Social Media Experts That I Trust

February 6, 2010

This post is adapted from an article that I wrote for The Bloggers’ Bulletin

When I embarked on my journey as a blogger last year, I began to search out sources of information and inspiration on the web.  Over time, I discovered a number of people who, by most accounts, are considered social media experts on blogging, Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn.  I get feeds from most of them and I also regularly visit a number of other social media sites.  Read on for my list of favorites. Read more

8 News Media Business Trends for 2010

December 27, 2009

These trends are reprinted from “ Mashable, the Social Media Guide,” By Vadim Lavrusik

With the news industry struggling to find new revenue streams that can reshape their broken business model, 2010 will be defined by experiments in news media monetization. This will also include content that is guided more than ever by the audience and ad revenue.

This coming year we will also see the results of news organizations putting pay walls up, as well as new experimental models like accepting Web donations from readers — some of which may prove to be successful. Below are eight emerging news media business trends to look for in 2010.  For more detail, go to Mashable for descriptions and images.

1. Social Media Monetization
2. Revenue Beyond Advertising
3. As Publications Fold, Others Become Lean and Mean
4. Growth in Hyperlocal and Community Models
5. Local Advertising Grows
6. Local Advertising Models Emerge
7. To Charge or Not to Charge?
8. The Fremium Model

• Try Different — Seth Godin

  The usual mantra is to 'try harder'. Trying harder is impossible when you're already trying as hard as you can.

  But you can always try different.

  Years ago, I was creating trivia questions for a product we built for Prodigy. We had a 99% accuracy rate in doing the questions. Which was great, except there were 1800 questions in a batch, which meant 18 wrong each time, which was totally and completely unacceptable. These were honest mistakes, made by smart people working as hard as they could.

  No matter how hard we tried, we couldn't do better than 99%. So we switched our system completely and did it in a totally different way. Same number of people, same number of hours, 100% accuracy.

  If it's not working, harder might not be the answer.

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