Toluu

I'm Not Actually a Geek

Observations on technology and business from someone who should know better

Do Not Kill Off Marketing During a RecessionNovember 18

It is a mystery to me why some companies (often the ones who find themselves eventually dying away) will react to a downturn by cutting marketing expenses. Cutting expenses is a super smart thing to do, but you should NOT cut back on your marketing.

David Risley, The Single Biggest Mistake in an Economic Downturn Is…

I like David’s sentiment, and I put together this graphic to complement it:

In the world of business sales, you cannot predict which prospects will become sales.  But, you know that you need touchpoints with companies. Which prospects will turn into customers? Hard to predict that.

One reaction to the reduced sales that accompany a recession is to cut back on marketing. Unfortunately, that’s just doubling down on your problems. There are fewer bona fide prospects out there during a recession as companies cut back. Which increases the value of each remaining prospect.

Thus, if you reduce the span/frequency of your marketing efforts, you’re going to miss some of the remaining prospects in the market. If you r

Follow Everything by a Select Few, Select Content by EveryoneNovember 17

Item #1: Fred Wilson tweet:

@timoreilly i want to follow less people and more keywords in my twitter timeline. can’t wait for summize to get integrated into twitter

Item #2: Adam Lasnik FriendFeed post:

I switched over to reading mostly a ’subgroup’ (”Favorites”) on FF, and was missing the serendipity of new voices. One way I’ve remedied that is to do searches on some of my favorite things (”a cappella”, “lindy hop”, etc.) and see who and what comes up.

Item #3: Steve Gillmor blog post:

A small number of Follows combined with Track produces a high degree of coverage on a daily basis.

The three items above share a common theme…limit the number of people you follow. At first, this sounds obvious. Isn’t that what people normally would do? Well no, it’s not. In social networks, there’s a dynamic whereby people tend to return the favor when someone follows them. This build up your follows over time.  As Louis Gray noted in a recent post:

While you might b

Social Media “Glue” and Gnip’s Co-opetition with FriendFeedNovember 12

We believe that enabling web technologies are going through a similar development cycle as enterprise application integration technology did 10+ years ago. Companies are creating tools, applications and platforms to enable more productive and automated uses of resources that have become ubiquitous parts of the online ecosystem. We think about these enabling technologies as the glue that will increasingly hold together that ecosystem.

Seth Levine, Foundry Group

Venture capital firm Foundry Group, which includes partner Brad Feld, described an important investment theme for their firm. Titled Theme: Glue, the thesis is that the growing number of web services and content-generating sites are causing increased complexity, and that there is a need for an infrastructure to handle all this.

This can seem a bit dry (”I know this back end plumbing stuff is boring to most of you”, as Michael Arrington says), but its relevance is can be considered in the context of:

• Twitter limiting API requests to manage its server load
• FriendFeed’s

A Promising Future for NewspapersNovember 10

Item #1: FriendFeed Widget Motivates Reporters to Use Social Media:

“This last week, I have been busy reorganizing our major financial blog, Bear&Bull, adding FriendFeed widgets in hopes of encouraging more audience interaction. The results have been surprising — although the audience has been slow to react, the changes have motivated many of my normally technophobic colleagues to start using video, pictures and live-blogging techniques.”

Item #2: Al Gore speaking at Web 2.0 Summit (thanks to Dion Hinchcliffe tweet):

“Gore says regulate the Internet as little as possible and says there is a future for journalists in curating content/new media. #web2summit”

Item #3: Forrester analyst Jeremiah Owyang on a “freemium” business model for analysts:

Today’s Social Media A-Listers: The Archetype of Tomorrow’s Company LeadersOctober 23

Dennis Howlett had a post yesterday on Chris Brogan’s blog, Web 2.0- Was It Ever Alive? In the post, he takes the postion that much of the value of “social” is overstated, and will suffer from low internal adoption. He also believes the Gen Y/millennial fascination with social media will pass as workplace realities creep in.

Another post I read a couple days ago was on the New York Times Bits blog, Will Microblogging at Work Make You More Productive? This post and Dennis’s are nearly diametrically opposed. Included in the comments to the post was a very pro-social media point of view from a 22-year old named Emma.

Taking the two viewpoints together, I came up with this chart:

This certainly parallels the recurring generational differences on things like war, helping the poor, music and many other aspects of our lives. Use of social software in the workplace is actually