Digital Sky Technologies, a Russian Internet company has invested $200 million into Facebook for 1.96% of the company. Facebook is a privately held company which claims that it is increasing revenue 70% year over year.
This deal interests me because I believe that Facebook will be at least as dominant a force as Google in the [...]

I’ve taken a bit of a blogging break due to moving and taking on a big project for an area business organization. However both of these activities have got me thinking about a few things that are very relevant to the conversational marketing theme I’ve been exploring.
Craiglist, local marketing and how it changes the landlord [...]

The conversational marketing model is not really new at all, vis a vis Seth Godin and many others, but it is a major change: When we buy, we discuss the choices with friends and, as Godin points out, we have a lot more friends because of social media. If I’m buying an LED monitor, I’ll [...]

One of the primary goals of social media marketing is generating motivated and qualified leads. This is accomplished by tracking your keyword phrases and initiating conversations with those who mention your keywords- whether they are in a Tweet, on a blog or anywhere else in social media. To turn these conversations into leads you need [...]

Good MediaPost column on the effects of using URL shortening services like bit.ly.com and TinyURL on SEO.
BTW, bit.ly does the permanent 301 redirects he mentions.

Knowing the business eco-system, be it hard, soft or a combination, that your company is part of is critical to understanding new patheways to grow.
‘Soft’ business models
I have a background in software marketing. Techrigy, the last company I worked for, and BlueTie, a previous employer, are both software as a service or SaaS companies. In [...]

By background I’m a writer so when I look at business models I tend to orient towards content. However, as Jeff Jarvis points out in his interesting but flawed book, What Would Google Do?, virtually all successful tech companies are platforms, not content producers.
Content does not scale well
Content, whether it’s writing, video, audio (I refuse [...]

I recently did some housecleaning in my Facebook account, defriending anyone who is littering their social messages with business pitches. I recommend you do the same or Facebook is going to get littered with pitch spam. Several of the people I blocked are friends in real life but insisted on regading Facebook as a place [...]

The problem with our current business models
There is a seismic change going on in the way companies communicate with their customers and prospects. In the traditional model there are three company departments that communicate with their market, typically in a silo-ed manner:

Product Development. Through research, including panels and focus groups, savvy product developers try out [...]

Unless you’ve been living in a cave, you’ve undoubtedly heard of Twitter, the microblogging platform that enables people to publish whatever they want- as long as those thoughts are not longer than 140 characters. While those of us working in social media marketing are immersed in the wonderful world of Tweets (those Twitter posts) and [...]