Today’s links:

Your Content Is A Service To Your Audience – thanks to Jason Falls for the kind words and mention in his post about the services that companies provide via their websites.  These are services that are above and beyond the normal goods and services that they charge us for.

The gang at MenWithPens have a series of posts around the theme of slaying writing dragons (here’s the latest installment) – might be useful for those of us who are struggle along with writing or are finding it hard to do so.

Mitch Joel of Twist Image is offering a free audio excerpt from his new book Six Pixels of Separation, which I hope to read in the near future (or, failing that, before I retire).

Enjoy!

I apologize if Broadcasting Brain hasn’t been available to you during the past day. There was a little problem with my hosting company which was fixed. Back to normal now!

Here’s a few interesting articles that I found today:

The Rise of the Professional Blogger (The Atlantic) – Benjamin Carlson says what a lot of us have noticed – the biggest blogs are now group blogs or content websites.  The individual blogger seems to be drowned out by the machines.  What was particularly interesting to me was the link out to The Blogosphere 2.0, where Laura McKenna of 11D, who’s been blogging for over six years, makes nine smart observations about the blogosphere in 2009.  Great conversation in the comments.  Hat tip to Tape Noise Diary for finding this one.

Seth Godin Tries Brandjacking – Lisa Barone writes a harsh critique about Seth’s new project Brands In Public.  In a nutshell, Seth’s got a team building websites (using Squidoo) that capture online conversations about brands (i.e.  KFC, Molson, Trader Joes, etc.).  For $400/month, he’ll give the brand owners the right to control these sites – they can monitor them for free, of course, but they don’t have any control.  Lisa calls this brandjacking, saying that the brands really don’t stand to gain anything positive from this, that they can do better themselves, and that Seth’s new websites are essentially taking control of something that belongs to the brand owner.  The thing is, everything that these websites do is to use existing RSS feeds or links to websites with content related to the brands.  There’s no advertising involved like there is on a standard Squidoo lens.  Now, if this is just a cheap grab for revenue, it seems pretty paltry:  100 sites would gross $500,000 per year (well, $480,000, but it rounds up).  1000 sites would gross $5,000,000 per year.  That’s a lot of money to you and me, but a business, even a small one, can burn through that much cash in a year, no problem.  I’d like to think that what Godin’s really trying to do is to sell the concept of online, public brand monitoring and that he’d really rather that companies were smart (or brave) enough to do this themselves.  However, any brand/company should have a clear, easy way to opt out of having one of these sites – that wasn’t immediately apparent when Godin posted.  A harsh view of this project would compare it to the days when people would register domain names of famous brands and then expect a big profit when they sold these domain names back to the brands.  Claim staking.  Anyway, Lisa seemed to be quite appalled by this project and I’m a bit taken aback myself, although I think this project may just be a case of trying to go out too far to the edges, as Godin might say.

The problem with the economy: you aren’t needed anymore – the glass is simultaneously half-full and half-empty in this Hank Williams post about the impact of technology on the economy.

Ignoring the widsdom (sp) of crowds – an interesting rebuttal to the “wisdom of crowds” concepts.  Jason Cohen looks at some well touted examples of the power of group decision making (e.g.  a crowd’s average guess of the number of jellybeans in a jar being incredibly close to being accurate; the accuracy of the audience polls during an episode of Who Wants to be a Millionaire) and pokes holes in them.

Just for fun, I’m going to write down a few thoughts about modern technology (mainly focusing on Web 2.0).  I’m really curious to see if you agree or disagree.  Let’s see what you have to say in the comments section, OK?

1. YouTube has become the video archive and de facto digital history of the human race and pop culture.
2. Text messaging will become obsolete in five years when someone creates a mobile Web application that does the same thing for no extra cost (today, it all depends on how you use Twitter, I guess).
3. Mobile computing will not replace either notebook or desktop PCs – too many people like the larger keyboards.
4. Paper books will not disappear unless there is a massive environmental or economic crisis that massively curtails the availability of paper.  In fact, paper books will stay at current sales levels, or even grow, indefinitely.
5. In ten years, it will be common for people to use some kind of mobile computing device to scan each other and do all kinds of things based on the data they receive from these scans.  For example, when two people meet and scan each other, applications on these devices might give them enough information to decide that they really don’t want to talk to each other.  So they won’t.
6. It will be 20 years before electronic voting will be permitted for a US Presidential election.
7. A key challenging for adopting microblogging within large corporations is that these corps will want to make it secure and only available to employees.  The problem, then, is that it may be hard to make a case to exploit it within these companies as there are already a number of similar technologies that do just about the same thing.
8. Within ten years, the US and Canada will adopt widespread electronic payments by using a smartphone or mobile computing devices to make the transaction.  But no sooner:  too many parties have an interest in maintaining the status quo.
9. As more and more companies are seeing their employees become more outwardly focused (i.e. looking more and more at what is happening outside of the company instead of what’s happening within the company), departments like sales, marketing, and customer service will either see themselves becoming more and more focused on more complex aspects of their work.  However, they could also turn into consultants to other parts of the business on how to better integrate their functions into the rest of the business.
10. The next big technology/paradigm shift will involve widespread implants or attached devices to help us use technology either by thought, muscle movements, or by voice.

What do you think?  Please share your thoughts in the comments below.  Feel free to tell me if I’m full of crap!

This is a book review of Friends With Benefits:  A Social Media Marketing Handbook by Darren Barefoot and Julie Szabo.

How I got the book:

Electronic review copy sent to me on behalf of the authors.  Note:  the book is slated for publication in November 2009, so it isn’t available for purchase yet.

Background:

Darren Barefoot and Julie Szabo have run social media marketing campaigns for national retailers.  Darren also blogs at DarrenBarefoot.com and is generally well known in the social media space, particularly in Canada.  More details here.

What you read is what you get:  as the title implies, this is a handbook full of advice and tips about social media marketing.  It goes through the basics.

The strengths:

This book gives a good overview of the social media space and how you as a marketer can use it to tell the world about your organization.  It’s very clear, easy to read, and non-threatening.  For example, they have a great section that describes RSS to non-technical folks.  The Netiquette section is also a very good overview (you can get a copy of it for free here).

The areas for improvement

While this is a very good overview, this might not be the book for marketing professionals looking for more advanced tips and techniques.

Other points of interest:

They used the name “Regina Phalange” in this book – no, I’m not making that up.

Verdict (8 out of 10): (definitely worth checking out; a useful resource for marketers, especially for social media beginners)

My methodology for book reviews and affiliate links: I’ll provide an Amazon.com affiliate link (or other related affiliate link) for content if I think it’s worth buying and reading. If I don’t, I won’t provide an affiliate link. The affiliate link helps fund my content creation activities.

If you would like me to review YOUR eBook, book, or other content, please send me an E-Mail at markdykeman@gmail.com to get instructions on how to send your book or content to me. You’ll get my honest opinion about your book, either publicly or privately.

1. Testing the QuickPress function in WordPress.
2. Testing FriendFeed Comments, which I just reinstalled.