The number of hit albums is in a rapid decline. Chris Anderson, editor-in-chief of Wired Magazine has prepared a study by comparing the number of hit albums to total sales by the music industry. He considers any gold or platinum albums in the RIAA database as the hits. We can clearly see from the following [...]

The Economist suggests companies prepare for blog crisis:
The spread of “social media” across the internet—such as online discussion groups, e-mailing lists and blogs—has brought forth a new breed of brand assassin, who can materialise from nowhere and savage a firm’s reputation. Often the assault is warranted; sometimes it is not. But accuracy is not necessarily [...]

Listen to this podcast where Johnnie Moore interviews Jason Korman of Stormhoek and explains how they succesfully used blogs for marketing doubling their sales.

Here’s how the blogs changed the way for a one well known journalist, Jeff Jarvis. He is writing in the Media Guardian (via Alan Moore):
Interactivity isn’t easy. I must confess that when I wrote for large publications, I said that I loved my audience … but that didn’t mean I wanted to actually [...]

We are proud to announce availability of our first training sessions on Social Media. The training is intended for groups of up to six people and it introduces the basics from reading, analyzing, participating in the online discussions as well as using the technology for company internal communications. We also give extensive look at how [...]

Here is a comparison of costs between a cable subscription in US and downloading selected shows form iTunes. The $2 charge per show is more expensive. Makes me think a competitive business model could be a subscription that gets you a show or a set of shows directly from the entertainment company.

Straight talk from Eric Weaver at Ad-Verse blog takes the fluff out of direct marketing and provides 11 steps to fix the problem.
Wooing customers is more than barraging them with information they don’t care about. It’s more than lead generation targets and rented lists and automated emails. It’s about an investment in the relationship…an investment [...]