Ken Berger

Dell Says It Has Earned $3 Million From Twitter – Bits Blog – NYTimes.com.

Dell said Thursday night that the company had earned $3 million in revenue directly through Twitter since 2007, when it started posting coupons and word of new products on the microblogging site. In the last six months, Dell Outlet earned $1 million in sales from customers who came to the site from Twitter, after taking 18 months to earn its first $1 million. Dell has also earned another $1 million from people who click from Twitter to Dell Outlet to Dell.com and make a purchase there.

Dell joins companies like Starbucks, JetBlue and Whole Foods as one of the most active corporate Twitter users. “It’s a great way to fix customer problems and hear what customers have to say, it’s a great feedback forum and it leads to sales — how can you miss?” said Richard Binhammer, who works in Dell’s corporate affairs office and is active on its Twitter accounts.

Twitter as a full fledged main stream marketing medium has arrived!

Posted in Marketing, Social Media, Twitter

Having returned a few weeks ago from a trip to Moscow, I was struck by the number of Mac’s in use in public places there.  At my hotel where there was free WiFi in the lobby area (along with great work spaces) Mac out numbered PC’s every day. At one point I actually went around and counted – there were 15 people using laptops in the lobby and 10 of them were Mac’s. One of the PC’s appeared to be Acer  netbook running a OSX hack. In my travels I have seen as much as 50% Mac use in higher end hotels and planes – the chic crowd is always strong Mac users but this was not as much a chic group more of a business group.

One of my meetings was with a large Russian bank and again I was surprised to see the management using Mac’s on their desks. When I asked why the response was not what I expected (easy to use etc), but rather more secure.  I took this initially to mean freedom from Viruses etc. But after further discussions it turned out what they mean is real security. In a world where everyone is paranoid of the government watching what you are doing (don’t know if this is warranted today or habits from an earlier time) they believe that the government can easily spy on what you are doing with a PC, but they have no ability to spy on a Mac.

My friends who travel a lot in Russia (and elsewhere in Europe) confirmed that the popularity of Mac’s in Moscow and commented that Russian business is almost as Mac centric as France (the Mac’s traditional Euro strong market).

Now all this is obviously anecdotal not factual market share numbers, and I am sure that among the more cost conscious masses the PC is still king.  Also I would think the sales numbers for Apple in Russia are not reflective of this as many of the Mac users I met bought their computers in the US or western Europe.

Posted in Apple
Tags: Russia

I loved this story, as Twitter moves from geeks to the main stream it will be interesting to watch the evolutionary impact on the way we communicate, our lives and our productivity.

There’s a strange phenomenon that happens almost every time someone joins Twitter. They hate it. At least at first.

But many of the people who once hated Twitter — or at least, didn’t quite get it in the beginning — are now many of its most active users and raving fans. So what’s going on here?

There seems to be four natural stages that the average Twitter user goes through from the point of first trying it until the point of fully embracing it and making it a part of daily life. Obviously, not everyone sticks with it and becomes a Twitter devotee, but there’s definitely a growing cadre of people who believe that there’s some magic happening in the Twittosphere

via Sanity check: The four stages of a typical Twitter user | Tech Sanity Check | TechRepublic.com .

Posted in Social Media
Tags: Twitter

Top Ten Myths About Google Analytics

Weve noticed some misconceptions about Google Analytics floating around, and we thought wed take a shot at correcting the most common ones. Without further ado, here they are, the top ten myths about Google Analytics debunked.

via Google Analytics Blog: Web Analytics Tips & Tricks: Top Ten Myths About Google Analytics.

Everyone should be putting google analytics on their web page even if they do not have the time now to look at the results, as when they are ready there will be a history of data to use.  In my experience google analytics is better and faster than any other product (that is affordable for all but the largest of companies  - so anyone in the pro audio biz).

Posted in SEO

China’s government is celebrating the 20th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square protests by blocking Twitter, Hotmail, Flickr, Windows Live, and just about every other social networking tool that Beijing can think of. What better way to celebrate the anniversary of a civil rights crackdown than by expanding the Great Firewall even further?

Yikes… they even blocked Bing, before the new-car smell wore off.

This isn’t the first time this has happened: remember when China blocked Youtube over the Tibet violence footage? Good times.

via China Blocks Twitter, Hotmail, Flickr, Bing Before Tiananmen 20th | NowPublic News Coverage.

Posted in Social Media, Twitter

altgate
Startups, Venture Capital & Everything In Between

Directory of Blogs by Entrepreneurs

This post was inspired by Fidelity Ventures Partner Larry Cheng who recently compiled a list of VC blogs and ranked them in order of Google Reader subscribers.  I have a few hundred feeds that I follow in Google Reader and the way that I find new ones is a random process of discovery so Larry’s post was great in that he not only provided a rank-ordered list but also a convenient way to mass subscribe.

via Directory of Blogs by Entrepreneurs – altgate.

Everyone who is looking for or is thinking about looking for venture funding should check out this valuable resource.

Posted in Venture Funding

Showtime Taps Amazon’s Kindle for Advertising
Cable Network Uses E-Reader to Promote ‘Nurse Jackie’

NEW YORK (AdAge.com) — Showtime may have finally cracked the code on using Kindle as an ad medium. Starting today the cable network is offering Kindle users a free, downloadable version of the pilot script for its new series “Nurse Jackie,” featuring Emmy Award winner and former “Sopranos” star Edie Falco.

via Showtime Taps Amazon’s Kindle for Advertising – Advertising Age – Digital.

The Kindle is now ad supported? The world is moving back to the free model? The wireless world is moving towards the internet age (oh would that be backwards?).

Posted in Online Marketing

THE THOUGHTFUL USER GUIDE

Writing My Twitter Etiquette Article: 14 Ways to Use Twitter Politely

Every form of communication deserves an etiquette manual, if only so we can treat our fellows better, even in 140-character bites. MARGARET MASON’S 14-point guide to improved tweets.

via Writing My Twitter Etiquette Article: 14 Ways to Use Twitter Politely by Margaret Mason – The Morning News.

Posted in Social Media, Twitter

Twitter proves to be a page-turner | Media | The Guardian .

Posted in Uncategorized

Emarketer projected that Social Network Marketing spending in the USA will reach approximSocial Media Graphately $1.3 billion in 2009.

via Social Network Marketing Spending to Increase in 2009 « Hiring The Internet.

Social networking is the buzz phrase these days, even in the Pro Audio Industry. At the NAMM show I was in more than 20 meetings about marketing budgets for 2009 and every single one listed social network marketing as the top priority.  Unfortunately most people didn’t exactly know what that meant beyond being able to say Facebook and Myspace let alone knowing how to go about doing it.

From meetings I have had with marketing people primarily in the MI and pro Audio fields look at web adn social media marketing as ways to save money.  This is a difficult year for most companies and they are looking at how to generate business while lowering their costs.

The problem I encountered when trying to get companies to actually implement a campaign is that they have not defined a social marketing strategy – as in what they want to accomplish.  You can use Social networking to achieve a variety of goals but as with any marketing effort it is best to start with your objectives and build from there rather than staring with tactics  and no defined objectives.

When your ready to move here is a lit (from the same article listed above) of the leading social networking sites:

Top Social Media Sites (ranked by unique worldwide visitors November, 2008; comScore)
1. Blogger (222 million)
2. Facebook (200 million)
3. MySpace (126 million)
4. WordPress (114 million)
5. Windows Live Spaces (87 million)
6. Yahoo Geocities (69 million)
7. Flickr (64 million)
8. hi5 (58 million)
9. Orkut (46 million)
10. Six Apart (46 million)
11. Baidu Space (40 million)
12. Friendster (31 million)
13. 56.com (29 million)
14. Webs.com (24 million)
15. Bebo (24 million)
16. Scribd (23 million)
17. Lycos Tripod (23 million)
18. Tagged (22 million)
19. imeem (22 million)
20. Netlog (21 million)

Posted in Marketing, Online Marketing

Doing cool stuff like grabbing data from a site and parsing it into something cool on your site will be easy someday, and we can see the steps in the progression happening today.  This article and the links bellow tel how Yahoo! is making their cloud data engine open to all, and building a legion of developers who are publishing script spinets you can use on your site to do cool data base type stuff.

Developers: Never Mind the APIs, Here’s YQL Execute

Written by Jolie O’Dell / May 2, 2009 10:00 AM

“I Tried YQL Execute and All I Got Was an Authenticated Javascript API Processing Layer in the Cloud”

There’s a great amount of data available on the Web in APIs or even straight HTML. It’s all there for the parsing – and parsed data from social media in particular is held to be a goldmine. But traditionally, it’s the heavy lifting (the broad variety of programming languages used in APIs, the challenges presented by complicated authentications, the occasional need for massive pipes) that has made accessing and sorting data into useful applications a laborious process.

Yahoo!, chiefly to serve the needs of its own engineers, has been developing a sophisticated solution that is agnostic across all Internet platforms and that lowers both the burden of labor and the barriers to entry for social and other web application developers, many of whom are already singing the praises of the newly released YQL Execute.

“It adds a lot of power,” said Mike Cannon-Brooks, co-founder of Atlassian, an Australian collaboration and development software company widely recognized as one of the biggest stars in the Enterprise 2.0 world.

“YQL Execute allows you to build tables of data from other sources online, using Javascript as a programming language and run it on Yahoo’s servers, so the infrastructure needs are very small.”

In the slightly more technical language presented on the Yahoo! Developer Network Blog, “The Execute element can contain arbitrary developer code that the YQL data engine runs during the processing of a YQL statement.”

It also handles authentication for third party sites.

Is there anything like it currently on the market?

“Nothing… It’s pretty awesome,” said Cannon-Brooks.

via Developers: Never Mind the APIs, Here’s YQL Execute – ReadWriteWeb .

Also check out GitHub Social Coding where you can find spinets to build data tables into your site for everything from lastfm to twitter. It still requires some understanding of code to use so it is great for the more geeky types to do all sort of cool mashups and topics specific stuff with.  It is only a little time before these type of operations become full web widgets that you can embed in your site by simply filling out some settings.

Posted in Social Media, Uncategorized, Web Development
Tags: Cloud Computing, YQL

TweetStack iPhone Twitter App Review: TweetDeck for the iPhone
Posted By: iPhone Fan on April 12th, 2009

TweetStack iPhone Twitter App: It’s like TweetDeck in the Palm of Your Hands!

Features of TweetStack v1.0

With TweetStack, you can now have this functionality right on your iPhone! Let’s check out the features of their initial release:

* Organise your Twitter stream using customizable Stacks
* Search Stack
* User Stack
* TwitPic gallery Stack
* Location stack
* Favorites stack
* Replies stack
* Direct Messages stack
* TweetDeck import (this is awesome)
* Multiple Accounts (a must with iPhone twitter apps)
* Add, edit, delete and reorder stacks
* Unread message count on stacks and application icon
* Locally saved messages for offline mode
* SMS style send and receive of messages (looks great)
* @ twitter id and # hash tag autocompletion (this is wicked)
* TwitPic upload
* Load conversation
* Twitter user profile view
* ReTweet shortcut
* Inline @,# and web links
* Streamlined UI

Read more at: www.iphoneincanada.ca/reviews/tweetstac>

Posted in Twitter, iPhone
Tags: iPhone, TweetStack, Twitter

The Online Ad Recession Is Officially Here: First Quarterly Decline In Revenues
by Erick Schonfeld on May 1, 2009

It was the last part of the advertising sector to fall and may be the first to recover, but online advertising is now in a recession. With the four largest Web advertising companies (Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, and AOL) having reported March quarter financials, we can get a pretty good sense of how the sector did as a whole. If you add up the online advertising revenues of these four online advertising bellwethers, the total online advertising revenues for the quarter came to $7.9 billion, a 2 percent decline from a year ago and a 7 percent decline from the fourth quarter.

The growth of online advertising has been slowing down for a while, but this is the first quarter to experience an actual decline in revenues. Given the poor performance reported by all of these companies during the quarter, this shouldn’t come as a surprise. Only Google was able to eke out any annual growth, the rest all saw online advertising revenues drop. The fact that Google’s advertising revenues represents 68 percent of the total and that it saw modest growth helped to dampen the overall decline.

via The Online Ad Recession Is Officially Here: First Quarterly Decline In Revenues .

Posted in Marketing, Online Marketing, SEO
Tags: Ad, Recession

Welcome to BuddyPress Testdrive. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!

Posted in Uncategorized