Great article from Augie Ray from Forrester report. The article describes and shares recommendations about three types of online influencers: Social Broadcasters, Mass Influencers and Potential Influencers.    Each of the three types of influencer is important to marketers, and each must be engaged in a different manner.  Social Broadcasters are appealing because of their large followings, but they tend to assist more with awareness than with preference. Mass Influencers is a new category of influencer–28 million in number in the U.S. alone–created thanks to the scale afforded consumers by social media tools. Finally, the vast majority of social media participants are Potential Influencers, people who have modest networks rich with trust.

You can read the full article here Tapping the entire online peer-influence-pyramid

Google unveiled a marketplace of business software to help to spur the adoption of its own suite of productivity applications. The Google Apps Marketplace offers products and services designed for Google users, including installable apps that integrate directly with Google Apps. Installable apps are easy to use because they include single sign-on, Google’s universal navigation, and some even include features that integrate with your domain’s data.

The question will be whether the adoption of this new offering will be as anticipated as Apples Apps store was? Only time will tell, however what Google does have to it’s advantage is market place reach with over 25 million people using Google Apps in more than 2 million businesses.  You can check out the Google Apps store http://www.google.com/enterprise/marketplace/home

What do you think?  leave a comment and let us know

]]> http://www.thinkbigbebigentrepreneurs.com/2010/03/google-opens-app-store-for-business-software/feed/ 0 http://www.thinkbigbebigentrepreneurs.com/2010/03/iphone-4g-new-images/ http://www.thinkbigbebigentrepreneurs.com/2010/03/iphone-4g-new-images/#comments Thu, 04 Mar 2010 13:05:33 +0000 Timothy Bosworth http://www.thinkbigbebigentrepreneurs.com/?p=2408

As the world awaits the official unveiling of the highly anticipated iPhone 4G sometime later this year, talented photoshop artists are having a jolly good time dishing out concepts of what they think should the next generation iPhone should end up looking like.

While we pass on most of them with a sly grin, this particular version – a very detailed one designed by an Italian iPhone fan is a pure work of art. The concept and the detailing is sure to leave you mesmerized and for once, you might just wish Apple ends up with something like this when the new iPhone eventually arrives.

As obvious from these renderings, this “new” iPhone comes in multiple color versions and has two versions 32 GB and 64 GB. There’s a microSD card thrown in as well. The screen seems quite larger than the “original” iPhone (a tad HDish, if I may remind?). This one also gets a front-facing video calling camera and of course, the much talked about 5 megapixel camera at the rear with probable support for HD Video recording.

We love this concept and would like to know your views on the same. Leave us a comment and let us know. We leave you with a few more images of the rendering.

Original Source: techtree.com

Individual stats like Facebook passing the 400 million user mark, Twitter hitting 50 million tweets per day, and YouTube viewers watching 1 billion videos per day are impressive on their own, but what if we looked at Internet-related stats collectively? Jesse Thomas did just that in his video State of the Internet.

The video — created and animated by Thomas with data from multiple sources — highlights some remarkable figures and visually depicts the Internet as we know it today. It’s a must-watch video for anyone trying to wrap their minds around just how immersed web technologies have become in our everyday lives.

(Via Mashable.)

Reading books has just got social. Social media that is.  Having just done a search on social media books at Waterstones I found that they were 529 books with social media in the title. Examples include The social media bible and Social media goes corporate. If we take a moment and think about what the landscape was like a few years ago one could argue that most of the books would not have anything to do with social media.

However, in today’s ever changing world, business has now become social.  The big boys are now playing with the street kids and the street kids being the people who are actually interacting on the ground level in terms of what’s going on in the market. And the big boys ie. the corporates are now having to get involved in the game and the only way to to keep up with what’s going on is to mix it up with the street kids whether they want to or not.

It will be interesting to see what the next six to twelve months will be like in terms of how we communicate especially with products like the ipad and kindle changing the way we consume our content.

What are your thoughts on consuming content from a digital perspective. Do you consume most of your information via feeds, blogs, video or even mobile.  Let us know by adding a comment or if you found this post interesting please retweet to your followers.

For the latest books on social media have a look at Waterstones social media section And a post on mashable.com. You can also check out my ebook:thesocialmediasecrets where you  Learn the secret tips, tricks and tactics to effective social media monitoring.

Want to keep thinking up great ideas? Research has found that by controlling factors in your life, living to 100 is actually much more possible than previously thought. In total, the US has the most centenarians with current estimates as high as 72,000, leading website The Centenarian states. In fact, if the population of centenarians continues to increase at its current rate of expansion, there could be close to one million people of 100 years of age or more by 2050 residing in the US.

Meanwhile, in the UK, while the overall numbers of centenarians are much smaller, the trend is the same. The Office of National Statistics reports around 9000 centenarians today in The UK and Wales, a 90-fold increase since 1911, and a seven percent increase from just half a decade ago in 2005. Estimates show that at the current rate of expansion, the UK’s centenarian population could reach over 40,000 by 2031. And, just as in other parts of the industrialized world, people aged over 90 are the fastest growing segment of the population in the UK.

In Japan, the number of centenarians are also extremely high, making Japan only second to the US with a current population of about 30,000 centenarians. At its current rate of expansion, Japan’s population of centenarians may rival that of the United States in sheer numbers in the years ahead. Certainly, by 2050, Japan proportionally will have the most centenarians in the world.

read full article

The Pareto principle, more commonly known as the 80/20 rule, is the idea that roughly 80 percent of activity will be accounted for by 20 percent of the participants. Vilfredo Pareto’s initial observation at the start of the 20th century, that 80 percent of Italy’s land was owned by 20 percent of the population, has become a common rule of thumb in business, but does it hold up when tracking activity for the U.K.’s most popular social networks?

To see if it does, we equated activity with ‘time spent’ to reflect who is posting or consuming content. The U.K. audience to each site in January 2010 was divided into groups: ‘light’ visitors – those spending no more than five minutes on the site during the month; ‘medium’ visitors – those spending between five minutes and 60 minutes: ‘heavy’ visitors – those spending more than 60 minutes. It’s worth noting that equating activity to ‘pages viewed’ instead of ‘time spent’ produced similar results to the graphs below.

Grouping Twitter’s U.K. audience in this way reveals ‘light’ users account for 67 percent of the site’s audience and average less than 2 minutes on the site during the month. The ‘medium’ users account for 26 percent of the audience, averaging over 22 minutes. The ‘heavy’ users’ account for 7 percent of the audience but average almost 6 hours and 17 minutes.

Pareto would suggest that 20 percent of the visitors to a site would account for 80 percent of the total time spent on that site. However, for Twitter in the U.K., almost 80 percent of the time spent on the site is accounted for by the 7 percent of ‘heavy’ visitors. Conversely, 93 percent of the people who visit Twitter account for just 20 percent of the content posted and consumed.

Twitter’s activity metrics are not unusual when compared with other social networks. Three percent of MySpace’s visitors account for 63 percent of total time spent on the site; 14 percent of Bebo’s visitors account for 87 percent of total time. For LinkedIn, 5 percent of visitors account for half the total time. Half of Facebook’s U.K. audience (52 percent) account for almost all (98 percent) of the time spent on the site. This is because during the month of January, Facebook’s ‘heavy’ visitors averaged 14 hours 20 minutes, their ‘medium’ users (32 percent of the audience) averaged 30 minutes while their ‘light’ visitors (16 percent) averaged less than 2 minutes. Original Source: http://blog.nielsen.com by Alex Burmaster, Communications Director, UK & EMEA, Nielsen’s online division discusses

As we come to the end of our 2nd month of the new decade it will be interesting to look at which brands will stand out from the rest at the end of the year.  When searching for great brands I came across adslogans who suggested that the following brands were good enough to enter the 2000 Advertising Slogan Hall of fame.

1. “We try Harder” – Avis”
2. “Go to work on an egg” Eggs marketing board
3. “Guinness is good for you.” Guinness
4. “Don’t be vague. Ask for Haig.” Haig Scotch Whisky
5. “Happiness is a cigar called Hamlet.” Hamlet
6. “Heineken refreshes the parts other beers cannot reach.” Heineken
7. “Beanz Meanz Heinz.” Heinz
8. “It is. Are you?” The Independent
9. “Just do it.” Nike
10. “Think small.” Volkswagen

Do you remembers this from Burger King?

Which brands do you think should be in the Advertising Slogan Hall of fame 2010

Brandalism is a Portmanteau and has many definitions. The  Urban Dictionary defines it as the creeping corporatisation of schools, libraries and other public buildings, which are gradually being daubed with company logos and slogans. Coined by graffiti artist Banksy, and expounded on in his book “Wall and Piece”

However there was an earlier citation by —Gareth Branwyn, “Jargon Watch, Wired, February 1999 who defines Brandalism as the increased “defacing” of schools, libraries, and other public spaces with logos, advertisements, and corporate slogans.

My interpretation of this concept can also be related to products and services. How many brands are you currently wearing, consuming, or have eaten today. I would argue that its probably five or more.  We’re all victims of brand overdose and over endorsement.  How many of us can honestly say we that we haven’t thought about a little bit of brandalism?  We can’t go anywhere now without the idea of brand being pushed squeezed or thrown into our faces. see example (Katie Price aka Jordan) as an example.

It would seem that counter culture has become so mainstream that the reason we do things from a brand prospecctive has been forgotten and has been replaced by the satisfaction that is derived from the brand. Brands take note, consumers are not stupid and will only buy into you when you buy into them.

Interesting talk about how advertising adds value to a product by changing our perception, rather than the product itself. Rory Sutherland makes the daring assertion that a change in perceived value can be just as satisfying as what we consider real value — and his conclusion has interesting consequences for how we look at life.

Original Source: Seth Godin

A new study has found that the phrase “bored to death” may be true for some people. A study of 7,000 government employees between the ages of 35 to 55 found that those who reported being chronically bored at work were more likely to die than those who were not always bored. But researchers say that boredom itself isn’t the problem. Instead, it seems bored people are more likely to engage in health-damaging behaviors such as alcohol, drug use, or overeating.

Read full story: healthcentral.com

Chinese New Year or Spring Festival which is on February 14th is the most important of the traditional Chinese holidays. Chinese New Year is the longest and most important festivity in the Lunar Calendar. The origin of Chinese New Year is itself centuries old and gains significance because of several myths and traditions. Ancient Chinese New Year is a reflection on how the people behaved and what they believed in the most.

This year it’s the year of the Tiger.  Check out this interesting article about “Tigeromics” and why the year of the Tiger will be good for you: http://bit.ly/7Jynvy

Here is a summary if you haven’t got the time:

“Tigeromics” is, if anything, a mix of predictions about diverse local trends that might loom large in the local market. Tigeromics stands for:

T – time for Korean chic;

I – into our neighborhood;

G – good to be geeks;

E – end of taboos;

R – ready-made to order-made;

O – omni-U solutions;

M – manner matters;

I – it’s aqua;

C – challenge your age:

S – style republic.

Great short video from Seth Godin about tribes and community and why they are so important to your business.

Just checking out scr.im Here’s what they say about themselves:

“Who: Ozh (blog, Twitter)

Why: because it was fun to do. And, really, because one day I needed to share my email via Twitter, and didn’t find a satisfying way to do so.

With:

• Some PHP and a MySQL database
• The uber awesome jQuery
• The colorful tree and the cute little red feature bug are creations of artist Tinneketin, aka Martine Lemmens, and are used with kind permission.

Contact

If you just want to say that this service is cute, or cool, or both, you can send me a tweet @ozh. Please, no feature request or bug report sent this way. Thanks!”

For more information visit http://scr.im/