Blizzard, the company behind the most successful and profitable entertainment franchise in the world*, World of Warcraft, held a mini-conference in Paris last week to announce that a second sequel to its Diablo series – Diablo III – was in development. Unlike a lot of press conferences, they invited along lots of fans, active forum members and bloggers about the …read the rest of this article

Via. Freeconomics Part I – or who is paying for your Free lunch? – broadstuff and found somewhere on slashdot.

“You must be new, welcome to the Internet. Here on the Internet you are required to view any publicly held company as evil and any effort on their part to charge for a service as pure, unadulterated greed preferably attributed to …read the rest of this article

I had the great pleasure this evening of attending the VRMhub meeting organised by Adriana Lukas, and attended by a group of extremely clever people working to try to make it happen (and me). Tonight, Cluetrain co-author and father of the VRM project Doc Searls was in attendance. I’ll paraphrase his introduction and add a little commentary.
Right now, VRM …read the rest of this article

If you were a brand manager for an FMCG company – let’s say you look after Bostik, for the sake of argument – what would you be doing when it comes to your online strategy?
Well, you’d probably try to work out how Google works. You want to come top of the search results for things like err.. ‘glue’. You’d probably …read the rest of this article

23 Actionable Lessons from Eye-Tracking Studies. An old post (well, Nov 13th), but one well worth reading when you’re designing a site. Here’s point number one as a taster:

Text attracts attention before graphics. Contrary to what you might think, the first thing users look at on a website isn’t the images. Most casual users will be coming to your site …read the rest of this article

The secret strategies of viral marketers seems to have caused considerable upset among the Techcrunch faithful, registering 444 comments to date. Clearly author Dan Ackerman Greenberg hit something of a nerve with the 2.0 faithful. Many readers, including head honcho Michael Arrington, seem to be very naive about what marketers are going to do with sites that allow individuals to …read the rest of this article

StoryCrafter, Edelman’s version of a social media press release service, has attracted a fair amount of attention. There’s no lack of good comments already out there, but the subject’s interesting to me, so I thought I’d pitch in too.
First a round-up:
Social media press releases are designed to give journalists and bloggers the elements of a release in a mix-and-match format. …read the rest of this article

Opening the WoM Communications conference, Steve Barton of Keevil Barton Kershaw [now defunct] talked about the reasons word of mouth matters more than ever. He cited research that states we receive over 3000 messages a day about products and services (source unknown, but I can believe it. Here is some info). We’re not able to process that amount of input, …read the rest of this article