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 […]

According to this blogger, GMOOT is the battle cry heard across marketing departments everywhere with respect to social networking. GMOOT is the acronym for “get me one of those” which this blogger characterizes as what’s fueling the interest in social networking activities. She goes on to say that the end result is that most organizations […]

The NYTimes had an article yesterday about how investors are pouring (and have poured) tens of millions of dollars into payments on mobile phones since that is the next payments frontier. It talks about turning phones into “virtual credit cards” that enable “click and buy” commerce. Then it proceeds to describe the complexity […]

A lot of those close to Twitter are now saying that their monetization scheme is to capitalize on its WOM power and make it easy for people to buy the products that their followers talk about. Couple of comments about that.
First, people tend not to mind adverts on Twitter. Maybe it’s because they are […]

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 […]

The financial services industry will be more closely monitored if much of President Obama’s regulatory plan that was released today gets enacted.
The White House team obviously put a great deal of work and thought into this plan. Congress, industry and the public will now need to go over it carefully. Here are four questions […]

The news of the RIF at MySpace puts front and center the need for social networks to adopt new business models to keep them afloat. As this news suggests, treating social networks as just another ad-supported on line channel puts them at risk when ad fortunes go south. More importantly, it fails to capitalize upon […]

The recently published research out of Harvard (and by our MPD colleague and head of MPD’s Social Strategy Practice Misiek Piskorski) has generated lots of controversy over that social media tidal wave known as Twitter. His research, which observed more than 300,000 users in May of 2009 revealed that the vast majority of tweets are […]

The populist bandwagon to whack the credit card companies for a financial crisis they didn’t cause is still going on. The latest is proposed legislation —really a revival of stuff that’s been floating around—to help the merchants reduce the fees they pay to the card companies. You don’t need an advanced degree in economics—just […]

Interesting interview in yesterday’s WSJ with John Malone. The topic: how to get web visitors to pay for content on the web. The conclusion: advertising as a business model won’t cut it but there is a way to get consumers to ante up for content if bundled with what Malone describes as community and connectivity.
Interesting […]