The 2nd Floor

Left Brain Candy

Left Brain Candy is still looking for a new name, so for this week we’ll stick with what we’ve got (although Left Brain Droppings has been our favorite suggestion yet).

And now, your weekly articles:

Knowledge @ Wharton: The Buzz Starts Here: Finding the First Mouth for Word-of-Mouth Marketing

An amazing article on what I would consider today’s best "influencers":

New research…has found that traditional targets may not be as influential as previously thought. The pharmaceutical firm that sponsored the research…had its "a-ha" moment when they found Physician No. 184 on a map.

Charted on the map was a tangle of points and lines representing physicians practicing in a large city and the connections between them.

The medical community was actually divided into two sub-networks split apparently by ethnicity, with one sub-network dominated by physicians with mostly Asian names and the other with mostly European names. Connecting the two, like a spider suspended on a thread between two webs, was the dot for Physician No. 184 — a doctor the company’s marketing department and salespeople barely knew.

McKinsey Quarterly: When job seekers invade Facebook

Only McKinsey would talk about Facebook like this:

"We will witness further conflict between the nonrational instinct to connect socially and the rational calculation to build social capital for professional reasons."

(Thanks to Julie for this, and for this)

PR Week: New class of CEOs require less barriers for messaging, efforts (subscription required)

PR Week EIC Keith O’Brien on why Zappos and Twitter CEOs are good communicators. The gist:

• Nimble thinking: Today’s class of CEOs tend to shun bureaucratic thinking.
• Value beyond influencer management: CEOs previously built walls between themselves and reporters.
• Messaging can’t be created in a vacuum: Some might say messaging is dead, but that’s not true.

paidContent.org / WaPo: What To Look For In 2009: The CEO Consensus From The Jefferies Internet Conference

The main points:

• More subscription models in 2009 and 2010.
• Consolidation is necessary and likely in online video.
• Display isn’t going away even though things look awful now.
• Profit margins will improve.

BoingBoing: Pizza joint gives staff t-shirts with the text of 1-star Yelp reviews

This strategy, unsurprisingly, does not appear in the Air Force’s blog assessment approach. Sample t-shirt line: "This place sucks."

Peter Shankman: Five ways Facebook can win the War of Relevance:

From our favorite free media query provider (HARO):

1. Lose the friend cap.
2. My mother is not my girlfriend, who’s not my accountant, who’s not my best friend from junior high school.
3. The Fan Pages don’t work in their current form.
4. Why don’t the fan pages work anywhere NEAR as well as a profile page?
5. We’ll all be on the grid eventually.

Looks like he was fairly prescient: Facebook’s response to Twitter (Techcrunch)

New York Times: Why Are iPhone Users Willing to Pay for Content?

Somewhat related: Apple Pulls $1,000 iPhone App

WSJ ‘Digits’ blog: Hearst to Begin Charging for Digital News

First, micropayments for riveting conversation, and now this?!

If newspapers turn off their free Web sites completely, the number of surfers is almost certain to decrease, but the financial impact is unclear – largely because there are few large-scale models in existence. (News Corp.’s The Wall Street Journal is the largest newspaper to offer paid online subscriptions, but it has been doing so since the inception of its Web site more than a decade ago.)