Mediaboss Marketing

Is word-of-mouth information on the Internet trustworthy or to be taken with a grain of salt?

The operator of a popular website collecting presumably honest consumer commentary about restaurants is endeavoring to gain consumer trust and ensure planted stooges aren't unleveling the playing field.

Kakaku.com Inc., which runs the site Taberogu, said in January it found 39 companies that had been paid by certain restaurants and shops to talk them up and asked that such mercenary practices cease.

Pretending to be a satisfied consumer posting complimentary comments is a classic example of stealth marketing, a practice that has gained greater traction in the online world.

Following are questions and answers regarding stealth marketing:

What defines stealth marketing?

Stealth marketing is an attempt to dupe consumers into believing that what they see posted are honest comments from their peers, not paid propaganda disguised as input from ordinary folks.

Generally, if restaurants, shops and other establishments pay people to write something positive about them on the Internet, that constitutes stealth marketing.

When did stealth marketing in its current form start?

The actual term was coined probably around 2006 in the United States, when Edelman, a large public relations firm, reportedly paid bloggers to travel across the country and write positive commentary about one of its clients, Wal-Mart Stores Inc.

Original post:
Caveat emptor: Not all 'word of mouth' blogs unpaid

When we consider speech and writing, its clear which we think of as the lesser art. Talk is cheap, chatter idle; get it in writing, we say. But in his new book from Oxford University Press, Vernacular Eloquence, Peter Elbow (the author of the classic writing books Writing without Teachers and Writing with Power, and professor emeritus of English at the University of Massachusetts Amherst) successfully challenges the assumption that writing is always better than speech. In fact, Elbow argues that the best way to free our pens is to unleash our tongues.

According to Elbow, our spoken language, through much practice (even prodigies start speaking well before they start writing, after all), effortlessly embodies virtues that we struggle to achieve in writing. For most people, unless youre another Dickens or Trollope, the daily ratio of speaking to writing is skewed wildly in the direction of speechso why not bring the strength of our experience in one mode to bear on the other? Our spoken language tends to be more direct, with fewer convoluted constructions and subordinate clauses and yet more naturally varied and interesting sentences. Speech gets to the point faster, and connects better with the audience. The intonation and phrasing of our speech elegantly map the patterns of meaning we want to convey, in ways that we may not be able to achieve on the page.

Read the original:
The Word - Write it like you’d say it

THE canals of Amsterdam, the tapas bars of Barcelona and the beaches of Ibiza are now even more accessible to thousands of Essex families after Southend Airport's new terminal opened this week.

The 30 million terminal will handle two million passengers per year, with easyJet offering budget flights to destinations like Belfast, Faro and Mallorca.

SPARKLING AND MODERN: The new terminal forms part of Southend Airport's 100 million transformation

LANDING sTRIP: The longer runway

MORE ROOM: The new check-in area inside the revamped airport

EYE IN THE SKY: The airport's new control tower

eXCITING TIME: Managing director Alastair Welch

"We really wanted to redevelop Southend Airport in time for the Olympics and it is a really fun and exciting time for us," said managing director Alastair Welch.

A great fanfare heralded the opening ceremony on Tuesday, as an assortment of mayors, councillors, X Factor runners-up and tanned reality TV types were joined by airport chiefs on the red carpet.

The bosses had plenty to celebrate: the rejuvenation of the former World War One airbase represents the greatest international progress our county has made since Stansted Airport's award-winning terminal opened in 1991.

See the article here:
Essex Chronicle published New terminal opens at Southend Airport

Greg Satell Digital Tonto: What is a business model? Yesterday at 11:04 | Greg SatellHow do you expect to make money?There is probably no more important question in business.

If you cant answer that, youre not likely to get very far or, in fact, anywhere at all.

Of course, conditions can change and very quickly, so the question is a fluid one. A highly competitive approach ten years ago might not be viable today and companies that are barley five years old are commanding valuations in the billions.

Thats why theres so much talk about business models. Somebody claims to have new one, while another says that an old one is defunct. But what is a business model really? As innovation researcher Tim Kastelle points out, there a multitude of definitions representing different points of view. That can be confusing. Its time to clear things up.

For instance, Henry Ford realized that by using an assembly line to manufacture cars, he could take a very niche product, a curiosity really, and make it into a product for the masses. Lou Gerstner transformed IBMs diverse product line into a powerful consulting model. More recently, the Google guys realized that the same logic that conveys authority is an academic setting could create a better search engine.

Sometimes, the innovation isnt about the product itself, but merely the way its sold. Tim Kastelle gives a great example in the story of Xerox, where they failed when they tried to sell copiers but then when on to great success when they began leasing them.

In other words, a business model is a lot more than just a key insight (Jon Kleinberg of Cornell had an idea for a search engine that was very similar and, some believe, superior to Googles concept, but it never really gained traction). You need to also figure out the mundane stuff, like how much your product will cost to make, who youll sell it to and so on.

However, even after you have all that figured out, you still need to get some idea if your business will be steady for years, grow very quickly or whether its likely to decline over time. For that, youll need more than just clever ideas, youll need to plug in some numbers.

Thats fairly obvious with a start-up, but its also true of an established business. As Ive pointed out before, prediction is a tricky business, even if you have a wealth of data at your disposal. The past cant be automatically extrapolated into the future.

Read the rest here:
Digital Tonto: What is a business model?

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By Adam Dachis, Lifehacker

You share music, rip DVDs, make Hitler whine about your first world problems, and much more in the course of your regular online activities and more often than not, you do these things without giving a thought to the fact that you're actually breaking the law. Here's a look at how you're inevitably circumventing copyright law and what you can do to protect yourself.

Why it's almost impossible to avoid breaking copyright law Copyright law is extremely complex. It's so complex that lawyers, lawmakers, and experts heavily argue over how it's interpreted and applied. Nonetheless, if you commit a crime, you can't use ignorance as an excuse. The law doesn't (officially) offer leniency for misunderstanding or lack of knowledge. So how can you comply with convoluted copyright laws when you can't realistically understand them all? You can't, and so you may end up breaking these laws on a regular basis without ever knowing it.

To make matters worse, a spectrum of illegality makes it acceptable to break the rules in some circumstances yet not others. Experience tells us that uploading a home video to a video sharing website (e.g. YouTube) that features a copyrighted song is sometimes okay, but downloading a television episode is not.

Both of these actions are similarly illegal, but the first example is regularly tolerated while the second can lead to a loss of Internet connectivity, a fine, or even jail time (depending on the number of offenses and how often copyright holders decide to "catch" you).

Just as it's easier for us to circumvent copyright law online, it's easier for copyright holders to come after us. I spoke with Derek Bambauer, assistant professor of law at Brooklyn Law School, who explained this is particularly problematic because infringement is often only a byproduct of the way we communicate and bears no intention of doing anything illegal:

The tricky thing is, if you and I want to share a recipe then I photocopy it and then come over to your office and give it to you so it's just you and me. If I want to do it online, the odds are pretty good that we're going to do it on a social network or a blog or something like that. That means that the blog is all of the sudden a choke point something that people who want to keep us from doing this can exert control over. The way the law deals with this is with the notice of takedown under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), but that's just on the copyright owner's say-so. The copyright owner says "That's infringing!" and the site should take it down. You can get it back up, but you have to file a counter notice and it takes somewhere between 10 and 14 days. It's a lot of hassle. Copyright owners, through the DMCA, have a good deal of control over the way we communicate.

But because rights holders are often fickle about what they choose to have removed and what to leave alone, it's difficult to rely on the law for guidance. The result is that we the average users and consumers of the Internet are unsure of how to proceed when dealing with copyrighted works and either have to assume we have no rights or make our best guess and hope it doesn't lead to legal consequences.

It all comes down to this reality: you will often have to circumvent or ignore copyright law to go on with your regular activities. Fortunately, there are ways to handle these circumstances better and keep yourself out of trouble. In this post, we're going to look at specific situations you encounter on a regular basis and what you can do to protect yourself.

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How you break digital law daily (and what to do)