Learning Goals/Tasks for Week 3:

• Chapter 1: "The Origins of Social Media," in The New Influencers, pp. 1-14. (Download content.)
• “The Death of Segmentation: IBM VP talks segments of one consumer.
• Video: Seth Godin: Ted Talk on: How to Get Your Ideas Spre
• Podcast: "Gil Frisbie and Frank Acito of Indiana University: The Long Tail"
•  Twitter and Brand Building assignment
• The Point of Twitter (from NPR "On the Media" program of April 23, 2010; 9 minutes)
• The Razorfish Social Influence Marketing Report

This week was a pretty busy week for me, school, work, and personal.  Unfortunately  I found myself scrambling to do most of my homework for this class today (Sunday)  I was out of town most of the week for work and then I was out of town Friday evening to Sunday morning for a friends wedding.  It is officially summer and it sure felt like it here in Northern Illinois.  We had humid heat followed by violent rains followed by more humid heat. Overall it was a good week and weekend.  

This was a big week in this class.  A lot of information to take in.  I learned more about Twitter this week during the assignment and also a new topic to me, the long tail.  I considered myself to be a casual Twitter user.  I mostly follow people and check out tweets on a weekly basis. This assignment helped me focus in on one brand an monitor how they use Twitter to build their brand.  I focused my assignment on TaylorMade Golf.  I followed them closely for five days a witnessed them promoting their brand with links, photos, and retweets.  They do a great job promoting their brand and their products.  The links take you right to their site to order their products.  The week I followed them just happened to be the week after one of their players, Justin Rose, won the US Open.  this is one of four major championships in the PGA season.  They provided links for followers to purchase the exact equipment he used.

The Long Tail was another interesting topic.  This is another marketing topic that I have some general knowledge of but haven't ever been formally taught about.  The Rhapsody song specific long tail was a pretty amazing analysis that is similar to other markets.  Something that I found interesting was that the "non hits" in the long tail when combined rival the amount of hits.  This makes sense when you look at a chart of the long tail but is interesting to think about.  The article used the example that Barnes and Nobel carriers 100,000 titles and one quarter of  Amazon's book sales is outside the top 100,000 titles.  This is a perfect example of how the long tail adds up.