Turning News Into Knowledge

If you’re a customer of MediaMiser, you should have already received your Christmas card and gift. We hope you enjoyed it. We put a lot of thought and effort into it.

However, every year seems to be the same for us when choosing gifts: Panic and rush!!! The main reason has to do with figuring out what is appropriate and meaningful.

That said, next year will be different. We’ve learned the errors of our ways and we plan to put our technology to work monitoring media and blogs to help come up with cool and meaningful gift ideas for 2008. This is one our New Year’s resolutions.

In fact, we came across a December 12, 2007 article in the Ottawa Sun talking about this very issue and providing advice on what is appropriate and what is not. The good news was, according the AP article, our idea did turn out to be thoughtful and appropriate.

By the way, for those looking for ideas for next year, we decided to give our customers 20Qs.

Happy holidays!

Chris Sorensen of the Toronto Star reported in a Dec 10, 2007 article that an unpublished study revealed one of every four Canadians has a Facebook account.

That’s nearly eight million Canadians. And of those accounts, 85 per cent were added in the past year-and-a-half, and half the users were over the age of 30.

According to the article, “some U.S. research estimates that nearly half of all Americans surfing the Internet now visit either MySpace or Facebook.”

I’m sure advertisers and market researchers already know this and are planning to exploit this phenomenon.

That said, it will be interesting to see how corporations and governments try to monitor and analyze social media such as Facebook and MySpace, since they likely won’t be added as a friend and therefore shutout.