Forget the International Star Registry: Now you can reserve your spot in Heaven (or send someone to Hell), and it’s far, far cheaper than a rosary blessed by the Pope (which I assume doesn’t come with a guarantee that refunds your money if you don’t get into Heaven).
Takeaway for marketers: Hey, it’s marketing 101: Find a need and fill it.
“Develop an interest in life as you see it; the people, things, literature, music — the world is so rich, simply throbbing with rich treasures, beautiful souls and interesting people. Forget yourself.”
—Henry Miller
It’s my new favorite buzzword. “Romadata.” It comes from the military, and is used, for example, thusly: “Well, this is only romadata, but I’d say that…”
“Roma” is, of course, an acronym for “right outta my…”
Well, you get the idea.
Well, most of them, anyway, assuming that by “us” you mean Google.
Back in January 2007, Google commanded 47.4 percent of the U.S. search market, while Yahoo! was a strong number two at 28.5 percent.
In May 2009, according to Nielsen, Google’s share of search has increased to 63.2 percent while Yahoo! has shrunk to 17.2 percent.
What a difference two years makes.
Some truly amazing things were happening on Twitter yesterday.
While the Iranian government was evidently trying to suppress grassroots information coming out of the country in the wake of its controversial election, street-level Iranians were Twittering news, information and photos. Servers were apparently shut down, but the IPs of functioning Iran proxy servers were being tweeted to assist in getting the information out (see first tweet in the screenshot above). Then word was passed that the government was monitoring Twitter, so a workaround for communicating functioning proxies was made known. Then Twitter announced scheduled maintenance, sparking an outcry to keep the system up and running, so maintenance was postponed. Meanwhile, user icons all over Twitter were turning green (see second and third tweets in the screenshot above), the color indicating support of Presidential candidate Mir-Hossein Mousavi.
Follow the stream tsunami of Iran election tweets over here — far more compelling coverage than anything you’ll see on teevee. Read Andrew Sullivan’s excellent writing about it all over here.
A huge takeaway from all this is pithily summarized by this tweet from@jennispinner: Social media’s best use isn’t sharing what u had for breakfast–it’s THIS.
Indeed.
