We know, TONIFY.net took a pretty long break. During the last four months, tonify.net wouldn’t get any update because of the lack of time mostly. Inspiration is everywhere, just take a look around. But when it comes to actually start writing, well… Now, that’s a problem!

What happened, actually? Well, The lack of time, the work volume and all the arrangements for new business took all the time and put this blog in a coma. But we’re back. And not only we’re back, but TONIFY.net has brand new clothes, inspired by pop-colors and Swiss graphic design. We thought a more professional look on a really good grid-based system would do a much better job in what concerns user experience.

Of course, there’s still a lot of work to be done, but the first steps were made. Now, besides some workaround up and down, here and there, the real big step to be done is delivering the best content and the coolest information that you were used to. Now, stop! We’re preparing a few surprises, so stay tuned.

Post from: Tonify.net

One really efficient hoax - Karen from Denmark, the single mother looking for her baby's father - should get a prize for creative PR

Some might say it’s stupid. I’d say it’s brilliant. VisitDenmark, a tourism agency, ran a viral campaign with huge potential and great results, actually. Though it wasn’t quite the best idea, mostly because the tourism agency basically said “Any kind of publicity is publicity”, almost one million people watched the video with the single mom searching online for her baby’s father. Karen was supposedly drunk one and a half years ago, she had sex with a tourist and got pregnant. From this to promoting “sexual tourism” is only one step. Still, it can be efficient

Mashable is the blog that made the hoax popular, though there were quite a few comments on YouTube saying the video just can’t be real. Considering the implications and the controversy, the idea is actually great. As long as they assume the full responsibility for all reactions, it’s fine. Of course, the idea of “sexual tourism” will generate a pretty nasty image for the tourism agency, but in the end, just think about it: cheap PR, right?

It’s interesting to follow this advertising trend regarding tourism. You can recall “The Best Job In The World” campaign for that island in Australia, which won the Grand Prix at this year’s Cannes Lions. This is quite similar, except the part where there’s no job, but there’s “business”, even if we’re talking about “sexual business”.

How cheap is this Danish Tourism PR?

First of all, you might consider the strategy is cheap as in low. May be, as long as it’s confounded with promoting “sexual tourism”. On the other hand, that doesn’t mean it can’t be efficient. Almost one million people watched the video and lots more will watch it, despite the fact it was removed. Copies are published on YouTube, so it’s still accessible to the public. As long as it will attract tourists as much as 2% of the viewers, that means it’s efficient. And let’s look at the big bright side: the huge brand exposure for Denmark.

Regarding the price payed to the creative agency, it can’t be that expensive.  Which is good for the business, as long as the video went viral in just a few days and has already become a PR case study. Why so? Again, for the huge attention drawn to Denmark and Copenhagen. So, are you ready to visit the country?

Is bad publicity actually becoming good publicity? As long as VisitDenmark announced shortly that it was just a campaign, and the countries image wasn’t affected (and I strongly believe it didn’t had the time to affect Denmark’s image), yes, it is.

Post from: Tonify.net

From switching a font to involuntary free marketing

They said it’s for the better. Switching from Futura to Verdana, the marketing guys from IKEA had in mind one simple idea: making their catalog readable everywhere, especially in countries like China or Japan. But then again, it wasn’t that brilliant. Hundreds of designers almost killed the IKEA’s marketing team. Still, though the company had negative feedback from designers, it had a lot of media exposure, including The New York Times, Time, etc. Is that good or bad? I think it’s free PR

Though IKEA never really needed a burst of popularity, at least not in Europe, they just got it. Involuntary, because I don’t really think someone actually thought about such a simple idea to bring so much media coverage. Basically, because they didn’t need it. IKEA’s marketing is all about catalogs delivered to your door. You take it, you check it, you like it, you go buy. And you keep the catalog for the rest of the year. We still have catalogs from three years ago, for example, and that’s because some of the furniture goes away in the new “book”.

Recently, I noticed that IKEA goes as well for unconventional OOH. In Bucharest, they arranged the furniture in the street or in bus stations. Pretty cool. But from direct marketing and OOH to online viral marketing, that’s a lot to go. So I believe what IKEA’s marketing people say it’s true. Some guy thought it would be nice to have a web font. It’s all about usability, right? Taking the new and inserting it into the old. Some sort of adapting to the new age, but in the old mediums. And, of course, Verdana is cheaper.

Well, the reactions were unexpected:

We’re surprised, but I think it’s mainly experts who have expressed their views, people who are interested in fonts. I don’t think the broad public is that interested.
IKEA spokeswoman, Camilla Meiby, to AP reporter.

What’s with all that fuss about Verdana?

There’s actually a petition asking IKEA to return to Futura. But it’s not about the fonts as much it’s about the reactions. A few days ago, I found the new catalog at my door. I took a short look and it’s actually good, despite the fact Futura was left behind. And I work as a designer on various projects. I don’t know if the new catalog looks worse than the previous one, but it sure doesn’t look better. It’s quite the same. And it’s not about the fonts as much as it’s about the products.

The guys that worked on the new version of IKEA’s catalog are actually good. In normal circumstances, Verdana looks really bad on print. The letter spacing is absolutely ugly when it comes to headings. So the designers took a really pretty approach and used Verdana italic. Which gives a whole new look to the layout. Verdana isn’t such a bad choice after all. I know, it would’ve been way cooler to just keep the old Futura, but it’s actually not that bad.

And the free PR

Being their marketing tool of choice, the IKEA catalog is one of the best examples of simple marketing when it comes to lovemarks. The catalog is that something that you actually wait for. It’s the spam you actually enjoy. You’d probably throw out all Carrefour catalogs, but you won’t get rid of IKEA’s. That’s why I can understand the designers, this product is an icon, right?

But changing the font created such a big buzz, that IKEA would be stupid not to use it next year just as well. No, they shouldn’t change the font again, this time to Arial. They should switch back to Futura and get new media coverage.

I quite enjoy this examples of free marketing, voluntary or not. These are great ideas that can improve your marketing strategies. Though designers took it to a revolution, the common people won’t bother looking at fonts as long as they’re readable. Still, that doesn’t mean everyone should switch to Verdana just because IKEA got into the news.

Post from: Tonify.net

Who's gonna buy a $141 burger? Who cares?

We’re going through a recession, right? What does that mean? Well, it means money should stay in your bank account and multiply. Because it’s not easy to make them. So what do you do to promote your business? Well, find a cool idea and get free PR. That’s what Burger King did. And the idea is great, though what they’re promoting is something no one will actually buy. But who cares as long as it’s free PR? Here we go.

Burger King “launched” this new burger, right? Well, they’re a burger company, so they should launch new burgers. But what if you were to own a burger company which sells burgers for five bucks and suddenly you were to launch an 85 pounds new cheeseburger? Who would actually buy that? Most probably, no one. So here’s how you make a simple campaign for a product with “utopian” sales.

What do you do when you can see that your products are selling less than expected and you feel like customers forget about you? Of course, you go for advertising. But advertising is not cheap. That’s why companies go for PR. PR should be cheap, there’s no production costs compared to advertising, where you have to pay for video and for outdoor, where money goes to buying paper and ad space.

But if you’re Burger King, you can afford a good PR agency. So what’s to be done? Well, why not launch a new product? A product that no one will ever buy unless he’s stupid? So here’s what Burger King did: they launched an exclusive burger, just for London, for the price of 85 pounds. That’s like 98 euros. To be more exact, that’s 141 dollars! Who would pay that money for a burger?

Well, it doesn’t matter. Guess what were the results? Media coverage. Cool, huh? Well, I guess that can be called “exploiting the cheap people”. Or just “exploiting the people”, because no one has such a small IQ to pay 141 dollars for a burger. But that means brand exposure and a lot more attention to the Burger King brand.

Post from: Tonify.net

Content marketing is contextual advertising with a real strategy

You have a business and your business has a website. It’s probably something like mycompany.com. You have the usual “About Us” page, the usual “Our Mission” page and all that boring stuff no one is reading. Even you got to believe those are “dead pages” and no one cares about them. You don’t have a budget to relaunch your website, though you’d like to make it look fascinating. And you don’t have the money to spend on display advertising, not to speak about TV ads. What should you do?, you’ll ask. Well, content marketing is the solution.

You started to believe pages like “About Us” or “Our mission” are dead, right? Well, that’s true, those are dead pages and no one cares about them. Unless you believe in them. Content marketing is all about working with words and having a small budget to attract people that read those words and will let themselves convinced to buy your products.

Big companies have big budgets to spend. What marketing people in big companies don’t understand is that a Flash website is not enough to build a presence on the internet. I said that before and I’ll say it again. But this time, I’ll add this:

The most efficient advertising is word-of-mouth. The second most trusted type of advertising is what’s written on the company’s website.

What does that mean? That means you only have to say good things about yourself. Write the story of your company, people love stories. Keep “Our Mission” page, but rewrite it and make it sound like a story, tell the world the story where you and your products will change the world. That’s it. That’s all the content you need.

Here comes the marketing

Now, you know your website needs visitors. And here comes the part about marketing. Run a contextual advertising campaign. It’s cheap and you only pay for each visitor that arrives on your website. That’s why it’s called pay per click. Create short ads for each of those “dead pages” written as stories. For info about how to write an ad, check out copyblogger.com and copysnips.com. It’s that simple: writing a great ad and getting visitors. Those visitors are your potential clients and they’re really cheap. You can pay a penny for each of them.

If you want a full content marketing experience, launch a blog and post articles about your industry and about your products, write stories on how your products are made, write articles about your employees and show the world what a cool boss you are. Choose your best articles and promote them through contextual advertising. People like cool stuff. If you’re not yet convinced to launch a blog, check these four reasons why you really should do it.

You can’t find any other cheaper form of advertising. Your dead pages will reborn. Anyone can do it!

Post from: Tonify.net

Using a Windows Mobile powered device - like HTC Touch Pro - is that simple. Full QWERTY keyboards make your life easier and emprove your efficiency

When I first got my hands on a Windows Mobile phone, I said “Damn it, this is Windows!”. In other words, I remembered about Windows 95 and how it crashed. The HTC Touch Pro was sent to me by the local McCann PR branch for a two-week test run. In the first seven days, it makes you go nuts. If you’re a regular Windows user, you know what I mean. But after the first week, you start to love it and you don’t want to give it back. And here’s why

Using a mobile device with a real operating system makes you see the endless possibilities. You can install software for almost anything you like. Instead of keeping the phone for two weeks, I kept it for a month and a half. Hopefully, the guys from McCann will still send me devices. And this happened for one single reason: you just start to love it and you just don’t want to give it back.

Actually, I had to give it back and I turned back to my old Sony Ericsson v630i. An old bad looking phone with no capabilities. Oh, joy!, I said. And then I got to test a Sony Ericsson, sent to me by a different PR agency. Yes, I said Sony Ericsson. But this time… well, it was the Xperia X1. Which is another device running on Windows Mobile. And the joy returned!

Where does all the joy comes from? From the software, of course!

True, not as much as in the first instance, basically because I had to reinstall all the software. And because of the keyboard, which is not actually full QWERTY (meaning it doesn’t have all the keys a regular laptop keyboard would have), like the HTC (believe it or not, beside the F-keys, it has almost every other key).

But the real fun comes from all the possibilities a Windows operating system is giving you. And it’s all about the software. Others tried, but it’s hard to actually create software for a mobile phone, I think. Especially when it comes to programs like video players or instant messaging clients. Here’s a few of what I use:

1. Core Player
   This one’s a must for anyone having a phone running on Windows Mobile. It’s the perfect player for any kind of video file, it allows you to browse a video and if you close the program, when relaunched, it will run the same video from the point you closed it. You can watch on your mobile phone episodes of your favourite TV series or any kind of movie in .avi format as long as you have enough space on your memory card.
2. Slick
   If you’re a instant messaging heavy user, Slick is the perfect application for your mobile phone. You can connect through any of the following services: Yahoo!, MSN, AOL, ICQ, GTalk and Jabber. It even stores some of your chat history.
3. iGO My Way
   If you have a car and you forgot to remove the GPS device from your car’s windscreen and someone broke into your car and stole it, you know that might happen again. Some guys crashed my car’s right door glass just to verify if the GPS device is in the glove compartment. And that happened because the rack was still attached to the windscreen. If that happens, I’m not sure you’d like to buy a new GPS device. But you can buy the GPS software and install it on your Windows Mobile powered phone.

These are only three examples. But you can do much more. And that’s the main reason I strongly believe Microsoft should start a marketing campaign for Windows Mobile.

What should Microsoft do?

I don’t know how much a Windows Mobile license costs. But in the first instance, I’d lower the price for phone producers. That means less production costs and, of course, lower prices for phones. That would be the first step in encouraging phone producers to install Windows Mobile on their products.

The second step would be a huge campaign to make the world know that the most used operating system in the world is working on mobile devices just as well and look, there are huge benefits! Microsoft runs a campaign for Office 2010, for Christ’s sake! Why not run a campaign for the future of your business: mobile entertainment!

Want it or not, the future is heading to mobile. Of course, no one will stop using laptops, it’s a huge difference between a 3 inch screen and a 17 inch screen. But only few people will dare taking their laptops out in the subway. Plus, the subway won’t give free wireless access. But mobile networks already have internet connections on reasonable prices. More, using a device like HTC Touch Pro, with a full QWERTY keyboard, allows you to send and reply e-mails while going to work. Instead of getting bored, you can finish at least 15% of what you have to do that day. That’s what I do.

Yes, there are a few issues

In Europe, Nokia is a lovemark. People love Nokia and most of them won’t give up for some other phone. But Nokia acquired Symbian, so they already have an operating system. Yes, but Sony Ericsson – which is another lovemark, by the way – doesn’t have one and their Xperia X1 runs on Windows Mobile. And there are plenty of other producers you can talk to.

Of course, not everybody affords a device running on Windows. My HTC Touch Pro costs as much as I’d pay for a laptop. But the technology inside costs as much as a desktop computer used to cost seven years ago. And I mean a lame configuration like: AMD K6-2 processor running at 450Mhz, 128 MB RAM and a 10 Gb harddisk. And that has a huge case. This device, on the other hand, is small and allows Windows to run helped by a Qualcomm processor at 528 Mhz and 288 MB RAM. And a 4 GB memory card costs no more than $20.

In a few years, devices running on Microsoft’s mobile operating system will be really cheap. Technology goes cheaper year after year. My Dell laptop was 1.000 euros last year. Now, it costs 550 euros. Beat that! So why not spend the money for the future instead of throwing millions on campaigns for products that people would buy anyway? And I mean Office, for example.

Well, we’ll live and see.

Post from: Tonify.net

Taking social media too seriously can really damage your image

Amanda Bobben rented an apartment from Horizon Realty. The apartment is… “moldy”. Or that’s what Amanda Bobben said in a tweet read by 20 followers. A tweet that Horizon Realty says it has damaged the company’s image and the tenant should pay $50.000. No one knows how Horizon Realty got to read the tweet, and it probably doesn’t really matter anyway. What matters is that they sued Amanda and that’s the best example of how online communication can damage your image worse than any opinion. How? I’ll explain.

No wonder social media is a great medium to invest in. Actually, social media is one of the best ways to promote yourself, your company or your products. But what happens when you take too seriously any small thing that you might think it’s able to damage your image? Well, Horizon Realty Group from Chicago did that. The results? Well, they sure looked lame and scared.

For a company like Horizon Realty, the financial crisis is indeed a problem. The prices for apartments and houses dropped seriously, so commissions aren’t as big as they used to. That means lower incomes and, eventually, lower profits. Social media seems to be the cheapest and the best way to promote yourself. We all know, when it comes to companies and reducing costs, the first cuts are always applied to the marketing budget. Well, now they’re going to spend more on marketing.

Exaggerating is bad for the business

Amanda Bobben just droped a line on Twitter. Probably, her tweet might have had the chance to be retweeted by one of her 20 followers. But in the end, probably no more than 100 people were to really read that line she wrote:

Who said sleeping in a moldy apartment is bad for you? Horizon realty thinks it’s okay.

The tweet isn’t actually a damage to Horizon Realty’s image. It’s more like a damage to Amanda’s capabilities of choosing the flat she wants to live in. From my point of view, it’s her only fault that she didn’t check the apartment before moving in. In any normal circumstances, before paying the rent, you check the place you’re going to live in. It’s not like she payed the rent and while she was out, some guy from Horizon Realty came and planted the mold.

The mystery: How did they find her?

Leaving the “who’s fault is it” subject behind, I’m trying to imagine how did they manage to find that tweet. Are the “online communication experts” from Horizon Realty searching for the company name on Twitter and keep pressing the refresh button? Because it’s actually stupid to do that.

And that’s why I say exaggerating is bad for business. Taking too seriously the social media and everyone’s opinions is called exaggerating. That’s not an online communication strategy, that’s not a done job, it’s just stupidity.

The solution

If Horizon Realty managers are really scared of what people say, they shouldn’t have done such a big mistake and under no circumstance sue the tenant. What they could have done was to contact Amanda Bobben and offer to pay her bills for one month. Or to call her and offer her a new apartment. Would you like to know how the result would have looked like?

Wow, the guys from Horizon Realty found me a better place to stay! They’re cool!

But that would have been just as exaggerated. What I would have done? Ignore her tweet. Because it’s not my fault or my company’s fault because she didn’t check the place in the first instance. Anyway, here’s a merely different opinion.

Post from: Tonify.net

A blog could make your company's voice heard. Really heard.

You know people from your company read blogs. You might read blogs. You know blogs are really trendy and though you don’t understand why exactly people read them, you know they’re important. You know there’s not necessary news, nor expert opinion, but some articles are really good and they are really coherent and all those ideas are enjoyed by people. And you see companies tend to have blogs and write about stuff, though there’s no logical explanation why someone should waste time writing on a blog, especially when some of the articles are not related to what those companies do. Should your company start a blog? I believe so. Let’s see why.

I’ll try to make a list of reasons why companies should blog. And when I say companies I don’t mean startups or small companies, I mean big corporations just as well. I believe in online communication and, most of all, I believe in cheap and efficient online communication. And that is what a blog means to a company: easy and cheap communication. An online voice for your company, a voice to spread the information you want to be heard by your potential clients.

1. It’s free (or at least really cheap)

   Building a blog for your business won’t cost you a penny. Just download WordPress, install it and start writing. It’s that simple. WordPress has built-in SEO capabilities, so the search engines will index your articles as soon as you start writing. What is going to cost you though, is the blog theme. If you have a serious business, you’ll need a personalized image, with visual elements from your company’s website. That’s a must.
   But that’s not a big problem. You can find a premium theme and pay someone to customize it or you can just pay someone to design the theme from scratch. Costs? Somewhere between $100 to maximum $2,000. Why is the second limit so high? It depends on what kind of features you want to include. But if it’s a simple custom theme built from scratch, that can cost you as low as $300.

2. Anyone can write

   And when I say anyone, I don’t mean any guy that has access to a computer. I mean anyone from your company, people from your PR or marketing department or even you. Of course, if you want to show off and let people see how cool is your company, you can even let your employees speak their mind to the public.

3. It requires few resources

   What exactly do you need to start a blog? A cheap hosting account. Of course, you don’t actually need a hosting account as long as you have a website. You just need a subdomain and a MySQL database account. 100 MB of space are more than enough and a bandwidth limited to 5 GB a month is perfectly fine for a blog in the first two to four years. Well, maybe you’ll close your blog or maybe you’ll enjoy it. But remember that as long as you don’t upload movies or huge photos, everything is going to be alright and you won’t have to pay more than necessary.

Here comes the best argument:

“But why should I start a blog?” Because it’s better to let the world know your side of the story

It’s cool when people talk about your products. But it’s not that cool when they’re speaking loud the bad and the ugly. So why not let them speak about you exactly what you want them to talk about? Writing on a blog means you’re open to communicate and that’s what people want. Show your customers that you’re open to talk about everything they want to talk about and you’ll be above them. They will admire your courage.

Though internet has grown and lots and lots of companies start blogging, there are few that actually talk to their customers. If you show them respect, they’ll show you fidelity. They will buy from you because they know you listen to their problems and you are trying to make your products better, according to their expectations. They trust you more than your competition.

Talking isn’t cheap. It’s free

Blogging is how you make people stick with you and not run to the competition

Let your marketing and PR people do the talking. That’s why you pay them, right? Let them make the buzz. It’s in their job description, remember? Let them speak for you. If you do that and they convince the people you’re really interested in emproving your products according to their hopes, your clients will stick with you and they’re going to become the ones to deliver your message forward.

You just have to be friendly and make sure that your company’s relationship with the customers is based on friendship. Because it’s friends the ones that carry on your message to their friends. And by all means, keep the friendship. Because word-of-mouth will always be the number one way to add new clients. People trust people. Give your business a human face.

Post from: Tonify.net

#iranelection, the topic that pumped traffic in Twitter, got back in the charts

Advertising Age breaks the news: According to news-monitoring service VMS, the media coverage Twitter got in the last 30 days worths 48 million dollars. That’s half Microsoft’s Bing.com launch advertising budget. AdAge asks just below the title: Can Twitter maintain its sizzle? I think the right question is: How did that happen? It’s not “the chatter” that worths the money, it’s the Iran topic that ruled the media. And guess what was the main source of information? Twitter

After almost two weeks of Michael Jackson in the top ten most discussed topics on Twitter, #iranelection is back in the chart. This is the main reason Twitter got such a big media coverage. Take a look back and try to remember what was the main source of information regarding this topic in the – more or less – traditional media. Twitter on TV, Twitter in the newspapers, Twitter everywhere.

The advantage of using Twitter as a medium to spread the information is that the microblogging became probably the fastest communication medium in the world. Yes, there’s the phone, which is definetly faster, but it’s pretty expensive and in times of political crisis, not only that it’s not actually the safest way to communicate, but you might actually not be able to use it.

Basically, after the Iran matter, Twitter became a real medium, just like newspapers, but more likely similar to the internet. An internet inside the internet. It’s actually interesting to analyze how Twitter changed the perception people have over news. It’s 140 characters easy to get the news and it’s millions of 140 characters news to be read.

Of course, Twitter will not replace the true media forms, like newspapers, television or websites. But it can be translated into a reasonable source for whatever information you might want to expand. It’s brilliant, actually. Too bad it’s too hard for the company to actually get payed.

Now let’s see some figures:

1. Twitter had 2,7 billion impressions in the last 30 days
2. PR value generated by TV – 57%
3. PR value generated by newspapers – 37%
4. PR value generated by magazines – 5%
5. $48 million dollars worth media exposure

Post from: Tonify.net

Billions of Internet users means billions potential customers. And you say the Internet is dead as an investment? Is it?

As you probably know, Wall Street Journal’s columnist James Altucher wrote an article about his perception of the Internet as a business medium and, most important, as an investment option. According to Altucher, the Internet is dead. And he gives examples like AOL, Microsoft, MySpace and even Google. His advice? Don’t throw your money out in the internet. Well, I disagree. If you want to win, you have to risk. But most of all, you have to be smart. And the main question remains: Are you smart enough to invest in the Internet? You decide.

As a managing partner of Formula Capital, “an alternative asset management firm“, and an author on investment strategies, James Altucher probably knows better than me where to spend his money. I know how I’d spend his money. But enough with the jokes, we’re being serious.

Altucher’s examples are poor

Formula Capital’s manager has really poor examples, and that’s not because the brands he named aren’t popular enough, but because he’s talking about companies that acquired online services or invested without having a real online strategy. Why? Well, here’s why.

“Time Warner would rather keep their legacy old-media businesses like People magazine than hold onto one of the biggest Internet companies out there, AOL“, says Altucher. But he forgets that once AOL was acquired by Time Warner, and once you become part of a big corporation, you have to answer to new chiefs, managers, whatever.

So, suddenly, you’re not your own boss anymore and you have to addopt new strategies, according to the corporate criteria. The point is, after being acquired, new people got involved, some probably without the slightest idea about the online industry. I guess we can all see the results, can’t we?

What about MySpace?

Here’s another one of Altucher’s example: MySpace getting under the News Corp. umbrella. After being acquired, MySpace didn’t use a good strategy for development. I’m not a big fan or some great user of their services, but I can see one thing: instead of keeping it as a social network, News Corp. should have invested in additional paid services. Don’t forget that the company is involved in the music industry. Why not use MySpace to promote its artists on a brand new level? Why not sell music cheaper using MySpace?

And that’s not everything. It’s true, they launched a video service. But News Corp. is involved in cinema just as well. Why not include a movie service? I wrote much more about this idea a few weeks ago. There are plenty of opportunities. But where’s the strategy?

Microsoft is the worst example ever!

James Altucher points the finger at Microsoft: “Look, the suckers that invested millions in the Internet and got nothing!“. That’s only half true. The problem with Microsoft though is that they have a very lousy image in the online medium. And that’s mostly because they’re that big corporation that created Internet Explorer 6, the browser we still use at the office and we all love to hate. OK, maybe it’s an exaggerated, but Microsoft didn’t really show any real interest in gaining something from online.

Microsoft’s core business is still Windows and Office, that’s what they sell and that’s their main revenue source. Despite they’re involvement during the ages, Microsoft is a newbie in online. And that’s because their PR policy was to sit tight and shut up. No communication, no cool stuff to launch, same old websites using a crappy nineties’ design. Microsoft just isn’t a good example.

No, the Internet is not a dead end for investors

Internet is actually a good market to bet on. The only thing investors should keep in mind is to double-check the business plan and to be creative. Any idea might become an innovation if there’s enough creativity and desire. And it’s not the big guys like News Corp. that you should have in mind as examples, but the little ones who grew to become big shots. That’s where investors should look for opportunities.

Post from: Tonify.net