by Alex Nesbitt
Tim O’Reilly interviews Jonathan Schwartz, CEO of Sun. Sun pioneered the phrase the network is the computer.
Tim asks Jonathan about how he uses blogging to help run Sun, what he thinks about cloud computing, the acquisition of MySQL, the challenges of power consumption and the importance of data in the world of the networked computer.
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by Alex Nesbitt
Yahoo’s CTO Ari Balogh opened his speech at Web 2.0 Expo speaking about about 3 big bets: being the most important starting point for the web, being a must buy advertising property and being open.
In his speech Ari, describes Yahoo’s New Open Strategy called Y! OS.
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by Andrew Krainin

You’ve seen the scantily clad cocktail waitresses in the casinos. The sexy woman posed on the hood of a car. We know that sex gets men’s attention.
But does sex actually sell?
A new research study by Brian Knutson of Stanford suggests the answer is yes; at least, that heterosexual men are more likely to take financial risks after being subjected to positive emotional stimuli - in the case of the study, erotic photos of a man and woman.
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by Andrew Krainin
Andrew and Alex joined Forrester for its 2008 Marketing Forum, which focused on the challenge of customer engagement in a digital media world. This second series of articles focuses on case studies of companies using interactive applications as the hook for building communities of superfans.
Creating Brand Advocates at Nike’s Jordan Brand
Emmanuel Brown, Director of Digital and Content, Nike’s Jordan Brand
Nike’s Jordan Brand has developed a couple of immersive experiences for highly engaged fans. The experiences start with deep insight into these “superfan” needs, and build intense community engagement for these hardcore fans, but are small scale communities relative to the scope of the Jordan Brand. Which raises the question, are these high ROI applications for engaging and activating superfans, or are they so focused on the hard core that they are failing to engage the brand’s mass market? Read on and share your opinion…
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by Alex Nesbitt
Levi.com’s VP of Marketing, Patrice Varni, spoke at the Forrester Marketing conference about Levi.com’s Project 501, Levi’s user submitted design contest. The project was launched using a branded experience on the television show Project Runway and an online campaign targeted to women. Digital Podcast covered the launch of the program and asked the question about whether this kind of campaign, done on Levi’s site, could drive a big enough audience to make the investment worthwhile.
Patrice spoke about how at the very start all the parts of the program were completely disconnected.
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by Alex Nesbitt
Nancy MacIntyre, LeapFrog’s Executive Vice President for Product, Innovation and Marketing, spoke at the Forrester Marketing conference. Nancy introduced a new integrated service called Learning Path. The service focuses on personalized learning by integrating an online site with toys so that learning can be planned and tracked.
She calls it an "educational GPS" and a CRM for LeapFrog.
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by Alex Nesbitt
We joined Forrester Research for its 2008 Marketing Forum. This article is the third in our series from the forum focused on customer engagement in a digital media world.
In part 3 of Popping the Question: Getting to Engagement we take on the issue of how to design for engagement. Two presenters at the conference provided us with a couple of frameworks for how to design for engagement.
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by Alex Nesbitt
The Association for Downloadable Media, an organization whose purpose is to help provide advertising and audience measurement standards for episodic and downloadable media, announced today a proposal for advertising standards at Ad:Tech San Francisco.
A cross section of podcasters, agencies, device manufacturers and others interested in monetizing downloadable media have developed the proposed standards.
Why do we need standards for downloadable media?
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by Andrew Krainin
Andrew and Alex joined Forrester Research for its 2008 Marketing Forum. This article is the second in our series from the forum focused on customer engagement in a digital media world.
Realizing Your Return on Empathy (ROE)

Steve Kerho, VP Analytics, Organic
Mark Kingdon, CEO, Organic
Creating effective online (and offline) marketing solutions starts with a deep, emotional understanding of your customer segments and their needs - in other words, “empathy” for your customer “personas”. This empathy serves as a critical guide in designing online and other touchpoints, and the personas also support breaking down how you measure and respond to online performance.
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by Alex Nesbitt
In Digital Podcast 46, we interview Rohit Bhargava, Senior Vice President, Digital Strategy & Marketing for Oglivy’s 360 Digital Influence group, about his new book, Personality Not Included: Why Companies Lose Their Authenticity And How Great Brands Get it Back.
The book is about why brands need to have a personality, how to avoid being faceless and finding a way to add more authenticity into marketing.
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