Biznology

I am a Chicago Cubs fan. There, I admit it. For those unaware, the Cubs this season are celebrating (?) their 100th year without winning baseball’s World Series. I even have a T-shirt that says “Any team can have a bad century.” This year, the Cubs are in first place, with the best record in the National League, but Cub fans know that July is often the peak of a Cub season. (One rumor is that CUBS is actually an acronym for “Completely Useless By September.”) Why am I telling you all this? Because Internet marketers can learn something from Cub fans. Read the remainder of this entry »

My dad once told me that he believes that stale cake has no calories. (I think that he has a similar rule for ice cream scraped from the inside lid of the container.) He’s kidding, of course, but when he talks this way, he’s really speaking to a desire in all of us to get what we want with no costs. In this case, we’d like to be able to eat cake and ice cream while not gaining any weight. And while we might accept that eating delicious desserts would pack on the pounds, we’d like to think that some food wouldn’t have those costs. We do the same thing in Internet marketing.

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Don’t look now, but another Google killer has just been released. I know, I know, we’ve seen all sorts of attempts before, but several people writing to me told me to review Cuil, because this one is really different. But is it? I don’t think so. Read my post at Search Engine Guide, “Why Search Marketers Can Safely Ignore Cuil” to find out why.

David Meerman Scott has a good post on Web Ink Now that discusses how we try to find reasons to avoid the inevitability of social media. David talks about how we tend to use our own experience (“I don’t read blogs”) or rely on flawed polls (many people don’t know that they are using RSS feeds when they look at Web pages) to decide whether social media is “taking off” yet. David’s insight reminded me of a similar experience I had recently.

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I have lots of friends. Well, at least Facebook tells me I do. I don’t think I’ve ever asked anyone to be my friend on Facebook (certainly no more than a handful if at all), yet I have 117 friends. Honestly, they are more like acquaintances, and some of them I don’t really know at all. I mean, I couldn’t pick them out of a lineup, much less tell you their names or anything I know about them. It got me to wondering about how we use social networks—and how some people use them very differently from me.

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