A roundup of relevant links affecting our industry.
Each week, I compose a newsletter that includes a series of links about current events and trends in the worlds of technology, business, digital communications and marketing in order to keep leaders up to date on changes, newsworthy items and content that might be useful in your job. And now you have the option of just subscribing to this newsletter if you wish.
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Industry
- It's never a boring week at Uber, whose culture has been called into question in recent months. And this week it was like a soap opera, as an Uber executive suggested that the company should hire researchers and investigative reporters to get personal information about any journalist who writes negatively about the car service company. (re/code)
- And lest you think it's just a Silicon Valley spat between a tech company and an insider publication like PandoDaily, the New York Times has picked up on it and the Pentagon distanced itself from the Uber executive who made the comments. (Bits Blog and BuzzFeed)
- You know you have a reputational issue to address when a leading venture capitalist notes that Uber's culture is driven by "ruthless execution combined with total arrogance," while a widely-read digital publication states that Uber has an a-hole problem. (Business Insider and Vox)
- You definitely have a problem when you get a letter from Senator Al Franken, the chairman of the U.S. Senate Subcommittee on Technology, Privacy and the Law. (U.S. Senate)
- The latest development was on late Thursday - somehow - a confidential deck of Uber's finances were "leaked" to the press. (Business Insider)
- Given the hiring of one-time White House advisor David Plouffe as head of policy and communications, and the talk of "oppo" researchers, a so-called leak such as this is very reminiscent of controlled leaks that are fed out in political campaigns to distract from the main issue.
- Is bad brand behavior out of control? Gawker sets up a dedicated page for bad brand tweets rather than having to write a new article for every one. (Gawker)
- Mobile is overtaking television as the primary screen for time spent per day. (Flurry)
- Mobile growth isn't only limited to smartphones: in New York City, old phone booths will be converted into "Links" that will feature touchscreens, wifi and charging outlets. There will be 10,000 hotspots eventually. (AdWeek)
- 2015 will be a big year: we'll surpass 3 billion people online, and by 2018 over half of the world's population should be online. (eMarketer) Other notable highlights:
- 2014: Brazil will supplant Japan as fourth-largest internet user population
- 2015: Mexico will settle firmly into the eighth spot, eclipsing Germany
- 2016: India will jump the US as the second-largest internet user population
- 2017: Indonesia will reach the top five, overtaking Japan
- 2018: China will eclipse three-quarters of a billion users, after showing accelerating growth in each year in our forecast
Platforms
- Last Friday evening, Facebook announced it will be reducing overly promotional posts from brands in your News Feed. (Facebook)
- Get ready for Facebook in the enterprise. Long the mainstay of solutions like Yammer, Jive and Chatter, Facebook is working on its own solution for internal social networking. (Mashable)
- Related: IBM is launching Verse, a cloud-based email and social collaboration tool. (WSJ)
- Conscious of the limitations of its main app when it comes to specialized needs, Facebook has released the Groups app for better control and connection. (Facebook)
- Forrester is back again with a report with limited research, claiming that brands are wasting their money on Facebook and Twitter. Claiming that brands don't have relationships with customers on the platform, analyst-lite Nate Elliott seems to miss the point that most brands haven't taken the proper step to build relationships because they've been too busy advertising at consumers. Of course they're not seeing ideal results. While we agree that it's important to have a strong owned media presence, any marketing strategy should contain a variety of platforms and tactics. (WSJ CMO Today and SHIFT Communications)
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| As usual, Forrester does a bang-up job of determining the what, but not the why. |
- Twitter is now indexed for search all the way back to 2006. Time to double-check for any embarrassing tweets from the early days. (Twitter Engineering Blog)
- You can now share public tweets via direct messages - most certainly a useful feature to customer service reps who need to take public conversations private to protect personal information. (TechCrunch)
- Snapchat is getting into payments with the ability to send money to friends in a partnership with Square, calling the new service Snapcash. (re/code)
- And speaking of e-commerce, Ello has taken to selling T-shirts. While not their core funding strategy, the no-ads-here network may turn to selling goods as its business model - a move that may not entirely square with trends toward the sharing economy. (re/code)
- Yahoo has forged a partnership with Mozilla, wherein it will be the default search engine for the Firefox browser for the next 5 years, replacing Google in an effort to promote "choice and innovation." (The Mozilla Blog)
- Amazon is about to launch Amazon Travel, a booking service for hotels, in select cities. This suddenly puts TripAdvisor squarely in Amazon's sites. (Skift)
Collaborative Economy
- Airbnb is creating a print magazine called Pineapple, named after the famed fruit of hospitality in colonial New England. (New York Times)
- Spotify is collaborating with Uber to allow riders to choose their music during a ride. (The Next Web and Spotify)
- Here's a listing of collaborative economy funding to date. (Jeremiah Owyang)
- Whttl is a browseable and searchable database of sharing economy companies. (Whttl)
Audio
- Some enterprising reporters caught a mention of "magic" and podcasts in Spotify's updated code. Could the personal music giant be prepping to include podcasting in its streaming next? If so, this will give iTunes some reasonable competition, although it has the advantage of coming installed on iOS devices. (TechCrunch)
- Look out, Spotify - Google has just released YouTube Music Key, which gives music lovers another streaming option - with video. (Gizmodo)
- Is radio about to fall off a cliff just as newspapers did, because of the rise of podcasting? (Seth Godin)
Metrics / Measurement / Big Data
- There are three telltale signs when it's time to invest in measurement tools. (SHIFT Communications)
- The future is now: Nielsen is finally getting into measurement of Netflix and other streaming video services. (TIME)
Content
- As you go into 2015, you might want to consider five content marketing strategies to guide your efforts. (School of Content)
- Patagonia serves as a shining example of using values-based marketing for storytelling. (Fast Company)
- Quality content (or at least talking about it) is all the rage. But how does Google judge for itself? Relevance, length, readability, the amount of advertising and the presence of images. (Econsultancy)
When You Have Time: Essential Reading / Listening / Watching
- We'll be off next week for the U.S. Thanksgiving holiday, so here's a story we hope isn't a turkey: how constantly connected cooks get ready for Thanksgiving. (Think with Google)
- Believe it or not, the government is a hotbed of social innovation. They may be worth a look. (HBR)
- Read this on your mobile device - or at least at your standing desk. Thoreau on the art of walking and the perils of a sedentary lifestyle. (Brain Pickings)
- If the developments of Snapchat interested you above, you might want to take a look at the future of global payments, where digital transformation, non-card real-time payments and data insights will have a large impact. (McKinsey)
- Here are the best business books of 2014. (strategy+business) Our top picks:
- Marketing: Tilt: Shifting Your Strategy from Products to Customers by Niraj Dawar
- Strategy: Business Strategy: Managing Uncertainty, Opportunity and Enterprise by J.-C. Spender
- Innovation: Social Physics: How Good Ideas Spread - The Lessons from a New Science by Alex Pentland
Image source: Jesus Solana (Flickr)
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