Does Apple's textbook success prove that tech bloggers are too gullible?
It's official: Apple's attempt to revolutionise the textbook industry has 'succeeded'.
Just three days in, more than 350,000 textbooks have been downloaded via iBookstore - and iBooks Author has been downloaded 90,000 times.
In fact, over the course of a single weekend Apple has established "a very strong following with authors, publishers, faculty and students and may capture 95% of digital textbook market."
Court: blogger isn't a journalist, owes $2.5m
In the age of the internet, every individual may have their own personal printing press, but that doesn't mean that the same legal protections afforded to journalists are always available to bloggers.
Something that Crystal Cox, an Oregon-based blogger who is facing a $2.5m judgment for publishing information an investment firm alleged was defamatory, knows all too well.
What big brands can learn from bloggers
Businesses are usually at the forefront of online marketing. But when it comes to utilising social platforms, there's a lot they could learn from humble bloggers.
In this post, I look at some social promotional tactics that mega-brands could benefit from, if only they could carry them off.
Buying bloggers: when will brands come to their senses?
The cozy relationships brands have forged with bloggers have been controversial from the start.
Are marketing and PR initiatives that target bloggers smart strategy, or are they little more than a flawed "I'll scratch your back if you scratch mine" approach to social media?
The concerns over the latter have been so great that government agencies have scrutinized how brands work with bloggers, and how those bloggers promote those brands to their readers.
Brands buy 'influence', but do they really get it?
Forget 'audience', 'unique visitors' and 'page views.' Thanks to social media, more and more brands are looking to base media buys on new metrics like 'influence.'
Take, for instance, the brands that are turning to the Influencer Network put together by Condé Nast's Vogue.
AdWeek describes the Influencer Network as "a panel of some 1,000 women deemed to have sway over other women, based on how active they are on social networks like Facebook and Polyvore, a fashion site where people create collages of outfits and share them with other members."
PR firms need to get hip to the new rules for reviews
PR has always been a tough industry. At the end of the day, PR firms are in the business of selling stories in a world filled with stories.
But PR firms aren't without tools that can help their clients stand out. One: free product.
J.C. Penney part deux: look at our high-quality paid links!
It's been a bad week for J.C. Penney, which found itself penalized by Google and scrutinized by the media after a paid link scheme apparently orchestrated by an outside vendor -- now fired -- was uncovered and detailed in the New York Times.
Not surprisingly, J.C. Penney isn't sitting idly by. It's defending itself.
Kuwaiti blogger sued for bad review #BenihanaKUW
Kuwaiti blogger Mark Makhoul recently wrote a very critical review of Benihana on his blog. The restaurant's reaction? It sued the blogger...
The reaction of the restaurant to this criticism provides an excellent lesson in how not to respond to criticism online, and it has seriously backfired so far, with the story spreading all across the Middle East and further.
Will the OFT regulate paid tweets?
Marketers have been paying celebrities to endorse their products and services for decades, so it's no surprise that there's a booming market for celebrity endorsements via their social media profiles.
With the help of companies like Ad.ly, celebrities and 'influencers' are reportedly earning thousands upon thousands of dollars for a single tweet or Facebook status update.
In the United States, marketers paying high-profile individuals to tweet and blog about their products worried the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) so much that it developed guidelines around the practice.
The HuffPo's compensation conundrum
If you're the head of a struggling newspaper, The Huffington Post has an enviable business model. While content production is almost always the greatest cost in running a publishing/media business, it largely relies on the writing of an unpaid army of contributors. The value proposition the HuffPo offers them: exposure to a very large audience.
It's a model that has been the source of controversy. After all, the HuffPo is a for-profit business, yet it doesn't pay the vast majority of the individuals who labor for it. That's an especially interesting thing for a company founded by a person who wrote a book entitled "Pigs at the Trough: How Corporate Greed and Political Corruption Are Undermining America."
