Current thinking in the newspaper biz is that the cure to what ails them is to figure out how to get some of the people to pay for some of the content. In other words, keep some stuff for free, but charge for the stuff that people really want. Not a bad strategy, and […]

Yesterday’s article about Facebook’s new search feature was as much a discussion of its strategic direction as it was the new feature. The article spent a lot of time explaining the travails around Facebook’s attempt to be more like Twitter and how its next update will eschew that in favor of the features that existed […]

I had the opportunity a month or so ago to moderate a CTIA panel of really neat people who wanted to talk about mobile social networking. Panelists ranged from execs from online gaming companies to those who operate online walled gardens (around dating and gaming and just general networking) to a company that aggregates […]

Really interesting article in yesterday’s NYT Magazine on the value (or lack thereof) of reader-posted comments to news websites. The author makes her case that reader generated comments are nothing more than the rehashed rants of the fringe who don’t really read the post but instead use the comments section as a forum to posit […]

Last week, Connor Mulcahey, 13, downloaded Bump onto his iPhone. Bump let’s you trade contact info and other stuff like photos on your iPhone to a nearby iPhone. Using an internet connection you select what you want to share with your chum and then you bump your phones together or wave them nearby. […]

Long airplane rides are great for catching up on my reading. But instead of putting my nose in the latest John Grisham novel, I opted to flip thru the March 9th issue of Fortune instead which carried the cover story, “How Facebook is Taking Over Our Lives.” It wasn’t all that fresh in terms […]

What do Randall Stross, Karen Webster and Aaron Strout all have in common? The same view on the prospects of “Friending” Your Toothpaste.
Would You Join a Toothpaste Community?
This post was co-authored by Bill Fanning and Aaron Strout.
A conversation I have somewhat regularly with our sales guys is the concept of whether or not a company […]

A couple of years ago I posted a paper on the credit card’s midlife crisis. At the time the problems were that the credit card had become commoditized (the desperate attempts by banks to appear different, shows just how same old all the offers are), the market was close to saturated, and the days […]

Professors Meyer-Waarden and Benavent have just published some new research on loyalty that may underscore some of we’ve been talking about now for a while: most rewards don’t reward those whose loyalty really matters.
Their thesis is that consumers all value different things and a one size fits all program will miss the mark the majority […]

Commitment - the holy grail of relationships. It’s what Carrie Bradshaw of Sex and the City finally got from Mr. Big and what Jennifer Aniston could never quite achieve with Brad Pitt. It’s also increasingly what savvy marketers hope to foster with programs that eschew loyalty in favor of solutions that create committed customers.
Conventional rewards […]