Category: Marketing

As this Rocketboom story explains, nycgarbage.com sells cubes of NYC trash — artfully arranged — at $50 a box. What’s interesting is that what started as a proof of the power of packaging turned into a proof of the power of pricing — increasing from $10 per cube to $50.  Ultimately, the success of the…

Professor Michael Wesch created the following video – it’s “Web 2.0 in five minutes” – using “CamStudio for the screen captures and Sony Vegas for the panning/cropping/zooming animations.” Beyond the content itself—remarkably current for a March 2007 release—we should study this use of media.  It represents an emerging (if not “new”) way for businesses and thinkers to…

This post is about a different kind of contract—it’s the contract you make with yourself as a writer. Thanks to National Novel Writing Month—NaNoWriMo—November has become an annual fest of unfettered word-cranking. Participants are encouraged to write at least 50,000 words from scratch.  Your inner wordsmith gets the keys to a gassed-up muscle car and…

From my perspective, Gary Vaynerchuk—the boy from Belarus who grew his family’s liquor store in New Jersey into a multimillion-dollar business, and who is now teaching others to use customer service (especially via social media) to grow their businesses—has set a new standard for all authors supporting their books. I’m piecing together a write-up of…

In “Marketing Small Businesses with Twitter” [NYT, 7/23/09], Claire Cain Miller profiles some small businesses that are using Twitter’s free platform to communicate with customers and peers. See the New York Times site: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/23/business/smallbusiness/23twitter.html. When we strip away the hype around Twitter (hype that is already normalizing a bit), we can see Twitter as a…

We had the pleasure of editing the first edition of NetLingo, Erin Jansen’s dictionary of approximately 2,500 terms related to computing and the Internet. Today, NetLingo.com was cited in The Wall Street Journal, in an article by Stephanie Raposo on translating the abbreviations used in texting. You can read the article, “Quick! Tell Us What…

Recently, I was speaking with a consultant who is writing her first book.  Since I found myself rambling and ranting, I knew I had some bloggable material.  Below, I present some of what I learned on the editor’s side of the wall: First of all, don’t worry about marketing strategy unless you’re sure that you…

I found myself wanting to share a video (below), but then realized that the pathway I took in discovering the video demonstrates the value of having a Twitter presence that’s coordinated with a Website presence. In calling it a “relay,” I’m inspired by my daughter’s recent field day activities – slapping hands or handing off…

On Friday, May 8, Chris Hughes spoke at NYU Stern. Hughes, 25, is a cofounder of Facebook and was a driving force behind Obama’s online campaign juggernaut My.BarackObama.com. He sat on a dais for one and amiably answered questions from Stern professor Jeffrey Carr and the audience. The luncheon was hosted by the Berkley Center…

Skittles stirred up quite a bit of chatter this week by outsourcing most of its Website to major social networking sites. In a move that is presumably acceptable to Twitter, YouTube, Wikipedia, Flickr, and Facebook (even though it reminds me of framing external sites within one’s own site, a technique long frowned upon since it…