John Ryan

Twitter on Ulitzer As more and more people are using Twitter, there is more effort being made by individuals and businesses to leverage Twitter as a business tool. Twitter recently published a Twitter Business Usage Guide.  There are three sections to this guide that include Getting Started, Best Practices and Case Studies. Here is the usage guide intro from Twitter, I encourage you to read the actual guide. Every day, millions of people use Twitter to create, discover and share ideas with others. Now, people are turning to Twitter as an effective way to reach out to businesses, too. From local stores to big brands, and from brick-and-mortar to internet-based or service sector, people are finding great value in the connections they make with businesses on Twitter. When people working in the Empire State Building twittered that they were craving ice cream delivery, ... (more)

The Future of Cloud Computing – A Study

Recently, I became an executive advisor to Kaavo, a Cloud Applications Management software company. Kaavo is in a unique position to capitalize on the soon to be obvious need to manage applications on the cloud. It's interesting to see the cloud computing predictions and how it will change the way we work with applications. Overview A solid majority of technology experts and stakeholders participating in the fourth Future of the Internet survey expect that by 2020 most people will access software applications online and share and access information through the use of remote serve... (more)

Quantcast is Cool Analytics

I have been using Quantcast for almost a year now to track traffic on my sites. From the very beginning of our use, Quantcast did a terrific job of measuring the traffic and giving me good data on demographics. For instance, it tells you some great information such as we had a high index score for male, very high for management level, very high for Asian sources and high for the educated user. It tells you how many people are regular visitors and how many are just showing up. Quantcast tells you U.S. and Global traffic as well as trending. You can view their methodology to get an... (more)

Prepare Yourself for More Email Coming to Your Inbox

From Forrester's Press Release Spending on email marketing in the US will balloon to $2 billion by 2014 — a nearly 11 percent compound annual growth rate — according to a new forecast by Forrester Research Inc. (Nasdaq: FORR). Falling CPMs (cost per thousands), a high return on investment, and growing consumer use of social email accounts will fuel the use of email by Direct Marketing professionals. In five years, consumers will be deluged with more than 9,000 email marketing messages annually. “By 2014 direct marketers will waste $144 million on emails that never reach their pr... (more)

Ulitzer vs. Ning - a Quick Review

Having used both sites for about two weeks, there is still a great deal I am learning to do with both Ulitzer and Ning, but a reader asked if I would do a quick comparison, so I will. The obvious point for me is that the sites have two different objectives for the writers.  For Ning, the writer is trying to be involved in a niche social network from scratch.  For example, I have built my own social network for marketers and salespeople called BuyerSteps.  I created BuyerSteps as a way for other professionals to join in a conversation around the 21st century buyer.  So, Ning repr... (more)