Digital Marketing And Social Media PR – The Future Buzz

Everyone knows the story of Pavlov’s dog. A summary for those who slept through 7th grade science class:

The original and most famous example of classical conditioning involved the salivary conditioning of Pavlov’s dogs. During his research on the physiology of digestion in dogs, Pavlov noticed that, rather than simply salivating in the presence of meat powder (an innate response to food that he called the unconditioned response), the dogs began to salivate in the presence of the lab technician who normally fed them. From this observation he predicted that, if a particular stimulus in the dog’s surroundings were present when the dog was presented with meat powder, then this stimulus would become associated with food and cause salivation on its own. In his initial experiment, Pavlov used a metronome to call the dogs to their food and, after a few repetitions, the dogs started to salivate in response to the metronome. Thus, a neutral stimulus (metronome) became a conditioned stimulus (CS) as a result of consistent pairing with the unconditioned stimulus (US – meat powder in this example). Pavlov referred to this learned relationship as a conditional reflex (now called Conditioned Response).

In the beginning of 2009, I compiled 22 smart, inspirational quotes from bloggers to share with you. Today I thought it would be fun to mash-up the quotes with visuals to make them come alive (be sure to view full screen):

Web traffic strategies is an ongoing series where I focus on one strategy at a time for building significant traffic to your web property, no matter what niche it may be in. This series is written for those who already understand basic tactics and are looking to take their site or blog to the next level.

Automation through technology is a beautiful thing from an efficiency and productivity standpoint. I’m a fan of automating low-level and/or repetitive tasks to free up time for cerebral and creative work. Unfortunately, there are also many things people choose to automate that can actually do more harm than good.

I frequently get pitched to cover businesses or other websites at this blog. Most of it isn’t a fit or just pure spam. As a marketing/PR professional by trade, I’m patient and take the time to help those who send me irrelevant pitches by pointing them to some tips for pitching bloggers.

Facebook wants to become the one-stop-shop for social networking. They didn’t upset 94% of their users without good reason. I was hoping someone would map out their potential path, and Robert Scoble did just that:

The 7 phases Facebook is going through:

Phase 1. Harvard only.
Phase 2. Harvard+Colleges only.
Phase 3. Harvard+Colleges+Geeks only.
Phase 4. All those above+All People (in the social graph).
Phase 5. All those above+People and businesses in the social graph. (Robert notes Facebook is moving into this phase now)
Phase 6. All those above+People, businesses, and well-known objects in the social graph.
Phase 7. All people, businesses, objects in the social graph.

(Interesting they are moving into phase 5 when there is still much wrong with the site as is, but perhaps this explains why they aren’t bothering to fix the little things – they’re focused on big picture.)