Pressure on the Presses

Excellent chart at WSJ showing the demise of newspapers across the country. Includes layoff details.

Top Social Media for Marketers: Twitter, Blogs, LinkedIn, Facebook

Good article on social media marketing and the sites marketers use most. It points out an inverse relationship between length of time a company has been at it and the amount of time spent each week on it. Those who've been at it only a few months say they spend 2 hours per week on social media marketing, while those who've been at for years spend 20 hours per week.

The 5 Phases of Social Media Marketing

Good article at Social Computing Journal on the 5 phases of Social Media Marketing:
1. Discovery
2. Strategy
3. Skills
4. Execution
5. Maintenance

Makes a great point that a good social media campaign is NOT free, as outlined in the BusinessWeek article Debunking Six Social Media Myths. Although many of the tools are free, a good campaign requires skill, experience, and money to incorporate e-commerce, branding, style sheets, etc.

Infinite ROI on Social Marketing

Augustine Fou gives an interesting thesis at Clickz on why the ROI on social marketing is infinite. He claims there's no such thing as Social Media.

Stream Your Tweets in Google AdSense Display Ads

The latest in social media marketing: Google has leveraged Twitter's technology to allow you to stream your 5 most recent tweets in your display ads that are part of the AdSense network. Read more about it at ditii.com http://www.ditii.com/2009/04/04/google-twitter-adsense-ads/.

This is by far the coolest development since behavioral targeting.

I discovered it at Mashable when I saw this ad for TurboTax:

"Times Pimps, Pillages Globe"

This is one of my favorite headlines ever. What else would you expect from the Boston Herald?
http://www.bostonherald.com/news/opinion/op_e/view/2009_04_07_Times_pimps__pillages_Globe/

For the sake of my ex-colleagues at the Globe, I hope everything works out for them.