A Better Course

Facebook May Revamp Beacon | Business Week ‘At issue is the Beacon program, which alerts members’ Facebook “friends” to purchases and other activities on third-party Web sites.’ Excellent use of the quotation mark from Business Week. (tags: businessweek facebook web2.0 advertising privacy) Neuromarketing » How To Increase Customer Pain Paying money for things activates the […]

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It would be interesting to see how many people went to the Overstock website from a Facebook Beacon news item, versus how many people went there from an article or blog post complaining about Facebook Beacon. Given the degree of closeness of most people on Facebook to most of the people on their friends list […]

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MySpace Isn’t Just for People Who Like to Watch – Bits – Technology – New York Times Blog MySpace will add a clone of the Facebook News Feed. But MySpace needs to be innovative in its own right, especially around more ways that people can create and consume entertainment with their friends. (tags: facebook myspace […]

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Are You the Best Boss for Your Business? | Business Week Many companies encounter problems when they grow to around 20 employees; when they are forced to make the transition from the high-performance/cheap-labor model that worked in the startup phase and start paying the real costs of labor and productivity. (tags: entrepreneurship businessweek business management)

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Perfectly Marketed TV Show Somehow Fails | The Onion – America’s Finest News Source Experts say that, while there have been several documented cases in the past of television programs underperforming in the face of brilliant marketing campaigns, a direct cause for the bizarre phenomenon has not yet been determined. (tags: theonion marketing television funny) […]

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The Psychology of Waiting Lines > General article by David Maister if managers are to concern themselves with how long their customers or clients wait in line for service (as, indeed, they should), then they must pay attention not only to the readily-measurable, objective, reality of waiting times, but also how those wai (tags: service […]

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Learning Mandarin | False Eastern promise | Economist.com In a few decades China may overtake America as the world’s top economic power. Will Britons who learn its language be rewarded with better careers? Barring some kind of sea change in global language learning, the answer will almost always be no. (tags: theeconomist china language career […]

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Lovely IKEA adverts (via swissmiss) I like the way IKEA are (or seem to be) responding to the perception of their furniture as entirely generic by placing the home as a site of creativity; as well as the above, the UK “Not For Sale” campaign puts their products in a similar space. It’s an well-timed […]

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In Small Biz, There’s No Small Stuff | Business Week I have come to see these scenarios as more than annoyances; they are often signals of a critical failure of leadership. We can only assume that senior execs they can’t be bothered by such trivial matters as customers reaching customer service (tags: businessweek customerservice customer […]

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Facebook’s Tracking of User Activity Riles Privacy Advocates, Members – WSJ.com Facebook, critics argue, takes its advertising beyond that by collecting specific data about its users’ activities on outside sites and broadcasting that data to their friends and acquaintances (tags: wsj facebook privacy online) swissmiss: simple, stunning IKEA ads I like what IKEA have been […]

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