International Commenters, Squirrels and Brian Solis

We’ve been working hard on our first deployment of Magento Commerce for a client of ours. We’re really excited about the launch and we’ll be sure to update you as we go live this week! We also had some great meetings this week with people like John Cass, Bob Collins and the team over at Rodale. Also, our podcast, The Tipping Point, hit 10,000 downloads. For us, that’s a huge milestone.

We also got invited to participate in The Marketing Hot Seat, a creation of Adam Cohen.

Needless to say, it’s been really fun. As we start a new week, we wanted to highlight some of the great content YOU created, so here we go.

Comments of the week

We understand that our readers add as much value, if not more, than we do in the generation of high-quality content at Tippingpoint Labs. That’s why, once a week we take some of our best interactions and highlight them – it’s all great online content and we appreciate your insight. Here’s this weeks best stuff:

Brian Solis Is Smart!

Brad wrote a great piece about Brian Solis’s Conversation Prism – which we use all the time in presentations and discussions and he was kind enough to comment on Brad’s post. Brian’s concept has evolved and he points out:

This is not about chatter, conversations, or content. It’s about focus and identifying paths to influence by understanding everything from relevant communities to sentiment to opportunities for influence. Once you have that intelligence you can embark on an “informed” New Media Life Cycle process.

- Brian Solis (Here’s the link to the Conversation Prism.)

This is why Brian is one of the smartest guys in the social media room. Thanks for commenting, Brian. We’re honored and more clear.

Mexican Social Media and Content Marketing

We’ve noticed an increase in readership in Mexico as we look at our Google Analytics and apparently it can all be attributed to one dedicated and loyal reader: Fernando. Just the other day, Fernando started commenting on our site and he’s even read Bernie Borges’ book. On our post about trying to figure out if your audience sucks or your content sucks Fernando said:

Ouch! Great article, extremely relevant to me, and as a result I’ve realized I’ve had a lot of irrelevant referrals and inappropriate audiences!

What do you do when unfortunately a lot of your potential audience don’t necessarily spend a lot of time online?

- Fernando, LatinMarketing.com

Fernando, I guess we’re going to have to write a follow up to this post. Great question!

Problems With a Client’s Success

On the same post that Fernando starting commenting, Amelia, who’s also an international reader, enlightened us with a customer success story that’s actually causing problems for her and her team:

This is the point really isn’t it? You need to get the site seen by the right audience, I have this problem with one of my customers. He want to optimise for a very broad keyword that is not entirely relevant to his products but does bring a lot of traffic to his site. I suggested that we optimise for more relevant keywords and lo and behold he started to make more sales, even though his visitor numbers reduced. He isn’t happy about this. Some people are very hard to please…

- Amelia, Creare Communications (in the UK)

Amelia, I don’t know what to tell you. Success is success. Ego is ego.

What we’re reading

We use Posterous to keep track of what the entire Tippingpoint Labs team is consuming on the web. If you’d like to see everything, feel free to subscribe. Here are some of our picks from last week:

Meme of the Month

Squirrels!

Okay, squirrels are getting a lot of play lately and there’s an entire photo meme that’s got lots of traction. Here’s a great ninja squirrel that Brad found.

It all started so innocently when an aspiring young ground squirrel stepped into the family photo of Melissa Brandts in Alberta, Canada’s Banff National Park, seeking fame and fortune. After showing up on National Geographic’s web site it was picked up by The Interwebs, and the rest, as they say, is internet history.

-Mashable.com

I’m not a big fan of rodents, but this meme is really fun.

Disney’s eBook Play

Disney's eBook Play

With the Kindle getting so much play, it’s interesting to see Disney’s take on the eBook revolution:

DisneyDigitalBooks.com, which is aimed at children ages 3 to 12, is organized by reading level. In the “look and listen” section for beginning readers, the books will be read aloud by voice actors to accompanying music (with each word highlighted on the screen as it is spoken).

- NYTimes.com

Look and listen – what happened to read?

About the author

Andrew Davis -

In 2002, Andrew founded Tippingpoint Labs with journalist James Cosco. Since then, he's spent countless hours exploring the online universe and building a methodological approach to developing digital strategies that drive revenue or reduce costs.

Andrew's always asking big questions and analyzing data to understand markets, online forces and even business models. Andrew's research has resulted in the creation of innovative online metrics including Online Brand Value and Category Brand Value, eye-opening graphical representations of website evolution through the New Media Life Cycle and even using online data to predict offline revenue.

When he's not surfing the web, Andrew's traveling the globe speaking to a wide-variety of audiences about everything from social media to the future of print. Andrew is a frequent contributor to the Tippingpoint Labs website and has been creating valuable content since the early 1990s for The Jim Henson Company, CNN, The Today Show and MTV.

He's contributed to a book of short stories, called The Way Things Were and produced and co-wrote Roadside Ambition a documentary film about one small town with two huge balls.

"In a world where content is consumed as rapidly as it's created, companies need to develop a sound strategy to creating valuable online experiences that can, and should, be leveraged enterprise-wide. There is a content solution to every business challenge."