Weekend Reading – January 9
Welcome back. We hope you enjoyed the holidays. We certainly did. We’d like to thank you for reading our posts from 2008 and look forward to bringing you more industry tidbits throughout 2009. Be sure to subscribe to our feed if you don’t want to miss any posts. Here’s the URL for your feed reader: or scroll down to the very bottom of this page and click on Entries (RSS).
Marketing execs “sick” of Web 2.0? Perhaps they drank too much of it in 2008, but a new survey by Anderson Analytics conducted for the Marketing Executives Networking Group (MENG), claims marketing executives are going back to basics this year, putting renewed focus on satisfying and retaining customers and investing in research and insights, but are “sick” of hearing about Web 2.0 and related buzzwords such as “blogs” and “social networking” compared with last year’s survey. However, marketers still admit they don’t know enough about it. This lack of understanding was evident in results from a November 2008 MENG social media study showing 67% of marketing executives consider themselves beginners when it comes to using social media for marketing purposes.
It’s really a shame to see this lack of understanding translate into a negative feeling towards an area of marketing which carries so much potential. Let’s hope these marketers get over their burned-out attitudes quickly enough to realize these Web 2.0 technologies are more than buzz words, and that when used effectively can make a real and tangible difference to a company’s marketing efforts – especially in the areas of satisfying and retaining customers.
Mobile Broadband to Exceed 140 Million U.S. Subscribers in 2013. So says a new report from Parks Associates.
“By 2013, there will be over 140 million U.S. consumers paying for mobile broadband, which will extend video, communication, networking, and support services to all sorts of devices,” said Kurt Scherf, vice president, principal analyst, Parks Associates.
Parks Associates also forecasts 4.5 billion mobile phone users worldwide by 2013, with many people using these devices as gateways for entertainment services, community information, and social networking. The increasing importance of the mobile phone will affect other product and service sectors. For example, over 100 million femtocells will be shipped worldwide in 2013, cumulatively serving over 300 million subscribers.
Broadband deserves some government help. The federal government should create a national broadband strategy, create incentives and support efforts to boost broadband demand in order to increase broadband access, according to a new report released by the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation.
Learning the right lessons and emulating the right policies will “enable the United States to improve our broadband performance faster than in the absence of proactive policies,” the report claims.
The report also argues that it is time to move the “broadband policy debate beyond the free market fundamentalism on the right and the digital populism on the left and begin to craft pragmatic, realistic public policies” that focus on the primary goal of getting as many American households using high-speed broadband networks to engage in online activities, including education, health care, work, and commerce.
Spammers and scammers discover Twitter. Hooray. If you’re on Twitter you’ve probably noticed an increase of followers that look like spam. It’s not your imagination that names like @dof74s or @prongirl are starting to appear in your stream.
And if you think spammers are bad, it gets worse. Scammers have also discovered Twitter as was the case when several high profile Twitter users were hacked recently via the Direct Message (DM) function by being lured into entering their log-in information into a spoofed screen.
Here are some guidelines we personally follow when using Twitter to help cut down on the spam.
No. 1: Be real. If you follow us and use the Twitter-supplied avatar we won’t follow you. By using a real image you’re proving you’re a real person or are at least making an effort.
No. 2: Be interesting. If you start following us and your previous Tweets are nothing but self-promoting (spam), we won’t follow you.
No. 3: List your location. It’s interesting to follow back users in our own backyard as well as those in other cities and countries. By leaving out your location you might as well add “Spam Robot Planet” as your location.
No. 4: Follow and be followed. Have approximately the same amount of followers as those you follow. If you’re following 2,000 people and only get followed by 10 that’s a pretty good sign you’re a spammer.
As far as getting hacked, never enter information into a spoofed screen – you can usually tell by looking at the URL or if you click on a link and you’re already logged in and are asked to log in, again. But, you knew that, right?
