" social marketers mistakenly equate the strength of their community with the size of their following. They establish fans on Facebook, Twitter and other social networks as key performance indicators and then blast them with brand messages. The truth is that the strength of your community has much less to do with how consumers are connected to y…

"Idiots come in 3 types. The first type is what I call the politician, the second type is the spectator and then last but not least there is the the whiner. Every business I’ve worked with has them either in or around them."

"the process we use here at Fractl to come up with ideas that we feel confident will find viral success. "

“There is a huge audience of readers out there craving this kind of storytelling ... With phones and tablets, they now always have a reading device available on them to dig into something.”

" "It takes courage to talk to customers but you have to do it,” Ritson would say. “First the qualitative, then the quantitative," he repeated. Interview customers (qualitative) before you create surveys (quantitative)."

"Since ancient times people have held the notion that there's something mysterious, unpredictable, and even divine about where good ideas come from. But according to David Burkus, assistant professor of management at Oral Roberts University, today researchers are studying the heck out of creativity and much of what we think we know about the topic…

I used to refer to great-websites-for-the-wrong-audience as Meatball Sundaes, but this visual metaphor is much better... using Sharepoint to deliver social intranets for organisations that don’t want social intranets, due to the passionate conviction that they need a social intranet.

"This is the first course in Google's newly launched Analytics Academy -- which will feature a variety of self-paced video lessons. The course includes 22 video lessons, each 3-10 minutes long, and provides learning activities. Google estimates this course will take a total of 4-6 hours to complete. The first three units of this course cover indu…

"Learn about the European Union, how it works, why it matters and what it can offer you. Regardless of where you live, the EU not only affects your life but may also transform it. This course aims at empowering you, your family, business and community in Europe and beyond and will enable you to discover jobs you were not aware of. "

"The way it works is pretty simple: You paste data from a table (this can be a spreadsheet or even a web page), choose from a handful of visualization types (Raw explains what each one is best for) and then drag the variables you want to analyze into the predefined mapping categories (as you can see below, it’s really self-explanatory). Then you d…

"The Databoard lets you explore insights from Google research studies, share them with others, and create your own custom infographics." via @chandlertwilson

"he and his Stanford colleagues have been focusing on phrases and sentences, and aside from sentiment analysis, he says their models are pushing the state of the art in areas such as machine translation, grammatical analysis and logical reasoning." Bloggingportal with automated sentiment analysis - what's not to like?

“We now know that there’s sleight of hand, and special effects, behind what we read in the newspaper.”... You didn’t know before?? What’s the % of newspaper stories with PR behind them in some way? 40%? 50%? More?

"A majority of digital marketers haven’t received any formal training in digital marketing: 82% report learning on the job."

"many marketers still feel in the dark when it comes to digital know-how, according to new research from Adobe. More than 80% of professionals are still receiving their digital training informally on the job and only 9% feel fully confident their digital efforts work, the poll of 1,000 U.S. marketers found."

All true and a v. nice metaphor. But it is also quite a good social network, with more intelligent conversations and a higher S/N ratio than average: "The reason why it doesn't seem like much of a social network is that the "friending" and "following" are just an accidental outgrowth of what it really does - being an invisible overlay between you…

"too many journalism students and journalists are native users rather than actual natives. The difference is enormous, and has real implications. Actual natives can build in addition to use digital tools, giving themselves many more opportunities to make better journalism. Users can only work within the constraints that other people set." Amen fr…

"That’s why today we’re excited to announce Analytics Academy -- a new hub for you and your colleagues to participate in free, online, community-based video courses about digital analytics and Google Analytics. With Analytics Academy, we aim to provide you with a guided learning experience to become an analytics expert in no time. Our first cours…

"“The level of discourse — the difference — was pretty stunning,” Orr said. The people posting through Facebook Comments displayed anger, but it didn’t have to be heavily moderated. “On the articles, it immediately plunged into the lowest common denominator — racism, threats, vulgarity. It was night-and-day.”"

"the new feature ... gives both Gawker authors and readers the ability to filter comments based on the writers and commenters they follow, or whose content they have “liked” or given a star to. So readers can click on Denton’s name and see not only the posts he has written, but also a specific selection of comments that he has chosen to show, from…

"The following is a visual model of all the core tenets I espouse so fiercely here at The Sales Lion and with all our clients as well (To view each, just use the scrolling buttons on the site). I know each of these 12 tenets, if followed, get results– specifically by building your brand, increasing traffic and leads, and finally by generating a lo…

"without giving up their traditional skills, journalists are becoming more and more information "managers". They are behaving like human filters which ... verify and add context to what user-generated content they think to be relevant, and feed it onto Web pages or mobile applications. Thanks to the rise of new social media curation platforms, t…

"I want to post 4 images in a particular order, and there doesn't seem to be anyway of doing it!"

A useful matrix of the pros and cons of 6 different approaches to meeting the single biggest challenge in content marketing - feeding the beast consistently

"Content Marketing is about devising, producing, and using content to market your products or services. You don't start Content Marketing from the content. You devise the content strategy, from scratch, around what you are marketing, and what form or forms of content will most effectively do that." A refreshing view from a fellow grumpy old …

"But even a fractious minority wields enough power to skew a reader's perception of a story, recent research suggests. In one study led by University of Wisconsin-Madison professor Dominique Brossard, 1,183 Americans read a fake blog post on nanotechnology and revealed in survey questions how they felt about the subject (are they wary of the benef…

" Popular Science has officially shut off its comment section, pointing to research showing that disagreeable comments hurt the reading experience. Or, at least, the reading comprehension. One study out of the University of Wisconsin-Madison found that mean comments under an article about nanotechnology "polarized readers," taking attention away f…

"a new kind of reblogging functionality so that readers can top the articles they share with their own headlines and introductions.... “Publishing should be a collaboration between authors and their smartest readers. And at some point the distinction should become meaningless."

"Scholars have worried that proliferation of personalization technologies will degrade public opinion by isolating people from challenging perspectives... study examines personalized news recommender system designs using a communication mediation model.... Results indicate increased selective exposure when using personalized news systems... portal…

"News in general doesn’t matter most of the time, and most people would be far better off if they spent their time consuming less news and more ideas that have more lasting import"