*Old Folks on Facebook: The social networking site, initially an online destination almost exclusively for college students and recent grads, is maturing as a result of its newfound popularity in
the corporate world, especially in Silicon Valley. Of the 33 million Web users the site now boasts, over 41% are of the 35 and over demographic, which accounts for a large portion of the 150,000 new
users the site claims it signs up every day. Executives, journalists, and publicists in the tech world and beyond have profiles on Facebook, including Google exec Vinton Cerf, venture capitalist
Vinod Khosla, and Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff. Consulting company Ernst & Young's Facebook network alone boasts 16,000 members, while Citigroup's claims nearly 8,500.
At this rate, Facebook may soon be ready to challenge professional-networking site LinkedIn as the go-to spot for investors and recruiters. The site helps build social capital with informal banter
between professionals, but many users' message boards are also starting to function just like work email inboxes. Meanwhile, though, its creator Mark Zuckerberg is challenged with maintaining a
grown-up audience without losing the hard-partying atmosphere that made it a hit with the college crowd.
Source: BusinessWeek.com
*E-Mail Marketing Masters: Come&Stay, based in the Danish city of Odense, is turning traditional the traditional advertising model on its head with its method of email marketing. Effectively
the opposite of a spammer, the company sends pitches only to people on its list of over 270 million recipients, who have indicated a willingness to receive advertising. Come&Stay maintains a
database of demographic information for those on its list, which it has collected largely from its blue-chip corporate clients, including BMW, Ikea, GE Capital, and Apple. Clients pay only for
responses, measured in clicks, purchases, or applications.
It's a simple, cheap, and low-risk model that's highly trackable, and it has helped Come&Stay's sales double for the past several years. Come&Stay is still a small player on the global
market, but the model could be seen as a threat to traditional media because, by using e-mail to access consumers directly, the company bypasses traditional outlets like broadcast and print. What's
more, the company's growth is likely to continue, as a senior analyst for Forrester Research estimates the e-mail marketing sector could be worth $2.8 billion in Europe alone by the end of the
decade.
Source: BusinessWeek.com
*Goofing Around on the Job: A recent survey of nearly 500 office workers found that most professionals think it's important to have a sense of humor around the office. Managers who can laugh at
themselves or about tough situations seem more approachable and in touch with their team, according to Max Messmer, chairman and CEO of Robert Half International, the staffing services firm that
conducted the survey. A few of the study's findings:
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97% of workers surveyed said they preferred workplace managers who could make them laugh; and,
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87% said their bosses were "pretty funny."
Source: INC.com
*The DIY Press Release: PR Newswire and Businesswire are the long-entrenched heavyweights of the press release world, controlling roughly 70% of the US market. But Web 2.0 upstarts like PRWeb,
which offers small companies and individuals the chance to issue online releases for a fraction of the price one of the "Big Two" might charge, have the potential to disrupt the old order. PRWeb, a
property of the small Maryland-based Vocus, offers not only a lower price, but web exposure complete with active hyperlinks, audio and videos, and tagging and redistribution through PRWeb's RSS
feeds. PRWeb also has search engine optimization down pat, to the extent that BusinessWire contracted a co-branded version of the site to update its own web offerings.
Old habits die hard, so we probably won't see the last of the Big Two for a while yet, especially in Fortune 500 circles. But the new generation of Web-focused PR pros who have adopted PRWeb may
be hard to win back, and the importance of the Internet and search engines to the distribution of news is only increasing, which means that the old guard, depending on how well they play catch up,
may be in hot water.
Source: Fortune Online