Free article on the worrying divide between facebook and myspace

Ethnographer and social network guru, danah boyd, has make her recent talk available online. She talks about how Facebook and MySpace are divided by race, class, education, and other factors.

Worth a read here.

Lawrence Lessig makes new book available for free

Author, Lawrence Lessig, has made his book, Remix - Making art and commerce thrive in the hybid cconomy, available to download completely for free under a creative commons licence. Fair play.

Mr Lessig is a smart and very articulate writer. I'm sure this will be good. I've downloaded this but not got stuck into it yet.

Wonderful (free) book on advertising.

I'd recommend this to anybody working in advertising - agency or client-side. You may not like or agree with everything Bob says, but he speaks lots of sense. It is short. Just 84 pages. And to the point. No bullshit. I really liked it - in particular, the 2nd part of the book.

You can download it from here. Enjoy.

Want to know what Bill Gates knows about social media?

Danah Boyd is one of the most insightful writers on teenagers + social networking. She recently took a new role in Microsoft and gave a talk to Bill Gates and other peers on social media. And she has made this talk available online.

This is definitely worth a read, even for folks well versed in this stuff. (I'm guessing Mr Gates is well versed.)

You can read it here.

Free Online Marketing Training material

If you're interested in online marketing, pop over to top blogger, Damien Mulley. He is generously giving away free copies of his training documents.

Get it here.

Better than free

The internet is a copy machine, Kevin Kelly tells us, in his most recent manifesto. But what qualities cannot be copied? Trust is one. Kevin expands on this and seven others that are better than free.

Download in pdf from here. It is just 11 pages long and is very good.

Found via Helge Tenno

24 of Greg Verdino's best posts

I subscribe to Greg Verdino's blog about marketing, media and trends. He has very kindly picked 24 posts from his past two years of blogging and collated into one PDF.

Pop over to his blog to download.

The Future of Brands - by top UK blogger + strategist

Just read an insightful thesis from Faris, a top UK blogger and strategist from Naked Communications.

"The Future of Brands: I believe children are our future" is good reading. Faris builds on some thinking by Henry Jenkins, author of Convergence Culture. I read this book last year, and it is definitely worth a read. I'll do another post on this later, as some of the examples he writes about are impressive.

Faris takes the idea of 'Transmedia Narratives' and outlines a new model for communication planning - 'Transmedia Planning'. This is interesting stuff and could well become a new model of communication planning. It has already been picked up by Campaign magazine, numerous bloggers and Mr Jenkins himself has commented on it.

Download it from here.

Free research: marketing on social networks

Does your ad agency insist that you must advertise on Facebook? Or develop a widget? Or find ways to get beboers to add your brand as a friend?

If so, it would do you no harm reading up on Tom Chapman's recent research on 'Social network marketing, engagement marketing and brands'. Free thankfully.

In addition to the quantitative research, Tom interviewed marketers from MySpace, Innocent Drinks and BBC Radio 1 - all having success with digital. The pdf is 47 pages long.

There is some good stuff here. Found via Real Fresh TV

A marketer's guide to understanding Facebook's population

Matt Dickman has a new presentation on Facebook. Good stats on growth numbers by demographic and country. While most are under 30, they are seeing some growth among folks aged 3o-40. Worth a visit.

Free report - changing role of direct mail in Ireland

Amarach have published "The Future is a Conversation", a 20-page report on the changing role of direct mail in Ireland.

There are some interesting bits in it. For example, they believe younger people are receptive to direct mail and "receiving something personally addressed to you in the post is something of a novelty for the bebo generation".

I'd admit I was a bit sceptical when I saw the report was sponsored by An Post but they don't pretend that the trends are all good. One stat they share claims that only 14% feel 'positive' or 'very positive' about direct mail.

Thanks Kevin for sending on. You can download here.

Rebooting America - download for free

Rebooting America is a collection of essays by the very talented Danah Boyd, Howard Rheingold (author of Smart Mobs) and many more - Yochai Benkler, Susan Crawford, Esther Dyson, Newt Gingrich, Craig Newmark (of Craigslist), Doug Rushkoff, Clay Shirky and David Weinberge.

You can buy it here or download it for free from Danah's blog.

Adopt a Designer

Image courtesy of is1313

Making it as a successful designer is not easy. There are lots of talented designers around looking for their first break.

But if you know your fashion and think you can spot up-and-coming talent, you might be interested in "Adopt a Designer", an initiative from an Irish company called Catwalk Genius.

In a nutshell, you buy shares in a designer to help her design her new collection and get a cut in the profits. And you even "get an exclusive limited edition design from your designer as a reward". Pop over to their site to see if there are any designers you might want to adopt. You can be part of it for just €15.

Nice idea. Another example of using crowdsourcing or crowdfunding as trendwatching.com called it in their recent free report 'Innovation Avalanche'

Seinfeld + Marketing

George Contanza is a hero of mine. I love his honesty about his insecurities and his selfishness. He says the stuff we think but don't like to admit.

So I was excited to hear somebody had written about how the show 'Seinfeld' can teach us about marketing. Bill Gammell uses scenes from the show to demonstrate marketing lessons - although not just George scenes. Definitely worth a read if you are a marketer and a Seinfeld fan.

I am jealous that I didn't write this first to be honest. Thinking about it now, I'm going to make a conscious effort to to link the occasional post to a Seinfeld insight - I'm convinced there are loads to pick from.

You can download it for free here.

Free 'Word of Mouth' book

Image sent to me by Emer.

Seth posted earlier in the week about Dave Batler's new book. I read Grapevine, Dave's last book, and admit I found it facinating. He specialises in Word of Mouth marketing and has built up a unique agency around this.

In true WoM style, Dave is giving away his new book for free. Read Seth's post and download the book for free here.

How to get your first job in advertising

A live chat with Dave Trott on Scamp's blog generated some good discussion on planners, copywriters, art directors, agencies, good ads, bad ads, lazy ads, lazy students, good students and advertising in general. They racked up an impressive 245 comments.

The original topic was whether Mr Trott's classic "How to get your first job in advertising" is still relevant today, 30 years after it was first printed.

Most people felt the answer was yes.

I had not read the booklet before, so downloaded it for free from here. It is concise and drenched in commonsense. You'll enjoy it.

The Wall

Image courtesy of spoon

danah boyd, the guru on online social networks, has uploaded a recent talk she gave, titled "Teen Socialization Practices in Networked Publics".

In particular I like her insights on what teenagers actually mean when they write on their friends' walls on sites like MySpace or Facebook. While it would appear that what they actually write is somewhat frivolous, irrelevant and random, there is method to their madness.

To quote danah directly:

"Often, the specific content is less relevant than the way in which that content helps teens maintain their relationships. In other words, "yo, wazzup" "not much, how you?" "goood" may seem pointless, but it has tremendous value.

That supposedly meaningless interaction was a re-affirmation of friendship, a tightening of social bonds, and a confirmation that there is no drama. Those meaningless interactions are what builds the social ties that we rely on.

In other words, what was really being said was: "I'm thinking of you and want validation that we are still friends and that you're willing to spend time talking to me." "Yes, of course we are friends. To prove it, I will say it publicly so that others know that we're still friends." "OK, cool. Thank you!!"

You can read her full draft here. I highly recommend it.

Email marketing metrics: free report

Some new research available on email marketing metrics based on 300 million opt-in newsletters and campaigns in 2007.

There is some good stuff here. For example, the best days to send are Mondays, Tuesdays and weekends. Also, open rates are down by a couple percent, partly due to consumers opening emails on handheld devices.

There are a couple of good case studies here too worth a read (in particular the one on morebusiness.com).

Original post from Dave in Clientwell, who has also given his quick summary of it.

Download the free report from here.

Free! Why $0.00 is the future of business

Chris Anderson, of Wired magazine and author of The Long Tail is giving away a 6,000 word preview of his next upcoming book "Free! Why $0.00 is the future of business".

Read it here.

New report on UGC, social media + advertising

The IAB have produced a 15-page document titled 'User Generated Content, Social Media and Advertising - An overview' to help marketeers and agencies understand the landscape and the opportunites.

There is some decent information here and useful if you are new-ish to social media.

One point I found interesting was the Nielson research from last Oct which claims only 34% of consumers trust search engine ads. Another I hadn't heard before was that the average LinkedIn user is 39 years old with an annual income of $139,000.

Thanks to Alan Moore for original post.

Download the report here at IAB's site.