Three Minds On Digital Marketing @ Organic

image credit: Irving Geis

We all love statistics!! Whether factual, misleading, or downright wrong... they are bite-sized and delicious. They make this whole crazy world quantifiable and human behavior easier to deal with. This weeks featured statistic comes from the 2008 Cone Business of Social Media Study:

"93% of Americans believe that a company should have a presence on social media sites and 85% believe that these companies should use these services to interact with consumers."

Hurray for social media, which is continuing to seep it's way into the hearts of consumers and companies alike.

What's Been Happening This Week...

Twitter Continues To Grow Up... Mostly
Evan Williams, co-founder of Twitter, got named one of Business Week's 25 Most Influential People on the Web. But what's funny about Twitter's success is that it wasn't intended to be used for what it is now. It's no longer about "what are you doing?", it's about communicating in the fastest way possible to the masses.

A great example of this occurred this week when Laurel Papworth, Australian blogger, decided to pull together an instant consultancy to respond to an RFP from Vodaphone. She put out a tweet and within 4 hours later, she had pulled together 65 people, they had set up a website called The Twitter Agency, and were exchanging tips and strategy via blog posts.

Big Twitter blunder this week came today when citizen journalism falsely reported that Steve Jobs had a heart attack. CNN carried the report, Apple stock dropped, until it was revealed it was false. Could this become a growing trend?

"You've got people who are trying to game the system to (possibly?) game the market or influence other events. The 'news market' will eventually start filtering these reports out, which raises the price of being a reliable news source and slightly degrades the Twitters and iReports as useful sources."
Mike Hudson

Web Apps: Alive, Dead, or Evil?
It was a weird week for the world of widgets and web apps. Mashable basically called web apps a necessary evil. And the rest of the blogosphere couldn't agree on whether the web app was dead or growing. Facebook announced that their apps are now portable to friendster, and Netflix finally launched an API to make their data available for widgetization. But is this all too late... AllFacebook has presented some pretty convincing charts that show a huge decline in web app installation, since the Facebook redesign.

One area that isn't down is mobile apps. Facebook launched a new version of their iPhone app this week. And presidential candidate Barack Obama released an iPhone app to help supporters connect and get involved, stay up to date on breaking news, read up on Obama's position on issues, and more.

Marta Strickland