Proud to be a community moderator for an award-winner!

Over two years now. Internet Evolution's thinkernet.com site has scored several awards over the last few months:
"We're thrilled to inform you that Internet Evolution won the min's Editorial & Design award for Best Blogs, recognizing the site's renowned ThinkerNet blogosphere, which publishes exclusive content from the biggest names in the Internet industry.

Read more about the award here: http://metacast.agora.com/link.asp?m=60666&s=7205559&l=0

Internet Evolution was up against a number of industry leaders, including Entertainment Weekly, About.com, Harvard Business Publishing, Martha Stewart Living, Newsweek, Time, and Haymarket Media.

With regular content from more than 200 industry leaders like Vint Cerf, Lawrence G. Roberts, Craig Newmark, and Andrew Keen, the now-award-winning ThinkerNet blogosphere has become the go-to destination for analysis and discussion on the future of the Internet.

This latest honor is Internet Evolution's fifth award this year. The site was previously recognized by minOnline for Best B2B Video Show, Best B2B Community/Social Network, Best Customized Website/Microsite, and Digital Team of the Year, taking accolades in categories against leaders from Sports Illustrated, Conde Nast, The Atlantic, and Scholastic Inc., among others.

The site also received Honorable Mentions in other Editorial & Design categories, including Best Use of Social Media, Best Online Column, and Best Special Section/Microsite.

(Yet another) top 10 list of tools for small business social media success (but a good one)

Okay, the title is a bit unwieldy -- my apologies. But it conveys my sense that we're being swamped with lists. TechCrunch even makes a list of its top ten lists. Magazines, of course, have long done this: 33 ways to drive your man crazy in bed; 27 new chicken dishes you can make in in under 60 seconds. However, I also have to admit that not only do lists serve to draw readers in, but they are easy to read, and therefore really can be useful.

So, clearly labeled as a sponsor list (but not a sponsor of this site, I'm sorry to say), her's the list of social media tools especially appropriate for small business...

But wait-- before I give you the link, let me say I have my own list within this list! Choose from the following list:
1. My shortened list of tools;
2. The original length-ten list of tools.

What do you mean, you're not measuring your social media ROI?

Christina Warren refers to a study that says 84% of social media initiatives do not include any measurement! That was last month. Now she has a very complete guide.

A model of how to monetize the attention economy

We've all been trying to calculate the value of advertising: views, clickthroughs, and lately, and vaguely, "engagement." But on social networks, ads don't seem to be working as well as they do on Google, where they're really part of the content, and relate directly to the user's intent. So along comes Adam Penenberg in his new book The Viral Loop, excerpted here in Fast Company, and modeled in an app for Facebook and iPhone. Estimate the value of each user to Facebook by how active they are, reveal that dollar figure so now I am motivated to try to raise it -- and then maybe together we can all pressure Facebook to share some of it back with us. Esther Dyson wrote about the attention economy a decade ago, and proposed that it should be worth it to companies to share it back with us, but I think this is the best attempt to do it in a long time, if ever. Check it out. My starting value on Facebook is $64.80. What's yours?

Powered by ScribeFire.

Does this list of hot startups inspire or depress you?

Inspire, because if there are these many good ideas, there's got to be one more...Or depress, because it seems like someone, and probably a team with a connection to venture money, got there first.

I'm in the former camp. Besides, maybe some of them are hiring!

Powered by ScribeFire.

"Your blog is your mothership"

By way of customizable news-gatherer socialmedian.com, from WebWorkerDaily.com comes this sage advice from yet another link (but you'll have to find it by going to the WWD link): Don't neglect your blog for lesser tools.

EU study: 20% might pay for content online

George Gilder promised and heralded it; the authors of "Blown to Bits" and "The Innovators Dilemma" warned about it close to ten years ago now; Chris Anderson has explained it in "The Long Tail" and now in "Free:" When the cost of a product and service decline rapidly, a couple of things are pretty likely to happen: new players will enter the market, unburdened by legacy cost structures and business practices (including past success); prices will fall, incumbents will suffer, and new business models will emerge. Nowhere has this been more dramatic and public than in the media industries I've worked in and around for almost all of my careers: books, music and movie delivery (MTV, Showtime, Movie Channel); consumer electronics (remember the Sony Walkman?); subscription newsletter; newspapers... Two items today are only the most recent among many to address this: Jeremiah Owyang's commentary on the first Cisco Eos contract with the big Hollywood media brands: http://bit.ly/ynaV3 and the European Union's large survey and report that, among other things, notes that P2P technology is not the reason media companies have lost sales. As I tweeted a few minutes ago, it's the business model, stupid (thanks to James Carville for the appropriation).

Great market opportunity: Two-thirds of Young People in EC might pay...

A new study has the wrong end of the stick as its headline: "Third of Young People Won't Pay for Online Content."  More good news in the study, throughout, but remember, in this paidcontent summary, to take the other side of each statistic.

E-marketers confess they don't test email campaigns

Very sad news, since it is easy to test, and you get results very quickly. It's a foundation of the innovator's best practice of "fail fast." From directmag: http://tr.im/utPh

The end of "command" for corporations

CIOZone published a review of the state of social media, itself reviewed in corporateeye.com and linked to linkedin.com -- illustrating how things travel. Here's the key quote: “'Like the fall of the Berlin Wall, many observers say we are witnessing the collapse of the command-and-control power of corporate mass marketing.'"

"That’s a much bigger message than 'you can’t afford to ignore Twitter.' That’s the end of the world as we know it."

Patterns and depth of social media engagement correlate with financial success

Of course, as ReadWriteWeb points out, correlation does not necessarily equal causation, but it is worth studying Charlene (Groundswell) Li's database and analysis of the top 100 brands and their social media activities at her new site, Engagementdb. Those companies that have focused and deepened their social engagement according to Li's analysis, have made the highest profits, while those least engaged have lost money over the last year or so.

Sobering security tale: 'Ecosystem' of web services makes breaches easy

It's worth reading through the detail of this anatomy of the attack on Twitter staff to understand how our all-too-human laziness in the face of dozens of individual password plus secret question systems makes for an overall weak system. It's not just individuals that are "at fault" for not following the advice to make individual, hard-to-guess passwords unique to each site, but companies/websites that act as if they are your only service.

Can your business afford not to offer "free" as a price?

Chris Anderson of Wired has long promoted this idea, and now his book is about to be published -- July 7th, at a price, and in the days following, to show his consistency and perhaps prove his point, free, in various forms. One example is in England, where an abridged version is available for free along side the hardbound unabridged edition. The paperback is sponsored by Adobe, which itself is a couple of years into its "freemium" business model: free, quite functional online versions of expensive software otherwise available for a price. Where might you apply it in your business?

Launch a Web Business for under $10k. Rinse and repeat.

Everything you need to know...

B2B marketing is harder than B2C

As Kyle Flaherty writes, that's because it's not actually businesses talking to each other, it's many specific people representing or working in businesses talking to each other, sometimes in serial fashion. Blog is engageinpr.com

Great case of web design vs. corporate culture (guess who wins)

Discovered this in the Fastcompany.com email, but here's the direct link: http://dustincurtis.com/dear_american_airlines.html

Speaking of useful iPhone apps...want to try one?

A management coach and I would like your input on a concept. Here's a scenario and suggested answers. Email your answer and I'll respond with the scoring. But also let me know what you think of the concept of learning about or assessing your mastery of workplace challenges in bite-size formats.

Scenario:
You take your coaching role very seriously and you have told your remote employees that your door is always open. Dawn has taken you up on that and is calling frequently complaining about her team mate Shirley. You try to help her to take appropriate actions. But the calls are becoming more frequent and the issues seem more and more petty. What do you do? Choose one option below:


a. Continue to listen and help her through each situation – both Dawn and Shirley are critical to the team.
b. Offer to mention something to Shirley next time you speak to her.
c. Tell Dawn that she has to stop calling you – that these calls are taking time away from getting the work done
d. When you see it’s her calling, let it go to voicemail.

Email your answer to modza [at] odzaconsults.com. Thanks! And good luck!

What if everyone created an iPhone app?

What's that you say? They already have? No...there are only 35,000 (and counting) -- that's far from everyone...

Seriously, there are a lot, but the business section of the app store is less full, and since the iPhone has already made and is continuing serious inroads into the business world still (for the moment) dominated by Blackberry, now is a good time to get in. Read all about it:

• Gizmodo app store chart: Compares the different app stores of the leading handhelds. A little out of date, since the Palm Pre store is not yet fully leaked, but useful nonetheless.


• Flurry blog: iPhone analytics. Haven't used 'em yet, but seems essential, and the blog has some useful findings.


• Forbes: Making Money from iPhone apps: This is where I read about Flurry!

Social media: If you measure it, does it work?

Not more than a handful of years after social media started exploding, the advertising industry is trying to catch up (while the big, truly "social" but not specific networks themselves try to justify their high multiples). But measurement, and consistent measurement in particular, is a start:
IAB Doc Seeks to Nail Down Social Media's ROI - MarketingVOX