Archives for October 2006
No RSS Reader? You’re Fired.
Robert Scoble said website managers not using RSS feeds on their sites should be fired. Almost a year later we should extend that notion to marketing and communications executives and managers.
I talk to a lot of Fortune 500 executives about digital media and all its opportunities each week. I’m amazed at how few of [...]
More Than Half Of MySpace Visitors Are Now Age 35 Or Older
Executives are always asking me to break down MySpace’s member demographics. I had the chance to meet with MySpace a month ago and they told me their fastest growing segment was 35+ year olds which at the time was counter-intuitive. Here’s some new data from comScore to set the record straight.
The data shows that [...]
Enterprise Will Value Natural Language Search
Don’t bother remembering the name Powerset because if they build a natural language search (NLS) engine that actually understands the concepts of time, place and sentiment, Google or Microsoft will snap them up.
Danny Sullivan is skeptical about Powerset’s prospects — too many broken NLS promises in his past. He points out that [...]
Forrester’s Charlene Li Calculates The ROI Of Blogging
This is a post worth studying: Charlene Li’s Blog: Calculating the ROI of blogging. Calculating ROI for a blog implies being able to complete the following sentence: “The $X we invest in our blog will generate a X% return on our investment annually…” While it’s important to go through this thinking process prior to launching [...]
Learning From Walmart’s Failed Social Network (and Microsoft and Nike’s successes)
Pete Cashmore wrote a good post on Walmart’s ill-conceived The Hub which was closed down after only 10 weeks. The Hub was Walmart’s attempt to recreate MySpace for their Gen Y shoppers. The problem is their Gen Y shoppers were having too much fun on MySpace to care one iota about The Hub. There’s a [...]
World’s Strongest Dad On YouTube
In follow-up to my last post, there’s a lot of healthy content on YouTube, too. My wife sent me this link today. A lot of people could benefit from watching this one, inside and outside the firewall. Grab a tissue. Hug your kids. Thank you, Dick and Rick Hoyt, for sharing. A lot of [...]
Fortune 500 CIOs Blocking Social Media (& Its Benefits)
In the past months I’ve had the opportunity to meet with a number of Fortune 500 companies’ marketing and communications executives to discuss the digital media landscape and new opportunities. Invariably we end up taking a look at social sites like YouTube, flickr, MySpace and Wikipedia to determine how their brands are represented. More than [...]
Yes… This Used To Be A Longhorn Football Podcast
“nytexanexan” sent me an e-mail this afternoon asking “where’s BJ and where’s my Longhorn football podcast…” I thought I should explain just in case there are other folks out there receiving The Zone Read feed. Last year BJ Jones, Bryan Anderton and I produced 20 podcasts on Longhorn football (you can still find [...]
Monitoring Blogs Just Got A Little More Efficient
This morning I needed to do some research on a prospective client I am meeting with this week. One of my first stops is always Technorati which is essentially a blog search engine. Periodically our search expert Wilson Tan compares Technorati results to Google Blog Search (still in beta), Ask Blogs & Feeds and other [...]
