Can a social-network-based service actually have a corporate culture? Clearly and honesyly asuming their commercial approach, Airbnb seems to be succesful where major brands are failing. 

-JimK

After the world's leaders in the field of education, it seems now to be the turn of big corporations to offer free training as a way of increasing their notoriety. Amazon is thus presenting their latest moves in the realm of cloud computing, and offering startups, incubators and other third parties the opportunity of being trained for those new uses. A smart move beyond customer fidelization, in my humble opinion, since it'll have both - the innovation and the consumers- working together from the very beginning of the project implementation.

There's a particular case in France that summarizes the effectiveness of this kind of customer approach: the telecommunications firm simply known as Free (CEO: Xavier Neel). After dramatically reducing the actual cost of telecommunications (both by technological progress and reducing customer input), he's now working on a code school that should offer its programs with no fees. His experiences with the telecom branch of his enterprise have shown that this kind of investments actually multiply incomes in the very short term. 

All of this reminds me a great paper by Peter Bourke, called UnSelling: Sell Less to Win More. His approach is worth the time, and he has really done his best to provide in-depth proof for it. As one of my former Business teachers used to say, "Sometimes you win a lot more by reaching someone and capitalizing their friendship than by actually selling them something just for once".

- JimK

One of the greatest ways social media have transformed everyday life for thousands of people, is by democratizing the right-to-the-word and empowering people. Recent history brings us lots of examples: from the role SM played during the so-called "Arabian Spring" to the way it's being used in Brazil for preventing violence in streets, both professional journalists and common people now have the same access (if not the same amount of actual listeners) to public speech. 

Nonetheless, the way that increasing word-power is evolving and being actually used, as well as its balance with ethics and social responsibility, is still subject to debate. Either way, there is a fact, and it's that social media have won a certain degree of notoriety in terms of place for sharing information in real time, virtually all around the world. 

Now that Twitter IPO date is closer (there are rumors that it will take place the 15th november, according to an article published yesterday by John Koetsier from Venturebeat), it seems that the social network has decided to drive, somehow, that kind of "side-effect" service into its core offer of services. This article by TechCruch explores some hypotheses about some facts and some ideas around the @Eventparrot experiment. What do you think about them?

-JimK