Category Archives: Marketing

The underground economy of social networks

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In a new study, Barracuda Labs analyzed a random sampling of more than 70,000 fake Twitter accounts that are being used to sell fake Twitter followers.

via The underground economy of social networks.

This underground economy consists of dealers who create and sell the use of thousands of fake social accounts, and Abusers who buy follows or likes from these fake accounts to boost their perceived popularity, sell advertising based on their now large social audience or conduct other malicious activity.

How the Kindle Fire and the Nexus 7 harmed the tablet market

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So the problem with the Kindle Fire — and the Nexus 7 — is the same problem that’s plagued the PC industry. Deep and extreme price cuts give the makers no wriggle room to innovate. There’s no doubt that a $199 was an attractive price point for a tablet, but it’s possibly that it was unsustainably low, and that by driving prices down to this level so rapidly, both Amazon and Google have irrevocably harmed the tablet market by creating unrealistic price expectations. It’s quite likely that these impracticable price demands could harm Microsoft and its tablet ambitions.

via How the Kindle Fire and the Nexus 7 harmed the tablet market | ZDNet.

PC Sales Flatline as Ultrabooks fail to make an impact

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The Gartner report reveals that in total 87.5 million units were shipped in the second quarter of 2012, a decline of 0.1 percent compared to the same period in 2011. “In the second quarter of 2012, the PC market suffered through its seventh consecutive quarter of flat to single-digit growth,” said Mikako Kitagawa, principal analyst at Gartner.

via PC Sales Flatline as Ultrabooks fail to make an impact – International Business Times.

Huawei to tout higher-end phones at Taste of Chicago

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Huawei has been around for a quarter century, but it entered the U.S. market with a mobile device only in 2007. It has historically been known as a manufacturer of telecom network infrastructure. Locally, the company made headlines early last year when it sued Motorola Solutions Inc. over the Schaumburg company’s sale of its networks business to Nokia Siemens Networks. Huawei, which had developed network technology to resell under the Motorola brand, said the deal would transfer its trade secrets to a major rival. Motorola also had sued Huawei for alleged theft of trade secrets. The two companies agreed to settle all pending litigation in April 2011, allowing the transaction with Nokia Siemens to close.

via Huawei to tout higher-end phones at Taste of Chicago – chicagotribune.com.

Report: Over 24% Of The Web’s Top 10,000 Sites Now Use Facebook’s Official Widgets

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According to a new study by website monitoring service Pingdom, 24.3% of the top 10,000 websites in the world as reported by Alexa now feature some form of official Facebook integration on their homepages

via Report: Over 24% Of The Web’s Top 10,000 Sites Now Use Facebook’s Official Widgets | TechCrunch.

Counting all kinds of links and official widgets, here is Pingdom’s final count:

  1. Facebook: 49.3%
  2. Twitter: 41.7%
  3. Google+: 21.5%
  4. LinkedIn: 3.9%

I would have suspected these numbers would be higher. My local DNS server hijacks all facebook requests so I see every time facebook.com tries to phone home from my browser.

Online Social Networks can be Tipped by as Little as 0.8% of their Population

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The spreading of a trend or behavior in a social network is a very active area of research. One very important model of trend spreading is the “tipping” model. With tipping, an individual in a network adopts a trend if at least half (or some other proportion) of his or her friends have previously done so. An important problem in viral marketing is to find a “seed set” of individuals in the social network. If all members of a “seed set” in a social network initially adopt a certain trend, then a cascade initiates through the tipping model which results in the entire population adopting that trend. So, if a viral marketer wants to provide free samples of a product to certain individuals, a seed set is likely a good place to start.

via Online Social Networks can be Tipped by as Little as 0.8% of their Population | The Central Node.

Our work, “Large Social Networks can be Targeted for Viral Marketing with Small Seed Sets,” will be presented at the IEEE/ACM International Conference on Advances in Social Networks Analysis and Mining (ASONAM) as a full paper this August

The Call of the Future by Tom Vanderbilt

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In 1986, the latest shift was “call waiting,” which Judith Martin compared to “standing at a cocktail party and not paying attention to the person you’re with, waiting for a more important person.” Now, of course, as we stand at that same cocktail party, fidgeting with our smartphones—which, despite rarely looking like something designed for speaking into, we not only talk on, but to (summoning the iPhone’s electronic concierge, Siri, for directions or the weather)—the interruptions that once occurred on the telephone line now occur in real time and space.

via The Wilson Quarterly: The Call of the Future by Tom Vanderbilt.

Why Verizon Doesn’t Want You to Buy an iPhone

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Here’s the problem: Verizon has spent millions of dollars rolling out its massive LTE network to cover 200 million people so far. You could call it billions, if you include the $5 billion spent on the C Block 700-Mhz spectrum licenses. But according to its first-quarter earnings presentation it’s only been able to convert 9.1 percent of its 93 million users to LTE.

via Why Verizon Doesn’t Want You to Buy an iPhone | News & Opinion | PCMag.com.

You Can’t Move an iPhone Customer to 4G
From Verizon’s position, the solution looks simple: move heavy data users in crowded urban areas from 3G to 4G as fast as possible. That would help everyone. The new 4G users get much faster connections, and the 3G users would see better speeds and network quality, too, as that network becomes less crowded.