Yesterday I spoke at Zappos Insights Live, an inaugural conference that offered a unique opportunity to learn about the spirit and culture of Zappos through a two-day immersion program. To say it was brilliant would be an understatement. And, I believe this is just the beginning. It’s incredibly clear that Tony Hsieh doesn’t just profess his belief in happiness and service; his entire organization lives and breathes it in everything they do. While Zappos the company is indeed “powered by…
Real-Time Conversations Gain in Influence, Hasten Social CRM
This is the unabridged version of my latest post on TechCrunch, “Real-Time Conversations Hasten Social CRM“ At the Real-Time Stream Crunchup on Friday in Redwood City, TechCrunch Editor-in-Chief Erick Schonfeld hosted a panel of industry heavyweights who are either building solutions or defining how they’re used in the world of business communications and customer service. The panel included: – Porter Gale, Virgin America – John Ham, Ustream – Eric Marcoullier, Gnip – Ross Mayfield, SocialText – David Sacks, Yammer –…
The Internet is More Biology Than Technology: The Top 10 Ways to Monetize Twitter
At the Real-Time Stream event in Redwood City, California organized by TechCrunch, industry pioneers and pundits discussed the state and future of the Real-Time Web also increasingly referred to as the “now” Web. When it comes to search, the most notable comparison between traditional and real-time discovery is represented in the difference between human memory and consciousness. The experience of searching for relevant information is personified in the context of what you’re doing and not necessarily that of what you’re…
Facebook Advertising to Surpass MySpace by 2011
MySpace has been losing “face” over the course of the last year. With sliding traffic and attention as well as shifts in management and reductions in staff, MySpace is not only a place for friends, but also a place for skeptics. According to a Compete.com, Facebook received 122,559,672 unique visits in June 2009 twice that of rival MySpace, which realized only 60,973,908 unique visitors. In year-over-year comparisons, Facebook volume skyrocketed with 248.17% while Myspace slightly recoiled, down 5.65%. The good…
Facebook Helps Brands and Personalities Transform Visitors into Fans
Facebook Connect is connecting people across the social graph to fresh content and furthermore it’s channeling outside Web events into individual lifestreams. Essentially, Facebook is solidifying its position as not only your primary social network, it’s also a emerging as a central hub for your attention, updates, news, promotion, and enlightenment. Now, Facebook is extending its network to the World Wide Web, allowing brands and personalities who have or will host Fan Pages to embed a widget version of the…
Unveiling the New Influencers
Traditional influence has followed a systematic top-down process of developing and pushing “controlled” messages to audiences for decades, rooted in one-to-many, faceless broadcast campaigns. Personality wasn’t absent in certain mediums, it was missing from day-to-day communications. For the most part, this pattern seemingly served its purposes, fueling the belief that brands were in control of their messages, from delivery to dissemination, among the demographics to which they were targeted. It scaled very well over the years, until it didn’t… Unbeknown…
Is Twitter The CNN Of The New Media Generation?
What follows is the unabridged version of my latest post on TechCrunch, “Is Twitter the CNN of the New Media Generation?“ This past weekend the Twitterverse spoke-out in exasperation and opposition against traditional media networks (CNN specifically) and the absence of instantaneous coverage of the Iranian election and the resulting fallout. “We the people” wanted real-time information regarding the violent protests that erupted on the streets of Iran and the stories probing potential foul play in the results. We took…
Twitter Inspires a Dedicated and Thriving Startup Economy
Twitter continues to amaze us. Its constantly evolving examples of change and connectivity persevere and reinforce how the “little microblog that could” is transforming media and communications while also silencing the most dubious of critics. At the same time, I’m confident that through our pioneering efforts and innovative developments, we also continue to amaze the team behind Twitter itself. As Jack Dorsey shared in his keynote today at the 140 Characters Conference in New York, “Expect the unexpected. Sometimes, be…
A Soliloquy: The Language of Social Media
© Tyler E Nixon (This is a striking photograph) While I was traveling in NY for InternetWeek and DC for the Vocus conference recently, Mark Olson sent a note inviting my thoughts on a post he was authoring on the subject of authenticity versus authority. I immediately replied, “I’m in.” This is a subject that is garnering much of my attention and contemplation as they are among the key words that orbit the social media marketing universe and are in…
How Tweet It Is: @DellOutlet Banks $2 Million on Twitter
Good friend Richard Binhammer of Dell (@richardatdell) reached out to let me know that the company is releasing the latest financial figures for its @DellOutlet account on Twitter tonight. Last December, the company generated over $1 million in revenue through @delloutlet by posting special offers and also nurturing customer relationships on Twitter. Today Dell reported over $2 million in sales through its popular @delloutlet presence. @delloutlet currently boasts close to 625,000 followers seeking exclusive deals available only on the micro…
