The Agitator

A couple of days ago I posted Social Net Fundraising – All Hype? triggered by a Washington Post article. The Post more or less said that Facebook was failing as a fundraising  tool or venue. While I think the Post has it essentially right, today I read a powerful countervailing piece on ...  Read more

You need to make a critical decision. When do you have "enough" information? When have you thought about it "enough?" Marketing maven Seth Godin addresses this issue wisely and succinctly as follows: "First rule of decision making: More time does not create better ...  Read more

Mercy me! Even while media researcher Niesen is reporting that social nets and online video have transformed the web, the Washington Post is telling us that online fundraising via social nets is over-rated. What’s a poor blogger to do? Say they’re both right! The usage trend data ...  Read more

Last week, The Agitator posted on online loyalty building and asked readers what they are trying along these lines. Here are two helpful replies we’d like to share. First, from Lisa Sargent at Sargent Communications: Tom, I covered this to a lesser extent when I wrote about trigger emails ...  Read more

We’ve had enough heavy stuff on The Agitator for this week, here is an item for fun. But it still has a purpose … encouraging creative use of online video. These are the top five online video adverts for the past week, as reported by Ad Age Digital: 1. T-Mobile — T-Mobile Dance ...  Read more

There’s probably no one out there who is not a "member" of some sort of loyalty program sponsored by a commercial merchant. From airline miles to stickers recording return visits to your local coffee shop, everyone seems to have some sort of program to encourage repeat business ...  Read more

Much has been written about candidate use of online tools in the 2008 election. But here’s one of the best pieces I’ve seen regarding sophisticated use of the internet for issue campaigning. The focus was California’s Proposition 8, which sought to ban same-sex marriages ...  Read more

In a recent blog post, marketing maven Seth Godin predicted that 90% of sales will come from word of mouth or digital promotion by 2011. He asked: "How do you change what you’re doing today to be ready for that?" Think about it … can you imagine that 90% of your ...  Read more

There’s lots of fresh data floating around on usage of social nets. This summary from comScore indicates that MySpace, with 70 million visitors in February, is still the #1 site for online US adults, but Facebook at 57 million is growing fastest (77% in past 12 months, compared to ...  Read more

Here from Pew Research is — for my money — the definitive report on the role of the internet in last year’s election. Below are some topline findings from Pew’s report, but you should treat this as "must read" if you are serious about engaging folks online around ...  Read more