By Francis Moran
I really don’t know what I think about the recent editing of Mark Twain’s classic American novel Adventures of Huckleberry Finn to replace the offensive word “nigger” with the more prosaic “slave.” The objectionable word was common parlance when Twain wrote this masterpiece of life along the Mississippi River in the southern United States in the mid-1880s and I am loath to see anyone tamper with an original work of such brilliance.
I do know that when I shared Huck with my then-tweenaged boys as part of our long-standing nighttime story-reading ritual, that I felt just as uncomfortable as Michael Chabon, although, unlike Chabon, I opted not to substitute something softer. I had ploughed through the far fewer iterations of the word in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, albeit with some trepidation, and I saw no reason to do otherwise with the sequel. Equally difficult were references to the character “Injun Joe” and the persistent use of vernacular speech that made Jim sound very much like the social and intellectual inferior he was held to be at the time. But I read aloud every word that Twain wrote.
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By Alexandra Reid
Quora’s rise to popularity is abuzz on Twitter, blogs and other media sites as a surge of people are trying out the social networking tool for the first time. Poking around the site myself this past week, my first impressions found it to be rather unintuitive. It seems that I am not alone in my opinion, as questions about how to use Quora and why it is important are being frequently asked, rather ironically, on the site itself. More importantly for my ongoing social media research for clients, I noticed that very little discussion has developed to provide insight as to why Quora is important for B2B companies and how it could be used to best effect.
First, what exactly is Quora?
Quora is “a continually improving collection of questions and answers created, edited, and organized by everyone who uses it. The most important thing is to have each question page become the best possible resource for someone who wants to know about the question.” Like Wikipedia, Quora is a collaborative effort, where users are meant to document the world around them. Over time, the database of knowledge should grow until almost everything that everyone wants to know is available in the system. Over the last couple of weeks, Quora’s traffic has doubled, likely making it the new “breakout site” of 2011.
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By Linda Forrest
It’s been busy around these parts the past few weeks as we had several clients exhibiting at marquee trade shows, and our own Francis Moran attended these shows to support our clients and get a finger on the pulse of our clients’ industries. If his Tweet, upon experiencing Retail’s BIG Show, the annual conference and exhibition of the National Retail Foundation (NRF) is any indication, 2011 is off to a good start: “Mood at NRF, the major retail trade show, is very upbeat. Quote from a veteran CES attendee equally applies here: ‘Woohoo, America’s back.'”
When I saw this, I was curious to know if this positivity denoted an upward trend across the conference and trade show universe, as, with so many marketing activities, investment in trade shows and conferences had waned in recent years for a variety of reasons – lack of budget, increased focus on no-travel events, virtual tradeshows and webcasts, podcasts and other reasonable excuses to put dollars elsewhere.
But as with all things, the pendulum swings and we’re seeing at least what seems to be a renewed investment in attending trade shows and events. Gone, however, are the days when participation in any and all industry events in your sector is a given part of your marketing strategy and budget, as seemed to be the case prior to the dot-com bubble bursting.
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By Leo Valiquette
The verdict is still out as to whether Goldman Sachs’ investment in Facebook heralds an IPO, but the $50 billion valuation it places on the popular social media platform is nonetheless a scary portent.
While Alex blogged last week about what this deal could mean for those who use Facebook and other social media tools for work and play, I couldn’t help but think that history may be repeating itself.
Late last week, CFRA’s John Budden and Rob Snow discussed the logistics around Goldman Sachs’ “special purpose vehicle” intended to skirt around the U.S. Security and Exchange Commission’s 500-shareholder rule. Rob characterized the US$500 million being put into Facebook by Goldman Sachs and Russian investment firm Digital Sky Technologies as a venture capital round, for lack of a better term.
“It’s just a staggering multiple for a private company,” Budden said of the lofty valuation the investment places on Facebook. Consider that $50 billion against the hard numbers: For 2009, Facebook had revenues of around US$777 million and net income of around $200 million.
“It has the feelings of the bubble that we experienced in year 2000, but it is different in character,” Budden said.
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By Linda Forrest
It’s a busy few weeks for inmedia, as our managing partner, Francis Moran, and several clients attend various conferences and trade shows. I expect Francis will write a blog post about his adventures at these events upon his return.
I plan to write next week about whether the tradeshow, a marketing program element that has taken a hit in the past few years due to both the increased adoption of technology and the struggling economy, is back. Just anecdotally, important events never fell completely from the agendas of the technology companies we work with, but it does seem that there’s an appreciable uptick in the number of events we’re seeing clients participate in in the past six months or so. Stay tuned for my post next week that looks at the actual facts and figures.
Meanwhile, here are the comings and goings of several inmedia clients over the next week:
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Facebook friends Goldman Sachs and the rich get richer
January 04, 2011 by Alexandra Reid
By Alexandra Reid Facebook has raised US$500 million from Goldman Sachs and Russian investment firm Digital Sky Technologies, according to the New York Times. The injection of cash values Facebook at about $50 billion. The social network now has a bigger capitalization than Boeing, at $48.7 billion, and Time Warner, at about $36 billion. The deal has […]
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What do a Christmas tree farm and a mortgage broker have in common?
January 03, 2011 by Leo Valiquette
By Leo Valiquette First up, a very happy New Year wish from all of us here at inmedia Public Relations. Many of you were no doubt in the same boat as my wife and me over the holidays, at home with one or more young ones to entertain for two weeks during their break from […]
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In defence of Mark Zuckerberg as Time’s Person of the Year
December 22, 2010 by Linda Forrest
By Linda Forrest That title alone is probably enough to put me in the crosshairs of many a critic of Time Magazine‘s selection of Facebook’s inventor and leader as its person of the year for 2010. But personally, I think that the selection is merited and that the vitriol detractors have spewed in light of his naming […]
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How to avoid becoming a pork belly writer in Topeka, KS
December 20, 2010 by Leo Valiquette
By Leo Valiquette Regular readers of this blog will recall that a few weeks ago I wrote about the U.K. court case of Meltwater vs. the Newspaper Licensing Agency (NLA), an ongoing story that spotlights the challenges of traditional media outlets to maintain control of, and monetize, their content in the age of Web 2.0 and […]
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In a tough economy, don’t let the need for austerity cripple future prosperity
December 13, 2010 by Leo Valiquette
By Leo Valiquette For those of you who may have missed it, London has been a battlefield between police and tens of thousands of hostile student protesters over the past week as Britain’s coalition government targets higher education with its austerity measures intended to help with economic recovery. Now, I don’t claim any deep knowledge […]
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Lessons from a launch: Scoring success in social media
December 10, 2010 by Alexandra Reid
By Alexandra Reid Delaney Turner, Worldwide Social Media Marketing Manager for IBM Business Analytics, presented his lessons from the launch of IBM Cognos 10 at Zone5ive yesterday afternoon. Turner, also a primary contributor to Performance Perspectives Blog, admited he was a skeptic of social media and that he initially didn’t even see the point. However, […]
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Online communications can make or break your reputation for customer service
December 09, 2010 by Linda Forrest
By Linda Forrest Customer service is an area of keen interest for us, as those who regularly read this blog will know. It’s clear that the increased adoption of social media in recent years has had a tremendous, we think positive, impact on customer service. The fact is that online communications can act as a […]
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Social Media Breakfast: Content Rules with C.C. Chapman
December 08, 2010 by Alexandra Reid
By Alexandra Reid C.C. Chapman, co-author (along with MarketingProfs’ Ann Handley) of Content Rules, kicked off his book tour at Social Media Breakfast in Ottawa this morning. Though just a tad bleary eyed at 7:30am, I was very excited to meet the man who creates the content that I read and listen to quite regularly online, and to […]
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By Francis Moran
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The Future of A&R – Walabe : [...] http://francis-moran.com/marketing-strategy/top-10-questions-every-strategic-communicator-should-ask... [...]
Traditional Marketing is Dead – Long Live Bikini Waxer Marketing | Scalexl : [...] pointed out by Alexandra Reid on the Francis Moran website content marketing is becoming more and more like journalism. So, it is not just about the content, [...]
It’s Summertime…and the Networking is Easy? | THE MERRAINE BRAIN : [...] In fact, summer is perhaps one of the times least used to network, yet at the same time has shown to be the most productive time to network. People tend to be in a brighter mood compared to during the gloomy winters-especially where I am from in England! Networking needs to be fun and not approached as another chore, like mowing the lawn. (http://francis-moran.com/marketing-strategy/social-media-strategy-why-meeting-in-the-real-world-matt...) [...]