New Case Study Shows: Social Media Is The Major Contributor To Lead Generation by Jeff Bullas

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Excerpt from a longer post:

"A Study by Marketing Sherpa of the company BreakingPoint, showed success using a wide-ranging social media strategy to generate leads. An update on their tactics — with a focus on integrating email and social media highlighted the original case study that first demonstrated how the team tested and measured activity from several social media channels. The results included

55% of all leads coming from inbound Web visits, and
75% of marketing-influenced pipeline coming from inbound Web leads

The case study outlined 6 Social Media steps to help fill the sales funnel:

#1 Create a blog to start and join online conversation
#2 Establish an active Twitter account
#3 Create a LinkedIn Group (or Facebook page depending on your demographic)
#4 Modify your press release strategy for blogger coverage
#5 Promote social media channels on your company website and in email signatures
#6 Measure growth of social media accounts and web traffic

Results:

Results of the researched company’s social media campaign showed that there was a dramatic correlation between the use of social media channels and the growth of the company’s web traffic and leads..."

INTERVIEW | Guillermo Del Toro, Part I: Videogames, Transmedia and Here's His E-mail - via indieWIRE

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Excerpt from an interview with Eric Kohn:

"In this first part of a two-part interview, Del Toro spoke with indieWIRE about why videogames and transmedia figure into his career almost as much as movies. Stayed tuned for the second part of the interview later this week.

EK: In addition to your various film projects, you’re also developing a videogame project called “Insane.” How does that fit into the other things you do with your time?

GT: I’ve been working on it for almost a year. I put a lot of work into it. It takes up a large part of my day. Sometimes, for days in a row or weeks in a row, I’m involved in working on this. I’m trying to learn everything I can about different media, because I’m a firm believer in transmedia. I think it’s a mistake to assume that since I know how to make movies, I know how to make videogames. However, I approach this videogame from the point of view of a very immersed gamer. I essentially grew up with videogames. I had the first videogame ever, the “Pong” game, and I’ve owned every console known to man since then. So I approach it as a medium that seems similar to film in some ways, but it’s actually very different. It has its own rules of language and storytelling. In this case, it’s not a passive audience. They’re far more active. I must say, in the past year, I’ve learned a lot working on “Insane,” which is good for me as a filmmaker. To me, videogames are a huge component of genre filmmaking in the future. You will always have Jim Jarmusch and Terrence Malick—there will always be quirkier independent films, but for the next big step for genre storytelling, videogames will be a major component.

EK: A lot of people think videogames are cinematic, but that can have many meanings. Some games are cinematic in the atmospheric sense, while in other cases the comparison has more to do with an internal connection to the events in the narrative. With that in mind, what sort of experience are you going for with “Insane”?

GT: We talked a lot about different versions of the game. We’re trying to do things that have not been done before, both in the gameplay and the devices that we use. We’re creating stuff that, at least for now—knock
on wood—hasn’t been done before. We’re trying to make it as immersive as possible...."

Henry Jenkins interviews Sherry Turkle: 'Does This Technology Serve Human Purposes?": A "Necessary Conversation" with Sherry Turkle (Part One)

'Does This Technology Serve Human Purposes?": A "Necessary Conversation" with Sherry Turkle (Part One)

After more than twenty years of living in the heart of the machine, I have concluded that there are two ways of doing humanities at MIT (perhaps anywhere): the first is entrenched and embattled, defending the traditions, from a broom closet, trying to civilize those who see virtue in the technological and who undervalue the cultural; the second is engaged, confronting the technological and demanding that it serve human needs, asking core questions about the nature of our species, and exploring how the cultural and the psychological reasserts itself through those media which we make, in Marshall McLuhan's terms, into extensions of ourselves. There is at MIT no greater advocate for humanistic engagement than Sherry Turkle, whose work on technologies as "second selves," as "evocative objects," as intimate tools and "relational artifacts", the central theme of her work.


It has been my joy and honor to consider Turkle my friend for more than two decades. Our paths crossed too rarely in the years I was in Cambridge, but each time they did, I left the conversation changed by her insights about core questions which shaped both of our work. Here is a video recording of our most recent in-person exchange, a public dialogue about solitude and participation in the digital age, which we conducted at the Scratch conference hosted by our mutual friend, Mitch Resnick, at the MIT Media Lab. It will be clear there that our shifting alignments, sometimes agreeing, but often coming at the world a bit askew to each other, brought out some fresh thinking from both of us.

MIT Tech TV

Excerpt from a longer post August 22, 2011:

"HJ: I was struck by one of the very first sentences in the book: "Technology proposes itself as the architect of our intimacies." Can you dissect that evocative phrase a bit for me? In what forms does the proposal take and how do we signal whether or not we accept?

ST: From the earliest days that I came to MIT, struck by the intensity of people's emotional engagement with their objects - and most especially with their computational objects - there were many people, and especially many colleagues, who were highly skeptical of my endeavor. And yet, I am inspired by Winston Churchill's words, who said, before McCluhan rephrased: "We make our buildings, and in turn, our buildings make and shape us." We make our technologies, and our technologies make and shape us. The technologies I study, the technologies of communication, are identity technologies. I think of them as intimate machines. They are not only, as the computer has always been, mirrors of our mind; they are now the places where the shape and dimensions of our relationship are sculpted.
I think of the technological devices as having an inner history. That inner history is how they shape our relationships with them and our relationships with each other. Another way to think of this is in terms of technological affordance and human vulnerability. Technologies have certain psychological affordances, they make certain psychological offers. We are vulnerable to many of these. There is an intricate play between what technology offers and what we, vulnerable, often struggle to refuse...."

The Next Day Reviewed - soon to be an NFB/PopSandBox iDoc (Not your ordinary comic books) - The Globe and Mail

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Excerpt:

"...The Next Day (which has also been turned into an interactive animated online documentary) is co-written by Paul Peterson, Jason Gilmore and cartoonist John Porcellino, acclaimed for his self-published King Cat series. Like Girard, the book uses cartooning to tackle profound subject matter: It’s based on interviews with four real-life survivors of suicide attempts.

In both dark subject and spare style, the book reminds one of Sarah Leavitt’s Tangles, which concerned Alzheimer’s and was the first-ever graphic novel nominated for a Writers’ Trust of Canada Non-Fiction Prize, in 2010. The visuals in The Next Day are even more distilled, however, in Porcellino’s trademark “doodle” style.

Yet Porcellino understands the power that resides in the simple graphic, and gets forceful ideas across in a direct, sometimes brutal fashion. And the effect perhaps mitigates or offsets the sadness of the narratives, without either undercutting or diminishing them.

The most powerful instance of this is when one character tells of being molested, as a child, by an uncle – with the relative represented as an amorphous yet threatening blob. Text and image also meld powerfully in a sequence where a character relates how she threw herself down stairs, with words and pictures functioning as counterpoint.

The Next Day is a worthwhile, distinctive follow-up to KENK...."

Must Read: Slavoj Žižek · Shoplifters of the World Unite · LRB 19 August 2011

Excerpt:

"Repetition, according to Hegel, plays a crucial role in history: when something happens just once, it may be dismissed as an accident, something that might have been avoided if the situation had been handled differently; but when the same event repeats itself, it is a sign that a deeper historical process is unfolding. When Napoleon lost at Leipzig in 1813, it looked like bad luck; when he lost again at Waterloo, it was clear that his time was over. The same holds for the continuing financial crisis. In September 2008, it was presented by some as an anomaly that could be corrected through better regulations etc; now that signs of a repeated financial meltdown are gathering it is clear that we are dealing with a structural phenomenon.

We are told again and again that we are living through a debt crisis, and that we all have to share the burden and tighten our belts. All, that is, except the (very) rich. The idea of taxing them more is taboo: if we did, the argument runs, the rich would have no incentive to invest, fewer jobs would be created and we would all suffer. The only way to save ourselves from hard times is for the poor to get poorer and the rich to get richer. What should the poor do? What can they do?

Although the riots in the UK were triggered by the suspicious shooting of Mark Duggan, everyone agrees that they express a deeper unease – but of what kind? As with the car burnings in the Paris banlieues in 2005, the UK rioters had no message to deliver. (There is a clear contrast with the massive student demonstrations in November 2010, which also turned to violence. The students were making clear that they rejected the proposed reforms to higher education.) This is why it is difficult to conceive of the UK rioters in Marxist terms, as an instance of the emergence of the revolutionary subject; they fit much better the Hegelian notion of the ‘rabble’, those outside organised social space, who can express their discontent only through ‘irrational’ outbursts of destructive violence – what Hegel called ‘abstract negativity’...."