"The fact that digital content can be distributed for no additional cost does not explain the huge number of creative people who make their work available for free. After all, they are still investing their time without being paid back. Why?
… because creative people crave attention in a way publishers do not. Prior to the internet, this didn't make much difference. The expense of publishing and distributing printed material is too great for it to be given away freely and in unlimited quantities — even vanity press books come with a price tag. Now, however, a single individual can serve an audience in the hundreds of thousands, as a hobby, with nary a publisher in sight.
For an author to be famous, many people had to have read, and therefore paid for, his or her books. Fortune was a side-effect of attaining fame. Now, with the power to publish directly in their hands, many creative people face a dilemma they've never had before: fame vs fortune."

Interesting and simple way to look at conditional probability. Would also be interesting to relate it to octopus Paul & his WC 2010 predictions.

Some usual suspects along with new ones. The comments have some more.

How long before it becomes passe?

The ROI of Social Media is like trying to ascribe ROI to a telephone line.
Part misinterpretation and misunderstanding of both terms and part the necessity to quantify in order to meet business objectives, are reasons why this enigma won’t be solved soon.

Interesting collection of tazos from different countries. You can even buy some of them apparently.

All thanks to the espresso book machine – http://www.lightningsource.com/ebm.aspx

Interesting concept catering to a niche – Gourmet food store providing cookery lessons and meal assembly, alongside food and cookery products

When do you charge a premium for a good or service – when its specially crafted or just to set it apart through its pricing?

A tad philosophical, and not the usual type of criticism directed at Apple.

Interesting concept that can be applied to consumers – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Levy_flight

Co-designing or completing a system with the users gives them a sense of ownership & can lead to much better adoption rates.

Branded manufacturers are trying to get the hang of online marketing & selling through strategic tie-ups.

Common mistakes:
1. Whoops – made the wrong stuff!
2. Whoops – looks great, doesn’t get any action out of shoppers!
3. Whoops – nobody saw it!
4. Whoops – I just visited a store and it’s not there!
5. Whoops – it didn’t make any impact!

Powerpoint could be the most powerful tool on your computer. But it’s not. Countless innovations fail because their champions use PowerPoint the way Microsoft wants them to, instead of the right way.

"Leah Dieterich's mother always told her to write thank you notes. So she does. To everything. thxthxthx is her daily exercise in gratitude."

"PowerPoint in and of itself is not to blame for communication failures in the workplace or military. As a reader in Dr. Edward Tufte’s blog points out, blaming PowerPoint for the Columbia disaster would be like blaming Microsoft Outlook for spurring people to donate money to non-existant Nigerian royalty. Rather, our over-reliance on slide-view software, over-filtering of information, and over-simplification of complex ideas into small bullet points and cartoons is to blame for our communication errors. Not all presentations need be complex and filled with special effects, nor do important ideas need to be transmitted via PowerPoint. After all, our counterinsurgency manual, FM 3-24, was, in part, written based off of notes taken on a beer napkin at a hamburger restaurant."

If you thought only students and people sitting in offices were subject to "death by powerpoint", think again.

Debt is one of the fundamental differences between the US & Indian consumer.

"fear.less is a free online magazine that empowers people through unique stories of overcoming fear. From entrepreneurs, business leaders, artists and scientists to survivors of extreme experiences, these stories demonstrate the hidden potential we have to confront our fears and come out victorious. Fear.less is our answer to an emergency."

Do your homework before indulging

The company’s goal is to push its coordinates up and to the right by finding ways to make the brand more culturally meaningful (y axis) and personally enriching (x axis), resulting in the highest possible brand significance score.

"Consumers have always valued opinions expressed directly to them. Marketers may spend millions of dollars on elaborately conceived advertising campaigns, yet often what really makes up a consumer’s mind is not only simple but also free: a word-of-mouth recommendation from a trusted source and that trusted source time and time again is other consumers.
Word of mouth is the primary factor behind 20-50% of all purchasing decisions."

"More than ten years into the widespread business adoption of the Web, some managers still fail to grasp the economic implications of cheap and ubiquitous information on and about their business. Hal Varian, professor of information sciences, business, and economics at the University of California at Berkeley, says it’s imperative for managers to gain a keener understanding of the potential for technology to reconfigure their industries. Varian, currently serving as Google's chief economist, compares the current period to previous times of industrialization when new technologies combined to create ever more complex and valuable systems—and thus reshaped the economy."

FlowingData is the visualization and statistics site of Nathan Yau, highlighting how designers, programmers, and statisticians are putting data to good use. Has quite a lot of interesting visualizations.

Pretty nice visualization.

"The question facing every company today, every startup, every non-profit, every project site that wants to attract a community, is how to use data effectively — not just their own data, but all the data that's available and relevant. Using data effectively requires something different from traditional statistics, where actuaries in business suits perform arcane but fairly well-defined kinds of analysis. What differentiates data science from statistics is that data science is a holistic approach. We're increasingly finding data in the wild, and data scientists are involved with gathering data, massaging it into a tractable form, making it tell its story, and presenting that story to others."

Key point: "Social media is not an end in itself"

Includes tips on making effective presentations too – conciseness, visualisation, connection, confidence & passion

"..gaining a complete picture of how importance matters to customers and actually drives outcomes (not just satisfaction in the example above), could materially affect what you as an organization focus on to make improvements. We’ve observed repeatedly that incomplete representations of what customers deem important may yield a list of improvement priorities — and those priorities can be vastly different than those resulting from a more complete picture (as illustrated above). So, be sure you have the complete picture before taking action; otherwise you could be focusing on the wrong things!"

The white paper sets out to answer the following questions:
• What consumer needs can be identified and met using mobile phones in retail environments?
• How can mobile phones support richer, more enjoyable, more efficient and more relevant shopping experiences?
• What changes need to happen in retail stores to support this?

A handy 5 step guide

Note that this was just demonstrated as a correlation, nothing more. Nabbing someone as a Facebook fan hasn’t been proven to increase spending in this study. The study just demonstrates that people who become fans of brands are more likely to spend and evangelize. If they liked the brand enough to “Like” it on Facebook, they might have done those things anyway.

Interesting statistics, albeit from US users

References the book "The Invisible Gorilla":
"Meteorologists are in a unique position to consistently get feedback on their ideas and iteratively learn and improve. This is an extremely valuable position to be in. Marketers are also now in such a position – it’s a matter of whether they choose to take advantage of it or not."

"The Invisible Gorilla reveals the numerous ways that our intuitions can deceive us, but it's more than a catalog of human failings."

Feature proliferation is the name of the game in new product development. Most innovation in the market is composed of incremental improvements to what's been done before. Yet those new features often outpace what the consumers actually want. In the case of the Fusion, Gillette had to launch a marketing campaign specifically targeted to their own Mach3 consumers. Instead of campaigning to steal share from competitors, they had to practically beg their own consumers who were plenty happy with the earlier Mach3 to upgrade to the more expensive Fusion. They over-served the market.

As Clayton Christensen argues in the Innovator's Dilemma, the best move when the market is over-served is to innovate from below, not to join the new feature arms race. Less can be more. Simplicity is the killer app.

There is a lot of buzz and excitement related to social media. But remember that for social media to have any real lasting benefit to your brand, you’ve got to make sure it’s based on a solid strategic foundation. Otherwise, social media is just going to gloss over the fundamental strategic weaknesses that have been the demise of many a brand.

"…But angry high-maintenance people are rarely where sustainable profit margins come from (unless, of course, you are a divorce lawyer OR a PR firm who gets paid to give hotels bad advice)."

A good start to leveraging social media to connect better to the customers, but usage is pretty limited among hotels. Moreover, do hotels want to listen to just the nosiest of customers? How do they evaluate the cost-benefit of addressing such complaints?

Interesting points of views from Google employees

A house & a restaurant built in the shape of the iconic Beetle