Wonder how the housing market folded?  Friends of Ira Glass explain how the financial crisis happened in his audio file, Giant Pool of Money at This American Life http://tinyurl.com/5fl6z7. I caught this audible podcast episode early last summer as I faithfully downloaded my subscription at iTunes. It was worth revisiting again last week.

Now they’ve followed up with Another Frightening Show About the Economy to explain more about how our economic crisis went global. http://tinyurl.com/497nkq

Locally, we’ve been talking about the head-turning affect in our rank/reputation research group.  Podcasts noted above clearly describe the startling phenomena of rapidly matched business strategies to keep market share. Did too many heads turn?  In attempting business survival of the fittest, was lemming-like behavior the unintended consequence?

I think these American Life podcasts are excellent examples of digital storytelling that both educate and entertain.

Here’s a research problem for you: How do you quantify creativity?

Economist David Galenson used statistics, biography and history to create what Wired writer Daniel Pink calls a “unified theory of creativity.” He hypothesizes two types of genius. The conceptual innovator  – think Picasso — typically succeeds early in life. The experimental innovator — Cezanne – is often a late bloomer. Read more…

Pizza companies are leading the charge in online food ordering. How big is the market? Online pizza sales are a multi-billion dollar market. Pizza Hut has debuted a Facebook applet that users can embed on their profile or wall pages. Users can then browse menus and place orders without having to leave the social network site. [from BetaNews] Already, over 312,000 Facebook users have signed up for Pizza Hut’s facebook applet.  Read more…

Virginia Hefferman, who writes for The New York Times Magazine column “The Medium”, makes an interesting point in her Oct. 13, 2008 article about New York City’s online grocer FreshDirect. She notes that it’s now not enough for an online business to sell their products; they need to also sell their online presence. “E-commerce sites — once little more than billboards, brochures or order forms — are now goods and services themselves.”  All of that enriched content — blogs, videos, podcasts, social networks, relevant articles – that a company works so hard to create to promote the product can instead become the main attraction.  The company ends up selling a lifestyle. In some cases, companies may give away what they are supposed to sell and end up selling the promotional item. (She also makes the point that the Grateful Dead did this years ago by letting anyone bootleg their music, but selling their own branded merchandise.)

Read the article in full here:  http://tinyurl.com/4dxxnd

Is it worth it?

A nifty little online calculator for estimating the return on investment for social network campaigns. It was built for non-profits, but can be leveraged for for-profits as well. It works a lot like a online mortgage or budget calculators. Plug in your assumptions and voila! 

It’s helpful to have a tool to compare social networking ROI with other more established methods. Also, it shows the cost of social networking and hey, guess what? it’s not free.

 http://tinyurl.com/4v4tk9

This week, President Bush signed the Pro-Copyright law. We now have a copyright czar. For me, having a copyright czar reeks of dystopian new-speak that would make Orwell proud. Why does copyright need a czar? How about potentate or terminator? Why czar? Oh well, I guess it fits with other recent efforts. We have a drug czar in our war on drugs. How is that war going? Are we winning? I don’t think so. I think we’re running neck and neck in that war with the war on poverty, i.e., we’re losing. Come to think of it, do we have a poverty czar?  Apparently Hillary Clinton thought it was a good idea but it never got any traction. For whom would this czar act as overlord, the rich? This would just get awkward…no future in it. Read more…

Google ad serving solution was praised to be the most successful advertising model in the age of Internet. Google Adwords made online advertising available for everybody, despite of the budget. It’s easy to use and it’s really working. However, not too much people ask himself or herself the question how do these Google algorithms serving sponsored results work. It doesn’t really matter for most of the users, until system malfunctions.

It’s usually really hard to observe the performance of each click if you get thousands of impressions every day. Weird things started to happen when I consolidated my Google Adwords budgets and started spending money more wisely, watching each click and continuously monitoring the performance of my online campaigns. I’ve got one case, which made me think about ad serving system malfunction few weeks back.

Lets call it The best CTR (click-through rate) ever.

If you have your ads out there, you’d definitely like to know how they are performing. That’s exactly what CTR is for. A lot of online marketing guides will teach you how to get a 5% click-through rate. What about 200%? You say impossible? Just take a look at the screenshot.

Google ad serving solution malfunction

Read more…

“As if waking from a dream, Silicon Valley has suddenly realized that the collapsing economy means trouble for tech companies, too.” Writes Daniel Lyons in a recent Newsweek article.  He goes on to discuss the high level of risk that new startups (since the dotcom bust of 2001) are facing in trying to create revenue streams to sustain their operations,

Twitter, opened for business in 2006, is especially mentioned.  The company raised $15 million in venture funding earlier this year.  CEO, Jack Dorsey comments “We’re prerevenue.  We’re focused on growth.”  Ostensibly, Twitter has a plan to create revenue in the future.  But the nagging question remains:  Social media tools are creative and gaining widespread support – but are they viable in economic terms?

The market here in Seattle isn’t much better.  Redfin, the online real estate broker, just laid off 20% of its workforce as reported in the Puget Sound Business Journal . Venture capitalists don’t part with their millions easily, and the PSBJ also reports of warnings from Sequoia Capital and Benchmark capital that their portfolio companies must reduce their burn rates to weather the economic turmoil.

Interesting times ahead for companies with names like: Slide, Tumblr, Publr, Chatterous, Posterous, Stream, Pownce, Spoink and Plurk.