A Sex Scandal for the Internet Age

Michelle Cottle of The DailyBeast.com writes, "For generations, congressmen and senators have cheated on their wives in Washington, but the Web has changed the rules of the game. In the long and glorious annals of Washington sex scandals, U.S. Rep. Christopher Lee has truly made history. Lee resigned last week just hours after the gossip website Gawker posted a story revealing that Lee, a married conservative Republican from upstate New York, had sent a shirtless photo of himself to a woman advertising for a boyfriend on Craigslist.

It was, in many respects, a sex scandal completely defined by the Internet era: Lee answered an online ad, sent some cheesy e-mails and a laughable beefcake photo to the woman (“I promise not to disappoint,” he boasted), and since he used his own name, the woman discovered that he was a married congressman simply by Googling him. When she notified the gossip website, Lee resigned “before the mainstream media could clear its throat.” For generations, congressmen and senators have cheated on their wives in Washington, but the Web has changed the rules of the game. Today, a philanderer “can be brought down by a sex scandal before he even comes close to having sex.” - As seen in The Week

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The Top 25 Online Ads Everybody Should Know

Online advertising has morphed into so many features and sizes, should online advertisers still consider measuring it in traditional marketing methods? Take a minute to brush up on your basic online ad lingo and then you tell me, what is the next step in online advertising measurement!?

An online advertisement (or Internet ad, or Web ad, or mobile ad, etc.), is a form of online advertising that is generally in the form of a graphic (or ad banner or text link) that takes a user to a Web site (or landing page) when it's clicked on. Other forms of online advertising include SEM and NFM.

Here are the Top 25 Basic Online Ads Everybody Should Know by Now:

  1. ad banner
  2. beyond-the-banner
  3. button
  4. contextual-based advertising
  5. CPC
  6. directory advertising
  7. house ad
  8. floater
  9. hyperstitial
  10. integrated sponsorship
  11. interstitial
  12. location-based advertising
  13. pop-under ad
  14. pop-up ad
  15. pre-roll
  16. post-roll
  17. mid-roll
  18. skyscraper
  19. social ads
  20. sponsorship
  21. superstitial
  22. text ad
  23. transactional ad
  24. trick ad
  25. ad overlay

For more online advertising and marketing lingo, go to the NetLingo Online Marketing List and the NetLingo Online Business List!



I Am Number Four

Linguists have often wondered, "Is our understanding of numbers innate or cultural?" New research provides stronger evidence than ever that humans must be taught to count, and that without language, math doesn’t exist.

Previous studies showed that Amazon tribal people who lacked words for numbers beyond “one, two, and many” were unable to understand precise quantities. But it was never clear whether this inability simply resulted from their not needing numbers to negotiate the world they inhabited.

The new study meets that objection by focusing on deaf Nicaraguans, called “homesigners,” who live and work in a society that runs on exact values yet communicate with a system of gestures that doesn’t include signs for numbers. The study found that the homesigners couldn’t accurately count above four. Shown a picture of 10 sheep, for instance, they seemed to estimate the amount—often holding up nine fingers.

By comparison, deaf users of American Sign Language, which does have words for numbers, and Spanish-speaking Nicaraguans who weren’t deaf aced the same tests—proving that the missing link for counting was not hearing or culture but language.

The study proves that the ability to count “isn’t something you just get for free because you’re human,” author and University of Chicago psychologist Elizabet Spaepen tells Wired.com. “If you’re not getting it in your language, you’re not going to just come up with it on your own.”
- As seen in The Week

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Online Ad Lingo: from 1:1 to CRM

1-to-1

a.k.a. 1:1, one-to-one

A marketing concept created by authors Don Pepper and Martha Rogers and turned into a marketing consultancy empire, 1-to-1 marketing espouses personalization and customization in building relationships with customers. Outside the Pepper and Rogers world, it's called customer relationship management (CRM).


NetLingo The Internet Dictionary

Customer Relationship Marketing
not the same as CRM

A 1-to-1 marketing model in which all of the information about a customer, gathered throughout the history of that customer's relationship with the company, is used to market to that customer in a way that promotes trust, loyalty, and therefore, increased sales.

Customer Relationship Marketing is not the same as Customer Relationship Management (CRM).


NetLingo The Internet Dictionary

CRM (Customer Relationship Management)
a.k.a. customer intelligence -or- e-business relationship management -or- e-CRM -or- personalization

A business discipline designed to identify, attract, and retain a company's most valuable customers. It describes improved and increased communication between a company and its customers. First espoused in the 1960's by management gurus Peter Drucker and Theodore Levitt, CRM is intended to provide a unified, company-wide view of the customer and to cultivate high-quality relationships that increase loyalty and profits. Basically, the idea is not to let an interaction with a customer escape a firm's centralized database. The focus is on learning more about customers and using that knowledge to refine every interaction with them.

Effective CRM requires an integrated sales, marketing, and service strategy, supported by CRM software that provides profiles and histories of each interaction the company has with each customer. When managers cull this data, it helps them evaluate their progress. A comprehensive CRM strategy can anticipate needs; tailor messages, products, and services; create value; anticipate problems; and improve the customer's overall experience in dealing with the company. Welcome to 21st century business!

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Are Facebook and Twitter tools of revolution?

Social networking played a key role in the popular uprisings in Tunisia, Egypt, Yemen, and Iran over the past year. “Did Twitter make them do it?” asked Jesse Lichtenstein in Slate.com. With hundreds of thousands of Egyptians massing in Tahrir Square in defiance of a severely weakened regime, fans of social media are pointing to the role of Facebook and Twitter in sparking yet another revolution. In similar popular uprisings in Yemen, Tunisia, and Iran over the past year, social media played a key role, helping dissidents form connections and organize protests.

That was even more true in Egypt, said Jennifer Preston in The New York Times. The uprising there was sparked by the death of Khaled Said, a 28-year-old businessman who was beaten to death by police last year after he obtained proof of police corruption. Human-rights activists created a Facebook page called “We are all Khaled Said,” featuring a photo of his grotesquely disfigured face, and within weeks, the page had 130,000 followers—growing to nearly 500,000 as the street protests began several weeks ago, organized partly by tweets and text messages.

In authoritarian regimes around the world, Facebook and Twitter are allowing “the discontented to organize and mobilize” in ways they never could before. Tell that to Lenin, said Malcolm Gladwell in The New Yorker. I could have sworn that both the Russian and French revolutions took place “before the Internet came along.” The East Germans who overthrew their government and tore down the Berlin Wall in the 1980s didn’t even own phones, let alone smart phones or computers. Under despotic regimes, brave souls willing to fight for freedom “will always find ways to communicate,” whether by iPhone, furtively passed handbills and pamphlets, or urgent whispers in the street.

Our fixation on the social media angle of these revolutions betrays a “simplistic Western chauvinism,” said Frank Rich in The New York Times. We love the thought that these “downtrodden, unwashed masses” are only able to free themselves thanks to the tools we gave them. Besides, said Lee Siegel in The New York Observer, the power of social networking “cuts both ways.” In Iran, the regime actually spied on dissidents involved in the Green Revolution through Facebook and sent out misleading tweets. Nineteen months later, the regime is still in office, carefully monitoring the opposition through the Internet.

In the short term, said Clay Shirky in Foreign Affairs, the advent of new communication technologies “is just as likely to strengthen authoritarian regimes as it is to weaken them.” The Chinese government, for example, has evolved beyond some early, crude attempts to block the Internet altogether, and now has developed sophisticated systems “for controlling political threats from social media,” and for using them as a tool of manipulation and surveillance. In the long run, though, said Walter Isaacson in Foreign Policy, social media can only be bad news for authoritarian regimes. “The free flow of information is the oxygen of democracy,” and there’s no disputing that the Internet, smart phones, and social media have radically increased and accelerated that flow.

“It’s not the tools” themselves, said Jose Antonio Vargas in HuffingtonPost.com. It’s the new sense of community and togetherness that those tools have made possible. Protesters on the streets of Cairo, Tunis, and Tehran are united not only by a thirst for freedom and self-rule, but by a new awareness—brought about by new technology—of their “common humanity.” Online, “the individual can be heard.” And in a matter of a few keystrokes, “‘I’ easily grows to ‘we.’”
- As seen in The Week

Humans still have the edge over AI

AI as in artificial intelligence. Jeopardy fans were mesmerized when Watson, the IBM computer that was programmed to play the trivia game, squared off and beat the world champion. It was a reminder of when Deep Blue out-chessed the Grand Master in 1990. But according to Stephen Baker, author of the book "Final Jeopardy: Man vs. Machine and the Quest to Know Everything", not to worry.

"Watson isn't nearly as smart as it looks on TV. Outside of its specialty of answering questions, the computer remains largely clueless. It knows nothing. When it comes up with an answer, such as "What is 'Othello?,'" the name of Shakespeare's play is simply the combination of ones and zeros that correlates with millions of calculations it has carried out. Statistics tell it that there is a high probability that the word "Othello" matches with a "tragedy," a "captain" and a "Moor." But Watson doesn't understand the meaning of those words any more than Google does, or, for that matter, a parrot raised in a household of Elizabethan scholars.

Watson is incapable of coming up with fresh ideas, much less creating theories, cracking jokes, telling a story or carrying on a conversation. Humans still have an edge. - As seen in the L.A. Times, read the full story here!

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