caterpillarcowboy:courtenaybird:
What Social Followers Want - eMarketer
Some things will never change. Old vs. new, we’re always looking to save a buck, even when some of us shouldn’t be spending our money on “deals” that we can’t even afford. It doesn’t matter if it’s a traditional newspaper ad spread or a link on Twitter, the American Way will never change. Media may, but not our impulsive spending habits.
“Internet Out?” sounds like an apocalyptic nightmare for an office that’s shared by three startups.
From Silicon Alley Insider — Photo tour of the Foursquare, Curbed, and Hard Candy Shell shared space
Last Night’s Checkins gives a heat map of all the places you’ve ever checked in.
The part of Foursquare that I’ve become most enamored with lately is this ability to create a lifestream of places. Can you imagine if you had all of this data from your teen or college years? This would be amazing to mashup over long periods of time.
I’m going to build a stupid simple Foursquare app that emails you the places you checked in one or two years ago on this day.
While I’m still pessimistic about widespread Foursquare adoption (my basic premise is that I could potentially envision my parents using Twitter, but definitely not Foursquare, because they just don’t get out enough), the opening of the API is huge for data, mapping, and urban planning geeks like me and will probably have the Foursquare guys in Twitter-esque scaling panic for a long time.
Foursquare is just another incredibly useful tool for discovering how we and others use our built environment. And, of course, it’s another incredibly useful tool for commerce. While “stupid simple,” Fimoculous’ idea could be valuable for, let’s say, a bar.
Just think: It’s Saturday, November 28, 2009, and you’ve just received a notification that you checked-in at Tom & Jerry’s this night last year. “Hmmm,” you say, “I haven’t been there in a long time, so why not tonight?”
It’s basic, yet a powerful tool for customer development.
How do you brand something when it doesn’t even exist? Ask the East Village (“ev”) marketing team in Calgary, CA, where a massive redevelopment effort is currently underway.
With any product, buzz generation—even prior to the actual product launch—is imperative, especially when competitors exist. Just look at the current Droid v. iPhone battle.
In cities, the same argument carries, because neighborhoods are in constant competition, whether its bars, restaurants, housing choices, or amenities. Competition, of course, is usually driven by developers, who operate on the “location, location, location” mantra. Developers and real estate professionals are constantly trying to position their products and the neighborhoods in which they exist as “prime.”
But what about a product that does not even exist?
With redevelopment, visioning is fairly common and essential (in urban planning parlance, visioning is analogous to a focus group, relying on local residents to dictate the positive and negatives of housing types, community amenities, streetscaping, etc), but full-scale, web-based marketing is not.
Times are changing, and they’re changing quickly. While local marketing machines are nothing new (think Times Square Alliance), developers and local business owners are beginning to leverage the interwebs in a comprehensive fashion, hoping to stoke a buzz and brand the product—a neighborhood—even before the first shovel hits the ground.
The ev marketing team is executing this strategy well, and it’s not only a win for economic development, but it also engages the community and anoints them as stakeholders. Too often in the urban planning process, projects are pushed through without much public input or awareness, and shortly thereafter, construction commences. Improve neighborhoods, but also engage the community.
Viva urban branding!
What a logo does not have to be or do
A logo is only the beginning for setting the tone for your brand. Your logo does not need to say exactly what your company does. Does Apple use computers in their logo? Does McDonald’s display cheeseburgers?
Etsy's Artists Are Totally Not Starving
The once starving artists of homespun craft marketplace Etsy.com have officially achieved mogul status. Last month, the site posted $133.1 million in annual sales—all before the holiday rush.
Three Reasons Why Bruce is the Best Boss
1. “Prove it all night” — Devote yourself fully to your people and never let up
Springsteen is obsessed with giving everything he has to his fans, and he always has been. When he shows up for work, he is wholly present and demands that every member of his band and company does the same. In the early days, he would spend hours before a show sitting in most of the seats to check the sound to ensure that it was good for everyone in the house. He plays until you’re exhausted.
2. “Come on up to the rising” — Create community by connecting people to something bigger than themselves
Bruce found salvation in music and in the brotherhood of his band. This sense of connection gives authentic vitality to the many roles, beyond that of musician, he takes seriously in his performances: revival-show preacher, wry comic, and self-educated social critic. His fans feel a bond cemented by ideas that matter — social justice, the hope for redemption, love. In a world that is increasingly volatile and fearsome, those like Springsteen who can “talk about a dream and try to make it real” are prized for bringing people together and helping them realize how they can make the world a bit better.
3. “It ain’t no sin to be glad you’re alive” — Appreciate what’s good; express optimism
Springsteen’s music, even as it focuses on the social and political problems of racism, economic inequality, and war (as in the Grammy-winning album The Rising), has a fierce determination to find the good and celebrate it. There is realism, but no cynicism. It takes both sensitivity and steadfastness to find and maintain this balance. The most successful and effective leaders have learned — through reflection on the crucibles of their own personal experiences — how to do this in their own distinct way, in their own unique voice.
Our turbulent world — more networked than hierarchical, more flexible than standardized — demands leaders like Springsteen, who generate loyalty and commitment not so much with their use of positional power and formal authority, but with their authenticity, their integrity, and their creativity.
@JimmySky <via @johnschneider>
According to this article in The Christian Science Monitor, a source says the 1965 number is 24x:
Top pay and bonuses are necessary to keep the talent. But it’s largely mythology, says Sarah Anderson, an analyst at the progressive Institute for Policy Studies and veteran critic of extreme executive pay. In 1965, the CEOs of major US companies made 24 times an average worker’s pay. By 2004, that ratio had grown to 431 times.
Nevertheless, it’s still an enormous divide.
11 tips for the VC pitch « Venture Generated Content
“The focus of the day was how to pitch investors and while every investor has his or her preferences, I find that there is 80%-90% overlap in what most investors are hoping to see and hear.”
Full Post
(via Venturegeneratedcontent.com)
End of the world as Hollywood knows it
Eric Garland, CEO of Big Champagne, a company that tracks file-sharing usage and sells the data to the studios and major record labels said: “Hulu may be doing immediate harm to elements of your business, but waiting right behind Hulu in the shadows, are things that do so much more harm.”
Twitter co-founder's 'Square' comes into focus.
Well, we finally have a glimpse at “Square,” the new mobile payments venture coming from Twitter co-founder and chairman Jack Dorsey. As expected, it’s a little hardware add-on that can turn an iPhone into a credit card reader.
The funny part: Details about the small-business-oriented project have been on the Web for months. It was just that nobody had put two and two together until some eagle-eyed folks at Engadget realized that a URL on a screenshot of the “Square iPhone Payments Venture” first reported by Coolhunting matched a domain registered to Dorsey.
Cool idea, and I guess it’s democratizing commerce to some extent (just like Twitter democratized media), but is there really a fertile market for this? Will businesses abandon credit card terminals in lieu of the Square? Maybe at some point in the future, but I really don’t see the overarching market “point” of the Square at the brick-and-mortar level.
There is, however, a decent market in the street vendor/home business owner operator sector, but then again, would you let some random person on the street swipe your credit card on their iPhone? I know I wouldn’t do that.
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