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Archive for November, 2009

A New Generation of Leads

November 24th, 2009 No comments

RBII’ve worked in a lot of different business media environments. Almost every organization that I’ve encountered is loathe to be associated with the “low class” function of lead generation. Traditionally, business media organizations, especially editors, want to be thought of as expert commentators on high-level issues of their day, and the iconic apex of their art form was the long form feature article–a linear, generalized, impersonal information experience that will eventually go the way of the radio play. The dirty mechanics of generating customers and sales always took place outside of the tent.
I’ve always been fascinated with the dirty mechanics, including lead gen, indexing functions (like directories or buyers guides), and community building (all building blocks for successful Read more…

Twitter: A Series of Tubes

November 3rd, 2009 No comments

twitterAs poor Senator Ted Stevens once told us, “the Internet is not something that you just dump something on. It’s not a big truck. It’s a series of tubes.” And then the laughter started.
I’m going to defend the Senator’s metaphor: The Internet is developing an underlying infrastructure (plumbing) that will support an impressive sprawl of new information communities. Chief among these is Twitter. Upon launch, Twitter in and of itself was easy to understand and caught on quickly but quickly earned the disdain of all of my busy colleagues, who saw it only as another place to try and avoid Kutcheresque gossipolemic. But with its open structure and immediacy, Twitter is emerging as an important piece of plumbing for enterprise messaging. I’ve seen more and more Tweetup references in conference coverage Read more…