Archive for November, 2006

From the Everything Old Is New Again Dept.

Wednesday, November 15th, 2006

Maybe the free phones will look something like this

The other day, Google CEO Eric Schmidt predicted a future in which cell phones would be given away free in exchange for the recipients agreeing to be subjected to ads on their phones.

The same thing was tried six or seven years ago when companies were giving away desktop computers for free. It didn’t work then. I doubt it’ll work tomorrow.

Then again, if Microsoft is filing a patent application associated with getting into this game …

A Warning To All SurveyMonkey Users

Tuesday, November 14th, 2006

Great tool, but be aware...

Just over 92% of the visitors to AndrewSullivan.com live in the U.S. Large city dwellers make up 46% of Andrew’s audience, 85.2% are male, 52.6% are married, 50% have a graduate degree and 31.7% describe themselves as politically conservative while 15.6% are independents.

When it comes to PBS podcasts, 63.8% of listeners find out about them through iTunes and 84.7% use iTunes to download them. Washington Week is the most compelling, with 62% of listeners always listening all the way through. Just over 52% have recommended PBS podcasts to friends and family.

More than half of business bloggers, 55.7% to be precise, have received a qualified lead from their blogs, with 45.9% of those bloggers closing business. Nearly 20% of bloggers say that more than 15% of their new business comes from their blog.

That’s just the tip of the iceberg of information you’ll find through this Google search that reveals detailed results of nearly 800 surveys created with the popular Survey Monkey software.

This is, of course, a huge problem if your survey requests personal information, includes open-ended questions that might prompt the volunteering of personal information or if you believe that the results themselves constitute information that’s sensitive and confidential for your company.

Here’s the good news: You can prevent this.

If you’re using SurveyMonkey, be sure to set your survey’s results-sharing status to disabled, even if you have no intention of sending anyone the link to your results. This will result in a “survey is closed” message being delivered to anyone who tries to access your results summary link.

Takeaway for marketers: Don’t forget: On the Web, virtually everything is accessible somewhere somehow by somebody. Make sure you have a good relationship with your engineering department to keep those important holes plugged as tightly as possible whenever you (or they) discover them.

Move Over Web 2.0 …

Monday, November 13th, 2006

Are you ready for the semantic Web?

… here comes Web 3.0.

Blackberry Helmet

Sunday, November 12th, 2006

Comedy, yes; but not a bad product idea!

Blackberrys (or is it Blackberries?) seem to be out of control. This is a pretty good idea for dealing with it all.

Giving PR A Preposterously Bad Name

Saturday, November 11th, 2006

Lloyd Bentsen

This press release led me to this Web site, and I simply can’t resist paraphrasing Lloyd Bentsen:

Rob Tencer, I work with PR professionals, I know PR professionals, PR professionals are friends of mine. Rob Tencer, you are no PR professional.