“Camden Town is burning down” claimed Amy Winehouse during her Grammy acceptance speech and, unfortunately, parts of it actually were. The fire that ravaged through Camden Market at the weekend received a lot of coverage in the press, and as a result searches for ‘camden’ increased by 250% last week. The top two destinations for searchers were the Camden Lock Market homepage and the Camden local government page, both of which experienced a significant spike in traffic on Sunday.

In the networked web era, influentials may not be people with a particularly connected temperament or Rolodex, or people who control and influence monopoly distribution channels (e.g. newspapers), but rather people who influence the network by leveraging the most powerful force on the web — the link. People like bloggers, top Diggers, del.icio.us power users, Facebook users who share lots of links, MySpace users who embed videos, Twitter users who post lots of URLs, or any social network user with links to lots of friends.

Not everyone is a content creator. Open up any report of statistics on social media, and you will usually see some standard ratio of content consumers to content creators that typically ranges from 1 in 10, or less. This means, on average, that in most communities less than 10% of the individuals in that community are creating content. This post is about the biggest myth many people believe about the other 90%.

At every conference or tradeshow, you get a badge. I have a box full of them on my desk, an increasing number of them with the title of "Speaker" affixed beneath my name. I recently had a conversation with some colleagues about the importance of being a speaker at an event. Often, the most important benefit is not just the visibility of speaking, but the license that speaker tag gives you to have a conversation with other speakers. If you think about it, the badges at a conference are like a caste system. Your badge identifies which group you belong in and can often dictate how people embrace or shy away from a conversation with you.

CES 2008 - As the Consumer Electronics Show comes to an end, one take-away is the rapid change in how the general public found out about what was going on in Vegas. As a blogger myself, I know the importance of this new form of communication all too well (as well as the discussion about whether it is "real" journalism or not), but rarely have I seen such a powerful demonstration of how widespread the blogging phenomenon has become.

Do you have a Kindle yet? All the buzz about the Wii aside, the most lusted after gift this holiday season for media pros may just be Amazon's new digital content reader called the Kindle (which sold out within 5.5 hours upon first release a few weeks ago). The device may not have an Apple-esque level of sex appeal, but it does represent a huge shift in thinking that may just propel portable digital content and ebooks in particular to the kind of widespread adoption that digital music has already enjoyed.

This summary of an article from the December issue of the Journal of Advertising Research (good luck finding the issue online because I couldn’t) says that common word-of-mouth advertising by regular folks is more powerful than “key influencers.” Which is to say that sucking up to A-list bloggers may not be all that it’s cracked up to be. It seems like it’s a bad day for celebrity endorsements.

My job is all about conversation. Having one with clients and peers, and helping them have one with their customers. To a degree, my own book is about conversations so this may seem like a strange observation coming from me ... but I don't see any point in publishing a video on YouTube and allowing comments.

I have a profile on just about every social network that I can find.  That doesn't mean I use all of them, of course, but I am starting to run into a very interesting problem that I have to assume others are running into as well.  The problem is keeping my social network synchronized.  I have nearly 250 contacts on LinkedIn, and nearly 100 on Facebook, and they are different.  I know most of those people have accounts on both, but if I am already connected to someone, it requires an extra step to connect again on another site ... which I don't take/have the time to do. 

Ok, maybe not so great - but over the next week I am going to become an active Twitter user.  I have not been a huge user of Twitter, though I have written before about seeing the potential for using it for marketing.  Recently, there have been several other folks also speaking out about how it could be useful for marketing - some in response to Mark Simon's recent article in AdAge calling Twitter "asinine." 

There is a metric used for scholarly journals called the impact factor (IF).  In the world of medical and professional journals, the criteria for influence is citations.  Similar to how much of the social media world uses inbound links - the citation metric carries significant weight in scientific and academic communities.  It also raises significant debate from critics who feel it is an incomplete measure.  A few shortcomings of the impact factor include:

Here’s a video featuring editors and reporters from the Wall Street Journal, Wired, TechCrunch, Seattle Times, and Seattle Post Intelligence discussing how entrepreneurs should pitch the press. You can also read the wrap up if you’re too busy to watch the video. Also, here's a video featuring only Michael Arrington from November, 2006. The short story: Create something great, throw out all the marketing bull shiitake, and explain it in thirty seconds.

The one question I am asked most often by people who are considering starting their own blog or struggling to keep momentum up on a blog they have already created is how to find the time to do it.  If asked for a fast response, I usually mention my two top assets - collectng ideas all the time so I have an archive of things to write about, and writing fast.  Of course, there're more to it than that.  So for all of you who may be struggling to keep a blog going while doing your day jobs - here are a few tips that I have learned which may help.  Blogging can be a time consuming thing...

Margie Zable Fisher runs theprsite.com. Every day someone tells her that he or she has been “burned” by a PR firm, and Margie’s goal is to help small business find the right PR firm. I asked her to provide the top ten reasons why PR doesn’t work:

There is a gap in online marketing today. Despite the rising budgets being allocated to online advertising, the distribution of this money is not equal. Even as thousands of new blogs and social networks are created, the vast majority of online as spending is still going to only the largest portal sites or search engines.