The Google+ Habit: Now that the initial wave of hysteria over Google+ has subsided, there are some more sober-minded analyses of the new social network. The overriding question comes down to whether or not a lot of people will make it a regular part of their lives. That’s sometimes lost in the eye-popping user numbers — Google+ now has 20 million — but is pretty fundamental. Shiv Singh, global head of digital for PepsiCo Beverages, picks up on this theme in a mostly optimistic early assessment of Google+. He finds it promising, yet still can’t help but wonder if it can barge into people’s already busy digital routines. Facebook, for better or worse, is a daily habit. It’s ironic that Google is now in that situation, since its search competitors for years complained how hard it was to break people from the Googling habit.
For Finance Guy to Entrepreneur: It’s not exactly zero to hero, but Vin Vacanti, founder of deal aggregator Yippit, has a nice yarn about how he went from yet another guy in a suit working in finance to the CEO of a startup in a hot space. Vacanti turned his back on a stable, extremely lucrative career moving money in order to build something new.
The Bloomberg Terminal for Marketing: It used to be that people in the digital ad industry all talked about “the dashboard” that brought together all the different marketing systems. Nowadays, with data all the rage, the talk is of the Bloomberg Terminal for marketing. Darren Herman, the chief digital media officer of The Media Kitchen and president of KBS+P Ventures, explains the need for a terminal. In his view, it comes down to the fact that data is on its way to informing nearly all marketing decisions. That means marketers (and publishers) need a way to make sense of it all immediately.
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