Bob Rinderle / Business & Beyond

Daniel Pink: Drive

Great video from RSA Animate set to Dan Pink's presentation on the motives that drive people's work performance.  Some surprising findings.

Bedrooms: More SMS, Less S&M

A Retrevo survey reveals that 16% of people think it is fine to text during sex.

"Social media is embedded in our lives. It's why people go to a restaurant and check Foursquare before they sit down with their friends," said Manish Rathi, co-founder of Retrevo, a consumer electronics shopping and review site, as reported in Ad Age. 

Bedrooms are the place to get social, but not necessarily for sex.  Retrevo found that 48% of social-media users check or update Facebook or Twitter once they are in bed, and/or before they get out of bed in the morning. That number jumps to 76% for the 25-and-under crowd, with 19% of millennials claiming they check in whenever they wake up during the night.

In-bed social media users also scan the news before leaving the sheets, although increasingly their news does not come from network morning shows; 17% check in before they turn on the TV, and 16% rely on Facebook or Twitter exclusively for their morning news.

"It's what they want to know - it's local and it ties into their social graph," Mr. Rathi said. "Will it replace 'Good Morning America'? Maybe not, but it might play an equal role, especially with breaking news as we've seen."

image credit: Gawker

Top 10 Global Social Networks

The visual shows traffic by country for the Top 10 global social networks, as visited by 830 million people in October, 2009.  Thanks to Mark Blevis, who sourced this from National Geographic and posted it to his blog.

Stop Measuring Hours and Angst

Hard Work's Overrated, Maybe Detrimental.

That's the title of a great article by Caterina Fake in FastCompany about knowing what to work on and the importance of patterning (rather than relentlessly throwing hours against a project to see what sticks). 

Unfortunately, it is still too common for the C-suite to measure quantity over quality (anyone talk to you about billable hours, FTEs, and timesheets lately?). 

I guess hours and angst are still easier to understand than creativity and innovation. 

Social Networks Threaten Ad Growth

"Two-thirds of advertising agencies are not prepared for the industry changes prompted by social networks and new forms of digital media," according to a new report from the Institute of Practitioners in Advertising (IPA), as reported by The Financial Times.

Not enough agencies are adjusting to the online world, the IPA warned.

“I don’t think [social media] is a replacement for paid-for media, it is just going to be a challenger for [consumers’] time and attention.” said Moray MacLennan, IPA president and CEO of M&C Saatchi Worldwide.

Unfortunately, the Chaos Scenario envisioned by Bob Garfield in April, 2005 continues to become reality:

"There is no reason to believe the collapse of the old media model will yield a plug-and-play new one.  On the contrary, there is nothing especially orderly about media's New World Order....  So what happens when 30 Rock and Black Rock and the other towering edifices of network TV are rubble, and the vacant lot has yet to be developed?"

iTunes is now the largest music retailer in the world, bigger even than Wal-Mart, as CD sales plummet to just half of what they were in 2000.  The broadcast networks lost a quarter of their audience over the past two years, and the Golden Globes had their lowest ratings ever on Sunday.  The mess in print is even worse, with an overwhelming number of magazines and newspapers experiencing double-digit declines, cutting back on their publication schedules, or shuttering altogether.  Chaos indeed.