— oh my marketing!

Tre anni fa, la famosa cover-story “Blogs will change your business” (qui).

Oggi, l’evoluzione di quei ragionamenti: “Beyond Blogs – what business needs to know” (qui).

Ho selezionato qualche passaggio.

Three years ago, we wrote a big story—but missed a bigger one.

We focused on blogs as a new form of printing press, one that turned Gutenberg’s economics on its head, making everyone a potential publisher.
This captured our attention, not least because this publishing revolution was already starting to rattle the skyscrapers in our media-heavy, Manhattan neighborhood.

But despite the importance of blogs, only a minority of us participates. Chances are, you don’t.
According to a recent study from Forrester Research (FORR), only a quarter of the U.S. adult online population even bothers to read a blog once a month.

But blogs, it turns out, are just one of the do-it-yourself tools to emerge on the Internet.

Vast social networks such as Facebook and MySpace offer people new ways to meet and exchange information. Sites like LinkedIn help millions forge important work relationships and alliances. New applications pop up every week.

While only a small slice of the population wants to blog, a far larger swath of humanity is eager to make friends and contacts, to exchange pictures and music, to share activities and ideas.

Sul titolo del nuovo servizio giornalistico:

So our first fix is to lose “blogs” from our headline. The revised title: “Social Media Will Change Your Business.”

Sulla capacità dei social network – in questo caso di Twitter – di produrre vendite:

A Dell employee who goes by the Twitter name of Ggroovin tells us that Dell’s service on Twitter has brought in half a million dollars of new orders in the past year.

Sempre su Twitter, questa volta per chi cerca lavoro:

Some on Twitter sniff around for the next job. “The new résumé is 140 characters” tweets 23-year-old Amanda Mooney, who just landed a job in PR.

Sull’importanza delle chiacchiere davanti alla macchinetta del caffè, secondo l’head of technology di British Telecom (10.500 dipendenti su Facebook):

There’s a lot to look at. “We’ve spent years talking about the value of the water-cooler conversations,” he says. “Now we have the ability to actually understand what these relationships are, how information and decision-making migrate.

We see how people really work.”

Why does this matter? The company can spot teams that form organically, and then can place them on targeted projects. It can pinpoint the people who transmit ideas. These folks are golden. “A new class of supercommunicators has emerged,” he says.

Su un account Twitter in vendita su eBay, comprensivo di 1.300 contatti:

Valuation is a hot question in social media.
Andrew Baron, the co-founder of Rocketboom, an early video blog, had some fun with it. A few weeks ago, he announced that he was auctioning his Twitter account, which had some 1,300 followers, on eBay.

Anyone who wanted an instant crowd with some influential followers could bid. (Of course, these followers might not stick around under a new regime. That was part of the risk calculation.)

The bidding quickly rose above $500. As the auctioning continued, more people (including us) signed up to follow Baron’s account so they could witness this drama in action. That increase in his crowd theoretically raised the value of his Twitter property. In the end, he called it off.

As we write, his following has climbed to 2,309.

Infine, Jeff Jarvis dice una cosa secondo me illuminante:

Three years from now, I predict BusinessWeek’s cover won’t be about blogs or tools but about companies as communities.