• Why Myspace Is Like Your Ex-Boyfriend
    Maybe it's a sign of my pitiful life that I've spent part of the week thinking about Myspace. The musings about Myspace, which unveiled its redesign a few days ago, have gone like this: Should I write about the new, sleek Myspace? Is it a sign of a complete lack of anything more interesting to write about if I do? Am I not trying hard enough? And what was my Myspace password again?
  • It's Google+ Vs. MySpace, Not Google+ Vs. Facebook
    Here's the thing: There's only one social network that will topple Facebook, and that's Facebook. People like their homes. It's why Oklahomans don't move after multiple tornadoes. It's why Detroit keeps rebuilding. And, it's why I stay in San Francisco despite living through the '89 earthquake. And, Facebook is a home. It would take a monumental failure on Facebook's part to suddenly lose a majority of its "citizens." The key word there is "suddenly."
  • Why The Second Social Media Election Is The First Post-Paid-Media Election
    Oh, for the good old days of 2008, when the presidential race between then Sen. Barack Obama and still Sen. John McCain was dubbed the "first social media election." Now let's fast-forward to 2012 and the second social media election -- the one where social gets ugly.
  • Trimming The Fat And Dropping The Pounds
    Excess weight is on my mind today. It could be because I started a 90-day Fitness Challenge. Or because I bought a FitBit for the challenge. Or because the FitBit told me my body fat is 29%. Or it might be because I got the 5.5 pound, inch-thick Restoration Hardware Source Book in my mailbox. Yeah, that's probably it. So get ready for a litany of weight metaphors....
  • Does (Customer) Loyalty Drive Referrals -- OR Do Referrals Drive Loyalty?
    The smart aleck answer is, of course, "yes." But let's dig further. That loyalty drives referrals is easy enough to recognize. We can see how (some) loyal customers become advocates for a product or brand, and choose to refer others. A lot of loyalty research and practice focuses on this causal link. One - the Net Promoter Score - proposes a single question as its simple loyalty measure: How likely is it that you would recommend our company to a friend or colleague? This approach to loyalty is blessed with supporters, as well as critics.
  • Five Reasons Mark Zuckerberg Needs To Get Out More
    Here's my takeaway from TechCrunch's Disrupt conference this week: Mark Zuckerberg needs to get out more. If you haven't watched the Facebook founder's half-hour sitdown the other day with Michael Arrington, the TechCrunch swami, then you should. What you'll also see is a company, and a CEO, pressing on in some promising ways, and making the case for why Facebook is, as they say, is a very serious play-ah, despite everything you've read over the last few months.
  • Why Pinterest Is Frozen Yogurt, And Not Ice Cream
    "$138 million is not a lot of money." Yep, I said that. In a fit of frustration. Publicly. On video. You see, an audience member asked a question at the tail end of our panel at last month's Social Media Insider Summit. A question that presupposed Pinterest was overvalued and overfunded at $138 million in funding.
  • The Tweets-Per-Minute Metric -- Or, Michelle Obama Is Our Next President!
    Until I decided that it wasn't necessary to juggle two screens during last night's speech by Bill Clinton at the Democratic National Convention, I was completely in a lather. The Tweetdeck app on my iPad just wouldn't load, and so I was left with only the rousing cheers in the Time Warner Cable Arena (plug! I guess) to determine whether Clinton still had it. Which brings me to the fun, yet potentially misleading, metric, called the tweet per minute, or TPM (which, I should point out has nothing to do with that other TPM, Talking Points Memo). Anyway, according to …
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