Jamie Beckland

Previously, I talked about how marketers need lots of content – way more content than they can produce themselves. That’s where the emerging category of curation tools becomes an important part of the online marketer’s arsenal.

Curation tools help push a lot of content through your site. That’s a good thing – you stay relevant in search engine results, and keep popping up in social spaces every time a new piece of content goes up on your site. Continue Reading »

Tags: content, curation, HiveFire, Marshall Kirkpatrick, PostRank, RSS, Yahoo Pipes

In a complex sale, the path from awareness to purchase is long and fraught with distraction. Many different stakeholders are consulted at different times, and with different information needs. The business analyst who is looking to streamline a process might initially find your service. The system engineer then needs to vet whether it will fit into the existing structures. The C-suite needs to understand how this piece fits in with the larger business roadmap. And the end user needs to understand how the new solution will be better than the current one.

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Tags: content

Spend any time on Twitter, and you quickly learn that looking at the unfiltered feed of tweets is like drinking from a firehose. There are a number of human ways of getting around this problem: setting a “Twitter check” appointment, or only reviewing certain Twitter lists. But, inevitably, you miss so much good stuff.

Enter Cadmus, which dramatically improves the signal/noise ratio, and gets you to the good stuff on Twitter fast.

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Tags: Cadmus, Justin Bieber, social media, third-party, twitter

The hottest emerging media question of 2009 was “What is Twitter’s Business Model?”  Many pondered, many posited, and few hints were given.

But, taking a breath before committing to a revenue model is a good thing for Twitter.  A completely new, never-before-experienced service like Twitter needs time to grow.  Users need to play with it.  They need to see what’s possible.  Then, they need to decide how they are going to use it.  And Twitter used 2009 to really listen and understand its users and their needs.

Now, we’re starting to see the results of all that listening. Continue Reading »

Tags: retweet, revenue model, twitter, twitter contributors, twitter lists

There’s a movement afoot to “kill IE6” (see IE6 update, killie6.com, ie6nomore.com) once and for all. Internet Explorer 6 debuted in 2001 and was a great browser for the time. But the Web has moved on, and IE6 is holding it back. Continue Reading »

Tags: cost/benefit, internet explorer, microsoft

The most recent addition to my (long) list of Web sites I can’t live without is Netflix. I know that an entertainment site is an odd choice for something you can’t live without, but during a recession every penny counts, and Netflix is saving me thousands of pennies each month. What I didn’t expect was how much better my TV watching experience would become. Netflix has found a way to do way more with much less. My great-grandmother, who lived through the Depression, would have been so proud. Continue Reading »

Tags: netflix, user experience, website design