Reference Center: Essential Reading
We post links to dozens of resources every week, but a handful provide especially interesting or valuable insights, strategies or ideas. Those posts are added to our "Essential Reading" list below, which is organized by date with the most recent additions at the top.
Browse Essential Reading List
I had a few of the folks at VizEdu.com send me this visual presentation of content marketing @Twitter, and I thought it was close enough to share. I like what they've done, but as always with trying to depict a philosophy visually, it leaves a few things out. Possibly for the next version?...
Gartner’s Adam Sarner recently released a report predicting that more than 60 percent of all companies will have a community for engaging their customers by 2010. This is a clear sign that many brands are coming to terms with the huge opportunity that social media offer companies to communicate directly with and learn from their customers, but it still begs the question of how they will get tangible ROI out of these communities. As companies begin to embrace social media as a strategy (rather than as a tactic or a campaign), we see many examples of how the conversation can help or hurt household names. These high profile successes and failures are a good thing because we are learning, but also indicate that we are still navigating the social media waters...
My former boss, who reads this blog, asked me how to actually build online communities yesterday. Good question. You start by identifying what you want to achieve and when you want to achieve it by. You figure out what resources you have and who you want to reach. Find a metric to measure success by. Then you focus on the people you want to reach. What do they value?...
Most people don’t like Cease & Desist letters. So when Twitterville learned two weeks before Christmas and just two days after Detroit automakers had asked Congress for a $35 billion bailout that Ford Motors had sent a cease and desist letters to The Ranger Station one of its own fan sites, and had demanded $5000 in financial compensation,I almost instantly heard a resounding “Bah Humbug” spread across the global neighborhoods...
As part of our work at GeniusRocket, a D.C. startup that crowdsources creative content, we researched some of the trends in viral video (as of July 2008) that confirmed certain assumptions and challenged several widely held beliefs. After looking at the 1) Top 50 Viral Videos of the Year, 2) Top 50 YouTube Videos in a Typical Day, and 3) Top 50 Viral Ads of the Year, we can share some insights that are useful whether you are a Brand Manager or have ambitions to be the next Tay Zonday...
