Simple Moves, Happy Customers, and Myriad Challenges

Today’s recommended reading is a bit all over the map. There’s something here to please communicators, entrepreneurs, consumers, and probably a half dozen other demographics. Don’t get too used to it, though, because I’m just as likely to get hung up on a single topic tomorrow.

Encouraging Your Customers to Utilize Your Service (Aug 11, 2009)
Noah Brier points out that customers who don’t use your service may
temporarily increase your profit margin, but will likely lead to
long-term client churn which may be more costly. He uses Netflix as an
example and explores other areas where it might equally apply.

Delicious Founder: I Wish I Had Not Sold to Yahoo (Aug 11, 2009)
For entrepreneurs, it often comes down to control vs. cash — at all
stages of a company’s life cycle. Delicious founder Joshua Schachter
said of his sale to Yahoo in 2005: “I wish I had not sold it to them.
The cash and freedom do not even come close; I would rather work on a
big, popular product.”

CustomScoop “Sucks In” Search Results and RSS Feeds (Aug 11, 2009)
There are days when I really enjoy eating my own dog food, as they say.
Today is one of them. We recently added functionality to the
CustomScoop ClipIQ product to enable it to consume RSS feeds of the
user’s choice and integrate it with the data gathered from our
proprietary search technology.

Big Media Companies Navigate Free Content and Apps (Aug 11, 2009)
Stephanie Clifford of the New York Times writes: “Media brands are
jumping onto the iPhone. USA Today? There’s an app for that. “The
Rachel Maddow Show”? “Entertainment Tonight”? Public radio? Yes, yes
and yes, there are apps for those. Now, if only there were an app that
showed media companies how to make money on the iPhone.”

Facebook Acquires Social Veterans in FriendFeed Deal (Aug 11, 2009)
Forrester Research’s Jeremiah Owyang says of the deal: “Friendfeed.com
doesn’t have a tremendous amount of visitors (monthly uniques are under
1mm says Compete, compared to Facebook’s 250mm registered users) so the
acquisition is for the cherry features like Search, Best of Day, and
elegant and rapid procuring of social content in real time. Expect
information in Facebook to continue to become more public, and this
acquisition will help fuel this.”

A Small Set of Simple Moves (Aug 11, 2009)
Brad Feld compares training to run a faster marathon to the simple
steps that need to be repeated relentlessly to succeed as a startup CEO

STUDY: 83% of organizations have or need social media specialist (Aug 10, 2009)
Heidi Miller has a great write-up of a study from Eric Schwartzman of
iPressoom that looked at how organizations are integrating online
communications into their business efforts.