Sunday Brunch Reads with Social Media ReInvention: Weeks of 09/01/14 and 09/08/14

 

Share-worthy and thought-provoking links I thought Social Media ReInvention Community Members would like to read while enjoying Sunday brunch:

1) The Wall Sreet Journal: US Mail Delivers Amazon Groceries in San Francisco. The US Postal Service (USPS) continues to hustle, reinvent, and adapt. They capitalized on their current strategic alliance with Amazon to play in eCommere and enter more profitable services (e.g., package delivery). Remember, when USPS started making Sunday deliveries for Amazon in 2011? The article describes the Amazon-USPS alliance as mutually beneficial:

  • Package deliveries are up 20% over the past 5 years to 3.7 billion packages
  • The 60-day experiment began in August and is limited to the San Francisco area
  • US Postmaster General Patrick R. Donahoe considers Amazon "excellent, excellent customer and an excellent partner."
  • The USPS expands Amazon Fresh's geographic reach
  • Amazon wants to expand beyond the current 12 cities USPS is providing Sunday delivery

2) BloombergBusinessWeek: How to Get Into an Ivy League College—Guaranteed. Can big data and predictive analytics get your child into Harvard? For $600,000, Steven Ma, Founder of Think Tank Learning, claims he can (and provides a money back guarantee). The company generates $18 million annually and serves 10,000 students throughout northern California and China (Beijing and Shenzhen). Northern California Asian American families and wealthy Chinese familes comprise 90% of ThinkTank's clientele. Their website and published content are an excellent case study in digital content marketing strategy and buyer personas. It's a fascinating story especially when American undergraduate programs are under fire for rising expenses and questionable ROI. 

3) LinkedIn Pulse: Club Ed: How Some Colleges Became $41k-a-Year Gyms. Point-of-view from LinkedIn Influencer and Bain & Company's Jeff Denneen on the escalating costs at American universities. The article discusses "the arms race" or "Law of More" for student amenities at competing private schools (e.g., gourmet, organic-ingredient meals, student athletic facilities, enhanced student housing, etc.). Denneen poses the question on the ROI these costs deliver to students upon graduation. Why? Thousands of students from private universities can no longer afford these amenitiies post-graduation because of either A) Unemployment or B) Under-employment (accepting jobs not requiring a college degrees). 

4) MarketingLand: Ford Motor Company Takes A Newsjacking Bite Out Of #Applelive Event. My fave article in this post.This is brilliant, timely, and funny newsjacking. Ford flipped on its head the attributes of the ballyhooed Apple Watch and apply them to their brands in real-time, laugh-out-loud, newsjacking examples. Denny's and Crest also delivered creative #AppleLive newsjacks. 

5) Fortune Magazine: How Google Works. Eric Schmidt (Google's Chairman) and Jonathan Rosenberg (Google's former Head of Product Development and Senior Vice President of Product Management) provide excerpts and thoughts from their upcoming book How Google Works. Key insights shared include why Google's approach to sustaining its growth (systematizing innovation into company culture), identifying talent (hiring the smartest people possible who critically think and continuously adapt versus hiring for specific job position criteria), and nurturing talent (aggressively rotate the most passionate people into different organizations — e.g., "pass the M&Ms and not the raisins."

 

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Tony Faustino is a marketing and corporate strategist.  He writes about how The Internet reinvents marketing strategy for organizations and individuals in his marketing strategy blog, Social Media ReInvention.  Follow his tweets @tonyfaustino or circle him on Google+.