Amazon makes it easy for its affiliates to tweet
You may not be able to fit a whole lot of words into 140 characters but a growing number of individuals and businesses think that it doesn't take more than 140 characters to produce a profit.
While Twitter focuses on building its platform and brand, plenty of third parties have been focusing on using Twitter as a marketing platform of their own. From established companies like Dell to upstarts like Sponsored Tweets, many are trying to cash in on Twitter.
The Guardian makes its comments search engine friendly
The Guardian has introduced some welcome updates to its comments system, with comments now handled server-side instead of client side.
This means that the newspaper is not using javascript to display comments anymore, which brings with it a number of benefits, as pointed out by Malcolm Coles:
Bloomberg gets to work on BusinessWeek
Bloomberg is wasting no time in getting to work on BusinessWeek, which it agreed to acquire last month. Although the deal is not expected to close until next month, Bloomberg is already plotting out the future for the weekly business magazine.
According to MediaWeek, Bloomberg's initial plans are to make BusinessWeek "bigger, glossier and more international". Talking Biz News, whose sources were at a meeting conducted by Bloomberg exec and future BusinessWeek chairman Norm Pearlstine, is reporting that the overhaul would "focus on making it more competitive with The Economist and less like Fortune and Forbes".
There is now a mobile device dedicated to Twitter. Why?
It may be hard to wrap your head around a device that exists solely to Twitter, but that does not negate its existence.
Starting today, Amazon is selling the TweetPeek. For the low price of $199, you can tweet for life. You may be wondering why you would shell out $200 for a feature that can be easily had on most mobile phones already. Well, that's a good question.
The NLA explains why it is going after the news aggregators
The Newspaper Licensing Agency (NLA) licenses companies to copy from national and regional newspapers and collects fees on their behalf.
I've been talking to the NLA's commercial director Andrew Hughes about the fees newspapers are asking web monitoring services such as NewsNow to pay in order to index and link to their content...
30+ Twitter Lists and 5000+ Twitter accounts worth following
Twitter Lists are now officially available to all of Twitter's users. And there are plenty of them. While it remains to be seen whether Twitter Lists will help Twitter boost user engagement, Lists offer a no-hassle means to discovering and following people who you might find interesting.
Here are 30+ Twitter Lists that collectively follow more than 5,000 interesting Twitter accounts.
Case study: e.l.f. is changing the cosmetics industry, $1 at a time
Through a mix of social media, word of mouth and user generated
content, women around the country have slowly been learning the secret
to buying cheap cosmetics online. It comes in the name e.l.f. The brand
(which stands for Eyes Lips Face) has been selling cosmetics online for
five years at absurdly low price points. For a long time all their
products could be found for $1 each.
Designed by Scott Borba, the man behind Hard Candy and Neutrogena Men, e.l.f. cuts out the marketing budget — and markup — that most cosmetics companies attach to their products. And the results have been astounding. This week, e.l.f. is making a large push into Target stores and online. The company is on track to reach over $20 million in sales this year.
With price points at $1, $3 and $5 an item, that's a lot of lip gloss. How did they do it?
Facebook wins $711 million anti-spam lawsuit. But social spam is here to stay.
By now everyone online is accustomed to receiving and filtering spam in their inboxes, but recent spamming attacks on social sites like Facebook have caught many by surprise. Facebook is hoping to change all that, with a court win this week against uber spammer Sanford Wallace.
Facebook hopes that a $711 million fine and the threat of jail time will not only sideline Wallace, but function as a deterrent to future social spammers. But let's be honest. That's not going to happen.
Case study: how to lose customers and destroy your brand
Software licensing can be a tough business. But if you're able to build a great product and acquire customers, it can be a rewarding business. The founders of Jelsoft, the company behind the popular vBulletin message board software, know that first hand.
Having built arguably the best message board software out there, they sold Jelsoft to Internet Brands in 2007 for an undisclosed amount. And two years later, Internet Brands is facing a violent customer revolt over a new product and new licensing terms.
Why SEM isn't all that
You have to love a contentious headline. In this article, I won't be declaring search engine marketing (SEM) dead. What I want to explore are the various ways you should support this kind of marketing elsewhere on your website.
Social media: the best and worst of 2009
Email marketing: six steps to improving customer engagement in 2010
Web 2.0
Graham Charlton
Strategy & Planning
