iThnk.com – Business Insight About: Social Media, Co-creation and Free/Style

Don’t uthnk becoming a fan is a big step to take.? Well I do. I struggled to become a fan of anything on Facebook for a long time. I thought “yea I’m into that, but FAN is a big call. I’m hardly fanatical about it.” So I took a seat on the fence and decided to commit to not committing to anything fan related. The main reason I didn’t pop my fan cherry was out of fear of adding to the amount of Facebook fannies. We’ve all seen the trail of update Diarrhea - “Jenny became... more

Though the payoff from free/style business is obvious for customers (free stuff!), what possible reason would managers have to implement such an approach? The organisational value in free/style comes about because it addresses the fundamental problem all firms face; how to get customers. In traditional approaches to business price acts as a barrier to entry, and lots of activity is related to knocking that barrier down. Marketing does this by trying to convince customers there is no risk in paying... more

Late last year Phil Osborne presented his thoughts and insights into the concept of free at TEDxDunedin, in doing so he also coined the phrase Free/Style… If you’ve been paying attention to the changes that have been made on iThnk you would have noticed that Free/Style is now a new topic heading. So you can expect both Phil, myself and who ever else chooses to jump into the fray to bring you our regular musings about fee. We’d love you to join the conversation and contribute... more

Have you ever tried to convince someone who has never read a blog, who’s anti Facebook and hates the concept of Twitter that Social Media is one of the most valuable marketing initiatives they could ever engage in? If you have I hope it went better for you than it did for me. In my experience trying to convince social media naysayers that they should get on the social media band wagon is largely a wasted exercise. These people seem to able to block out the sound business rationale behind using... more

This is a guest post that I wrote for iJump – check out there other posts for some great insight into social media. In 2009 there’s no doubt that social media rocketed into the mainstream, but towards the end of 2009 there were various signals pointing to the fact that social media had now become a massive turn-off! Firstly, Pete Cashmore wrote an alarming post about the fact that there are 15,740 social media experts on Twitter – yuck. Around the same time last week Simon Young... more

This is a guest post that I wrote for the PocketSmith blog. Pocketsmith is a personal finance and forecasting application that uses a freemium model – check them out. When talking about free there’s clichés aplenty…“there’s no such thing as a free lunch”, “there’s free as in speech and there is free as in beer” etc. The funny thing about clichés is that there’s often a kernel of truth to them. There’s No Such Thing As A Free Lunch. You might be thinking…I’ve... more

It’s no secret that the almighty interweb has caused a major downturn in the print magazine biz. All sorts of fixes have been tried, for a while some were hailing embedding video players in print magazines as the saviour of print based advertising. When talking about the future of Wired, Chris Anderson said “We need to do something that doesn’t exist online, and do it in a superior way. Otherwise we should just do it online.” This might just be the superior way that they’ve been... more