Sanjay Dholakia is CEO of Crowd Factory, the leading provider of crowd-powered marketing applications. He writes for Mashable that it’s not enough to enable your content to be shared; you have to creatively encourage it from your fans.
Why should I share your product’s campaign? Here are five good ways your brand can answer that question. read more
Thousands of hackers have recently been working together for a huge hacking session over 19 cities. Random Hacks of Kindness has chosen three as the most outstanding applications. read more
As Internet companies attempt to personalize their services to each user, there is an unintended result: we view an edited down version of reality that colors the world that we see. Eli Pariser discusses this in his latest TED talk that you can watch here. read more
Today I read a great blog post written by Richard Watson, the publisher of What's Next (a website that documents global trends) and co-founder of Strategy Insight (a specialist scenario planning consultancy). The blog's title, Why Doing Nothing is Often Better Than Doing Something, grabbed my attention. What Watson found was that he felt overwhelmed with too much information. He was drowning in the details of life and was missing the boat on being an innovative, creative deep-thinker. read more
Here is a great video of business strategist, Valerie Maltoni, explaining how businesses can talk to customers so they listen. She believes technology can help transform buyers into returning customers and explains the difference between buyers and customers. Buyers are people with many singular transactions whereas customers are buyers who decide to come back two, three, or more times to purchase from a brand they believe in. Social media not only helps transform a buyer into a customer, but it encourages that new customer to bring along their friends. read more
Apple recently announced its plan to tack a 30 percent fee on to publishers who charge subscriptions through its App Store. These fees apply to magazines, books, newspapers, music and videos. Apple is also dictating that these publishers can't offer their subscriptions elsewhere at a lower price, and the consumers will have the option to withhold to sharing their details — such as name or location — with the publisher. read more
A new study conducted by Manuel Egele, of the Technical University of Vienna, and three other researchers have revealed that about half of all iPhone apps are sharing your sensitive information without your knowledge. Technology Review reports that out of the 1,400 iPhone apps studied, Egele found that over half of them used a tracking technology and collected the 40-digit number unique to each phone. In a small minority of cases, apps "blatantly compromised privacy." 36 accessed the iPhone's location without permission, and five accessed the user's address book without asking. read more
Social Hype has teamed up with Online Schools to develop an interesting infograph about the 2010 trends with Facebook and its usage over the last year. As expected, the numbers are showing that Facebook is growing leaps and bounds every day. Within 20 minutes, one million links are shared! One out of every 13 people in the world have an account and half of those have logged in on any given day. Over 71 percent of the American Web audience is on Facebook. Really interesting stuff. So, will Facebook turn out to just be another MySpace one day or are they just savvy enough to grow their audience, surpassing Google? read more
Now that it's 2011, all the top trends of 2011 lists are coming out. A noteworthy one I stumbled upon today is Mashable's Five Design Trends for Small Businesses. What's great about what we see coming up in 2011, is that many of these trends won't require any more out-of-pocket expense to implement. They create a lot of bang with very few bucks, possibly even saving you some money, which is crucial to a small business. Here's what you should see come our way in 2011. read more
The dreaded Project Triangle; something that I've been aware of, but recently found out that some folks have never heard of it. The project triangle is a graphical representation of the constraints that surround a project. These are cost, time and features/scope. It's a useful way to discuss how "having it all" sometimes isn't as realistic as we all might want it to be. I've heard the "I want it yesterday, with tons of bells and whistles, and oh yeah, I have a very tight budget." Don't we all? read more