I was at the « Seize the new business opportunities » conference yesterday. The objective of the conference was to highlight new business opportunities created by the current economic crisis. Most speakers (Seth Godin, Tony Chapman, etc) focused on the creation of products that lead to word of mouth and social marketing.

The presentations were all relevant and highlighted interesting ideas and success stories but globally, I felt that something was missing. My issue with marketing has often been that ROI is not always quantifiable and social marketing is not getting us out of the woods.

The reality is that ideas that spread are rare. With more than 30 000 new products launched every year, creating a community or Facebook application for each product will only create new clutter. Attention is scarce, time is limited and it’s already spread across 2+ networks. Most people are on Facebook, more and more people are joining Twitter, LinkedIn is essential if you’re in business, etc.

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Very inspiring presentation on making money online by David Heinemeier Hansson from 37signals.

In this video, you’ll hear about:

• The benefits of targeting a ‘niche’ market
• The importance of being patient
• The myth of early retirement

You’ll probably laugh too.

Watch the movie

Do you know a lot of non-technical people who use feeds to keep up with information online?  If your answer is “Yes”, chances are that they’re using iGoogle, My Yahoo or another reader that understood that, what people care about is the content not the technology.

RSS, RDF, XML or Atom are all technologies used and marketed to get content from a blog or service to a user. But, the problem is that all these acronyms increase confusion and diffuse the feed subscription market. “Are XML feeds also compatible with my RSS feed reader?”

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Time to relax a bit and enjoy this very clever viral marketing campaign from Samsung.

It’s interesting to see how YouTube’s annotation feature was used to navigate within the site. Great campaign, effective product placement.

Earlier this week I was shopping for a digital camera. I went online and compared products and prices on a few Websites. After I had an idea of what I wanted to buy, I ended up going on a big electronics chain’s Website.

I sign up, add the product to my cart, proceed to checkout and begin the 5-step process.

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