A few months ago, I wrote about Vitrue’s study on the value of a Facebook fan being worth $3.60; and last week, Syncapse released a similar study and assigning a $1.36 value to a fan.  The 18 page comprehensive study can be downloaded here but here are some key findings:

Product Spending: Facebook Fans spend, on average, $71.84 more than non-fans over a two-year period

Brand Loyalty: Facebook fans are 28 per cent more likely to continue using a brand than consumers who are not fans on Facebook

Willingness to Recommend: 68 per cent of fans are ‘very likely’ to recommend a product to family and friends (as opposed to 28 per cent of non-fans)

Brand Affinity: 81 per cent of fans feel a connection to the brand (versus only 39 per cent of non-fans)

Earned Media Value: Incorporating all of the above factors, the average value of a Facebook fan is $136.38 to an organization

Bribery, while useful, isn't always an effective means of obtaining a large user base, Microsoft has discovered.  Microsoft announced today that it will retire the Bing cashback program because not enough people stuck around after taking advantage of it.

The program did work in some respects, helping Microsoft establish relationships with a lot of different businesses.  A post on the Bing Search Blog even stated, "[W]e had over a thousand merchant partners delivering great offers to customers and seeing great ROI on their campaigns . . ."

Yusuf Mehdi, Senior Vice President of the Online Audience Business Group at Microsoft, admitted, though, "But after a couple of years of trying, we did not see the broad adoption that we had hoped for."

So the last day individuals will be able to earn cashback by shopping with Bing will be July 30th (at 9:00 PM PST, to be exact).  Then users will have one year to claim their cashback sums before the whole program is terminated.

Bargain hunters can't be expected to take this news well.  Still, Microsoft fans have reason to be pleased since Mehdi said the company will start to channel its energy (and money) into different and more effective approaches to attracting and retaining users.

I’m starting a new educational project soon. The larger focus of all the projects will be to help people with some facet of running a human business. In all cases, there’ll be a mix of community stuff, educational materials, and publications. Some of the starter content will be about writing, about running a small business, about professional speaking, and maybe sales, too. I tried launching something like this at the beginning of the year, but it didn’t work the way I wanted it to, so I went back to the well with a slightly different approach, and I think this way will work okay. We’ll see.

Anyhow, here’s what I wanted to do: If you’re interested, I want you to sign up to be on an email list. It will most definitely be an email list where I’ll promote these projects, so it’s not just going to be content. There will be offers. Hopefully, if you choose to sign up, you’ll WANT the offers.

This is going to be for people looking to start their own businesses, people who run a smaller business, people who want to improve some aspect of their professional skills. Beyond that, I won’t talk about it until I have something to show you. But, in the mean time, I’m asking you to sign up, if you want to be updated.

You in?

Once you fill this out, it’ll pop you to another page to confirm. Just click the HBW list, not the Newsletter list, and confirm that we’ve got it right. Good?

Every time my friend Michael Sean Wright and I have recorded a conversation (for a podcast, testing purposes, or any other reason), he’s taken to tagging it out with “Go Net Neutrality,” as a callback to a test podcast we did last week with the WeTokU service.

Since then, I’ve put forth the argument in a number of podcast appearances (including the latest episode of my political podcast with fellow ANGLEr Art Lindsey) that goes a little like this: “It sounds good to say ‘Go Network Neutrality!’ and encourage our friends to make calls to our governmental representatives to stifle competition and further inhibit free speech.”

The inevitable response from whomever is interviewing me on the subject is “How will Network Neutrality regulation inhibit free speech? I thought that the intention would be to ensure that free speech /> [...]

Thu Dec 10, 2009 08:05 am