Digital Marketing And Social Media PR – The Future Buzz

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).

“Analog Retirement” (credit: busted tees)

As technology moves forward and business and society change consumption patterns, certain mediums and aging solutions become obsolete. Yet industries seek to hold onto the past tightly, even when their time has come and gone, at a cost to society – time, money, frustration and future progress.

Just for fun, I thought I would take a lighthearted approach to listing a few technologies/services which have served a function but have been made obsolete ages ago by a changing world. Previous examples (as seen in the image above) include cassette tapes, the floppy disk, VHS and camera film.

image credit: a wordle of the gmail blog

I will be perfectly honest. When I see people with an @aol.com, @hotmail.com or @comcast.net address they instantly lose any and all tech credibility with me. I’ve had discussions with several people on this, and I’m not the only one who feels this way.

I have used and experimented with quite a few of the free, web-based email services. Let me save you a lot of time: Gmail is above and beyond the best.

Using web-based email is a great portability solution for your email, whether it is for personal or business use. However, Gmail is light years ahead of AOL, Hotmail and Comcast. It boggles my mind that anyone still uses them (I single out these other brands of webmail because they are so popular).