Today’s LA Times asks a good question: Is Mark Zuckerberg in over his hoodie as Facebook CEO?
Business writers Walter Hamilton and Jessica Guynn dig into an issue that I suspect some of us have seen before, and it’s remarkable that the clamor over Zuck specifically hasn’t been louder for some time.
Should Mark Zuckerberg, the social media visionary but neophyte corporate manager, step aside as CEO to let a more seasoned executive run the multibillion-dollar company? Continue reading
Sonia over at Copyblogger has a great piece on “The #1 Conversion Killer in Your Copy (And How to Beat It).”
What makes people almost buy? What makes them get most of the way there, then drop out of your shopping cart at the last second? What makes them stare at your landing page, wanting what you have to offer, and yet, ultimately, close the page and move on to something else?
It turns out there’s a hideous troll hiding under the bridge. Every time you get close to making a sale, the troll springs out and scares your prospect away. Get rid of the troll and your copy will start converting better than it ever has before.
The ugly, smelly, dirty, bad-mannered troll is prospect fear. And it’s sitting there right now, stinking up your landing page and scaring good customers away.
She does a great job of explaining where the “conversion troll” comes from, and she’s 100% correct. If you’ve grown up in this society, you have probably have a degree of well-justified trepidation about trusting the claims of those trying to sell you something.
I’d go her one better, though, because I feel like the principles she’s articulating when she says that “[t]rustworthiness, transparency, credible authority, lots of high-value content, and just plain old decency are your best weapons” apply to a lot more than the point of sale. Continue reading
Have you ever noticed how social networks don’t do a very good job of representing how our personal networks actually function? Sure, places like Facebook and MySpace and LinkedIn have their utility, but their flatness is a problem.
Think about your Facebook, for instance. If it’s like mine, you have friends there who run the gamut from “real life best friend” to “people I know” to “guy I couldn’t pick out of a lineup if my life depended on it.” You may have relatives, friends from school, co-workers and “assorted others.” And they’re all absolutely equal.
Our LinkedIn networks can be even less attuned to how our lives works. Continue reading
A quick-hitter here. I’ve done a little work on Electrolux’s behalf (this is actually me voicing this video) and I really like the philosophy behind their approach. I’m expecting more good work from them on the social media front in the future – so keep your eyes on them.
Black Dog’ reader (and former student extraordinaire) Jeffrey Folck sends this item along:
I thought you might enjoy this… especially the first line about how Clinton is leading the way in innovative use of the media…
[sigh]
And still, her utilization of mobile is a joke. Mailing a DVD out is fine, but it’s hardly revolutionary. It’s called direct media marketing (like direct mail, only you send CD-ROMs or DVDs) and it’s been around for several years now. Continue reading
So says Mark Cuban. Now, I’m typically a big Cuban fan. But I’m looking at an AdAge report on his remarks from yesterday’s Cable Telecommunications Association for Marketing (CTAM) Summit, and I’m a little puzzled.
Speaking at the Cable Telecommunications Association for Marketing (CTAM) Summit in Washington yesterday, Mr. Cuban declared “the Internet is dead” in an otherwise subdued panel that included executives such as ESPN President George Bodenheimer and Time Warner Cable CEO Glenn Britt.The real growth medium is the “intranet,” otherwise defined as the on-demand and digital video-recording platforms provided by cable companies. “There’s less restriction on the intranet, it’s like your own corporate network for all the cable networks and even wireless,” he elaborated in an interview after the panel. “It’s all locally driven anyways. It has a true neighborhood feel. If I’m in Dallas and I’m on Time Warner Cable, I want localized content.”
Mr. Cuban views the TV as the real computer, citing the decline in sales of desktop computers as a direct result of where media consumption is moving. “All that [content] is moving to the TV. What’s the difference between a PC and a TV? Nothing.” Social networking and user-generated content are all the rage for Web 2.0, but there’s “nothing on the horizon” from a content perspective, he said (apparently glossing over the looming launches of NBC and News Corp.’s NewCo web-video venture and Joost). Broadband video, according to Mr. Cuban, has “stopped growing.”
There’s a lot to try and parse here, and I wonder if his views would be clearer if I’d heard the entirety of his remarks.
In any case, his concept of “intranet” seems to refer to a proprietary content dump where there’s not much community or interaction. Continue reading
wordSmith | Writing / Content Marketing 