Welcome to August, everyone! It's the month where not one single thing gets done at anyone's job anywhere in the world. But just because there is nothing to do doesn't mean you can just sit at your desk and do nothing. Here's a guide to making yourself look busy without troubling with any actual work.
Every January 1, everyone wakes up with the best intentions of improving themselves and living a better life. By March 12, all those ideals are out the window. Not this year! Here's how to make your resolution last all year.
Going to nightclubs would be a lot more enjoyable if people knew how to behave properly. Follow these seven simple yet important rules and you'll make life easier for everyone.
Everyone's thinking—or at least should be thinking—about what they're going to dress up as for Halloween. Don't fall into the trap and wear one of these clichéd costumes that everyone else will have on. You can do better!
Get ready for everyone to be outraged now that Mo'Nique has said her husband is allowed to "cheat." But if more people had open relationships, wouldn't life be a whole lot better?
NEW YORK — Facebook is making a huge push during Advertising Week, an industrywide series of events for media buyers and publishers taking place now. Mark Zuckerberg's marketing minions bought a full-page ad in the program; sponsored sessions on Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday mornings; and put Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg on a panel. They're throwing a party Thursday night; Bob Marley's kid, Ziggy Marley, will be the entertainment. "We're finally sponsoring something!" I overhead one Facebook employee gush to another on Monday. It's all a big effort to reintroduce Facebook to the New York ad agencies after Zuckerberg botched last year's first try.Judging by Sandberg's panel appearence Monday, Facebook particularly wants to push its new Engagement Ads — the ones which allow users to comment on advertiser's banners. Yesterday, I sat down with a top executive from one of the major interactive agencies and asked him what he made of Facebook's showy efforts. Engagement Ads? "Eh, those aren't what I want," he said. Then he suggested three things Facebook needs to do right now to win Madison Avenue's money faster than a week's worth of sessions, panels and Ziggy Marley parties ever could. Build a toll booth. Everyone knows banner ads don't do it for big-budget advertisers anymore— not even ones that allow users to comment on them and share with their friends, like Facebook's new ads. Instead of creating gimmicky features that users don't want, Facebook needs to come up with ways for advertisers to be seen as providing new functionality on Facebook itself. By way of analogy, my source told me to imagine American Express sponsoring a normally congested toll road for a day. Drivers approaching the toll booths would see them empty and maybe billboard that read: "No toll today. Drive on through and see what it's like to be an American Express cardholder." That's the kind of branded experiences Facebook needs to create for users and advertisers, my source told me. Not gimmicky ones like asking users to design Mazda's new cars or come up with new Ben and Jerry's flavors. Facebook should encourage users to feel like a site improvement was brought to them by a brand. Maybe Facebook's Video application should have been sponsored by Sony's CyberShot line, for example. The challenge: Facebook's site developers work separately from the group which comes up with ad products, a divide Facebook needs to erase. Facebook needs to stop imagining it will ever reach Google's size. One reason Facebook hasn't come up with these kinds of advertising arrangements already is that they require lots of creativity, planning and customization. They're one-offs, and Mark Zuckerberg can't simply program a computer to sell them over and over. It's a terrifying reality for Facebook because its investors put money into it expecting it would become the next Google, which is an automated moneymaking machine. (Only 3,000 out of its 18,000 employees are required to run its advertising operations.) The sooner Facebook management and its investors realize that the company will not be the next Google — which, let's face it, lucked into a ridiculously simple way of making money — the sooner it can take advantage of its massive, desirable user base. Zuckerberg and Sandberg need to hire Madison Avenue insiders. My source says Madison Avenue avoids spending money on MySpace because no one in New York knows its ad salespeople. Facebook needs to put Madison Avenue insiders in positions where they have Mark Zuckerberg's ear. For example: Zuckerberg could have used someone with advertising experience to challenge him with the baby-name test before the company went forward with its Beacon ads. The baby-name test? "You know," he said, "The one where you take the name and think of all the terrible things it rhymes with and then decide if you still like it."
In China there's a popular consumer practice called tuangou or "team-buying," in which a large group of like-minded shoppers meet online and organize a trip to a local store. On that decided-upon day, they all show up in a huge pack and offer to buy, say, 75 digitial cameras from the store owner, but only if he'll agree to a 25 percent discount. If the owner doesn't agree to the deal, they all walk out. Instead of spending all their time developing better ways for Facebook users to poke each other or play board games online, why don't widgetmakers use the "social graph" to determine which users might have like-minded shopping interests, band them together and send them as a pack to amenable online and offline vendors? People have tried this before, but they didn't have acess to all of Facebook's data. I'm sure nobody would mind such an actually useful service taking a PayPal-esque cut off the top, Mr. Levchin.
When Fortune magazine asked Google cofounder Larry Page what was the best advice he ever got, Page said that while at Stanford he couldn't decide which of his 10 projects to focus on until his advisor, Terry Winograd, looked at one them — something to do with "the link structure of the Web" — and said "that one seems like a really good idea." Since, the advice has paid off for Winograd; he's landed a consulting gig at Google and even took a sabbatical to work there from 2002 to 2003. Google's recent market cap: $179 billion. (Photo by boltron)
StyleDiary's Patricia Handschiegel just posted a picture that was taken of her the day she sold her online-fashion startup to StyleHive in November 2007. In it, she's at her least glamorous — and most gleeful. "I love that picture because I was so fucking happy," she tells us. We wanted to know how she got that way. At first, Handschiegel wouldn't talk. "I know some things," she said, "But if anything, this shit makes you humble. You see how small you are and how big business and everything is." Fortunately, persistence and well-placed guilt trips paid off. And so below, her bullet points for the wantrepreneurs out there — girls' girls or not — looking to actually accomplish something.
