A Relationship Economy….The intersection of technology and Human Relations
Serving an audience is a daunting task of never ending exchanges. Today these exchanges are in the form of conversations. The currency you create from these conversations are the indicators of your brands value, whether personal or institutional. Old advertising methods have not been efficient in creating conversational currency. Simply put these old methods are anti-social and the market of conversations is indeed rejecting these methods. Don’t believe it? Just 4% of users click on social-media ads, and 9% say they find the ads useful when deciding what to buy, according to a study by LinkShare.
Thought provoking article on the applications of Web 2.0 internally (sometimes called Enterprise 2.0) vs Externally…
Is, and I know how heretical this may sound, is social media outside the firewall truly productive? I guess I can guess some of the answers in terms of wisdom of clouds, tapping into the mindset of consumers and turning that into lucrative products, niche marketing in the long long tail. But, does any of this actually generate wealth? In the firewall we create things and sell them, that’s the business model. Most of what goes on there is invisible. We want at least some privacy, and often we want a lot, confidentiality is important to any business – few, if none can be 100% transparent.
Which side of the firewall is hotter?
If every business has an archetype….
(from Living Brands andAccount Planning)
OR
Male archetypes: Chief, Bad Boy, Best Friend, Charmer, Lost Soul, Professor, Swashbuckler, and Warrior.
Female archetypes: Boss, Seductress, Spunky Kid, Free Spirit, Waif, Librarian, Crusader, and Nurturer.
Writer’s Guide to Heroes and Heroines
….does that mean every business story works within the 7 basic plots?
- Overcoming the Monster
- Rags to Riches
- The Quest
- Voyage and Return
- Comedy
- Tragedy
- Rebirth
Common Narratives in Storytelling
Or maybe we should look wider at the 36 Plots
Domain search – with a little extra 
Split testing using Wordpress and Google Optimizer
The Google Website Optimizer Plugin integrates the Google Website Optimizer into WordPress blog posts and pages. It allows WordPress bloggers to insert the tracking codes required to run headline and copy tests to determine which blog copy/content drives the best conversions.
Google Website Optimizer Plugin for WordPress by ContentRobot
A good explanation of how to get hold of expiring domains. Be aware, anything useful will require competitive bidding!
Contrary to popular belief, domains do not expire when they say they do. If the owner of a domain does not renew by the expiration date of the domain, the domain goes into “expired” status….
- 40 days – Expired period
- 30 days – Redemption period (extra fees if owner want to re-register)
- 05 days – locked (on expiry anyone can register)
- 75 days – TOTAL
Mike Davidson – How to Snatch an Expiring Domain
After expiry of the Locked 5 day period, domains are released. At that point a number of commercial services are avialable to bid for you. This is called Catching the Drop. And of course if someone else registers to bid, well you’ll have to bid against them. For example: http://www.namejet.com/
If the 1st rank in organic is expected to get 42% of clicks (around 4 times the rank 2) then how is this skewed where Adwords takes the top position above the organic results. The oft quoted split of PPC taking 14% is surely skewed where the top 1 (or 2 adwords) are displayed above the organic. You would think that position would be gaining 30%+ of all clicks! I’d love to see some data on this.
After analysing various sites and their data and our own research we see googles premium sponsored results which shows up over the natural organic results are clicked 5 times more than the regular organic Search engine results.
Pay Per Click Blog
This article talks more about how all process-oriented tasks are being outsourced. I love the quote from Peter Drucker (remind me: find the source for quote!) because it makes sense: the best “new” companies don’t even have a sales team during startup because people are so eager to drink their Kool-Aid
Peter Drucker’s observation that the aim of marketing is to make sales superfluous. In other words, if you do a good job of understanding the needs of your customers and market well, the sale will be a foregone conclusion.
CRM News: News: Right-Brained CRM
This fascinating article explores how ideas evolve – literally. Ideas compete and the best ideas rise to the surface. The study looks at how ideas mutate as they spread on Facebook.
Then something curious happened: It mutated. Since everyone who participates is supposed to paste the original instructions into her own note, it’s easy to tinker with the rules. Soon enough, 16 things (and 16 tagged friends) morphed into 15—and 17 and 22 and 35 and even 100. As the structure crumbled, more users toyed with the boundaries. Like any disease, “Random Things” was mutating in hopes of finding a strain that uniquely suited its host. In this case, the right number was vital to its survival: The more people who are tagged, the more likely the note is to spread. The longer the list, though, the more daunting it is to compose and the fewer participants will be roped in.
Evolution and Facebook’s “25 Random Things About Me”
