Marketers Like Twitter More Than Consumers Do

MediaPost Publications, July 27, 2009 — The Rockies may crumble, Gibraltar may tumble, they're only made of clay, but is Twitter here to stay?

Harris Interactive's new study with LinkedIn Research Network suggests advertisers are a lot more optimistic about the staying power of that web platform for pointillist pontification than regular people. The firm ran an online poll of 1,015 marketers and agency types and 2,025 consumers in June, asking their opinions about Twitter and its uses as a marketing platform and found some disparities.

The Napkin Sketch

How Wal-Mart, Microsoft, and others are using the power of images to digest complex ideas.

Fast Company, March 20, 2009 — You ought to be in pictures. No, really. Companies are increasingly using simple pictures to distill complicated concepts into easily shared, easily remembered nuggets. "Graphic expression and visual thinking are a central part of human cognition," says Neil Cohn, a researcher in cognitive psychology and linguistics at Tufts University. These ideas are spreading from how companies sell what they do — as in UPS's "Whiteboard" ad campaign, featuring its agency's creative director sketching out what brown can do for you — to plotting strategy. For example, Mark Zuckerberg has said that Facebook is based on the "social graph," a visual model of how people interact.