Nov
29
As reported in the Washington Post, "Hurricane-ravaged New Orleans will deploy the nation’s first municipally owned wireless Internet system that will be free for all users, part of an effort to jump-start recovery by making living and doing business in the city as attractive as possible."
Read more about it here, here , here and here. We needed some good news!
Nov
27
Want to get people to remember your name? Well, start out with a cool name, say like Pajamas Media. Now change it to something boring like Open Source Media. Be sure to pick something that is either a direct or indirect infringement on someone elses trademark. Wait for the warning letter, make a little bit of a fuss, blog about it, get a few other people to blog about it (don’t worry they will have fun at your expense). Now hire a branding company and get them to suggest that you change it back to the original ‘cool’ name. At the end of the day everyone will know your new name… [via]
Nov
26
Just a couple of years ago everyone was looking for the next ‘new’ thing in design. I can recall sitting with the Architel guys. They wanted a new website with all of the coolness of Flash and the complexity of Amazon. This year they decided to go ‘retro’ and focus on simplicity. Check out their new site and blog interface at architel.com. Fast Company latest article titled, The Beauty of Simplicity details this new trend. Jason over at 37signals details the article , he suggests,
"staying simple on purpose"
He also expands on the idea by indicating,
The big guys are discovering what the small guys have always known. The small companies leading the way and have been for years. The big guys are following the small guys. The Less movement is bottom up, not top down. There’s a big story here. I wonder which journalist will grab it.
Nov
26
Selena Maranjian with The Motley Fool authored a piece I found on MSNBC titled, The Business of Blogging, How blogs are influencing business — and helping investors.
Would you be more likely to buy stock in a company whose CEO blogged on a daily basis or one that never blogged? I can hear the snipes already, "I would never buy stock in a company whose CEO had enough time to blog!"
Selena’s article suggested a few insights blogs offer investors including:
To read the full article click HERE.
Nov
26
Drew Neisser, CEO of Renegade Marketing, predicts that,
In 2006, expect blogs to be standard items in the marketer’s playbook. Corporate blogs will continue to proliferate. Some will earn kudos for their honesty and informative nature, while others will be recognized as blatant, homogenized propaganda and ignored. Content blogs (such as www.AfterHoursCity.com) will deliver “street cred” for marketers smart enough to create their own slice of aggregated info and brave enough to let the consumer-generated content run unfiltered.
Brian coined the phrase and now marketers like Drew are using it. "Blog Monitoring" services are going to be huge according to Drew,
Blog “Monitor” will be the newest, hot job in corporate communications, as marketers try to stay up on both the positive and negative buzz in the marketplace (Dell found out the hard way the importance of this role, as Jeff Jarvis’s “Buzz Machine” shamed them into replacing his malfunctioning computer). Consumer blogs will continue to multiply as mobile devices like Sony’s AIBO support blogging on the fly. Blog networks like WebLogsInc will make it easier for marketers to advertise on these sites, especially the ones that attract consistent audiences with quality writing.
Finally, Drew suggests that partnership between big players and smaller, niche players (like WeblogsWork) will become the norm, not the exception,
In the last few months alone, smaller agencies have delivered slap shots to the biggies, stealing away such prestigious accounts as Heineken, Volkswagen, Sprite and British Airways. Agencies like Mother, Strawberry Frog, Renegade Marketing and Crispin Porter and Bogusky (the Wayne Gretsky of the idea pack) are among a handful of firms that are building reputations for delivering channel neutral multi-disciplined campaigns, and driving what will be an enormous shift in how clients approach their agencies in 2006. Big clients are already starting to see the benefits again of having multiple partners, and asking each for “media neutral” ideas; it might not be long before clients designate one firm as the “idea agency”, tasked with coming up with the media & channel neutral idea, while other firms are tasked with execution according to their specialty.
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