There's an ongoing business axiom that defines customer service: "the customer is always right."

Publicly, this may be the proper posture. People like Tony Hsieh (CEO of Zappos and the author of the best-selling business book, Delivering Happiness) built his first business on making customers happy (the company was LinkExchange - which he sold to Microsoft for $265 million) and pushed the concept even further with Zappos (the online shoe store), which was also sold (but this time to Amazon was over one billion dollars). That being said, there are instances when the customer is not always right. In fact, let's be honest: sometimes the expectations of consumers is so far beyond the pale that anything the company does to try to please them will be met with grumbles and complaints.

The majority of customers simply want value.

They want their products or services to do what it says it will do - reliably. In this day and age, the challenge is that brands are being held to task in the online channels. Any individuals can complain in text, images, audio and video, instantly and for free online for the world to see. If you're in line at your favorite retailer and you're wondering why they don't open up a second cash register, you're just a tweet away from holding that company responsible for their store policies. The other day, I was reviewing the Facebook page for a major airline and there was one complaint that stood out: "I'll never fly with you again! I was stuck at the security line for over two hours!" What does security have to do with the airline? (Answer: nothing). Have you ever been on TripAdvisor (the popular online destination that rates hotels)? You'll see a constant stream of one and two-star reviews where individuals complain about things like a lack of chocolate on their pillows or not enough channels available on their TV (while at the same time commending the hotel for having a nice staff, clean rooms and a cheap rate - the main reasons the majority of people would chose a hotel).

Are we quickly devolving to the sad state of: "you can only please a few of the people some of the time"?

The evolution of customer service and brand loyalty is a topic that has captured the imagination of Fred Reichheld for over twenty years. In 1996, the Bain Fellow published his first book, The Loyalty Effect: The Hidden Force Behind Growth, Profits, and Lasting Value. Recently, Reichheld (along with co-author, Rob Markey) published a newly updated version of his 2006 seminal book, The Ultimate Question (now titled, The Ultimate Question 2.0). So, just what is the ultimate question that every business should be asking...

"How likely is it that you would recommend this company to a friend or colleague?"

If your company is doing well (and this doesn't mean you have to be perfect), your customers become your brand champions. They become the evangelists. They become the marketers. They are the ones who get your ideas to spread. "It turns out that people won't enthusiastically recommend your business to a loved one unless you have treated them in a very special way," says Reichheld via Skype. "It goes beyond the brand and loyalty. Social Media has made the model more apparent to businesses, but the roots of this concept go all the way back to the bible. It goes back to the idea that a name and a reputation are worth more than silver and gold. We created the Net Promoter Score system around the ultimate question to help businesses know - day by day - whether they are building their reputation or diminishing it."

Big or great?

While the simple and immediate feedback loop of deploying the Net Promoter Score (a system that allows customers to grade a brand on a scale from one to ten with a few, short questions) has been adopted by many businesses, the final results also empower a brand to think differently about the types of customers that they can be successful with. "There is no brand that is right for everyone," continues Reichheld. "A brand should be working very hard to make sure that the people who are buying their product or service are the people who it was intended to be sold to. They need to have a very clear focus. This means that when they get a Net Promoter Score of a nine or a ten from a customer, it's because they picked the right customer and they are appreciated for what they have to offer. Sadly, what we see historically is metrics around 'bigness,' meaning how many customers or how many units sold? What we should be looking at is a metric around greatness, not bigness."

So, is the customer always right?

"I don't think that the customer is always right any more than I think that the employees are always right or that a shareholder is always right," conceded Reichheld. "You do owe it to your business to understand the root cause of the feedback and what implications it has on your decision making, prioritization and your actions. But, there are criminals out there that are your customers. You want to keep those customers away. Not just from your cash registers but from your employees too, because they are abusive and they make life hell for everyone in your business. The Net Promoter Score is based on the golden rule that we should treat others the way we would want to be treated in their shoes, but it takes a lot of deep thinking to do this right. It's not superficial. Think about what actions a business takes when it gets a zero or a one score? The business should dig in to figure out what's wrong, try to fix it and understand how it feels to be in the customer's shoes, but it doesn't always mean that they are the right customers for your business."

The complete audio conversation between Reichheld and myself will be published this coming Sunday (October 30th, 2011) as episode #277 of Six Pixels of Separation - The Twist Image Podcast.

The above post is my twice-monthly column for the Montreal Gazette and Vancouver Sun newspapers called, New Business - Six Pixels of Separation. I cross-post it here with all the links and tags for your reading pleasure, but you can check out the original versions online here:

Montreal Gazette - Companies should focus on greatness, not 'bigness: ' author.

Vancouver Sun - The customer is (not) always right.




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rob markey

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zappos

Online social networks are everywhere these days, a truly global phenomenon. But where are the different social networks having the most success in terms of popularity? That is what we’ll try to answer in this post.

We have included 11 social networks in this survey: Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+, Orkut, Tumblr, FourSquare, MySpace, LiveJournal, Hi5 and Bebo.

Please note that this isn’t meant to be an exhaustive list covering all social networks out there. There are literally hundreds of them.

To map popularity, we’ve used Google search statistics (their Insights for Search tool). This will give us a good indication of the interest – or popularity, if you will – of a social network in a given region. We’re basing this survey on search results from the past 90 days, so it’s a reasonably large, up-to-date sample. After all, we want to know the situation right now.

A few initial observations
We’ve gone through and summarized some of the information for you, but please feel free to scroll down and check out the individual social networks you’re interested in.

Top countries for each social network (in terms of interest)

Facebook is most popular in Turkey and Venezuela.
Twitter is most popular in Venezuela and Brazil.
LinkedIn is most popular in the Netherlands and India.
Google+ is most popular in Taiwan and Hong Kong.
Tumblr is most popular in the Philippines and Brazil.
FourSquare is most popular in Indonesia and Malaysia.
MySpace is most popular in Puerto Rico and Myanmar (Burma).
LiveJournal is most popular in Singapore and Russia.
Hi5 is most popular in Thailand and Romania.
Bebo is most popular in Ireland and New Zealand.
Orkut is most popular in Brazil and Paraguay. The interest shown for Orkut in Brazil far outstrips that of any other country.

It’s worth pointing out that this doesn’t necessarily mean that the majority of users come from these countries. We’re talking about sheer interest in a service. The size of the local user base will depend on the size of the Internet population in that country.

Also note that we haven’t compared the social networks against each other. This is a survey that examines where each social network has managed to garner the most interest in its service.

Some standout countries in this survey

Brazil is in the top five for Twitter, Orkut, Tumblr and Bebo.
Singapore is in the top five for LinkedIn, Tumblr, FourSquare and LiveJournal.
The United States is in the top five for LinkedIn, Tumblr and MySpace.
The Philippines is in the top five for Tumblr, FourSquare and LiveJournal.
India is in the top five for LinkedIn and Orkut.
The United Kingdom is in the top five for LinkedIn and Bebo.
Indonesia is in the top five for Twitter and FourSquare.
Venezuela and Turkey are in the top five for Facebook and Twitter.

That was just a brief summary. Why don’t you go ahead and have a look for yourself? We’ve listed the results for all the included social networks here below. We’ve also included direct links to Google Insights for Search if you want to dig even deeper into the results and play around a little.

Facebook

Countries with the highest interest in Facebook:

Turkey
Venezuela
Tunisia
Colombia
Dominican Republic

You can dig deeper into Google’s search stats for Facebook here.

Twitter

Countries with the highest interest in Twitter:

Venezuela
Brazil
Indonesia
Turkey
El Salvador

You can dig deeper into Google’s search stats for Twitter here.

LinkedIn

Countries with the highest interest in LinkedIn:

Netherlands
India
United Kingdom
Singapore
United States

You can dig deeper into Google’s search stats for LinkedIn here.

Google+

Countries with the highest interest in Google+:

Taiwan
Hong Kong
Nepal
Finland
Honduras

(Ok, Hong Kong isn’t a country per se, but Google Insights for Search lists “regions”, which don’t always correspond to countries.)

You can dig deeper into Google’s search stats for Google+ here.

Orkut

Countries with the highest interest in Orkut:

Brazil
Paraguay
India
Haiti
Oman

You can dig deeper into Google’s search stats for Orkut here.

Tumblr

Countries with the highest interest in Tumblr:

Philippines
Brazil
Australia
United States
Singapore

You can dig deeper into Google’s search stats for Tumblr here.

FourSquare

Countries with the highest interest in FourSquare:

Indonesia
Malaysia
Singapore
Thailand
Philippines

You can dig deeper into Google’s search stats for FourSquare here.

MySpace

Countries with the highest interest in MySpace:

Puerto Rico
Myanmar (Burma)
United States
Jamaica
Trinidad and Tobago

You can dig deeper into Google’s search stats for MySpace here.

LiveJournal

Countries with the highest interest in LiveJournal:

Singapore
Russia
Belarus
Ukraine
Philippines

You can dig deeper into Google’s search stats for LiveJournal here.

Hi5

Countries with the highest interest in Hi5:

Thailand
Romania
Peru
Laos
Portugal

You can dig deeper into Google’s search stats for Hi5 here.

Bebo

Countries with the highest interest in Bebo:

Ireland
New Zealand
United Kingdom
Brazil
Australia

You can dig deeper into Google’s search stats for Bebo here.

Final notes
As you noticed, we only included a limited list of social networks in this survey. For example, we didn’t include social networks that are regional by nature, i.e. don’t have a global focus. There are plenty of country- or language-specific social networks that are successful in individual countries, for example VKontakte in Russia and the Russian-speaking countries of the former Soviet Union, Mixi in Japan, RenRen and Qzone in China, Hyves in the Netherlands, etc.

If you’re curious, you can check out a similar survey we did three years ago, in August of 2008. We thought an update was long overdue, since things change so rapidly in social media.

This was a post from the guys at Pingdom, a site monitoring service that makes sure you're the first to know when your site is down. Check it out for free.

Eight years ago on this day in 2003, I started Blogging.

Here's some basic info about what has transpired in eight years here at the Six Pixels of Separation Blog: over 2700 Blog entries, over 20,000 comments and over 270 audio Podcasts. If you have read or listened to only one percent of all of that content, you'll know that both acknowledging this milestone or speaking about the numbers (how big/how many) is not my style. But, when I woke up this morning and saw the date notification in my Outlook, it gave me pause. It wasn't a sense of pride or accomplishment, either. The only question that continually popped into my brain was: was all of this Blogging worth it? And, the answer is obvious: yes.

Yes it is.

Starting this Blog was (and still is) without the question the single most important thing I have done in my professional life. It has changed me. It has changed the way I learn and grow and it has changed how I think about the world (and business and marketing and media and beyond). In spending some serious time soaking in this anniversary, I listed out why Blogging was (and still is) the smartest thing I have ever done.

8 Reasons Why Blogging Still Rules:

It's slow. I'm in no rush. Most brand are. They think that Social Media is cheap, fast and easy. Blogging has taught me that nothing could be further from the truth. In 2008, I wrote a Blog post called, In Praise Of Slow, that evolved into a much longer and important piece of my first business book, Six Pixels of Separation and the idea still rings true. Blogging has taught me the merits of building true relationships between an audience and content... and that takes time. Lots of time and effort. As fast and simple as it is to publish content with a Blog, success with a Blog as an engine of Marketing is a slow process. And, like a great cup of tea, the process is worth it if you have the intestinal fortitude to see it through.

Critical thinking. People like to think that Blogging is about the discourse (the comments, trackbacks, links, likes and tweets). While this makes up an important piece of the Blogging puzzle, the main reason I Blog is to publicly think about New Media and my media hacking ways. To be blunt: it's a selfish act. The only part that isn't selfish is that I publish it for the world to see, comment on and criticize. But (to be blunt again), that is selfish too, because everything that everyone tacks on to my Blog posts make me think more (and even rethink my initial positions). The simple act of Blogging forces me to think in a more critical way and to get that thinking down in writing. The writing part is (obviously) the hardest part of critical thinking. Putting your thoughts into words is not easy.

The people you meet. People often talk about stepping away from the computer to enjoy the conversation and meeting of people in the real world (more on that here: The Real World). My Blog has allowed me to not only meet, but become very close friends with people I would have never met otherwise. When I was a kid, I often wished that someone at my school liked comics or martial arts as much as I did. Now, we take for granted how easy it is to meet and connect with fellow, like-minded individuals. I don't take our connectivity for granted. Ever. Blogging has allowed me to meet and connect with people by removing the challenge of geography. While I don't often get to press the flesh with certain individuals often enough, I enjoy waking up and hanging out online with friends like Seth Godin, Amber Naslund, Julien Smith, Hugh McGuire, Liz Strauss, Christopher S. Penn, Mark W. Schaefer, Hugh McGuire, Tamar Weinberg, C.C. Chapman, Arjun Basu, Joseph Jaffe, Tom Peters, Jeff Jarvis, Jay Rosen and countless other (just look at my Blogroll on the left for more or who I follow on Twitter or Facebook:) I have coffee with all of these people each and every morning - whether they know it or not.

Writing (and reading) as art. This concept was really driven home to me after reading the book, Linchpin, by Seth Godin. Some people paint, some people scrapbook and others twiddle on a guitar in their basements. I write about business, marketing and media hacking. That is my art. For years, I thought it would sound either pretentious or ridiculous to say that writing about business is an art form. Well, this is my art. Take it or leave it.

Personal branding. Really, it's about reputation. It's easy to say something. It's easy to do something. It's hard to build a real reputation that is based on who you truly are for the world to see. This Blog is as real as it gets. It has been a tool, platform and space for me to demonstrate how I think. I believe the results are reflected in how Twist Image (my marketing agency that I own with my three other business partners) has grown over the years. I also believe that there is no better resume than this Blog to define me. I wish more people understood the power of having a living and breathing ongoing publishing platform that allows you to demonstrate how you think, that anyone can access from anywhere.

My place to go. I'm hooked on Arianna Huffington's line: "Self expression is the new entertainment." People often ask, "when do you find the time to Blog?" All I can think to myself is, "when do you find the time to watch half of the television shows and movies that you've watched?" By definition, I'm much more interested in active media than passive media. So, while you're relaxing and watching a sitcom, I'm relaxing and writing a Blog post. This is my place to go. My Blog is my treehouse. This is where I go for fun.

It keeps me regular. I made a commitment to publish six pieces of text-based content and one audio piece each and every week. You can use all the Metamucil you want, my Blog keeps me regular. Knowing that I am committed to creating and publishing this amount of content makes my ears perk up. It keeps me open to uncover new and interesting topics to discuss. The regularity and consistency of the Blog has forced me to keep that "nose for news" that I first developed when I started off in professional journalism during my late teens.

It connects me to you. Think about life before Blogging. You would be waiting for a new book to come out or for a published piece in a newspaper of magazine. No more. Blogging connects me to you. You don't need to read it every day and you don't even need to leave a comment, and yet it still connects us (some more than others). I Blog in the hopes my thoughts resonate. I Blog in the hopes that it creates a level of discourse. I Blog because I'm tired of "top 10 reasons"-types of Blog posts. I Blog in an attempt to raise the bar. I Blog because it connects me to people like you... the exact kind of people I have been waiting my whole life to meet.

Why do you Blog? Better yet, why don't you Blog?




Tags:

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content

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jay rosen

jeff jarvis

joseph jaffe

journalism

julien smith

linchpin

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martial arts

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Confession time.

A few months ago I found myself on a long flight with nothing to watch. I had already seen the many Hollywood blockbusters along with the documentaries and news specials that were being shown on-board. In a moment of weakness, I decided to watch the Justin Bieber documentary, Never Say Never. I thought Never Say Never was a live "concert" film mingled with some backstage footage of the teen heartthrob blow drying his hair, playing Xbox with Usher or clips of young girls professing their love to The Bieb. I put the word "concert" in quote marks earlier, because I wondered how much of the live footage would truly be live. I know nothing about Justin Bieber other than he was discovered on YouTube by his now-manager Scooter Braun. With over a decade of music industry experience, I've had my own fair share of interviewing these types of teen sensations. Many of them don't last more than five years in the music industry (and the majority of them flame out sooner). It's not cynicism. It's a matter of fact that the music industry (and mass populous) have a short attention span for this genre. Today's Justin Bieber is yesterday's New Kids On The Block (or Backstreet Boys... or...). And, there's always something new and different right around the corner.

Crying.

The movie captivated me. Justin is not only portrayed as a very smart and focused young man, he is a musician. A true musician. He cares about playing, writing and performing. Yes, the glitz is there and there are plenty of scenes with Bieber horsing around and clips of young girls professing their love to him, but it's a touching and personal story. A key figure in Bieber's success is his manager, Scooter Braun. After seeing some videos on YouTube, Scooter moved Justin and his mom from his home in Stratford, Ontario into a townhouse in Atlanta where they struggled to get Justin a record deal. It's a very touching and real story. In a few scenes I found myself holding back tears and in other scenes, the tears were flowing. Laugh all you want, but his story is both impressive and inspiring, it almost seems like it's impossible that it's a work of non-fiction.

This is where you come in.

Scooter Braun shared the stage with pro-skateboarder and entrepreneur, Tony Hawk, at this year's Google Zeitgeist event. During their panel discussion on music, entertainment and new media, the host, Sal Masekela (ESPN X Games) asked Scooter about his use of Social Media to build Justin's audience. Scooter re-iterated a key point from my recent Blog post on direct relationships (more on that here: What The Next Five Years Will Be About): when Justin was turned down by the music industry, it only fueled them more to use Social Media to create that direct and tangible relationship with the fans. Their strategy worked so well, that Justin, Scooter and the entire Bieber Fever crew truly do control the relationship between Justin and his fans. When further pressed about using Social Media as a marketing channel, Scooter said something that fascinated me:

"It's not marketing. It's real."

It's true and it's powerful and it's the number one reason why corporations are not all that successful with these platforms. Instead of using Social Media to be real, they're using it as another engine of advertising. I often say that Social Media is the most exciting form of marketing because it allows for real interactions between real human beings. It's so basic. Justin could just communicate and connect to his fans. He could (virtually) touch them, share with them, play with them, inform them and ask them. Scooter used five words to describe the new realities of business: those who think that they can simply advertise and not balance it out with being real (creating connections and developing direct relationships) are going to struggle - deeply - with loyalty and long term success. While Justin may have a long, hard fight ahead of him to prove his mettle in the music industry as something more than a teen sensation, brands could learn a lot from him and Scooter about the power of being real by creating real relationships.

Being "real" - it seems so basic and simple. Then again, we all know what they say about common sense... it's not all that common.




Tags:

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direct relationships

documentary

espn

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justin bieber

live concert

marketing

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music industry

never say never

new kids on the block

online video

record deal

sal masekela

scooter braun

social media

tony hawk

usher

x games

xbox

youtube

The current big international social networks are Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and the newly formed Google+, and perhaps Tumblr, if you choose to look at it as a social network. However, go back to around 2004-2005 and these were either not around yet, or just taking their early baby steps. Back then the big ones were Friendster, LiveJournal and MySpace.

And we’re talking in past tense, because oh how the mighty have fallen. Web users are a fickle bunch, and there is probably no market as trend sensitive as social networking.

How bad is it? As you’ll see, they’re all caught in a downward spiral, but they might have peaked later in life than you think.

MySpace
Started in 2003, MySpace was the big dog before Facebook stole its thunder. It was a pretty strong player until quite recently, especially in the United States.

At its peak in 2007-2008, the then News Corp-owned MySpace was valued at $12 billion. In June this year, News Corp. sold MySpace for $35 million and a 5% stake in the new owner, Specific Media.

Worldwide interest in MySpace, 2004 – today:

Worldwide site traffic to Myspace, 2009 – today:

(There’s more information over at Wikipedia, if you want to read up on MySpace’s history.)

Friendster
Started in 2002, Friendster quickly became a huge success (it’s the site that inspired MySpace) and pretty much became a blueprint for the modern-day social network. It went from being popular everywhere, to mostly being used in Asia, especially SE Asia, which has remained its power base.

In May this year, Friendster pretty much committed harakiri – at least as a social network – and was completely redesigned to focus on social gaming.

Worldwide interest in Friendster, 2004 – today:

Worldwide site traffic to Friendster, 2009 – today:

(You can read more about Friendster’s history over at Wikipedia.)

LiveJournal
Started in 1999, LiveJournal is a blogging service with strong social elements. In many ways it’s one of the social networking pioneers. To give you an idea of its status, early in the movie The Social Network, Mark Zuckerberg (as played by Jesse Eisenberg) is seen blogging on LiveJournal. The scene takes place in 2003.

In 2009, after having been bought by a Russian company (SUP) a couple of years earlier, the operation of LiveJournal was moved from the United States to Russia.

Worldwide interest in LiveJournal, 2004 – today:

Worldwide site traffic to Livejournal, 2009 – today:

(More about LiveJournal’s history over at Wikipedia.)

“Hold on, we’re not dead yet!”
The funny thing is, relatively speaking these social networks are still big. They still have millions of users. They haven’t died, they’ve just fallen from grace, most of their users having left for greener pastures.

It’s like one of those aging Hollywood movie stars of yesteryear, still good, but no longer cast in the best roles and no longer able to pull the crowds to the theaters.

“I used to be famous,” she said with a sigh. “I used to be a star.”

This was a post from the guys at Pingdom, a site monitoring service that makes sure you're the first to know when your site is down. Check it out for free.

Social media is now routinely used to augment reporting of public events. There are entire units in news organizations dedicated to getting stories from the audience, often under the awkward rubric of “user-generated content.” But why sift for events online when you can give your audience the tools to give you the story directly? Right now if I see a plane land in a river, I tweet it. Wouldn’t a news organization prefer that I send my eye-witness photo to the UGC editor instead?

Social media always attracts looks of derision but when rightly used especially for news reporting, it can be the best source we have.

"A Pattern Language is a book about architecture that was written in the 1970s, before the Web as we know it was even conceived. But the book provides hundreds of valuable patterns for community planning and architectural design, many of which can easily be applied to online communities and social networking websites."

Feeling overwhelmed by the bevy of social networking services? Google wants to help — by adding one to the list. On Tuesday the company unveiled Google Buzz, another way for people to tell other people what they’re doing, thinking and feeling.

82% of Twitter users have less than 100 followers and roughly the same percentage are following less than 100 people themselves.

So how can we encourage more people to share our links? One of the easiest options is to include a set of links at the bottom of your posts which readers can click to automatically vote for your article. There are plugins which can do this of course, but that requires you to work with their settings, names icons in their banner and it means having yet another plugin installed on your site. If you would rather avoid that and have complete control for yourself, then you might prefer to code the links into your theme yourself.

I want to know what Dr. King would make of Twitter, the insistent social-media service that asks its users to describe “What’s happening?” in 140 characters or less.

Obviously there are real people using twitter for leisure and not for business, and I kept asking myself how I could find these people and, more importantly, how I could get them to follow me.

Though forthcoming, my friend was anxious to preserve her anonymity; Facebook employees, after all, know better than most the value of privacy. As she is not permitted to divulge company secrets, and would like to remain employed, her name has been omitted from this interview. It provides an interesting snapshot of the inner workings and culture of Facebook in the summer of 2009.

Reader-to-author e-missives come in a few, quite specific, categories.

Remember: jumping off of a 200-foot cliff is a lot of fun for 199 feet. That final 12 inches is a bitch.

“People have so many online strings that bind them that cutting one does not sever the relationship. There are always more.”

Conversationlist is a Twitter list of the people that you talk to (and about) on Twitter. The list is automatically updated daily, so that it always reflects the people that you are paying attention to right now. If you @reply (or @mention) someone, they're added to your list. If you stop talking to that person, they drop off your list.

Socialite is a beautiful Mac OS X application, designed to make it easy to stay in touch with the social networks and services that matter to you. From news on Digg, photos on Flickr, statuses and photos on Facebook and Twitter updates, to full Google Reader RSS syncing, Socialite keeps all your social networks in one convenient place.

Click through these lists and you’ll see a different world than you would have thought possible on Twitter.

Dell says it has made $3 million using Twitter.

The beauty of Facebook’s many features is that now you can choose what you show and to what type of people. By using friend lists and playing with your privacy settings, you can create different views for each segment of your life.

Despite all the recent Twitter-enthusiasm about this platform's unique power to alert millions of people in decentralized and previously unavailable ways, there are quite a few reasons to be concerned about Twitter's role in facilitating an unnecessary global panic about swine flu.

This widget clearly has features that overlap with Digg, but it’s not a website or service of its own. Yet the question must be asked: could Google build a social media service from this widget that could compete with Digg or StumbleUpon? Would they want to?

the whole breakfast question is a huge straw man periodically pushed across the tracks in front of speeding internet technology. There is much that happens on Twitter or on blogs or on Facebook that has nothing to do with small groups of people communicating about seemingly nothing.

Twitter co-founder Biz Stone says the San Francisco start-up is watching the outside initiatives closely as it prepares to launch its own fee-based services this year

RT @labnol From @neilpatel: "15 Things I Wish I Had Known When I Started My First Blog"

Thousands of dancers jammed a major London train station in a Facebook-driven "flashmob" mimicking an advertisement for a phone company.

It will allow you to broadcast your location to select friends, family, and colleagues based on the coordinates of your cell phone. India included.

The first post on the Obama White House Blog goes up a minute after he is inaugurated.

If you are keen to increase Twitter followers, here’s a compilation of 100+ Remarkably Beautiful Twitter Icons And Buttons you can apply on your site.

Nobody quite does what we need. Used in concert and with a little work, these tools together can build you a pretty good reading list of top blogs in any niche.

Putting out TechCrunch is like riding a bullet train. When I jumped aboard, it was already going 150 miles per hour.

"The individual user has been king on the Internet, but the pendulum seems to be swinging back toward edited information vetted by professionals." So much for Digg-ifying everything in sight, eh?