commbasics

Lots of investors are worried that Web companies such as Google and Facebook don’t have a clear way to make money as people increasingly access their services on smartphones and tablets instead of personal computers. Small screen sizes, the intensely personal nature of phones, and other factors mean it’s not readily apparent what kind of advertising will work best on mobile devices. via www.forbes.com I remember when marketers were at the cutting edge of communication practices. I'm that old.

Continuing on with our discussion about good content, I've come across some fascinating data regarding how customers in the world of semiconductor design are consuming it and what it means for social media.  Let's start with a poll taken by a company I've been consulting to in recent weeks. The company wanted to get some attention from a select segment of customers.  The company estimates that their entire customer base consists of a few thousand people worldwide and they only need to reach a small part of that to be successful.  So they were looking into ways to best reach them.  Good content was a given in their estimation, but how to create that content and how to deliver it most efficiently was the question.  They had an assumption on what would be the best path that I questioned so I asked them to do something: talk to your current and potential customer about where they get their information. I've asked my clients to do this for many y...

Continuing on with our discussion on what makes good content, I want to give a big shout-out to Don Tuite from Electronic Design who provided, in a comment with an outstanding example of what it takes to make a good technical news story. Don pointed out that when he does a piece, he does a fair amount of editorializing, but that is tempered by a lot of information from many sources.  That speaks to the issue if truth in content.  An opinion is not necessarily untrue and passes the test when it is backed up by information from both sides.  To get to that point, however, requires a helluva lot of work. Don's outline of his process took not only days of research and discussion, but time to put it straight in his own head and then write down his perception of reality.  If lucky, he gets to do that 20 or 30 times a year.  There are about 5 editors in the industry like Don so we can count on about 150 stories with that kind of effort over the course of a yea...

This is a sidebar to the current discussion of trustworthy content. Learned something interesting today about those Facebook posts from groups or organizations that people like to "share." Most of them come from spammers.  For example, there is an organization called Activist.com.  You won't really find out who these people really are unless you are a hacker of some skill, but it's fairly easy to find that they have been blacklisted by several organizations.  Every time they get blacklisted they move to another server to wait until the heat dies off and the blacklisting expires.  Right now, they are working off their fourth server. In the case of Activist.com they are creating email lists for political campaigns to target who will give money to specific issues and candidates.  They don't particularly care what side they come down on because it's all good money. Here's how it works: Every time you see one of these FB memes th...

Discretion will never go out of style. Just ask Gene Morphis. Up to last Monday he was CFO at Texas-based Francesca’s, a publicly traded fashion retailer. He was fired that day for "improperly communicating company information through social media.” via www.techfluential.genuitypr.com Hood advice from Jane Evans-Ryan at Genuity PR