TOP 4 Most Infuentials Blog Marketing

My Yahoo Adds Peer-to-Peer Polling

Fri, 03 Jul 2009 08:33 GMT

Do you My Yahoo? I still do, occasionally, though I iGoogle more these days. I have been using My Yahoo for over 10 years, but what's great is that they haven't stayed still. Now My Yahoo is getting more social.

Yahoo today added a new social feature that lets you poll your friends right from the personalized page. You can grab it here. Unfortunately, this experience only integrates with friends within the Yahoo network. You can, however, share a link to your polls. It would be great to see this more seamlessly integrate with Twitter and/or Facebook Connect since that's where people are spending time these days.

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Question of the Day: Can a Phone Replace a Laptop? (My Take: Probably Not)

Fri, 03 Jul 2009 08:17 GMT

This is something I have been thinking about lately: as smart phones (pick one, any one) get more sophisticated, can one get away traveling for business sans laptop? For me the answer to date has been: sort of. Basically, if the trip is less than two nights and I know I won't need PowerPoint, I take the risk. Still, my laptops remain indispensible.

For more, see/comment on this post from Zee on Friendfeed. What's your view? As netbooks get thinner, lighter and cheaper this may all be a moot point.

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Friendfeed Brings "Best of Day" to Lists, Helps You Spot Trends from Friends

Fri, 03 Jul 2009 07:16 GMT

See and download the full gallery on posterous

One of my favorite Friendfeed features is called "Best of Day." I use it all the time to hone in on the most liked/commented conversations. If you're logged into Friendfeed, you can hit this link to see the most interesting conversations from your friends over the last 24 hours or this one for the past seven days. The problem with the feature, however, is that it only worked across all of your friends. This can be problematic if you follow hundreds of people, as I do.

Last night, however, Friendfeed quietly added a killer feature that brings "Best of Day" to lists - groupings of friends you categorize. Now you can more easily spot trends from friends. The screen grab below shows you the most interesting items over the last month just within my "favorites" list. This smart filtering of content plus the recent addition of real-time search on Friendfeed is exactly what those of us who participate in the social web need.

This incremental innovation gives me just another reason to be excited about Friendfeed. It's also why I love Gmail, Posterous and Evernote. They constantly keep innovating all the time even through the tough times.

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Google Knows You

Fri, 03 Jul 2009 04:52 GMT

Here's a fun little find for a Friday. If you have a Google Profile and you're logged in to your Google account, search for the word me. Your profile will come up as the top result. This is great if you get amnesia.

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What to do with special requests

Fri, 03 Jul 2009 03:20 GMT

The bike shop is busy in June. If you bring your bike in for a tune up, it will cost $39 and take a week.

A week!

What if someone says, "I have a bike trip coming up in three days, can you do it by then?"

At most bike shops, the answer is a shrug, followed by, "I'm sorry, we're swamped."

The problem with telling people to go away is that they go away. And the problem with treating all customers the same is that customers aren't the same. They're different and they demand to be treated (and are often willing to pay) differently.

So, why not smile and say, "Oh, wow, that's a rush. We can do it, but it's expensive. It'll cost you $90. I know that's a lot, but there you go."

Outcome: Maybe they'll still leave. But maybe they'll happily pay you for the privilege of doing business with you. Why should this be your choice, not theirs?

If you do tax accounting for mid-size businesses, why not offer a special last-minute service? A service in which you process shoeboxes filled with unsorted papers? A service that costs less but happens during your slow season?

There are two really good reasons to turn down special requests:

1. because you're marketing yourself as extremely busy and perfectly willing to turn down good work.

2. because you want to market yourself as someone who is a rigid artist, a stick in the mud or a crotchety perfectionist. This works great for pizza places.

Video: PBS Mediashift Interview

Thu, 02 Jul 2009 15:18 GMT

I spoke with Rubel a couple months ago when he was visiting San Francisco for the Ad:tech conference. We met at B Restaurant near Moscone Center and I interviewed him with my Flip camera.

Mark Glaser writing for Mediashift on pbs.org

Timestamps of the interview are on the PBS site if you want to drill down into a topic.

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Video Interview: Marco Arment of Instapaper

Thu, 02 Jul 2009 14:18 GMT

I took a quick trip uptown today to learn more about Tumblr and meet with their team. (I will have a video interview next week up with Tumblr's co-founder, David Karp.)

While I was there I shot this five-minute interview with Marco Arment, who developed Instapaper as a side project. (Follow him on Twitter @MarcoArment)

If you haven't tried the fantastic Instapaper service, be sure to check it out. Instapaper, which works on many mobile devices, is really for active web readers. It makes it a snap to save articles for future reading. Though we don't have it on video, Marco showed me some of the forthcoming features in Instapaper 2.1 for the iPhone. The new version, which should be out in a few weeks, has stronger integration with Twitter and Tumblr.

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Scott Rosenberg on his new book, Say Everything

Thu, 02 Jul 2009 14:01 GMT

Here's a short interview I did earlier this week with Scott Rosenberg, the co-founder of Salon.com and author of the new history of blogging, Say Everything.

Do Twitter people spell better?

Thu, 02 Jul 2009 12:13 GMT

Just got a press release from GooseGrade.com with results of a study that Twitter users, on average, actually spell better than the average schmo.

The study was conducted last week and consisted of one hundred random*, English-speaking participants who either identified themselves as users or non-users of the Twitter service. Each group was then asked to write 100 words about what they did that day.

He found out that while Twitter users maul the grammar, they seem to spell well--once they're operating outside the cramped confines of 140-characters. But why would they (or we, since I'm a Twitterer)continue to cut corners on grammar outside the Tweet box, but improve the spelling? Ideas?

A Basic Social Media Data-Set

Thu, 02 Jul 2009 09:08 GMT

Earlier this week in my post about equivalencies in social media measurement I mentioned some of the core data we collect for basic tactical elements of social media programs. What does that look like? Below is an example of basic data available for the following scenario: A corporate blog post is announcing an event, in the post there are some photos and a video. Once posted, a link is shared via Twitter.

As you can see it's quite a bit of data and it needs to be collected from a number of different services. Then you can compound this with trending, that is collecting the data at different intervals during the day.

Of course, that's just the raw data. As I said previously, the value is in the analysis. More on that in the coming weeks.

Cross posted to VoceNation