February 3, 2012
When Facebook becomes a public company-it’s obvious that it will be forced to generate ever increasing revenues from its user base. The only way the company can deliver these revenues is by selling more advertising and making more money through user transactions. The advertising issue is key-...
October 31, 2011
Watch Sheryl Sandeberg’s presentation at this year’s ANA Conference and you come away with the impression that Facebook believes its the leader in a communication revolution that’s transforming consumers from listeners into broadcasters. Consumer broadcasting manifests itself in...
October 11, 2011
Marketers are just getting to grips with the reality of Facebook’s power and are obviously eager to capitalize on it. However, the bigger it gets the harder it seems to go beyond eyeballs to develop something meaningful in terms of a deeper relationship with consumers. It’s very easy for...
September 9, 2011
TBG Digital published some interesting research this week about ad performance on Facebook analyzed by time. They discovered some obvious facts that could be ignored by most planners. - Men are 42% more likely than women to transact during the evening hours - Women 50+ are most likely to buy during...
July 1, 2011
Zynga’s S1 filing contains a very candid statement about potential risks to its business. “We rely on a small percentage of players for nearly all our revenues” In a marketing world, where there are a ton of clients who claim they just want to reach “everyone”-...
May 19, 2011
A report in Mashable yesterday stated that social-gaming leader Zynga had made 14 acquisitions in the past 12 months. That kind of pace is quite extraordinary from what many consider to be a relatively small company- albeit with a potential market cap of $10 billion. It makes you think: 1. Category...
March 31, 2011
Diary - Celebrity NewsFacebook's corporate culture becoming a management talking point was one thing I predicted at the start of the year, so it's an interesting to see a flavor of that prediction coming true. MTV recently aired a behind-the-scenes look at the corporate culture of Facebook and...
March 28, 2011
Brands could do worse than think about how they might get closer to start ups. In recent months both Facebook and AOL have made plans for this. Facebook is partnering with Seedcamp in Europe to provide start-ups with access to their platform, opportunities to visit Facebook HQ, etc. This gives the...
March 22, 2011
Here's a brief element of some nice research done by IBM, who went out last year and explored global consumer expectations of social media and contrasted those with the reasons executives believed consumers followed them on social sites. The results are startling...Consumers want...To buyTo...
March 7, 2011
Facebook is certainly going to emerge as a commerce platform- the question is not about if, it's all about when? Waiting around for an answer to that question is a complete waste of time. You should be selling something on Facebook now, it could be a bunch of your inventory, or as in the case of...
March 3, 2011
Netbase is one of dozens of companies that measure social media. They out together a handy graphic to measure what they define as "brand passion" based out of social conversations.What's interesting to see in the tech space is how not unexpectedly, Apple and Twitter dominate the passion zone and to...
January 25, 2011
The full merging of brands into the social media space is now going to happen with Facebook's new initiative around sponsored stories. This means that your interactions with brands on the giant social network get turned into ads which get shared on the network. This development marks the point when...
January 19, 2011
Some good insight provided by Hugh Pickens on Slashdot of how Facebook ships code. It gives us a bit of a window into how Facebook's hacker culture works.1. All engineers learn the system at boot camp- 4/6 weeks of fixing bugs2. Engineers get access to the live database3. New feature ideas can be...
January 6, 2011
Everyone loves Facebook, it's now even the darling of Wall Street. With its 600 million users and a 70% penetration of the US population, it's a media giant. However, in terms of the sophistication in which brands are using Facebook, we are at an embryonic level. As Callum Sunders points out in his...
December 17, 2010
Paul Graham's piece on Yahoo's demise is a must read for anyone looking for answers to the fail from grace of a once iconic brand. Graham's rationale for Yahoo's failure is put down essentially one thing; its lack of a "Hacker Culture". It didn't have brilliant engineers at the heart and soul of...















