Mircea Baldean's shared items in Google Reader

U.S., Canada Set Deal on 'Buy American'

(author unknown) — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 16:14:29 PST

The U.S. and Canada, reached a preliminary deal to settle a dispute over "Buy American" provisions in the U.S. stimulus package.

Exchange-traded funds: Trillion-dollar babies

(author unknown) — Thu, 21 Jan 2010 02:37:35 PST

A fast-growing asset class

NOT all financial innovations have come to grief in the credit crunch. The explosive growth of exchange-traded funds (ETFs), investment pools that are listed on stockmarkets around the world, continued throughout the past decade. At the end of 2009 ETF assets under management topped the $1 trillion mark for the first time, according to BlackRock, a fund-management firm. The industry’s assets were just $40 billion at the end of 1999.

The industry has been growing faster than hedge funds, but with much less negative publicity. ETFs are usually linked to a stockmarket index or asset class and give retail investors a way of diversifying their assets at relatively low cost. The average expense ratio—the proportion of assets that gets eaten up by the cost of running a fund—of an American-based ETF was 31 basis points (less than a third of a percentage point) at the end of 2009. By contrast, the average expenses of index-tracking mutual funds were 78 basis points, and actively managed funds had expenses almost twice as high. ...

8 ways to use social media

GuyKawasaki — Mon, 25 Jan 2010 07:38:39 PST

Here’s a great video by Lewis Howes on how companies should use social media. In less than six minutes, you can learn the elements of good social-media practices.

Think the Internet Will Replace Cable ? Read this first

markcuban — Wed, 13 Jan 2010 20:39:24 PST

As is the normal way on the internet, people love to read headlines. Of course they rarely read the substance of the article behind the headline. They take the headline and run with it as gospel. This is particularly true of internet video and the presumption by many that the internet will be so vast and powerful that its a foregone conclusion that video on the internet will replace traditional television delivery.

Aint gonna happen. I can go into depth about it, but my buddy Dan Rayburn does a far better job of it. He asks the simple question of “how is it the Youtube , with all of google’s resources,. cant solve their buffering problem ? ” Then he answers much of it.

Now maybe Youtube will fix their buffering problem someday, along with the other issues that Dan addresses, but it wont be easy and it wont be quick.

You can find Dan’s work here. Make sure to also read the comments. He does a good job there as well

Let me add a couple other thoughts. There are many that think that video over the internet will “set them free” from having to deal with a small number of big companies (think cable, telco). . If that is what you think, you better think again. There are maybe 3 companies that can stream to 1mm or more simultaneous users. Google, Limelight and Akamai. And that 1mm simultaneous users isnt just for your content. That is for EVERYONE’s content and they cant get much beyond 2mm without big problems. More importantly, if you want to stream your content to millions of users at once, its going to cost you an incredible amount of money.

Which leads me to a lesson for all you netizens who are jazzed up about over the top video. If you really believe the demand is there and your content will command 1mm simultaneous users , its probably cheaper to pay Directv, Dish Network and Comcast to create a channel for you and let your viewers watch it on tv.

Let that sink in. Its going to be cheaper to have the big traditional cable distributors offer your content to viewers than it will be to reach a large audience on the net. Thats for a one time offering. If you plan on doing it more than once or on a regularly scheduled basic, there is no question its cheaper to do it this way. And the picture quality will be dramatically better.

In fact, that is probably a great business opportunity for satellite, telco and cable companies. Open up times to bid to offer content over their networks. You want channel 1020 on Directv, its X dollars per hour minimum or the best price bid. Here is how you provide your content to us. You can buy marketing from us as well. Directv, Dish, Comcast could make a boatload of extra money offering this service.

And i can give you one more option. It may be cheaper to go to a movie theater chain and pay them to broadcast the content you want people to see via digital to their theaters. As long as its a slow night and they can sell popcorn, I can assure you it will cost you less than a content distribution network would charge to deliver to thousands of viewers.

Maybe someday over the top video will be a realistic alternative to traditional distribution of content, but its not now and its not this year or next or the next and probably not the year after that

ShareThis

Why Google isn't racing from China

Mark MacKinnon — Mon, 18 Jan 2010 14:17:00 PST

Old China hands accept that doing business in the country means playing by different rules

The Future Is Evidently Blurry

chrisbrogan — Tue, 12 Jan 2010 19:51:50 PST

I just came back from CES, the largest consumer electronics show, and from what I can tell, the future is in blurry TVs. Okay, not really blurry. 3d. Most of the big TV vendors think we’re going to sit in our living room and watch 3D TV. When I polled people around me, most of them said they didn’t want to wear glasses in their living rooms. Me? I don’t even own a TV now, so not sure I get a vote on that one.

(Quick note: None of these folks are clients. Some of these folks have been clients.)

I wanted to share a few snaps with you from the event, and a cool video down at the bottom. From my perspective, here’s what I took away from the event:

Tablet computing is back and hot, only now it’s mostly in single-purpose e-readers. Is this going to be really true? I have my doubts. Of them, the coolest I saw was the Hearst Skiff.
Personal video cameras to compete with Cisco’s Flip camera are all the rage. I saw Kodak’s new camera, as well as Sony’s Bloggie. Sony gave me an evaluation copy of the new Bloggie, so you’ll get a review soon (Thanks, Sukhjit!)
TVs will be 3D. I’m still not sold on this, but that seemed to be the big feature I saw. Oh, and widgetized TVs that let you tweet.
Cars are now extensions of computing platforms. Ford made some big splashes about this. It was interesting to consider.
The Minority Report is coming. The video at the very bottom of this post shows the amazing Intel Info Cube (or whatever they called it). The wall was basically just a way to demo their new something-something-7 chip (hey, this isn’t Engadget), but I was blown away by the wall. Pair it with Microsoft Surface and you’ve got something. (I’m really serious, Bryan and Ken, about licensing the tech).
The show is just to big and crazy to see everything. Perhaps not exactly a point about technology, but CES is overwhelming in its size. Getting a printed paper map is no longer good enough to attend this event. We need some kind of interactive planner that lets us map the event according to topics of interest. (Please?)
And the show is much more a media show than a buyer’s show, at least for the bigger companies.

Where do I think the consumer electronics space is going? Beats the heck out of me. I think it’s pretty amazing how the show seemed stuffed to the gills with attendees and that the technology companies were there in full force. Nothing felt skimped on, so that’s something.

And now, for a few snaps and the cool Intel wall video.

Sony Bloggie (one of two or three configurations

Great Art Made at the Speck Booth

Evidently iPhone/iTouch accessories are popular.

Chevy Volt Looking Slick

Very Much a Media Show

Any place that boasts Dr Dre, Lady Gaga, Brent Spiner and Levar Burton and more isn’t really just about the gadgets any longer.

Please, Santa: Bring me THIS Next Year?

Simply, I need this wall. Okay?

Did you go? What’d you think? What do you think in general about the state of consumer electronics? Are you getting more and more interested in gadgets, or where are your interests going instead?

Why ask why?

Seth Godin — Thu, 07 Jan 2010 03:02:00 PST

The secret to creativity is curiosity.

We often forget to teach kids to be curious. A student who has no perceived math ability, or illegible handwriting or the inability to sit still for five minutes gets immediate and escalating attention. The student with no curiosity, on the other hand, is no problem at all. Lumps are easily managed.

Same thing is true for most of the people we hire. We'd like them to follow instructions, not ask questions, not question the status quo.

Yet, without "why?" there can be no, "here's how to make it better."

Build Response By Blasting Buzz Marketing - Stun Them!!

(author unknown) — Mon, 11 Jan 2010 19:09:34 PST

Shake things up and grab attention with Buzz Marketing. In new marketing, whether it's word-of-mouth, buzz, viral or social media the rules are reversed. Your target customers don't join you - you join them. You do all the work to create the relationship and present the story. Here's how to get people talking about your brand and keep them talking.

Hollywood and the internet: Coming soon

(author unknown) — Thu, 07 Jan 2010 02:42:06 PST

The film business tries to learn from others’ mistakes

HOLLYWOOD came late to the internet. Protected for years from digital piracy by huge file sizes, it was not forced to develop an online retail model, as the music business was. Nor, having watched newspapers struggle on the internet, did it much want to try. This week it finally stepped forward, touting two systems for selling films and television shows online. The initiatives are well thought-out, reflecting the lessons learned from watching others’ mistakes. But they may also be too late.

Legal film downloads in America accounted for just $250m last year, according to Adams Media Research. In many countries there is no legitimate market. That would not worry anybody, except that sales of DVDs, the silver discs that rebuilt Hollywood’s fortunes over the past decade, are faltering. They have fallen from $12 billion in 2004 to $8.7 billion in 2009 (see chart). It seems that consumers have rediscovered renting—which is less lucrative for Hollywood—through the post and the rapidly-proliferating kiosks owned by Redbox. ...

Nokia tries to reinvent itself: Bears at the door

(author unknown) — Thu, 07 Jan 2010 02:42:06 PST

Can the world’s largest handset-maker regain the initiative?

ASK Finns about their national character and chances are the word sisu will come up. It is an amalgam of steadfastness and diligence, but also courage, recklessness and fierce tenacity. “It takes sisu to stand at the door when the bear is on the other side,” a folk saying goes.

There are plenty of bears these days at the doors of Nokia, the Finnish firm that is the world’s biggest maker of mobile handsets. Although it is still the global leader in the fast-growing market for smart-phones, its devices are losing ground to Apple’s iPhone and to the BlackBerry, made by Research in Motion (RIM). On January 5th Google took a further step into the market with the launch of the Nexus One, a handset made by HTC of Taiwan that the internet giant will sell directly to consumers, and which runs Android, Google’s operating system for smart-phones. ...

Inside Google, data drives 'everything'

(author unknown) — Mon, 21 Dec 2009 14:12:12 PST

Inside Google, data drives 'everything'
Register - Dec 21, 2009

Newly-appointed Google evangelist Don Dodge has confirmed that inside the Mountain View Chocolate Factory, decisions - big and small - are driven almost entirely by data analysis. "Everything is ...

Voice May Join Google's Enterprise Lineup - TechCrunch
Google Voice to Join Google Apps for Businesses - Erictric
TechWhack

Facebook Joins the 2009 Web Trend Party

Kit Eaton — Tue, 22 Dec 2009 14:47:53 PST

Facebook's released a very detailed analysis of the trends in status updates for 2009, and it's fascinating stuff. For example, did you know Facebookers are depressed on Mondays, and mourned Patrick Swayze about as much as Michael Jackson?

Facebook's Data Team put the list together, and it's a little more sophisticated than other trend lists you've probably seen. Facebook's calling it Memology--a map of the emerging memes of the year. The data was pulled from U.S. users status updates for the whole year, with an algorithm trawling for phrases of between one and four words, looking for bursts of interest in new phrases an comparing the data with 2008's results. The top ten memes are shown in the table above.

Straight off the bat there's an ironic surprise sitting at number ten: Twitter. Facebook and Twitter are busily engaged in a pitched battle to be the one true measure of what the World is talking about in real time, so it's fab to see Facebookers talking about Twitter so much. Talking about this, Facebook can't resist slipping in a subtle dig: "April showed a peak of activity and momentum, though mentions of the word "Twitter" decreased over the past few months."

The "Celebrity Deaths" meme isn't much of a surprise, given the big-name stars who've departed this mortal coil in 2009. Facebook notes that while the fuss about Michael Jackson resulted in the biggest peak of keyword frequency for any event this year, the attention faded away very quickly. After a week, statuses were mentioning Jackson about as much as before his death. Facebook's diverse user base is also reflected in the fact that when Patrick Swayze died, the peak of status updates mentioning the sad news was about the same (two thirds) as when Jackson died.

The rest of the list is pretty unsurprising: Since Facebook is all about self-expression, and relationships between people, the fact that "Mom," "Dad," "kids" and "I" were frequently used is a no-brainer. Sports and current affairs like H1N1 and the health-care debate were big news too. Lady Gaga's presence on the list is a slight surprise, but the star has really forcibly stolen the limelight, and appeals to Facebook's younger demographic. "Yard," however, has Facebook stumped--is this an emergent slang phrase?

And then there's the "FML" graph. This charts yearly usage of the three letter acronym which is a digital expression of, ahem, general blueness (in a not-safe-for-work lingo)...and it's amazing. The May weather and exams seem to have sparked a peak in depressed status updates, along with the return to school and the end of Summer in September. The use of FML on a day-to-day basis also peaks on Monday and Tuesday--but that's totally understandable, and is a phenomenon long since perfectly summed up by Garfield.

Having trawled through Facebook's data, here's a look back at Twitter's and YouTube's trends for this year:

January: inauguration February: christian bale March: the climb April: susan boyle May: pacquiao vs hatton June: michael jackson thriller July: michael jackson August: usain bolt September: kanye west October: paranormal activity November: bad romance December: tiger woods

The differences from Facebook are striking aren't they? Lady Gaga or Patrick Swayze don't get a nod on Twitter or YouTube--which is odd, given the video-friendly nature of Gaga and the news-breaking nature of Twitter for Swayze [Note: Yes, i get it now. November in YouTube was Lady Gaga month. My bad. Or possibly: My good, if you don't like her either.]. It also looks like Facebookers are more religious than Twitterers or YouTubers, which is possibly due to the fact that so many adults use Facebook over the other two.

Of course the daddy of trend maps for 2009 is going to be Google's year-end popular search phrase list, since Google is the tool most people use to find out the good stuff online. We can't guess at the order of the list, of course, but we can have a stab at predicting some of the members, given the data from Facebook, Twitter and YouTube. Michael Jackson and H1N1 will be in the top three, along with Obama, I suspect. Your guesses in the comments...

[Via blog.Facebook]

Last.fm's Year in Music: New York, London, and the World

Cliff Kuang — Tue, 22 Dec 2009 13:38:35 PST

The differences are a lot more pronounced than you'd guess.

Last.fm has released two great charts illustrating the year's most popular music in New York, London, and the World. (Click those links for full-size versions.)

Last.fm has always been a haven for data nerds (if you've got a subscription, you can create one of these charts of your own listening history). But when you see that data in the aggregate, it starts to look pretty strange, when you think about it.

We all assume that cities have different, edgier tastes than the 'burbs. But did you really think the differences would be this large? And the cities themselves aren't similar at all. Here's a detail of New York:

And London:

There's very little overlap in popular music in those two musical trendsetting cities.

The graphs actually illustrate some facets of the current music industry. To become a world-wide smash, you need big record labels and the marketing muscle they bring. But even without that, a band can become quite big indeed. A band like Animal Collective, for example, is still relatively obscure. But they can sell-out live shows by the tens-of-thousands.

A decade ago, that kind of popularity would have at least garnered several gold records. And the following appearance on the Billboard charts or some such would have been enough to propel a small band to global success. (The best example: Look at Nirvana, Pearl Jam, and the other big "alternative" acts of the 1990s, which seemed to spring from nowhere but hit the mainstream when they started appearing on the bottom of record charts.)

In the age of illegal downloading, the playing field has changed radically. A band like Animal Collective has what amounts to an artificial cap on their world-wide popularity--that is, without a single metric of their popularity, such as record sales, they'll always look tiny and indie even though they've got a huge following. They'll never boast splashy album sales numbers, which amount to better marketing than they could ever buy. They'll have to rely on niche tastemakers like Brooklyn Vegan or Pitchfork. The result, I think: Global pop music is getting more and more boring, because "breaking through" isn't possible. The fresh blood just can't compete.

(For all you data nerds: This type of graph is called a Stream graph, and it was invented just a couple years ago by Lee Byron--incidentally, as a project to visualize his own listening history on Last.fm. The most famous application so far has been this graphic that Byron created for The New York Times, which shows 2008 box office sales over time.)

Microsoft's Lost Court Case: Change "Word" or Stop Selling It [Updated]

Kit Eaton — Wed, 23 Dec 2009 09:38:48 PST

Boom! This is a broadside attack fired right into Microsoft's exposed flank: It's just lost a court case against Canadian firm i4i over patents. The penalty is a $290 million fine, and an order to fix MS Word's code, or stop selling it.

Back in August Microsoft was determined to be in violation of XML-customization patents owned by i4i, and also, thanks to the dominance of the word processor in the workplace, of capturing 80% of the XML add-on market, which caused disruption to i4i's normal business. That was a district court decision, and Microsoft appealed. It's that appeal which has just been denied by the U.S. Court of Appeals. (XML, for those not in the know, is a digital language for encoding the format of word-processed documents.)

The penalty is a fine of nearly a third of a billion dollars, which is significant enough to slightly dent MS's bottom line. But the injunction granted against Microsoft also requires the company to excise the infringing XML code from the on-sale version of Word. Within three weeks. Or, and this is the absolute shocker: Microsoft must stop selling Word.

As a key part of Microsoft Office, and a vital tool used by business people, academics and people at home the world over (no matter how maligned it is for being badly written an user-unfriendly), if MS were to stop selling Word the repercussions could be surprising. And of course, Microsoft isn't taking that route--you can imagine it has a coding team on the surgical removal job already. Oddly the injunction also requires MS to stop "using" the infringing versions of Word too--though we can only assume that means within the company, rather than barring everyone around the World from using copies of Word 2007.

[Via SeattlePI]

Update: According to the folks at ComputerWorld I was right--Microsoft's coder team was very swift (or had planned in advance) and Micorosoft now has a patch available that strips out the infringing XML edit-related code from Microsoft Office. The patch is intended for original equipment makers that churn out Windows PCs in vast numbers--but though MS was swift, the court-imposed three week deadline is likely to cause a headache for makers like Dell who'll already have huge numbers of PCs partly built, or in store-rooms awaiting order. All of these machines will have to be patched if they're to be sold after January 11.

Online Canadians Have Aggressively Embraced Social Technologies -- And So Have Canadian Marketers

Nate Elliott — Thu, 03 Dec 2009 06:11:06 PST

[Posted by Nate Elliott. Follow me on twitter.]

I've spent the last year living and working in Vancouver, Canada -- speaking with many Canadian interactive marketers and agencies, and collecting survey data on Canadian consumers -- so I'm pleased to say that yesterday we released a new report, Canadian Social Technographics Revealed, and added our latest Canadian data to our free Social Technographics Profile Tool.

In researching this report, I learned that:

Canadians are the most active social networkers in any market we survey. In our Social Technographics Ladder, we refer to those who regularly use social networks as 'joiners.' And Canada boasts a higher percentage of joiners than any of the other 12 countries we regularly survey: 57% of Canadians told us they use social networks at least once each month. (The next strongest social networking market is the US, where 51% are joiners.) Canada also has more 'creators,' critics,' and 'spectators' than many other countries. [An edit to avoid confusion: while Canadians are the strongest adopters of social networks we've found in our surveys, they are not the strongest users of social media overall (which would include not just social networks but also blogs and other social platforms) -- that would be the South Koreans.]
Many Canadian marketers have been using social media for years. With all those socially engaged consumers, it's no surprise Canadian marketers have been pretty aggressive in adopting social media too. The report includes several great examples of marketers successfully using social media, and I found that some of the most innovative marketers (like Vancity and Molson) have been leveraging social media for 3 or 4 years now.

One of my favorite examples of social media marketing in Canada comes from the political realm. NDP leader Jack Layton recognized that his followers were among the most socially engaged in Canada, as you'll see below. So he used Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube to energize NDP voters before the 2008 federal election -- and that helped the party gain 31% more seats in Ottawa than they'd had in the previous government.

Go and have a play with our Social Technographics Profile Tool and you can find free cuts of this data by age and gender. (Clients can also ask us to cut the data by other factors, like where people bank, which mobile carrier they use, or what province they live in.)

And if you've got any other great examples of social media marketing in Canada, let us know in the comments below.

Bing/News Corp: Not a Game Changer

Shar Van Boskirk — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 13:52:38 PST

Posted by Shar VanBoskirk and Sarah Rotman Epps]

Media outlets report that Microsoft and News Corp are in talks about an exclusive relationship, where Microsoft would pay News Corp to remove its content from Google and allow it to be indexed only through Microsoft's Bing.

My colleague Sarah Rotman Epps and I put our heads together on the potential deal. Here is our take:

News Corp’s short-term desperation will sabotage its long-term interests. Everyone is watching newspaper companies lose more ad revenues as subscriptions fall even lower in 2009 than the declining trajectory they have been on since 2000. Getting consumers to pay for content is a hard sell; media companies may have an easier time generating revenue by licensing their content to other companies, like portals, device makers, and non-media companies like Fidelity who need content for their Web sites. Murdoch wants a deal like this to get MS to pay him for the opportunity to index his companies' content. But the tradeoff for short-term revenue could be long-term irrelevance: If consumers don’t find Newscorp results in Google searches, they’ll just click on another content source. “If a tree falls in the woods…” could be rephrased as “If a site isn’t indexed by Google, does it really exist?” For the 65% of searches relying on Google, the answer is no.

Microsoft wins publisher goodwill, but probably not much search traffic. Bing has enjoyed growth in its share of searches since its launch in summer 2009, but it still accounts for only about 10% of searches compared to Google's 65%. So Microsoft needs to do everything it can to try to gain search traffic. I see this as another way to try to drive searchers to use Bing instead of other possible search engines. But stealing one content source from Google won’t be enough to change consumers’ search habits.

Consumers don't care about a deal like this. Consumers do not expect search engines to be exclusive. In their minds, search engines are gateways to answers, and if they can’t find something through search, it may as well not exist. So, while News Corp and MS might enjoy scratching each others backs in a deal like this, consumers won't know and won't care that Bing is the only place they can find Wall Street Journal articles and other News Corp content.

Most content doesn't have enough value for exclusivity to matter. A number of reporters have asked me if this is the beginning of something big in terms of media/search engine deal. My take is no way. Because frankly content is plentiful and cheap and consumers are very good at finding what they need without having to pay for it or be inconvenienced to get it. So while News Corp may have some content that still qualifies as "exclusive," I don't see many other media firms having any leverage to create similar deals with search engines.

See Forrester's blog for Consumer Product Strategy Professionals for additional take on this deal and others affecting the media industries.

Guest Post: Tom Cummings on how marketers are using Twitter (and what they can do better)

Nate Elliott — Fri, 11 Dec 2009 10:06:17 PST

As a Forrester analyst I get to work with a fantastic team of researchers – including Tom Cummings, who contributes some great work to our research on social media marketing and a wide range of other topics. Below, Tom discusses a piece of research we collaborated on, covering how marketers are using Twitter:

[Posted by Tom Cummings.]

We recently published WebTrack review of how major companies are using Twitter. Over a span of three days in October, we tracked 30 marketers on Twitter to see how they named and branded their accounts, how often they tweeted, how they interacted with other Twitter users, and more. We didn't just study the most popular accounts on Twitter – instead, we looked for a broad sample of accounts across key industries (including retail, travel, financial services, auto, and CPG).

For the most part, brands get the basics right. The large majority interact with followers (more than three-quarters of the brands we tracked reply and retweet). And most fill their streams with a steady flow of relevant content (80% tweet at least daily). We especially liked seeing companies go beyond traditional marketing messages – like when State Farm promotes fire alarm safety or when Ford gives behind-the-scenes perspective on their new engineering processes.

But while most get the basics right, many branded Twitter accounts still fall short on some key points. For instance, it’s surprisingly difficult to find the appropriate account for many brands. Neither Google nor Twitter search offer an ideal way to find a company's official account – and often, a company's official primary account isn't the most active or the most followed.

We were also surprised that only half of the accounts we reviewed “validate” their Twitter page. It's not enough to link from a Twitter account to a corporate page – those corporate pages must also link back to the account to prove that the account is official.

We like how Whole Foods – which runs more than 100 official accounts – handles both of these problems: They keep their primary account name simple and searchable (@WholeFoods) and link from that account to a list of all their other accounts. Other marketers should follow suit – because it’s up to them to prove the authenticity of their account (no matter how many followers they have) and to make it easy for fans to find the right account to follow.

Clients can read more examples and findings in the full report. In the meantime, we’d love to hear how your brand is using Twitter, how you let fans know about the account, and what other tips you have for best leveraging the power of Twitter.

My Speech at LeWeb

chrisbrogan — Thu, 10 Dec 2009 08:29:31 PST

Here’s my speech from Loic LeMeur’s LeWeb event in Paris. It’s a bundle of my most recent ideas, mixed with Trust Agents. Here’s the video:

If you can’t see it, click here.

Is it too late to catch up?

Seth Godin — Thu, 03 Dec 2009 03:01:00 PST

What if your organization or your client has done nothing?

What if they've just watched the last fourteen years go by? No real website, no social media, no permission assets. What if now they're ready and they ask your advice? And, by the way, they have no real cash to spend...

Here's a list of my top ten things to consider doing:

Use gmail to give every person in the organization that can read English an email address.
Use a free website creating tool or even Squidoo to build a page about your company. Nothing fancy, but list your locations, your people (with addresses) and make it clear you want to hear from people.
Start an email newsletter using Mad Mimi or Mail Chimp. Give the responsibility for the newsletter's creation and performance to one person and offer them a bonus if they exceed metrics in sign ups and in reducing churn.
Start a book group for your top executives and every person who answers the phone, designs a product or interacts with customers. Read a great online media book a week and discuss. It'll take you about a year to catch up.
Offer a small bonus to anyone in the company who starts and runs a blog on any topic. Have them link to your company site, with an explanation that while they work there, they don't speak for you.
Have the president post her (real) email address in every invoice and other communication the company sends out, asking people to write to her with comments or questions.
Start a newsletter for your vendors. Email them regular updates about what you're doing, what's selling and what problems are going on internally that they might be able to help you with.
Do not approve any project that isn't run on Basecamp.
Get a white board and put it in the break room. On it, have someone update: how many people subscribe to the newsletter, how many people visit the website, how many inbound requests come in by phone, how long it takes customer service to answer an email and how often your brand names are showing up on Twitter every day.
Don't have any meetings about your web strategy. Just do stuff. First you have to fail, then you can improve.
Refuse to cede the work to consultants. You don't outsource your drill press or your bookkeeping or your product design. If you're going to catch up, you must (all of you) get good at this, and you only accomplish that by doing it.

The problem is no longer budget. The problem is no longer access to tools.

The problem is the will to get good at it.

How to protect your ideas in the digital age

Seth Godin — Mon, 07 Dec 2009 02:23:00 PST

If we're in the idea business, how to protect those ideas?

One way is to misuse trademark law. With the help of search engines, greedy lawyers who charge by the letter are busy sending claim letters to anyone who even comes close to using a word or phrase they believe their client 'owns'. News flash: trademark law is designed to make it clear who makes a good or a service. It's a mark we put on something we create to indicate the source of the thing, not the inventor of a word or even a symbol. They didn't invent trademark law to prevent me from putting a picture of your cricket team's logo on my blog. They invented it to make it clear who was selling you something (a mark for trade = trademark).

I'm now officially trademarking thank-you™. From now on, whenever you use this word, please be sure to send me a royalty check.

Another way to protect your ideas is to (mis)use copyright law. You might think that this is a federal law designed to allow you to sue people who steal your ideas. It's not. Ideas are free. Anyone can use them. Copyright protects the expression of ideas, the particular arrangement of words or sounds or images. Bob Marley's estate can't sue anyone who records a reggae song... only the people who use his precise expression of words or music. Sure, get very good at expressing yourself (like Dylan or Sarah Jones) and then no one can copy your expression. But your ideas? They're up for grabs, and its a good thing too.

The challenge for people who create content isn't to spend all the time looking for pirates. It's to build a platform for commerce, a way and a place to get paid for what they create. Without that, you've got no revenue stream and pirates are irrelevant anyway. Newspapers aren't in trouble because people are copying the news. They're in trouble because they forgot to build a scalable, profitable online model for commerce.

Patents are an option except they're really expensive and do nothing but give you the right to sue. And they're best when used to protect a particular physical manifestation of an idea. It's a real crapshoot to spend tens of thousands of dollars to patent an idea you thought up in the shower one day.

So, how to protect your ideas in a world where ideas spread?

Don't.

Instead, spread them. Build a reputation as someone who creates great ideas, sometimes on demand. Or as someone who can manipulate or build on your ideas better than a copycat can. Or use your ideas to earn a permission asset so you can build a relationship with people who are interested. Focus on being the best tailor with the sharpest scissors, not the litigant who sues any tailor who deigns to use a pair of scissors.