Digital Marketing, Media, PR Analysis And Insight – The Future Buzz

Kara Swisher, usually quite the quality reporter for WSJ’s All Things Digital blog, had a pretty surprising post this week lamenting a lack of business models for the entertainment industry in the digital age. Surprising, in that Kara let herself get influenced by an industry that has been disrupted by technology, but refuses to change.

Previously, I shared an interesting situation that erupted between Fortune Magazine and TechCrunch. It appeared to me as a case of the left hand not knowing what the right hand was doing (essentially, it looked like legal got upset with something the PR team executed on). Either way, Fortune did not come off looking good in the situation and they should know better than to agree to things they can’t fulfill.

The early adopters tend to overvalue what’s new. That’s fine and nothing out of the norm, it’s just what they do. But what bothers me is when they proclaim a new piece of technology created by companies they’re fans of changes not just general consumer tech, but also industry x or y without really understanding those industries.

Previously, I wrote that companies and personal brands have a symbiotic relationship. Smart companies nurture personal brands, those personal brands promote their employer, and situation emerges where all parties experience digital reputation benefits. When there is mutual respect and transparency involved, everyone wins.

A stunning statistic: 70% of surveyed HR professionals in U.S. (41% in the UK) have rejected a job candidate based on online reputation information.

Free/advertising supported web services and applications are nothing new. They are also extremely useful and we all get value from them daily. But there is an inescapable truth about using them: you are ceding control to someone else.

I’m headed to SES San Jose next week as both a member of the media covering the event and a marketer to learn from talented practitioners in the SEM industry. I’ll be covering the event in as real-time as possible with TopRank Online Marketing team member Jolina Pettice for the Online Marketing Blog.

Techdirt is running a great experiment on a business model concept that is applicable to anyone who produces digital content. It would be useful for musicians, photographers, video producers, bloggers or anyone in between to take notes here.

The formula is simple:

Connect with Fans (CwF) and give them a Reason to Buy (RtB).

or

CwF+RtB=$$$

I’m breaking my own rule and jumping into the echo chamber today. Don’t worry, this won’t take long.

Hate to be the one to say this, but the 25 things meme is not news. It is simply what the social web does. If national media (yes, national media – NYT, USA Today, even TIME) are going to write up note-tagging on Facebook and that is the best web culture reporting they can come up with – that’s just sad.

As our digital and physical lives blur further, the internet has become the information hub where people spend a majority of their time learning, playing and communicating with others globally.

Sometimes it is easy to get lose sight of just how staggering the numbers are of people collaborating, researching, and interacting on the web.

I thought it might be fun to take a step back and look at some interesting/amazing social media, Web 2.0, crowdsourcing and internet statistics. I tried to find stats that are the most up-to-date as possible at the time of publishing this post.

The numbers presented below should be a close representation of today’s numbers (please correct me in the comments if you find more recent numbers somewhere and I’ll update).