Tag: Optimized Referrals

Where Your Other Facebook Friends Roam

September 26, 2018August 18, 2011

by Steve MacDonald

Social Media is how we communicate these days and Facebook is currently the belle of the Ball. While spending 90 seconds on a web site is a good long stay, most Facebook users spend about 25 minutes wandering Zuckerberg’s conversational multi-sphere at any given time. How long that dominance lasts is anyone’s guess but for the time being, if you are networking, marketing, or just connecting with people you know (or looking for people you have not seen since Nixon–or maybe Clinton–was in the White House), odds are you have a Facebook account.

So are you connecting? The average user has a few hundred friends. Serious users peak around seven-hundred. And then there are the folks who get up past 800 and just blossom into the thousands. Whether you have thousands or hundreds, regardless of whether you are actually friends or just share an interest, odds are good you are missing or ignoring most of them, and they you. And it’s all your fault.

The Media’s New Peep Show

September 26, 2018July 29, 2011

by Steve MacDonald

Several in the New Hampshire dead tree press, and their digital protrusions, are jumping on the latest trend in information sharing (or lack of it, actually), the registration wall. The registration wall is similar to the pay-wall except that you can receive limited access (or metered) content for free, but only up to a point. It’s the velvet rope that leads to another velvet rope from which you can see through the open door, but no more. It’s like a peep show. People who want more will have to pony up their PayPal account (or any approved credit-card) for unlimited access. It’s the front page viewed through the bin. Drop in some change and you get to see what is inside.

This old frontier on the new frontier has or is being embraced by many of New Hampshire’s media ‘titans.’ Before you get to peek they want you to register, give up your email so they can tease you with headlines, and a password; six or more characters, letters and numbers, no tildas or ampersands or pound keys–oh my! "Sorry that password is already taken." The goal? It can’t be traffic or money.

Take a look at the New York times for a clue. The graph pictured here gives you some idea as to the likely path to failure from a meter based viewing scheme with the option to buy.

Want to see something else startling, look here.

OK. So it won’t work for one of the worlds most well know left wing rags. But is local news compelling enough content to attract more people than might already be bothered to purchase the dead tree edition, (or a full boat digital subscription), on a platform that has little if any tolerance for distraction or delay, and trillions of other choices just one caffeinated-energy-drink-A.D.D-twitchy-mouse-click away?

They don’t even have to be better choices. Five seconds is five seconds too long and a death knell to your life-expectancy as a viable content provider. I’m wondering if they considered that? Or how about this?

It’s A Shameless Capitalist Endorsement!

September 26, 2018January 18, 2011

by Steve MacDonald

I have invested some time and (renewable) energy arguing against federal subsidies and hand outs to prop up businesses that make environmentalists and their democrat sugar daddies happy. My primary objective with "green" energy projects has not been the business itself or even the goal, but the way in which the state and federal government uses our money to pick winners and losers or to incentivise things.

So it only seems fair to point out when someone is trying to advance alternative energy the right way. I recently met the guys who run Adros Energy in Amherst New Hampshire. Theirs is a veteran owned company that does home energy audits, and specializes in hybridizing or combining clean energy systems like solar, thermal and wind together to free people from the control of government regulations over energy and what usually amounts to some kind of monopoly on power and pricing by one or few providers.