing people to make choices about how much information to give to Google.

In his report, The New York Times' Saul Hansell applauds Google for taking steps toward helping people understand what the company is doing with their information. That said, it doesn't answer questions about how Google uses this information on its other pages. The disclosure only refers to search results, not advertising, which is the second important area where Google leverages user data. As Hansell says, "I'd like to be able to see what data was used in deciding to show an ad to me and who will get what information if I click on it. Yes, some of this may be seen as "proprietary" information, but to my mind a company that wants to use my "proprietary" history of Web surfing needs to come clean about what it is doing with that data." - Read the whole story...

Trip It Real Good

noreply@blogger.com (gz) — Wed, 30 Jul 2008 20:10:00 +0000

From Daily Candy - July 30, 2008
Organized Travel with TripIt

You edited your stuff until your bag fits overhead (if it requires more than a bikini and cover-up, you’re not doing it). But that avalanche of travel info printouts could fill a steamer trunk.

Next time, get help from online travel tool TripIt. Its patent-pending technology, the Itinerator, gobbles info from all your sources and spits it back out as a single plan.

Lost you with “patent-pending”? Yeah, it’s dorky. (We’d never actually say the word “Itinerator” out loud.) But it’s easy and damn useful. You e-mail everything — flights from ba.com, hotels from Orbitz, car rental confirmation — to one address and it’s all (miraculously, mysteriously) condensed into one itin.

TripIt gets bonus points for all the, uh, bonuses: weather forecasts, city guides, maps, and directions. Traveling with a gang? E-mail everyone the Itinerator-generated play-by-play and never again suffer the dreaded “what time is our flight again?” call when you’re already at the airport.

Ah, technology. We just love this interweb thing.

Available online at tripit.com.

Top Gaming publishers, from Kotaku.com

noreply@blogger.com (gz) — Wed, 30 Jul 2008 00:37:00 +0000

Here Are The Top 20 Publishers In The Business, Ranked According To Cash Money Intake

Edge's Top 20 Publishers 2008 [Edge]

Leftover Ad Space? Exchanges Handle the Remnants

noreply@blogger.com (gz) — Mon, 28 Jul 2008 22:18:00 +0000

Joe Zawadzki, chief of MediaMath, analyzes ad exchanges.

Published: July 28, 2008

Joe Zawadzki’s traders spend their days in front of two computer screens, feeding their systems with data and trying to perfect their trading algorithms.

Joe Zawadzki of MediaMath is looking at the financial products that could emerge from advertising exchanges.

But they are not analyzing stocks. They are analyzing advertising.

What they are measuring is activity on advertising exchanges, where companies bid to place their online ads on space provided by publishers. As advertising exchanges gain popularity -- Yahoo, Google and Microsoft have all moved into this arena recently -- Madison Avenue is borrowing tactics from Wall Street.

It is reminding some observers of what happened when technology came to the stock exchange, including the arrival of trading advisers like Mr. Zawadzki’s firm, MediaMath, that are running numbers and promising to offer sophisticated financial instruments.

For now, Mr. Zawadzki is using the exchanges to buy and sell ads instantaneously as opportunities arise — a spot market, in Wall Street lingo — but he is working on more complex trading strategies.

“Right now it’s more the in-the-moment, taking advantage of the spot market with aggressive bid management,” said Mr. Zawadzki, whose firm is based in New York. “But we’re certainly thinking about where that goes later in terms of secondary markets, derivatives, options, hedges, all the rest.”

Big publishers try to sell Web site advertising space through their sales forces at high prices. Most cannot sell all their inventory, so they send the leftover, or “remnant,” space to an ad network or to an ad exchange. These deliver an ad, but at lower prices than the publishers’ sales forces fetch — usually around $1 per thousand impressions, versus the $20 and up that top sites’ sales forces ask for.

Ad networks and ad exchanges are both in the business of selling remnant inventory, but they do it in slightly different ways. The networks, which function as middlemen, sell chunks of inventory through their sales forces, which can simplify the buying process for advertisers.

Exchanges, on the other hand, let advertisers buy ads directly, and place them one by one. Because there are usually lower fees, buying off exchanges tends to be cheaper — though more labor-intensive — than buying through networks.

In 2007, exchanges sold about 15 percent of the remnant inventory, and about 5 percent of online display advertising overall, according to ThinkPanmure, a research and financial services company. Most of the other 85 percent was sold through networks.

The major appeal of exchanges is that with some analysis, advertisers can buy ads one by one, and track the performance of each ad. This contrasts with ad networks, which roll up broad audiences for advertisers (often using the exchanges) through their own sales forces.

Ad exchanges have gotten a few big boosts lately. In 2007, three major portals announced they were buying exchanges. Yahoo bought the Right Media exchange for $650 million; Google announced it was buying DoubleClick in April, which had announced weeks earlier it was setting up what is now called the DoubleClick Advertising Exchange, for $3.1 billion; and Microsoft acquired the exchange AdECN.

Last month, the advertising holding company Publicis Groupe said it would start working with DoubleClick and Right Media’s exchange to buy advertisements. The advertising companies Havas Digital and WPP have announced similar deals with Right Media in recent months.

But it is not so much the exchanges themselves that is interesting the advertising world — it is what can be done with them.

“The exchanges are just a platform to buy and sell media, but you have to layer the measurement and data on top, which could come from different areas: some agencies will build it, some agencies will partner,” said Darren Herman, head of digital media at the Media Kitchen agency.

“We use the analogy of, anybody can trade on the financial markets, anyone can get an eTrade account, but it’s how you’re smart about how you use your eTrade account that determines how well you’re going to do trading,” Mr. Herman said.

With some Wall Street-like analysis, advertisers can find individual Web surfers, figure out how much to pay to show them an ad, and analyze how those ads have performed. Firms like Mr. Zawadzki’s are analyzing which of those users might be attractive, then tracking whether people click on the ads they see. If an advertiser wanted to reach a very specific group — say, people in Atlanta who have already visited its home page — it might bid more to get that audience.

The growth of exchanges has a clear benefit to advertisers, allowing them to test multiple ads quickly with specific groups, potentially minimizing expensive campaign testing and focus-group work.

The exchanges may benefit publishers, at least short term. Most exchanges take a lower cut of ad sales than ad networks, the other option for unsold ad space, because exchanges have lower costs and no big sales forces.

And some exchanges offer additional leverage for publishers: on the exchange Adsdaq, publishers are able to set minimum prices for their inventories. (If a price is not met, the inventory is kicked to a second-choice network.) Two other exchanges, Traffiq and AdBidCentral, serve as rudimentary futures markets, letting publishers sell ad space several months in advance.

“Once there’s a market place where you can buy and sell using your own technology, you can absolutely create financial instruments or media instruments,” said Zachary Weinberg, the chief executive of Invite Media, a start- up in Philadelphia that is working on ad-exchange strategies. “I think what you’ll see is traders come in, and they’ll look to create derivatives on certain packages of media, and resell them to other guys. You’ll see a whole marketplace develop because of this technology shift.”

The auction-based pricing should, theoretically at least, set fair market prices.

“I think the exchange is really good at creating a market-based pricing dynamic,” said Shar VanBoskirk, an analyst at Forrester Research. “They’ll not necessarily guarantee higher pricing for the publisher if the publisher doesn’t provide any value. So I think the exchange will work just like we see a stock exchange work, where the inventory that is of great value will definitely go up in price because of market demands for that inventory.”

Long term, it may be a different story for publishers. If the exchanges grow, and advertisers figure out how to find their target audiences wherever they are on the Web — rather than going through a Web site focusing on motherhood or autos — they may not need to pay the high prices that publishers are asking for.

Of course, an exchange needs supply and demand to work, and the exchanges are not huge now. The largest exchange, Right Media, based in New York, says it handles about six billion transactions a day. This sounds large, but that six billion is the total number of transactions — that is, the number of interactions between the buyer and the seller — rather than the ad impressions it is serving, a much lower number. And MySpace alone showed an average of 1.7 billion ads a day just to United States viewers in April, according to comScore Ad Metrix.

“It’s still very early in the development of these exchanges and marketplaces, but there’s no doubt that they are here to stay and I think they will continue to get more influence in the marketplace and will continue to evolve,” said William Morrison, an analyst with ThinkPanmure.

Original NYT article here

TechCrunch sponsors

noreply@blogger.com (gz) — Mon, 28 Jul 2008 17:20:00 +0000

Affinity Circles is the leading provider of exclusive social networks for established, professional organizations seeking to promote career advancement opportunities among their members.

Blurb is a company and a community that believes passionately in the power of books: making, reading, sharing, and selling them.

Cannonball Wine Company is one of our favorite wine providers that makes great wine at a great price.

Center’d helps people plan any event or activity, simple or complex, and discover new places to go and things to do based on the opinions of trusted friends.

Engine Yard focuses on Ruby on Rails application deployments and operations support, so you can focus on developing your application and business. Customers have started during development and grown to millions of users without stress along the way.

Etchstar.com provides turnkey on-demand product customization solutions, working with leading OEMs and retailers to offer online shoppers premium products featuring custom art and text via engraving and direct-to-garment printing. Etchstar’s massive but tightly curated licensed art library includes Pink Floyd, Wu Tang Clan, The God Father, Family Guy, the CIA, SpongeBob, UCLA and only the best user uploaded art and logos.

EventBrite is the world’s largest online event management and self-service ticketing site. Distinguished by its ease-of-use and cost-effectiveness, EventBrite has helped tens of thousands of companies, organizations and non-profits take advantage of the Internet to promote and sell-out their events.

Future Works and the Future Works Studios are joining us as the official August Capital media sponsor. Thanks guys!

Helpstream is a brand new customer service application built for the Web using innovative SaaS technology to provide engaging service-driven communities for organizations who are dedicated to exceptional customer support.

Hugh MacLeod, the man behind Gapingvoid.com, is well known for what he modestly calls, “cartoons drawn on the back of business cards”. When Hugh is not doing his pithy cartoons, he works closely with some Fortune 100 businesses, finding new ways to better tell their stories.

IDrive.com is an online backup service for consumers and small businesses provided by Pro Softnet Corp. IBackup.com is another variation with additional emphasis on SMB market with Exchange, SQL Server and Disaster Recovery capabilities. With over 250,000 user base between these two services, we are a leading player in the online backup space.

Jaduka enables companies to harness communications to create more effective operations. With Jaduka’s Web Services APIs, applications can trigger individual or group calls; provide automated alerts; manage surveys; activate digital content; and administer account and transaction information for a variety of solutions.

Kaboodle is the #1 social shopping website where people discover, recommend and share products. With over 8 million monthly unique visitors, at the heart of Kaboodle is a fun and engaging community of people who love to shop.

Kontagent is an application that integrates tightly with platforms such as Facebook to offer widget and application developers a high level of analytics data. Developers can use the tool to track the application’s usage and adoption rate, and a number of other details that more basic analytics programs can’t offer.

Kosmix scours the Web to automatically generate home pages for any topic from Le Corbusier to Burning Man, and connects consumers to the information that makes a difference in their lives. Spend less time searching and more time exploring, discovering and learning at www.kosmix.com.

Limbo is the largest mobile community in the US with over 2.5 million members. All of our services are free to our members. Limbo amplifies your social life – giving you quick and easy access to more activities, people and places. Limbo is headquartered in Burlingame, Calif., and backed by Azure Capital, DFJ, and NEA.

Loopt, based in Silicon Valley, uses location technology to improve the way people connect, share and explore in the real world. Loopt’s interoperable and accessible social-mapping service is available across multiple carrier networks and supported on over 80 mobile devices.

Malaria No More’s mission is simple: to end deaths due to malaria. The world has known how to beat this disease for more than a century, yet it remains the number one killer of children under five in Africa, claiming more than 1 million lives a year.

Media Temple is an industry leading, inc. 500, privately held, profitable web hosting and software application service provider in California. Since 1998, (mt) has provided businesses worldwide with professional-class network environments for web, email, applications, and rich media content.

Mixx is a branded social media site and active online community dedicated to connecting users and publishers through communities and tags. Launched in October 2007, Mixx has more than 2 million users and is the social media platform of choice for major publishers such as CNN, Los Angeles Times, USATODAY, New York Times and thousands of blogs.

Mobissimo simultaneously searches more than 200 different travel sites in 30 countries and five continents, including major global airlines, low-cost carriers, consolidators, and hotel/car rental sites, to find the best fares and rates online.

Mo’Jiva’s flexible mobile-web advertising platform allows agencies, publishers, advertisers and sales-reps to leverage and add-value to existing relationships and content partnerships by providing an extension to fully manage mobile marketing strategy.

Pandora is a personalized radio service, available anytime and anywhere on the PC, in the home and on mobile devices, including the Apple iPhone. By simply entering a favorite song or artist, a listener is instantly launched into a personalized listening experience, full of discovery as Pandora explores their favorite part of the music universe.

Plista is a user-centric real-time personalization and recommendation network based on collaborative filtering. It allows for enhancing end-user experience by recommending more relevant content, products and ads. It works with any item and via various channels: as a widget, per API, or browser plug-in.

ScanDigital converts old photos to digital format. Customers send in their loose snapshots or albums, and the company scans and color-corrects them. The photos are given a permanent online home on the company’s photo sharing site, to which customers can upload additional images.

SezWho provides a universal distributed profile allowing site visitors to discover quality content based on people. Additionally SezWho provides the capability to rate content from which we derive context specific author reputations.

Snap is a distributed media network, reaching 10% of the US audience and 35 million unique global users each month in 48 languages (June 2008). Snap’s product is called Snap Shots and is used on over 2,000,000 websites and blogs, to improve user experience by revealing the content that users want and delivering it to them right where they are, without forcing them to click links or conduct searches.

Socialmedia.com is the largest independent social advertising network. Over 5,000 applications from Facebook, MySpace, Bebo and Hi5 participate in socialmedia.com’s network, attracting a global audience of over 30 million monthly unique users.

Stormhoek is a little South African Winery that has built global awareness through the use of social software. Located in Stellenbosch, South Africa, Stormhoek thinks that wine is about Love, Passion, Spontaneity, Dreaming Big, Celebrating, and Changing The World.

Tapulous is building a family of fun and social applications for iPhone. The company’s first release, Tap Tap Revenge, is currently the #1 download on the App Store

TokBox is a first-of-its-kind, video communication service that makes it effortless for anyone to make video calls, send video mails or embed video communication into any website – for free! TokBox is located in San Francisco, California and is privately held.

Topix is the leading news community on the Web, connecting people to information and discussions that matter to them in every U.S. town and city. Topix also helps media companies to engage their online audiences through syndicated forums, hyper-local platforms, RSS feeds, and more.

vSNAX Videos is a free application that delivers mobile video clips to iPhone and iPod touch users from more than 35 premium media partners including AccuWeather.com, CBS, Ford Models, Ripe TV, and MTV Networks’ VH1, Spike and GameTrailers.

Zivity provides subscription-based reality entertainment and social networking for an 18 and over audience. Zivity’s initial focus is a community-powered showcase of professional-quality photography promoting female beauty and expression.

BBC's Olympic Journey to East

noreply@blogger.com (gz) — Sat, 26 Jul 2008 01:21:00 +0000

Gorillaz's Damon Albarn and Jamie Hewlett retell the Chinese Monkey King folk tale.

Full Credits

Client: BBC
Agency: Red Bee Media,
RKCR/Y&R
Executive Creative Director: Damon Collins
Creative: Paul Angus,
Ted Heath
Producer: Deborah Stewart,
Cara Speller,
Syleste Molyneaux
Production Company: Passion Pictures,
Zombie Flesh Eaters
Director: Jamie Hewlett
Animation Director: Pete Candeland,
Rob Valley
Animation Producer: Emma Phillips
Music Composer & Producer: Damon Albarn
Lead Vocals: Jia Ruhan
Choir: Tianyuan Choir, Beijing
Musical Director: David Coulter,
Mike Smith
Mixer: Jason Cox
Engineer: Steve Sedgewick
Sound Studio: 750mph
Senior Engineer/Director: Andy Humphreys

'Not a Site, but a Concept': Tapping the Power of Social Networking

noreply@blogger.com (gz) — Wed, 16 Jul 2008 22:00:00 +0000

'Not a Site, but a Concept': Tapping the Power of Social Networking

Published: July 09, 2008 in Knowledge@Wharton

Mini USA, the American branch of BMW's Mini Cooper line, tracks everything being said about its brand everywhere on line -- in blogs, discussion groups, forums, MySpace pages and much more -- then uses what it learns to guide advertising campaigns.

At Hewlett-Packard, 50 executives log into their individual blogs each morning to join the ongoing online conversation about each of their product lines, immediately responding to customer problems and concerns.

Ernst & Young recruits many of the 3,500 college graduates it hires every year using a career group on Facebook, where it not only posts job information but also answers individual questions from prospective employees. And Del Monte Pet Foods uses a private online community to regularly "chat" with 400 pet lovers whose opinions help shape new products.

These are all examples of companies savvy enough to participate in the "groundswell," according to Charlene Li, vice president and principal analyst at Forrester Research. "The groundswell is a social trend in which people use technologies to get the things they need from each other, rather than from traditional institutions like corporations."

Li was a speaker at the recent Supernova conference, an annual technology event in San Francisco organized by Wharton legal studies and business ethics professor Kevin Werbach in collaboration with Wharton. Li and Forrester colleague Josh Bernoff have co-authored a book on the subject, Groundswell: Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies.

"The more you know and understand the individuals who make up the groundswell around your brand and your company, the more you can use the new social networking phenomenon to your advantage," she said.

Such understanding comes from going well beyond traditional user surveys, however. According to Li and other speakers at the conference, too few companies study how people actually interact with the web and utilize online collaborative tools, yet much of today's Internet revolves around individual users, the content they create, the communities they form and the transactions they choose.

"People's lives are rich and complex, so you need to get data both in the large and in the small," said Elizabeth Churchill, principal research scientist at Yahoo! Research whose work focuses on user Internet experiences. "That means quantitative data from large groups to answer the 'who, what, where and how' questions, and qualitative data to answer the 'why' questions. For example, we know from research done by [photo sharing website] Flickr that while Americans are big sharers of photos, Scandinavians are not. Why? What is the cultural impact on photo sharing?"

Failed Searches and Alpha Moms

Looking more carefully at people's behavior on the Internet can uncover surprises, sometimes calling into question basic assumptions -- for instance, that most young people are adept at using the Internet. Conference presenter Eszter Hargittai, Northwestern University professor of sociology and communication studies, studied a diverse group of students attending the University of Illinois at Chicago and found that 43% failed on a search task, based largely on their misunderstanding of Internet terminology and on their inability to navigate links.

Hargittai reviewed research showing that people differ significantly in their understanding of various Internet-related terms and activities. For example, when asked to assess their own Internet know-how, women, African Americans, Hispanics and those with poorly educated parents report lower levels of knowledge than men or Asian Americans.

"Since such skills are not randomly distributed among the population, certain content providers and content users stand a better chance of benefiting from the medium than others," said Hargittai.

Li agreed, citing Forrester research on the range of behavior on the web, which is sometimes based on skill and demographics, while at other times linked more to a user's stage of life. So-called Alpha Moms "are comfortable with technology, interested in parenting, and have above-average incomes," said Li, "but they have no time. So if you're trying to reach them, you don't give them blogs. You give them communities of their peers with opportunities for feedback."

To help companies target their Internet strategies, Li and Bernoff have organized Forrester research into a "social technology ladder," which classifies consumers based on their participation in various types of social networking. At the lowest rung of the ladder are the "inactives," some 44% of all U.S. American adults who were online in 2007. Higher up are the "joiners," the 25% who visit social networking sites like MySpace; collectors, an elite 15% who collect and aggregate information; and critics, those who post ratings and reviews as well as contribute to blogs and forums. Only 18% of all online Americans actually create content, publishing an article or a blog at least once a month, maintaining a web page or uploading content to sites like YouTube.

The power of such a classification lies in giving organizations a clear understanding of how consumers are behaving online, said Li. "Any successful strategy to tap into the groundswell has to begin with assessing customers' social activities. Then you can decide what you want to accomplish, plan for how your relationship with your customers will change, and finally decide what social technology to use."

Li is currently investigating why people move up and down this ladder of social technologies, and what are the levers companies can use to encourage consumers to act. It is critical for organizations to hone their understanding of groundswell activities, said Li, because "in five to 10 years, social networks will be everywhere."

The New Black

Google's Joe Kraus agrees. Speaking at the Supernova conference, the director of product management for the search giant acknowledged that social networking is the latest fashion -- "the new black," as he called it. "But people have been endlessly fascinated by one another for a very long time. Social networking is not new; we just have new ways to do it."

That is not to diminish the power of social computing. In fact, Kraus already sees it as the force behind three major trends in the way people use the Internet.

First, "the process of information discovery is changing from a solitary activity to a communal activity," said Kraus, citing as an example his own recent behavior in choosing an anniversary gift for his wife. He searched and found that candy is traditional for a sixth anniversary, then set up a message on his G-mail account, saying he needed ideas for a candy-based gift.

A friend emailed to tell him of an extraordinary baker who constructs specialty cakes and, thanks to her suggestion, his sixth anniversary gift became an elaborate cake in the shape of a colorful purse. So, said Kraus, he went from solitary information discovery to social information discovery -- and a much better result than he could have achieved on his own.

Second, he said, how we exchange information is changing, from sharing information actively (emailing photos to friends) to sharing it passively (uploading those photos to Facebook and emailing notification to friends). "What's happening is that we're separating access from notification," said Kraus. This leads to more sharing because people don't worry as much about interrupting others with emails, calling attention to themselves and appearing too self-important.

Third, and most important, Kraus sees the web eventually becoming entirelysocial. "Today, social computing is something you do at a specific site," said Kraus. "But we're realizing that being social is not a site. It's a concept."

We won't get to that entirely social web, he added, until we find ways to allow users to do three things: establish a single identity to log on to many sites; share private resources such as photos or contact lists without handing out private credentials (such as an email account password); and distribute information across multiple social applications.

Google Friend Connect, a service that enables websites to easily provide social features for its visitors, incorporates three standards that respectively address each of those problems -- Open ID, OAuth and OpenSocial, says Kraus. A preview version of the service was released in May. He sees Google Friend Connect as a path to the open web he predicts will arrive sooner than we imagine. "Already you can browse a site like the New York Times or Amazon, then write comments and reviews. Why shouldn't I be able to go to the Ticketmaster site and see where my friend is sitting at a concert I want to attend, providing he wants to expose the information?"

What all organizations need to prepare for, said Kraus, is a completely social web, where "your users will simply expect to be part of the conversation."

Internet Famous: Julia Allison and the Secrets of Self-Promotion

noreply@blogger.com (gz) — Wed, 16 Jul 2008 21:57:00 +0000

Internet Famous: Julia Allison and the Secrets of Self-Promotion

By Jason Tanz 07.15.08

Julia Allison can't act. She can't sing. She's not rich. But thanks to a genius for self-promotion, she's become an Internet celebrity.
Photo: Platon

I am five minutes late to catch Julia Allison's latest publicity stunt — literally five minutes — but I can see from two blocks away that she has already drawn a crowd. There she is, at the epicenter of Times Square. About a dozen tourists surround her, and more join every minute. All around them, theater marquees and building-sized billboards jostle for attention, but they are no match for Allison.

She has asked a few friends to join her this afternoon — former hedge-fund analyst Meghan Asha, handbag designer Mary Rambin, and Randi Zuckerberg, the sister of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg. They are all dressed in 1980s Jazzercise outfits; Allison wears purple spandex, leg warmers, and glittery eye shadow. Strains of Martha and the Vandellas' "Dancing in the Street" waft thinly from Rambin's iPod speakers. The four women bounce around, giggle, and shout encouragement at one another. Their audience is captivated.

Allison has enlisted a couple of cameramen to document the event. Her new Web site, xojulia.com — like her previous sites, juliaallison.com, itsmejulia.com, and juliajuliajulia.com — is dedicated to sharing almost every waking moment of Allison's life. Visitors to xojulia.com can follow her schedule of bachelorette parties and fancy dinners, see photos of her latest outfits, and read her dating advice. They can watch videos of Allison playing with her dog or horsing around with friends. If readers want an extra shot of Allisonana, her Twitter stream provides periodic updates like a postmodern news ticker.

How Famous Are You Online?

Want to see how your online q-rating measures up to Julia Allison's? Check out the Vanity Validator, designed by Wired's editor-in-chief Chris Anderson. Using Google's PageRank technology, you can scan trusted sites to measure your Internet fame on a scale of 1 (unknown) to 100 (ubiquitous). Good luck! But to make sure that your rep doesn't get confused with someone else's, add a minus sign before terms associated with your namesake's. (For instance, if your name is Michael Jordan, you might want to throw a - in front of "basketball" and "Bulls".) Good luck!

After about 15 minutes, a police officer wanders by to bust up the party. Allison doesn't have the required performer's license, and her admirers are clogging up Times Square. No problem! The mob follows her a couple of blocks uptown, looking for another vacant patch of asphalt where she can make a scene. As we cross 44th Street, a passerby squints at us. "You guys are famous?" she asks. "What do you do?"

Good question. Allison may not be famous by the traditional definition; certainly nobody here seems to recognize her. But to a devoted niche of online fans — and an even more devoted niche of detractors — she is a bona fide celebrity. She says that more than 10,000 people read her blog daily, and gossip sites like Gawker, Radar Online, and Valleywag detail her every exploit. An anonymous blogger has set up a site, Reblogging Julia, dedicated to parsing Allison's posts. The New York Times has profiled her, and New York magazine has called Allison — a dating columnist for Time Out New York and former editor-at-large for Star — "the most famous young journalist in the city."

But with all due respect, Allison's renown has little to do with her day job. Indeed, it's hard to describe exactly what she's famous for. She's not an actress or a singer or a misbehaving heiress to a hotel fortune. She hasn't recorded any meme-ready videos like Tay "Chocolate Rain" Zonday or Tron Guy or the "Leave Britney Alone!" dude. She doesn't flaunt tech knowledge like bloggers Robert Scoble or Dave Winer. She is undeniably pretty — flowing black-coffee hair, sparkling eyes, gamine physique, broad smile — but beauty alone can't account for her celebrity.

Allison is the latest, and perhaps purest, iteration of the Warholian ideal: someone who is famous for being famous. Like graffiti writers who turned their signatures into wild-style gallery pieces, she has made the process of self-promotion into its own freaky art form. Traditionally, it takes an army of publicists, a well-connected family, or a big-budget ad campaign to make this kind of splash. But Allison has done it on her own and on the cheap, armed only with an insatiable need for attention and a healthy helping of Web savvy.

"She used this medium and became unstoppable," says Choire Sicha, former managing editor of Gawker. "She just made it happen in a way that seemed seamless and kind of magical."

It's easy to dismiss Allison as little more than a rank narcissist — and many of her vocal online critics are happy do just that. But come on, admit it: You've spent a good half hour trying to pick out the most flattering photo to upload to your MySpace page. You struggle to come up with the mot juste to describe your Facebook status. You keep a bank of self-portraits on Flickr or an online scrapbook on Tumblr or a running log of your daily musings on Blogger. You strategically court the gatekeepers at StumbleUpon or Digg. You compare the size of your Twitter-subscriber rolls to those of your friends. You set up Google Alerts to tell you whenever a blogger mentions your name. See? Self-promotion is no longer solely the domain of egotists and professional aspirants. Anyone can be a personal branding machine.

The whole article here: http://www.wired.com/culture/lifestyle/magazine/16-08/howto_allison?currentPage=all

Digg Is Pushing More Traffic To Traditional News Sites

noreply@blogger.com (gz) — Wed, 16 Jul 2008 21:47:00 +0000

Digg Is Pushing More Traffic To Traditional News Sites

Posted: 15 Jul 2008 11:34 AM CDT

As Digg becomes more mainstream, so are the headlines linked to on its homepage. The once tech-heavy site long ago expanded into other categories such as entertainment, world, and business news. But that change is finally hitting its home page, either because Digg is attracting more mainstream users who are Digging more mainstream stories or it is using other (algorithmic) methods to point its firehouse in the direction of mainstream media. (Comscore shows 15.4 million unique visitors in May, and 6.3 million U.S. visitors in June).

Hitwise released some data today indicating that Digg now sends nearly as much traffic to entertainment sites as it does to news and media sites. As the chart above shows, 21.3 percent of its traffic goes to the former, while 20.7 percent goes to news and media sites. A year ago the gap between the two categories was a 50 percent gap, now it is a 3 percent gap. The traffic sent to entertainment sites as a percentage of Digg’s total outgoing traffic is down 20 percent, while the traffic it pushes to news and media sites is up 16 percent (although both are down since April).

This data confirms a trend that Allen Stern at CenterNetworks noticed last week. Namely, that UK newspapers in particular, like the Guardian, are showing up a lot more often on Digg’s homepage, displacing more familiar tech sites such as Ars Technica, Engadet, and Gizmodo. (When I checked today, about half of the stories on Digg’s homepage linked to traditional news sites). He also speculated whether this meant that Digg is trying to sell itself to the Guardian, which bought the blog network that owns PaidContent last week for an estimated $30 million.

That seems like a stretch, but showing that it can drive more traffic to traditional media sites would certainly make Digg more appealing to any potential acquirer. There has been no shortage of acquisition rumors over the years, but it would make more sense for a semi-neutral technology company like Microsoft or Google to make a bid than a media company with ts own properties to promote.

Practical Content Necessary For Mobile Phone User Satisfaction

noreply@blogger.com (gz) — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 17:48:00 +0000

From Center for Media Research

A recent study by the AKQA's Research & Insights department in conjunction with dotMobi, finds that there is a strong consumer desire for practical mobile content on phones. Nearly 90 percent of consumer respondents stated that they would be more likely to choose an airline with mobile check-in facilities over one that did not offer them. And, rather than basic entertainment and ringtones, consumers stated that their most-wanted mobile activities included phone-optimized banking and travel planning.

In demanding access to mobile banking and mobile commerce abilities for basic utilities such as groceries, plane tickets and books, consumers said they trust the mobile Web to keep their personal information secure, as opposed to the PC-based Internet, where security remains of utmost importance.

Other results from the mobile Internet usage and attitudes study include:

90 percent of the 2,000 respondents in the online panel are interested in learning more about the mobile Web
Fifty percent of respondents were unaware that there are mobile sites optimized for use on mobile phone
86 percent of participants said they were interested in knowing which sites are easily accessible on a mobile phone
Nearly 50 percent of respondents said that a poor experience on their initial use of the mobile Web made them "reluctant to access" the site on their mobile phones again
Poor site display and layout remain top reasons for mobile Web dissatisfaction among consumers
Almost two-thirds of participants stated that they would consider purchasing theater tickets, take-out food and travel tickets via a mobile phone
63 percent of survey respondents said they would be more likely to give up their money than their mobile "smart phone" if they were mugged

Daniel Rosen, managing director of AKQA Mobile, concluded "The enormous popularity of mobile devices has had a profound effect on the lifestyle of the consumer... (but) consumers were (easily) turned off by earlier, ill-conceived mobile campaigns... with mobile devices more ubiquitous... there is a real opportunity for brands to deliver ground-breaking... campaigns... developed specifically for mobile applications."

The survey was conducted May 19-28, 2008 with a Research Now online panel of 2,019 consumers, half from the US and half from the UK. Participants were representative of online populations in both countries.

For more information about the study and dotMobi, please visit here.

Digg Recommendation Engine Confirmed!

noreply@blogger.com (gz) — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 05:39:00 +0000

from TechCrunch. Click here for videos and links.

Update: Digg Recommendation Engine Confirmed For This Week

Digg has released some materials around their new Recommendation Engine, which we wrote about last night, and say that it will be released this week. Two overview videos are below, including an interview with Digg Lead Scientist Anton Kast. We’ve also included the text of a white paper on the Recommendation Engine.

Digg Recommendation Engine from Kevin Rose on Vimeo.

Anton Talks About The Digg Recommendation Engine from Kevin Rose on Vimeo.

The Digg Recommendation Engine
People love Digg because it’s a place to discover and share great content from around the Web. The Digg homepage always has the most popular stories, but many Digg users find their content in the Upcoming section, which gets over 15,000 new stories a day. To help users filter this enormous amount of content, we have created a new feature: The Digg Recommendation Engine.

When you Digg a story, you tell the Recommendation Engine two things: that you recommend the story to other users and, less obviously, that the users who Dugg the story before you are good at finding content. The Recommendation Engine keeps track of users who Dugg particular stories before you did, and it recommends you the stories they Dugg. The more content you Digg, the smarter the Recommendation Engine becomes.

Finding Diggers Like You
The Digg Recommendation Engine uses your Digg history over the last thirty days to make Recommendations. (You can see the number of items you have Dugg over the last month on the right-hand side of the Recommended view.) Every time you Digg a story, the Engine matches you with other Diggers who Dugg the same story, and keeps track of all your Diggs in common with them.

When it’s time to calculate your Recommendations, the Engine draws from this pool of matched Diggers. For each matched Digger, it computes a correlation coefficient between you and them. It then picks a cutoff for this correlation coefficient, and the Diggers who make the cut are called “Diggers Like You.”

It’s easy to understand how the correlations are calculated. For each user with whom you Dugg something in common, the Engine determines how many stories the two of you Dugg in common, and divides that number by the total number of stories you or they Dugg. The ratio is a correlation coefficient, a number between zero and one (zero if you and the other user never agreed; one if you always did). Such a ratio is sometimes called a “Jaccard coefficient.”

This scheme automatically accounts for the overall level of Digging activity. If another user Diggs a lot, they have to agree with you on many stories to become a Digger Like You. If another user Diggs rarely, then a small amount of agreement can suffice. 2
From Diggers Like You to Recommendations
Once the Engine has determined your Diggers Like You, your Recommendations consist of stories that your Diggers Like You have already Dugg, minus the stories you already Dugg or Buried. There are some extra steps, like the diversity rules and the promotability constraint described below, but this is the basic idea.

Recommendations are always displayed together with your Diggers Like You and their compatibility percentages. These percentages are just correlation coefficients. You may notice that you are more compatible with a user that has fewer Recommendations than a user with less compatibility but with more Recommendations. This is because although you have Dugg more items in common with the more compatible user, that user has not Dugg as much.

The Recommendations you get from any particular user will come from topics (such as Technology or World News) where you have a shared Digging history. We figure that two users may have similar interests in a subject like ‘playable web games’, but one person might be into politics while the other follows celebrity gossip. So we actually compute correlations, Diggers Like You, and compute Recommendations in several collections of topics independently.

Promotable Stories
Since the Recommendation Engine works only with Upcoming stories, all the stories you get from the Recommendation Engine are “promotable”, meaning that they are recent enough to be eligible for the Digg homepage but haven’t appeared there yet. This means that whenever you Digg one of your Recommendations, you are helping select stories for the front page of Digg!

Diversity
Just like stories on the homepage, we want your Recommendations to be diverse: a balanced number of stories, not all on the same topic, and not all Dugg by the same people.

To make sure that your Recommendations are diverse, the Engine imposes limits that keep things from getting too focused. It makes sure that no one Digger Like You determines too many of your stories. It attempts to make your Recommendations reflect the spectrum of topics that you’ve Dugg in the past, and it adjusts the compatibility cutoff for Diggers Like You so you don’t get too many or too few stories. The Engine also limits the influence of any single one of your Diggs. For instance, if you are Digg number 1,000 on a popular story, you will have 999 similar users from that one Digg alone, and those users are not necessarily more compatible with you than the two or three who may have Dugg a less popular story you also liked. The Engine limits the total pool of users you can get from a single Digg to balance things out.

We hope you enjoy using the Recommendation Engine and look forward to helping you uncover even more great stories on Digg!
Digg on!
Anton Kast – Lead Scientist Digg

Mastering Millennials: Porter Novelli Offers Insight

noreply@blogger.com (gz) — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 06:02:00 +0000

NEW YORK, June 23 /PRNewswire/ -- Global communications agency Porter
Novelli today issued a thought-provoking white paper about Millennials as part
of the agency's highly regarded Intelligent Dialogue series.

Born in the 1980s, Millennials -- some 75 million of them in the U.S.
alone -- are beginning to enter the workforce and making a profound impact
with their wholly different perspective on, approach to, and expectations of a
professional experience. To help employers around the globe navigate the
sometimes treacherous intergenerational waters, Porter Novelli undertook a
comprehensive research initiative, drawing on the expertise of all levels of
the Porter Novelli organization of more than 1,000 communications
professionals, as well as interns from schools including Virginia Tech,
Michigan State and the University of Florida. The paper, "Intelligent
Dialogue: Millennials," is the result of that effort.

"If you want to understand Millennials, you need to allow your mind to
freewheel," notes Porter Novelli CEO Gary Stockman. "They do not strive for
the things we Baby Boomers and Gen X'ers have accepted as gospel. That
everyone wants to get ahead at work. That work is the means to a rewarding
life. That privacy is something to be held dear. It can be very hard, but
understanding Millennials requires parking these preconceptions -- and many
more -- at the door."

The report poses five key questions, which anyone who works with
Millennials -- i.e., everyone -- should be asking:
-- How different are Millennials?
-- What happens to confidentiality in an age of radical transparency?
-- If being entertained is the norm, what happens to work?
-- What does the world of work and business mean to Millennials?
-- What stories are Millennials telling to make sense of themselves and
their generation?

In examining these challenges and others, the report aims to provoke a
meaningful discussion about the effects these new employees are having on the
workplace. Steering clear of easy generalizations, it provides a nuanced
portrait of Millennials in all their complexity. They're savvy and ambitious.
They want to be part of a team, part of the ideas and part of the outcome.
They want career success -- but on their own terms, and they believe that
their expectations should matter to employers and others. Central among those
expectations is that they'll work to live, rather than living to work.
"Millennials believe that work should be fun and that dues-paying is for
suckers," says Stockman. "And even in the era of 24/7 connectivity, they
believe there are times to 'not work.'"

In addition to other recommendations, the report also features tips on
managing Millennials from 24 senior managers at Porter Novelli. Highlights
include:
-- Give them plenty of committees and teams -- they are very social, like
to work with "friends" and place great stock in sense of community.
-- Acknowledge and harness the benefits of Millennials' tendency toward
somewhat impulsive action (or immediate fix): Assign projects that involve
overlapping multitasking skills and consider tighter deadlines so they don't
get distracted.
-- The boundary between professional and personal doesn't exist. Get to
know the Millennial personally without falling into the "friendship trap."
-- Get comfortable with instant messaging; Millennials may take a long
time to respond to voice mail but will respond instantly to IM.
-- Lose the rhetoric about how to progress through the organization. If a
Millennial needs to take a detour to build their portfolio of professional
experiences, embrace that -- even facilitate it.

To download the complete "Millennials" report, please click here:
tinyurl.com/4lbgrt

Porter Novelli's Intelligent Dialogue series is based on the Company's
core value proposition, Intelligent Influence -- helping clients achieve their
objectives by systematically mapping the most effective and efficient
interactions and making them happen. The centerpiece of both Intelligent
Influence and Intelligent Dialogue is conversation -- fluid, evolving
exchanges conducted across multiple, interlinked channels and stakeholder
groups. The first paper in this series was "Prime Angst," an exploration of
the domino effect of the mortgage crisis. Please go to
tinyurl.com/3z3g5v to download "Prime Angst."

About Porter Novelli
Porter Novelli was founded in Washington, D.C., in 1972 and is a part of
Omnicom Group Inc. (NYSE: OMC) (www.omnicomgroup.com). With 100 offices in 60
countries, we take a 360-degree view of clients' businesses to build powerful
communications programs that resonate with critical stakeholders. Our
reputation is built on our foundation in strategic planning and insights
generation and our ability to adopt a media-neutral approach. We ensure our
clients achieve Intelligent Influence, systematically mapping the most
effective interactions, making them happen and measuring the outcome. Many
minds. Singular results.
SOURCE Porter Novelli

Lisa Gruber, +1-212-601-8358, Lisa.Gruber@PorterNovelli.com

Google Opens Its Data Vault - A Crack

noreply@blogger.com (gz) — Wed, 11 Jun 2008 18:00:00 +0000

Google Trends, a tool for tracking what’s on the minds of Web searchers, has been missing one crucial component since its launch two years ago: numbers. Until today, that is. (from the WSJ Blog)

Internet Ad Spending down

noreply@blogger.com (gz) — Wed, 11 Jun 2008 17:54:00 +0000

How much $$ do your friends/peers make?

noreply@blogger.com (gz) — Wed, 11 Jun 2008 13:36:00 +0000

At Glassdoor, Find Out How Much People Really Make At Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, And Everywhere Else.

Charting the TV Trends

noreply@blogger.com (gz) — Tue, 10 Jun 2008 00:17:00 +0000

Charting the TV Trends

07 June, 2008 08:52:00 http://www.rbr.com/media-news/research/charting_the_tv_trends.html

It’s a 118+ channel world out there in the average television household, according to a new study from The Nielsen Company. And the numbers suggest that the more channels people have, the more they watch.

The number of television channels that the average U.S. home receives has now reached a record high of 118.6 TV channels. This and other television trends were released in a report from The Nielsen Company that highlights population, television ownership and advertising trends in the United States.

Highlights from this Nielsen study include:

* In 2007, the average U.S. home received 118.6 channels.

* As the number of channels available to a household increases, so does the number of channels tuned. In 2007, the average household tuned to 16 or13% of the 118.6 channels available for at least 10 minutes per week.

* General dramas dominate the English language broadcast networks program lineups, comprising 40% (67 of 168) of the primetime programs, an increase of seven programs from last year. Variety programs make up 23% of English language network prime time programs.

* When Spanish language networks are included general dramas still dominate with 38% (92 of 243) of the total. Variety programs make up 23% (56 of 243) of the total Spanish and English network programs. But, there are more “Other” type programs (34) than situation comedies (33).

* African Americans continue to watch more television than the total U.S. composite while Hispanics watch less. Total viewing among all households was 31 hours and 55 minutes per week while that figure was 45 hours and 22 minutes in African American households and 27 hours and 13 minutes in Hispanic households.

* Viewing in African American households is more likely to be to ad-supported cable television (62%) than broadcast network (40%) while Hispanic households watch more broadcast network (51%) than ad-supported cable (46%). The total composite U.S. household tips toward ad-supported cable (58%) compared to broadcast network (40%)

* The 30-second commercial is still the television advertising standard in primetime, accounting for 60% of all commercial units on English and Spanish language broadcast networks.

Number of Channels Available

In 2007, the average home received 118.6 channels. The percentage of homes receiving 100+ channels stands at 58% with 26% receiving between 60 and 99 channels. Nielsen found that the average television household in the U.S. receives 17 broadcast TV stations. On average, 44% receive up to 19 broadcast stations an additional 21% of homes receive up to 19 or more broadcast stations. An additional 28% receive between 20-29 broadcast stations.

As the number of channels available to a household increased, so did the number of channels tuned, although the percentage of available channels actually viewed decreased. In 2007, the average household tuned to 16 (or 13%) of the 118.6 channels for at least 10 minutes during the week.

Broadcast Network Programming Trends

This year, Nielsen included programs from 11 broadcast networks, including English and Spanish language broadcast networks’ (ABC, CBS, NBC, FOX, CW, ION, MNT, Univision, Telemundo, Telefutura, and TV Azteca ) schedules to profile the number of programs, types of programs (situation comedies, dramas, etc.) and hours in each schedule.

General dramas dominate the prime time lineups, comprising 38% (92 of 243) of the programs. The number of Variety programs has reached 56. Situation Comedies make up 14% with 33 of the 243 total programs.

Types of Primetime Programs on English and Spanish Language Broadcast Networks

Trends in Broadcast Network Commercials

The 30-second commercial is still the television advertising standard in primetime, accounting for 55% of all units. The 15-second commercial continues to be an important component in advertising. In English language network daytime television the 15-second commercial outpaces 30-second commercials. Fifteen-second units still account for the largest percentage of daytime commercials at 53% of English language and 42% of total English and Spanish language combined. The number of commercial minutes aired increased in both daytime and primetime for both English only and English and Spanish language combined. In primetime, 30-second and 15-second units make up 93% of all commercials. Together, 15s and 30s account for 94% of the total daytime commercials.

Other Relevant TV Facts from the Nielsen Study:

* The average U.S. TV home has 2.5 people and 2.8 television sets.
* 31% of U.S. TV homes have Digital Cable.
* 61% of homes have wired cable hook-ups (down from a high of 68% in 2000) and 27% have satellite or specialized antenna systems to receive television signals, up from 19% in 2005.
* 82% of U.S homes have more than one television sets at home.
* 87% of U.S. homes have a DVD player, with that technology overtaking VCRs which are in 79% of households.

(source: The Nielsen Company www.nielsen.com. )

TravelMuse

noreply@blogger.com (gz) — Mon, 09 Jun 2008 23:59:00 +0000

Answer Questions, and get a suggestion of where to travel. http://www.travelmuse.com/

Latin American Social Network Sonico Raises $4.3 Million

noreply@blogger.com (gz) — Thu, 05 Jun 2008 00:28:00 +0000

Study: Social Network Preferences Tied to Ethnicity (MediaPost)

noreply@blogger.com (gz) — Tue, 03 Jun 2008 17:52:00 +0000

YouTube is having trouble attracting as many female African-American and Hispanic adults as their male counterparts. And MySpace and Facebook are having a tough time appealing to Hispanic females.

These are just two findings from a recent study conducted by Synovate, the market research arm of Aegis Group, exploring the online behavior of U.S. ethnic demographics.

"For many multicultural consumers, Internet usage is about connecting with friends and family, and to keep up on the latest trends and news," said Denise Marks, Vice President of Diversity Research at Synovate. "As more Hispanics and African-Americans spend time online, marketing efforts should be directed towards building trust among these consumers to help them feel comfortable about online commercial transactions."

Synovate surveyed a total of 4,000 males and females ages 18 and older across the U.S., including approximately 1,000 "general market" respondents, 1,000 African-Americans and 2,000 Hispanics.

Although younger people across all groups are much more likely to be online, Synovate found major differences, including between males and females of the same age and ethnic group.

While about one in four Hispanics, African-Americans and general market consumers have visited YouTube.com in the past six months, African-American and Hispanic males ages 18-34 were more likely to have visited YouTube than their female counterparts, according to the study.

Among African-Americans, 55% of males and 33% of females visited YouTube, while among Hispanics, 41% of males and 20% of females visited the site. This differs from the general market, for which visiting this Web site was equally popular between males and females in the same age group.

For Hispanics, this gender disparity also appears to extend to social networking sites such as MySpace.com and Facebook.com. Hispanic females were significantly less likely than Hispanic males to have visited social networking Web sites recently, with 18% of women and 27% of men claiming to have visited them. This is in sharp contrast to African-American and general market men and women, who were equally as likely to have visited MySpace or Facebook.

The differences in online behavior are especially prevalent with online shopping, Synovate found. Among general market consumers, 57% have made a recent purchase online, while only 42% of African-Americans and one quarter of Hispanics have done the same.

The gap is apparently even larger with eBay visits. Less than three out of ten African-Americans and Hispanics have visited eBay in the past six months, versus 41% of the general market population.

Hispanics also lag behind other groups in adopting online banking, with only 24% claiming to have paid monthly bills online recently compared to 38% of general market consumers and 34% of African-Americans.

While Hispanics overall are less likely to own financial products such as bank accounts and credit cards, their lower use of online banking may also be due to the fact that only 59% of Hispanics have Internet access at home, work, school, or through other means. This is substantially lower than the African-American and general market populations, of which at least 80% have Internet access.

Gavin O'Malley can be reached at gavin@mediapost.com

Wired: Rise of the Instapreneur

noreply@blogger.com (gz) — Tue, 03 Jun 2008 14:54:00 +0000

Jeffrey Wegesin is a furniture maker. His most popular creation is a curvaceous side table, and even though he has sold only two copies of it, he has already turned a profit. He did it without so much as setting foot in a wood shop. And he is not alone. Wegesin is one of 5,000 merchants who have established accounts with Ponoko, a year-old on-demand manufacturing service in New Zealand. Designers upload their blueprints to Ponoko's servers; when a customer places an order, Ponoko's laser cutters automatically trim wood and plastic to create the product on the spot. Wegesin, a Web designer, sells the tables through the site for $250, not including shipping. He then pays Ponoko $124 for each table to cover the cost of materials and cutting fees. The $252 he's brought in so far may not be much, but because he incurred no up-front costs it comes as pure profit.

Welcome to the age of the instapreneur. With nothing more than a design, amateurs can manufacture jewelry, robots, T-shirts, furniture — anything. No warehouses. No minimum orders. And no money down. The digital economy isn't just digital; the same market forces that allowed midlist musicians to make a living distributing their songs online now give amateur clothiers the chance to sell their wares without having to persuade Barney's buyers to carry them.

Thousands are launching instant businesses. Zazzle, of Redwood City, California, offers a dizzying array of user-designed products from posters to tennis shoes. StyleShake, a custom-clothing site in London, received 25,000 dress designs in its first three months. Spreadshirt, founded in Leipzig, Germany, hosts 500,000 individual T-shirt shops. "These companies significantly lower the threshold for someone to bring anything to market," says Neil Gershenfeld, director of MIT's Center for Bits and Atoms. "There's an industrial-age bias that you need volume to support a factory; but with this, much-more-creative low-volume businesses become viable."

These are not just CaféPress-style in-jokes — T-shirts and mugs meant to appeal to a small circle of friends. According to Spreadshirt CEO Jana Eggers, her site saw a 30 percent increase last year in the number of North American shop partners that sold more than 1,000 shirts annually. Even CaféPress has become a bona fide business platform. Jim Gamble, a Bay Area entrepreneur, uses the site to sell 50,000 of his T-shirts and bumper stickers — all emblazoned with conservative political slogans — every year, giving him an income "well into the six figures," he says.

Large brands are starting to see the appeal of manufacturing-as-a-service, too. Lexus recently used Blurb, an on-demand publisher, to print 1,800 copies of a book promoting the automaker's green practices. Franchises from Dilbert to the Discovery Channel sell licensed merchandise on CaféPress. Disney has uploaded more than 3,500 of its designs to Zazzle, allowing the company to sell a wider range of products than just the blockbuster Mickey Mouse T-shirts favored by conventional retailers. The service also gives the Disney machine unprecedented agility. "Here, I can see that Hannah Montana is taking off, we can upload a design right into Zazzle's system, and in a day or two it's a product," says Patrick Haley, senior manager of customization for DisneyShopping.com. http://www.wired.com/images/article/magazine/1604/bz_instapreneur2_f.jpg

As everyone gains the ability to create and sell anything, the long tail will apply to making things as well as to selling them. Amazon.com may be able to offer near-infinite inventory, but only as long as the products exist. On-demand manufacturing could eliminate that constraint, leading to a world where products are always available, nothing ever gets discontinued, and the virtual shelves are always stocked.

gzWorks

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Wired: Rise of the Instapreneur