So earlier today I tweeted about Second Harvest’s Lunch Money Day – it’s this year on February 16th. Basically LMD is a grassroots campaign that asks us to support Second Harvest, Canada’s largest food rescue organization.

The idea is simple: donate your “lunch money” so others can enjoy what many of us take for granted … food. Every $10 donated provides enough food for 20 nutritious meals.

Please visit http://SecondHarvest.ca and http://LunchMoneyDay.com to pledge your support.

*** BRIBE ALERT ***

Now you can donate and never tell a soul … or if you want, you can donate and tell me.

If you forward a copy of the email receipt (you get one after donating) and tell me your Twitter userid (mine’s @jamesburchill), I will tell the Twitterverse what a good egg you are!

Look, all kidding aside … being hungry sucks. I can’t feed everyone and I can only do so much alone. But if sharing your twitter ID with my ~15K followers helps you help the hungry, I’ll do it.

PS. And don’t over think this “should I or shouldn’t I?” … “what will people think of me?” Seriously folks … many smart businesses help charities and announce it. It’s not about bragging, it’s just smart to let people know you actually care enough about others to give a damn and do something about it

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Now, my friend isn’t any kind of strange ‘the media just brainwashes us’ types, he has a smart phone, uses the Web, is active on Facebook, and is what most of us would consider to be ‘normally connected.’

‘We were spending $200 a month on our cable television and trips to see the latest at the theatres,’ he said. Turns out, during a recent illness, they had an epiphany.

The Game Changer

One of my friend’s family members got sick and the rest of them succumbed to the same flu. So for about a week, members of the family were, from one to the next, sick in bed. They would each turn on the television to find that nothing was really worth watching and the stuff they wanted to watch was not on until later.

On demand? Ya, right. If you’re into sports or old movies, maybe, but for today’s TV shows and new movies? Nope.

So their change of heart came while they were talking about this. During her sick days, his wife tried to watch a new movie that had released about three months ago. No dice. It’s not on any cable channel, but it was on Netflix, where she streamed it. His kids wanted to see various TV shows that were, of course, only on in the evening, but they were also available on Hulu.

No Longer Paying Into the ‘Scarcity Scheme’

As my friend put it, they decided to shut off their cable and go with streaming services. ‘We were paying into this scarcity scheme that the movie houses and TV producers have. They make a show and then keep it from being released to anywhere useful, like Netflix or Amazon rentals, until they’ve milked everything they can out of box office and exclusive cable deals. We’ve decided not to make that profitable for them anymore and walked away.’

It’s a growing idea. It turns out, many people are no longer paying cable TV bills, going to the theatre for every release, or paying premiums to get high-cost extra channels on cable or satellite. Instead, they’re supporting instant-gratification streaming services like Amazon, Hulu, and Netflix.

If enough people begin to do this, it’s obvious that the big studios and producers will have to notice eventually. Instead of fighting technology, which appears to be their intent, they should be embracing it. These on-demand services could have some real profit in them if the studios were to take hold and use them in a more creative way.

What if Netflix had a premium service where you could pay a little more or pay per view to stream brand new releases that aren’t even out on DVD yet? Would you pay three bucks to see a movie that just left theatres last week? What if Amazon offered streaming rentals as soon as the DVD released instead of having to wait like they do now? Would you be more likely to use their service?

This is just another example of how Hollywood hasn’t awakened to the change that is happening. Independent studios have realized this and are largely embracing new technology. As more and more people like my friends walk away from the old guard way of thinking and support new ideas instead, things will continue to change.

Would you consider shutting off your cable or satellite and going pure stream?

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For complete details goto http://bfmp.kajabi.com/

Or click the image…

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Here’s something I wrote called the Whistleblower Report: A Short Story of Success With A Long Tail

It ruffled a few feathers when I published it because it outlines my approach to marketing and how I convinced CAA clients that aliens were responsible for a rash of dead car batteries at Christmas.

I even explain why eBay staff thought they had a corporate mole they heard about my special coupon marketing idea. All fun stuff.

No opt-in required. You can download it from Scribd. Enjoy, and remember if you like it – share the link on your social network.

Thanks!

James

PS. If you like this content, SUBSCRIBE to my email list for more.

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They’re calling the project the Hackerspace Global Grid (HGG) and are building plans for a grid of ground stations and communications satellites that would be independent of governments world wide. Long-term, if the initial project succeeds, they’d like to further prove the model that governments aren’t the only answer by staging the first moon landing since the Apollo missions.

The Challenges

Beyond the obvious challenge of funding, the technological feats here would be huge. So far, hobbyists and amateurs have only managed to put low-orbit satellites into space for short periods and tracking has proved nearly impossible without a large budget to afford complex and costly hardware.

Most of these attempts have been made with balloons with only a few successful rocket attempts having been made. Most amateur rockets that do make space are not capable of carrying a payload as large as a usable communications satellite.

Of course, none of this means that HGG would have to launch their satellites themselves. Or even make the satellites to be launched. All could be purchased from professionals already in the game, many of which are private and not government.

That goes back to funding. A satellite and launch can cost in the millions. Nick Farr, the hacker-activist (not the same as a ‘hactivist’) behind the HGG project, has only just begun asking for donations in August. So the project is still in its infancy.

The Ground Network Will Be Toughest

The toughest part of the project will be the ground network. Since virtually all land on the earth is claimed by one or another government, any buildings or equipment used to track and communicate with satellites in orbit would be subject to their laws (and enforcement).

Conceivably, a looser network of activists without a solid location could accomplish this in an underground fashion, but long-term, this is not likely to be a solution.

To counter this problem, the HGG project is proposing a ‘grid’ of small stations – something that could be in a person’s home, backyard, or even stashed on an abandoned property – that would act as a sort of reverse GPS. Rather than using a satellite to track geo-locations, the grid would use geolocation systems to track satellites. If the sites are fixed and in precisely-known locations, this would be easy and would not require expensive hardware.

HGG Overall

The total plan is ambitious, interesting, and definitely fun to speculate about. Would it make reality? That depends entirely on the will of those who are on-board with the project. Larger things have been accomplished by dedicated groups before. There’s no reason this one should be any different.

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Amazon proudly announced they sold over 4 million Kindle devices during the Holiday shopping season (late November through December). Over a million Kindles a week were purchased while e-book sales jumped 175% over last year.

More interesting information comes out of these figures. It’s not just about Amazon success. In fact, Amazon is suspected to have been losing money on every Kindle Fire sale (that can be read more than one way), but the huge increase in e-book purchases may have made up for that.

Kindle Sales Figures

The big news, from Amazon’s perspective, was in Kindle device sales. All three Kindle family products (Fire, Touch, and standard Kindle) held the top 3 spots on Amazon’s bestsellers list for the entire month of holiday shopping. The Fire was the most wished for and gifted product on the site this season as well.

Overseas, it was the top selling product in the UK, France, Spain and Italy.

Further, Amazon was prepared and had no back order issues this year and actually outpaced Apple’s iPad in sales as well.

E-Book Winners and Losers

With e-book sales up over 175% from last year, many authors and publishers made out very well this season. Interestingly, the number one and number four best selling electronic books this year were both self-published by the author independent of publishers via Kindle Direct Publishing. That’s an amazing statistic and shows something important: the old paradigm of publishing houses is falling.

E-books as gifts followed the sales trends, with year-on-year numbers matching sales growth. Christmas Day was the largest day ever for Kindle book downloads, which makes obvious sense.

The losers? Big publishing houses. Most of them count on hard-copy book sales during the holiday season and their sales figures this year were not so good. They remained relatively constant with little growth. Amazon reported that more e-books than hardcover books were sold during December and self-reported numbers from publishing houses seem to corroborate this with last year seeing more e-books sold than hard copies, as of February 2011.

Third-party Amazon.com Sales

Third-party sellers, now a big part of Amazon.com, also made out well this year. Third-party sellers experienced record holiday growth with 44% more $5,000+ sellers on Amazon than the year before. This makes sense, given the new, expanded, and easier-to-use seller platform Amazon rolled out and has been advertising heavily.

Bestseller Of All?

The best seller of all, according to Amazon numbers, was Walter Isaacson’s Steve Jobs biography. By a landslide. It was the most-browsed, most bought, and most gifted thing on Amazon ever.

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Who then owns the profile?

A lawsuit happening in a U.S. District Court in Pennsylvania is asking just that question.

The Back Story

Before we look at the suit itself, let’s look at the story behind it. A startup called Edcomm was purchased by another company, Sawabeh. Shortly after the buyout, the founders of Edcomm were fired. This quickly lead to a lot of lawsuits.

The lawsuit dealing with a social media account specifically involves Dr. Linda Eagle, PhD. Other allegations include breaches of contract and so forth. It seems that there may have been an agreement with Sawabeh that Edcomm would remain autonomous and retain its corporate officers (namly Dr. Eagle and two others).

The social media account in question, though, is Dr. Eagle’s LinkedIn account.

The Allegations

Both sides have different stories. Sawabeh says that it was Edcomm policy to create and maintain, at their own expense, social media accounts on behalf of their employees – specifically corporate staff and sales. Eagle says the opposite is true and that the account is hers.

The other founders involved in this case also had LinkedIn accounts, but are not, apparently, being included in this case because neither of their accounts were accessible by Edcomm employees when the company terminated them. Eagle’s however, was.

Sawabeh alleges that when Eagle left, she continued to use her LinkedIn account (which they claim as theirs) and that she took other items associated with it (a phone number she transferred to another phone, etc). Again, Dr. Eagle denies these claims and says the phone number was hers as was the laptop they say she took.

What’s really at stake here are the contacts made and networking achieved through Eagle’s LinkedIn account.

Social Contacts and Ownership

The real issue, as far as the LinkedIn account is concerned, are the contacts it has. When Eagle left, the company immediately changed her profile to hold the name of another employee and their photograph. This was what started the lawsuit. The company claimed ownership of the account, but was not claiming ownership over Eagle’s likeness or profile, just her contacts list, it appears.

That says something. The issue isn’t whether or not someone owns their LinkedIn profile, but whether or not they own the networking contacts that can be made through it. In a more broad sense, this would apply to all business-centered social media accounts.

So what do you think? Should a company be able to own the contacts lists their employees have on their social media accounts if those accounts are maintained at company expense? How far does this reach? If you are accessing your social media from work and even contacting business clients through them, you are in many ways using corporate resources for those accounts. Doesn’t that mean they have some kind of ownership interest in them? Or not?

These are hard questions, but it’s obvious that they’re going to become more and more common with the rise of social media in our daily personal and business lives.

Technorati Tags: employment, marketing, social media

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The pen is mightier than the sword. What a great line. Written no doubt by a pacifist I’m guessing, because I’m all for the power of the word (in the beginning there was only the word…) but facing someone in battle armed only with a ballpoint pen… I’d run a mile – unless of course I was Bruce Willis or Stallone, then I’d win no matter what.

But what has that go to do with the price of fish? Not a great deal other than the fact this annoyingly cute saying is in fact correct. Granted in physical combat it’s a no-win, but in todays wired world where we communicate at the speed of thought the sword is no match for the word.

And once you accept the power of the word – spoken or written, you begin to understand the true scope of its applicability to our very nature. The nature to which I refer to is that of our social qualities, the act of gathering together and exchanging stories, values, ideas and sharing perspectives and opinions.

The town square and village pub were slowly replaced online by the bulletin boards of the 1980′s and then again with the power of the Web and email. Today the next evolution has occurred with websites like Twitter, Facebook and other social networking venues. And if you think that these websites are just for kids talking about how cute someone is – you’d be wrong…very wrong.

Today many of these social networking ‘watering holes’ get more daily page views (traffic) than Google. Yes you read that right – MORE THAN GOOGLE. This watershed moment happened in the summer of 2007 and it’s been rising steadily since. This shift in “influence” has happened very quickly. The biggest surprise in the traffic game has been YouTube. This site now gets more daily traffic than Google by a very healthy margin and a visitor spends on average at least 15 minutes experiencing the content.

The other sites like Facebook are currently matching Google (however this is changing monthly and may well be higher by the time this goes to print.) You can see for yourself if you’d like by visiting www.alexa.com and typing in the names of the sites you’d like to compare.

Is this rapid rise of social marketing a surprise? Not to me. It’s human nature all over again. And if you stop and think about what this means to you, well it can be good or bad depending on how this new ‘force’ is applied. Today with Web2.0 and Social Marketing gaining momentum like never before, I’d have to agree that the pen is truly mightier than the sword – yet again.

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Data + Interpretation = “Meaningful” Information

Without ‘parroting’ the obvious, content (meaningful information) is what people seek online. And in all fairness what people really seek is an answer to some question. Further compounding the challenge is the fact people use words and phrases natural to them – not to a computerized search engine.

It’s quite the conundrum… What key unlocks the door to untold ’search’ riches?

Cornerstone Key Phrases

Keyword phrase demand and supply is at the cornerstone of content provision and armed with an understanding of the search terms, and the modalities of the user’s presentation (how a person perceives the world), you can begin to provide answers to their questions in the form of articles, white papers, blog postings, forum inserts and so on.

Writing is an art, and although most people think writing is easy they’d be incorrect in that assumption: bad writing is easy, good (or great) writing is hard work.

The Artful Dance

And writing to balance the needs of a human with the needs of a computer is an artful dance for sure.

But there is some relief, since the dawn of the Internet the search engines have aimed for purity of search. In other words the engines are attempting to understand the true meaning of your question so they can return the best possible answer.

This means that so long as you write truly to meet the needs of the people (and keep an eye on the engine requirements) you will undoubtedly be rewarded for your efforts.

The ‘Real’ Reason

Writing content so the engines find you is great, however the real reason for this publishing process is the embedded links back to your select sites. As you publish and share your content, those that pick up your work and republish it will also republish your links to your selected websites.

Article marketing (for this is essentially what this is) is incredibly powerful and results in a strong and wide web of connections and links back to your sites.

Of course you need to provide content that people want to read and share…

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