5 Tech Companies That Get Content Marketing Right

How many tech companies do you think have corporate blogs? Given the buzz around content marketing and its importance to branding and reputation building, you’d think most would.

Think again. Fewer than 21% of technology companies have a corporate blog, according to a recent report from Percussion Software. That’s problematic since the same report also suggests that companies with great content on their blogs are perceived to have better, higher-quality products and a more established reputation.

To be clear, we’re not talking about the official Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook blogs, as their audiences are brand loyal and even product updates count as a good read. It’s the smaller or lesser-known brands that need a bit more creativity to turn visitors into dedicated readers.

The following five companies not only have innovative products, but are great examples of insightful blogs that provide their audiences with valuable and compelling content.

1. KISSmetrics

The Product: KISSmetrics is an online analytics platform for websites and e-commerce platforms.

The Target Audience: Website owners who want more conversions.

What Their Blog Does Right: The KISSmetrics blog provides effective tips and tricks for navigating the online world. It’s information like, “8 Habits Of Conversion-Focused Copywriters,” which is useful for just about any site.

How They Engage Readers: There’s a consensus among tech industry influencers that the KISSmetrics blog is where you go to find concrete advice that you can immediately implement. The blog serves up information about a variety of online and content marketing areas, including A/B testing, list building, web design, and analytics.

The blog’s high-quality content reflects how the product is perceived. Even a reader who may not be a direct customer gets the sense that KISSmetrics is a powerful analytics tool. The result is plenty of recurring readers subscribing to the blog by email so as not to miss out on the latest tips.

2. Instagram

The Product: Snap a photo, add a filter. That’s Instagram. If you can’t see the value, that’s okay. At least a few folks thought it was worth $1 billion.

The Target Audience: Any human being with a smartphone will work.

What Their Blog Does Right: Instagram’s blog serves as a platform for users to tell their stories via images. Rather than directly promoting itself, Instagram gives users the power to share themselves via the Instagram product.

How They Engage Readers: The greatest blog feature is “This Weekend’s Hashtag Project,”, which encourages users to take pictures according to specific instructions and add the hashtag of the week to them. Now that’s how a brand really engages their users.

3. Eventbrite

The Product: Eventbrite is an online tool that helps individuals put together events.

The Target Audience: Event creators and their attendees.

What Their Blog Does Right: They connect event attendees to the real people behind the events.

How They Engage Readers: As stated in their manifesto, Eventbrite’s mission is to make events as easy as possible to create, find, and attend. Their blog helps companies achieve this goal through the “meet the organizer” section, which spotlights various event organizers who explain their event and what they’re trying to accomplish. This is a really effective way of drawing in a bigger audience.

4. Buffer

The Product: Buffer is a smart tool that helps you schedule your social posts at a prime time so most of your users actually see them.

The Target Audience: Anyone who is looking to get a lot of shares, re-tweets, mentions, and likes will find this useful.

What Their Blog Does Right: The Buffer blog takes social sharing to another level, providing very unique insights into the world of social media, such as how certain human behaviors impact our sharing behavior.

How They Engage Readers: The company’s blog voice is what makes it special, giving their topics a pseudo-philosophical twist with posts like “how our brains work.”

5. Wix

The Product: Wix is a great platform for creating HTML5/Flash websites.
The Target Audience: Anyone with a need for a website that looks awesome and who doesn’t necessarily have the means to create one from scratch.

What Their Blog Does Right: They emphasize the fun and creative aspects of website creation.

How They Engage Readers: The Wix blog consistently offers sassy articles on web design, mobile development, and new technologies. Following the announcement of their new HTML5 platform, they started emphasizing the new technology by filling their blog with great infographics, like “The History of HTML5.”

LinkedIn Now Has 175 Million Members

LinkedIn now has 175 million members, the company-- announced on Thursday.

In May, the professional social networking service had claimed 161 million --members, up from 150 million in February.

The company announced the figure in its second-quarter earnings release on Thursday, in which it also reported earnings of $0.03 per share on revenues of $228 million. Analysts were-- expecting earnings of $.01 per share and revenues of $216 million. The company’s stock price was up more than 4% in after-hours trading.

LinkedIn’s stock price has jumped 48.5% since the-- beginning of the year.

‘Huffington’ iPad Magazine Goes Free

Huffington, the weekly iPad magazine from AOL’s Huffington Post Media Group, is now available for free in Apple’s Newsstand.

The magazine launched in mid-June as part of a call for a “slow news movement,” an opportunity for The Huffington Post‘s readers to sit back and dive more broadly and deeply into stories outside of the fast-paced, incrementally focused environment of web journalism. It is edited by Tim O’Brien, formerly the editor of The New York Times‘s Sunday business section, and features a mix of long-form features, short reviews and multimedia ranging from photographs to videos and interactive infographics.

The magazine, which is released on Fridays, was formerly priced at $0.99 per issue or $1.99 per week after a one-month free trial. The app has been downloaded about 115,000 times, Joe Pompeo reports.

It’s hard to believe The Huffington Post would come to this conclusion after the magazine launched we suspect subscriptions weren’t high enough to justify it as a premium product. Better, perhaps, to have more users and generate more impressions for advertisers. And, who knows, maybe layoffs at The Daily had something to do with the outcome.

From now on, Huffington will be supported entirely by advertisers. Right now, Toyota remains the sole advertiser, a spokesperson confirmed.

Getaway Rents Out Your Car for You

Loaning your car to strangers on Getaround just got a whole lot easier with Getaway, a new service launched Thursday.

Never again let your car sit in the garage during a long vacation, or have to leave it collecting dirt in your parent’s driveway when you go to college. Getaway will loan it out for you and possibly bring in some hefty change.

Getaround is like Airbnb for cars. Register your car on the site, decide pricing and rent it out when you’re not using it. This not only helps car owners reel-in money, but could positively impact the environment by taking new cars off the road.

But it takes some work replying to people who want to borrow your car, scheduling rental times and doing the key-hand off if you decline the Carkit (a proprietary device that lets you unlock your vehicle from your iPhone). With Getaway, simply put your vehicle in the hands of Getaround and they’ll manage everything from pricing, renting, maintenance and insurance.

The service is marketed toward college students, honeymooners, members of the military traveling overseas or anyone who’s not going to use their car for an extended period of time and don’t want to bother with trying to rent it out.

“Getaway was a response to people who didn’t have time to manage their own rental,” said Jessica Scorpio, founder of Getaround.Getaway is launching in beta in San Francisco and Chicago.

 SEE ALSO: Facebook Stock Price Drops Below $20

And the money you can make is impressive, too. Getaround users make around $350 each month. But after a trial period with the fully-managed Getaway service, Scorpio said customers are likely to make $1,000 per month from their vehicle. Getaway is so sure that you’ll pull in cash from your car, they offer a $1,000 guarantee for the first three months.

With Getaway, the “Customer Happiness Team” decides the rental pricing of the vehicle, unlike with Getaround where users set their own pricing. Of course, pricing depends on the type and condition of the car. They recommend cars not be older than five years and have less than 100,000 miles to earn $1,000 per month. But you can register an old beater car on the site, although it may not get rented.

Getaway subscribers will get the Carkit installed in their vehicles, plus security features like GPS to track the car.

With Getaround and Getaway, Scorpio says they conduct “rigorous driver screenings,” meaning no renter can have anything serious such as a DUI on their driving record in the past 7 years. There is also a late fee if the borrower returns the car after their scheduled rental drop-off time. But Scorpio says having a community makes people more responsible and they’re more likely to stick to the allotted time they rent the car.

Getaround also announced on Thursday it’s secured $13.9 million in series A funding. Funders include Marissa Mayer, Ashton Kutcher and Innovations Endeavours.

Getaround is available in four markets San Francisco, Austin, Portland and San Diego. With this new round of funding, Scorpio says they plan to rapidly expand Getaround and its Getaway services to new markets.

“We are looking at partnerships that will continue to spread adoption and improve the experience,” Scorpio said.

Scorpio started working on Getaround in 2009. At Singular University, her and co-founder Sam Zaid were challenged by Larry Page to come up with an idea that could positively impact a billion people. They focused on transportation overpopulation and came up with Getaround.

Getaround is not the only service that lets you rent your car out to other drivers. OnStar’s car sharing program called RelayRides launched last month says it could also help you earn $600-$1,000 more each month. And WhipCar for London residents lets you borrow the vehicle next door, or down the street.

Facebook Stock Price Drops Below $20

Facebook’s stock price plunged to a new low on Thursday, dipping for the first time below $20 almost half the price it debuted at in May.

The latest figures put the company’s market cap at around $43 billion a far cry from the $100 billion-plus valuation that had been touted prior to the IPO. However, since the company went public, investors have increasingly fretted that the company is poised to lose revenues as users migrate to mobile platforms.

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Developer Claims Facebook Tried to Destroy His Business

The developer of a Facebook app has gone public with a post claiming that Facebook executives tried to hire him because the company was building a similar app.

While the idea of an “aqui-hire” might not sound bad to some, Dalton Caldwell, the CEO of App.net, charges that Facebook uses its heft to intimidate developers like himself rather than help build up the app community.
Reps from Facebook could not be reached for comment.

In a post entitled “Dear Mark Zuckerberg,” Dalton claims he visited Facebook’s Menlo Park, Calif., headquarters on June 13 and met with several execs at the company. “I was hoping the outcome of this meeting would be executive-level support for my impending product launch,” Caldwell wrote. Instead, Caldwell found that Facebook had a different motivation:

The meeting took an odd turn when the individuals in the room explained that the product I was building was competitive with your recently announced Facebook App Center product. Your executives explained to me that they would hate to have to compete with the “interesting product” I had built, and that since I am a “nice guy with a good reputation” that they wanted to acquire my company to help build App Center.I quickly became skeptical and explained that I was not interested in an acqui-hire. I said that if Facebook wanted to have a serious conversation about acquiring my team and product, I would entertain the idea. Otherwise, I had zero interest in seeing my product shut down and joining Facebook. I told your team I would rather reboot my company than go down that route.

Caldwell added that the platform developer relations exec at the meeting didn’t help defend his position. Rather, the exec told Caldwell that he was recently put in charge of App Center and because of new ad units the company was building he was now responsible for $1 billion in revenues. “The execs in the room made clear that the success of my product would be an impediment to your ad revenue financial goals, and thus even offering me the chance to be acquired was a noble and kind move on their part,” Caldwell wrote.
Finding no sympathetic ears in the company, Caldwell penned the missive directed at Zuckerberg.

Mark, I don’t believe that the humans working at Facebook or Twitter want to do the wrong thing. The problem is, employees at Facebook and Twitter are watching your stock price fall, and that is causing them to freak out. Your company, and Twitter, has demonstrably proven that you are willing to screw with users and 3rd-party developer ecosystems, all in the name of ad-revenue. Once you start down the slippery-slope of messing with developers and users, I don’t have any confidence you will stop.

Caldwell never explains what his app is. In a string of comments on Hacker News, some criticized the developer for complaining about what appeared to be a good deal from Facebook. Others, however, pointed out that Facebook’s position appeared to be “join us or die.” Beyond taking sides in the spat, though, one pointed out that Caldwell’s argument is itself a negotiation tactic: “It’s a game, FB used hard tactics, now he is using public sentiment. It is just an money game in the end. Blog posts like this just hurt both companies perceptions.”

Compare Local Service Prices With Centzy

Choosing a hair salon or dry cleaning service based on quality is easy with the amount of user reviews available online, you never have to chance a bad visit to a new business. Finding actual rates online, however, proves a bit more challenging. After all, “$” and “$$” aren’t very specific.

That’s where Centzy comes in. The new price comparison site allows you to see prices for local services alongside reviews from Yelp, Citysearch and more. The site is the first local search site that shows both prices and reviews.

“Less than 10% of local service businesses post their prices online, so consumers who want to compare prices have to call around or ask friends to figure it out,” CEO Jay Shek tells Mashable. “We’ve built a proprietary workforce of phone agents who call every business for you and collect prices and store hours over the phone.”

In other words, Centzy does the dirty work for you. Save yourself the hassel of calling around for quotes on an oil change and instead pop over to Centzy, which will tell you who’s the cheapest, as well as the most efficient.

The company originated when Shek and co-founder Jeremy Clemenson began to wonder why it was so difficult to track down prices for the services they use in real life, on a regular basis. The two set out to create a site that made comparing rates for local services just as easy as finding flight rates on Kayak, or book prices on Amazon.

“[Our users] are savvy consumers who care about finding great values in their city and appreciate how new websites like Centzy can help them do that,” says Shek.

They’re also on the move. The site is currently web-based only, but based on the amount of mobile traffic it’s received, a native mobile app is likely to be introduced in the near future.

‘New Yorker’ Hands Over Instagram Account to Guest Photographers

For the past six months, The New Yorker‘s PR department has been promoting the photography and illustrations in current and past issues via Instagram. Now, it’s handing over the reins to the photographers who shoot for the New Yorker.

“We love Instagram, it’s a great place to promote photography, but we felt that we were not using it properly,” Alexa Cassanos, senior director of public relations for the New Yorker, said of the decision.

Staff photographers will rotate ownership of the account “every few weeks or so,” says Cassanos, beginning with Martin Schoeller, a staff photographer for The New Yorker since 1999. Over the past couple years, Schoeller has been photographing sets of identical twins, triplets and quadruplets around the country, and he will now begin sharing that work, as well as the processes for its production, with followers of the @newyorkermag Instagram account. His first photo appeared on the feed Wednesday afternoon.

It’s not entirely uncommon for brands to bring on guest photographers for their Instagram accounts. London-based fashion house Burberry has brought on popular Instagram users to take photographs for the @burberry account during its last few runway shows; others, like eyewear manufacturer Warby Parker, have hired popular photographers to shoot events.

The photography produced on The New Yorker‘s Instagram account is likely to be interesting, but will it be on brand? I can’t help but wish the magazine would bring me a little closer to the New Yorker itself, to transfer a little of its signature style and wit from its office to mine.

Email Takes Up 28% of Workers’ Time [REPORT]

More than a quarter of the average worker’s day is spent answering and reading emails, according to a new survey.

McKinsey Global Institute and International Data Corp. found that email is the second-most time-consuming activity for workers, next to “role-specific tasks.” The consultant claims that time spent on email can be cut by 25%-30% by introducing social networking communications into a business. Doing so would free up 7% to 8% more of the workweek for other tasks. Assuming an eight-hour day, that translates to about two hours, 14 minutes a day spent on emails

.
Overall, the survey found that Americans spend 11 hours a day communicating and consuming messages in person, via watching TV, reading and using email.

The McKinsey report didn’t outline the number of emails workers process per day. However, a report from the Radicati Group this year found that the average corporate email user sends and receives about 105 emails a day.

Despite spam filters, about 19% of messages are spam. Another report from Radicati expects those stats to remain static through 2014. 

5 Ways to Get Email Overload Under Control

If you’re like most people with a connection to the internet and a job that requires you interact via email, then you probably know what email hell feels like. The only good news is that you’re not alone. In fact, the average person gets more than one hundred emails per day. The bad news is it’s not getting better.

The number of emails you receive will continue to grow every year. So what, if anything, can you do to get a grip on this email avalanche? Start with these five tips.

1. Set a Time Limit

According to a recent McKinsey Global Institute report, people spent 28% of their time writing, reading, and answering email. Most of it is unproductive because email is reactive by nature. The inherent gamification of clearing your inbox provides a brief feeling of accomplishment. But unless you’re doing customer support, your job description probably doesn’t include “respond to every email.”

Answering email is just one part of work. That’s why you should determine how much time you want to spend in your inbox on a given day, and don’t exceed it. One suggestion is to dedicate 15-minute blocks every two hours to staying on top of email without letting it take over your day.

2. Know Your Etiquette

If you haven’t read the Email Charter, you are probably pissing off a lot of people. The average time it takes to respond to an email is greater than the time it took to create it. So every hour you spend writing emails is double for your recipients. The Email Charter lists ten specific tips everyone should follow to avoid this collective downward spiral. The core underlying principle of the Charter is “respect recipient’s time.”

3. Prioritize

Most email clients and web mail UI’s give each email the same amount of real estate on the screen. Flags, stars, and other prioritization signals help, but it’s hard for our brain to discriminate. This creates a tendency to give each email the same amount of attention upfront.

In reality, not all emails are created equal. Some need to be read and responded to right away. Others should be archived or deleted in bulk. Keep in mind that in a few years you’ll get even more email than you do now. Since there will still be only twenty four hours in a day, the bar for emails that deserve your full attention will need to be higher.

4. Don’t Signup for Junk

This is an easy one. When signing up for a new web service, opt out of “updates.” When given an option to get a real time, daily, or weekly summary of any kind, choose the least frequent option. Also, stop signing up for newsletters you’re never going to read.

However, be careful when unsubscribing or marking emails as spam. Unsubscribing is only as reliable as the sender’s integrity. You may also be exposing yourself as a real person to a spammer, who will sell your address to someone else. On the other hand, marking a legitimate email you subscribed to as spam is bad karma. It could impact the sender’s standing with email services.

5. Don’t Open Mail Twice

Inbox Zero has emerged as a respected process for managing email. The key principle is to never open the same email twice. As you open each email, you give yourself only five options: delete/archive, delegate, respond (if you can do it in under two minutes), defer, or do. This process keeps you from wasting time by re-reading the same information.

Although many suggest that email should be reinvented, it’s not going to happen any time soon. According to Andrew McAffee, whatever solution replaces email would have to be not just better than email, but ten times better. He argues that people are typically so averse to change that they overvalue current solutions by three times and undervalue proposed substitutes by three times.

But even if email is replaced by another communication protocol (similar to Asana or Yammer?) that replacement will continue to be ruled by the same principle of scarcity of time. That’s why overcoming the bad behaviors that are created by email overload are key.

Apple Ramping Up Production For September iPhone Launch [REPORT]

If the latest rumors hold true, we’ll see a new iPhone come mid-September.

A report by iMore Monday indicated that the next-generation of the popular handset would be announced on Sept. 12 along with an updated iPod Nano, and that both would be hitting retail locations on Sept. 21. That rumor has since been bolstered by reports from by a number of sources, including Reuters and Bloomberg.

AllThingsD also confirmed that the event would be held the week of Sept. 9 with Wednesday Sept. 12 being the likely day of the event and took the investigation a bit further by looking into Apple’s recent prepayment for inventory components.

A recent spike in the company’s prepayment for inventory components indicates it’s ramping up for some sort of product release or releases soon.

The iPhone 4S was released on Oct. 4, 2011, making a late September or early October release based on history alone seem likely.

The huge spike in components is the highest Apple has seen in four years, which may indicate that it has something else  an iPad Mini up its sleeve in addition to a new iPhone and iPod Nano.

In typical Apple fashion, the company has been silent on what we can expect. Leaked parts for the iPhone 5, or perhaps just “iPhone” suggest that the next generation of the handset will have a larger screen, faster processor, and LTE connectivity amongst other features.

Tablet Newspaper ‘The Daily’ to Lay Off 50

The Daily, the tablet-only news publication News Corp. first launched on the iPad a year and a half ago, is letting go nearly a third of its staff, a spokesperson has confirmed. Approximately 50 of its 170-person staff will be laid off.

Those staffed on The Daily‘s editorial and sports sections will be the worst hit, AllThingsD‘s Peter Kafka reports. “Skeletal versions” of those sections will appear in future editions. In another cost-saving measure, the publication will only format pages in vertical rather than vertical and horizontal layouts going forward.

That may have been the case in February, but News Corp.’s recently decision to divorce its lucrative cable and TV properties from its less profitable newspapers appears to have changed things. Last month, SmartMoney, which is a part of News Corp.’s Dow Jones unit, announced it was shuttering its print edition and letting go of 25 employees. Kafka says that News Corp. has also been quietly laying off some of the business executives in that unit.

UPDATE: An e-mailed statement from The Daily says that sports coverage will now be supplied by content partners, including Fox Sports. The Opinion section is being removed altogether. “Opinion pieces and editorials will appear in the news pages, clearly marked, from time to time as appropriate,” the statement reads.

Editor-in-chief Jesse Angelo wrote, “These are important changes that will allow The Daily to be more nimble editorially and to focus on the elements that our readers have told us through their consumption that they like and want… Our standards will not diminish as we move forward, nor will our enthusiasm for creating an outstanding daily digital publication.”

Mark Zuckerberg’s Sister Is Now a Google Employee

In what may make for awkward family get-togethers, Mark Zuckerberg‘s sister, Arielle, is now a Google employee.

The younger Zuckerberg is presumably making the move as part of Google’s acquisition of Wildfire Interactive, which was announced on Tuesday. Arielle’s blog lists her occupation as junior product manager for the social media marketing firm. Arielle previously offered constructive criticism of her brother’s company’s site overhaul last fall.

Arielle’s not the only Zuckerberg sibling in the business. Randi Zuckerberg, former director of marketing for Facebook, left the company last August to pursue other projects. Randi is an executive producer for Silicon Valley, a Bravo reality TV show that is raising hackles in the Valley for bringing Hollywood voyeurism to tech. Randi tweeted about the move on Tuesday, alluding to the fact Arielle’s not the only Zuckerberg at Google:

Entrepreneur Claims He Made $8,000 in One Day Via Facebook Ads

In a nice counter argument to startup Limited Run’s claim that 80% of the clicks on its ads were bots, an entrepreneur has stepped up to provide a real-life example in which he made $8,000 in one day via Facebook ads.

The entrepreneur, Brendan Irvine-Broque, is the director of growth for PageLever. In a post on his personal blog that made Hacker News, Irvine-Broque claims he made $10,000 on Saturday, May 12, after holding an event in his backyard in which he sold 6,000 vinyl records for $3 each.

Irvine-Broque had previously run a business selling vintage vinyl records and he was eager to get rid of them. He says he spent about $2,000 for the bulk of those records. Marketing costs were cheap: He created a Facebook Event, shared it on the platform and bought about $150 worth of Facebook ads to promote the event.

In response, Irvine-Broque got 341 people who claimed they were attending and 104 maybes. The upshot:

At the end of the day, hundreds of happy customers later, I counted $10,000 in cash (and some payments accepted via Square – yes, I’m reporting the income, IRS). Over 3000 records sold in one afternoon. The majority of my customers came from Facebook Ads, so what is the calculated ROI, 2000%? 3000%? You do the math.

Irvine-Broque writes that the argument over bots is immaterial.

“As far as I’m concerned, clicks coming from Facebook are the realest click in the game right now.”
Meanwhile, Irvine-Broque says he wanted to share his experience to further a dialogue about Facebook ads. “It’s important for people to get out there and be talking about it,” he says.

Too often, he adds, businesses that are successful on Facebook don’t want to talk about it for fear that competitors will steal their ideas. That said, Irvine-Broque isn’t completely objective in the matter: PageLever’s business is based on Facebook analytics.

“I work for a business that’s very much heavily invested in Facebook,” he says. “It’s a fair critique to say I’m a little big biased, but I’m sharing things that I can back up.”

Google Acquires Social Media Management Platform Wildfire

Google has acquired social media management platform Wildfire Interactive for an undisclosed amount, the tech giant announced Tuesday.

Wildfire, which launched four years ago by Victoria Ransom and Alain Chuard (pictured) was funded in part by Facebook, counts Amazon, Verizon Wireless, Virgin, Gilt Groupe and Spotify among its clients. It helps them manage their content, ads, promotions and more across Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn, Google+ and Pinterest.

Wildfire is the latest in a string of acquisitions of B2B social media firms. In May, Oracle paid $300 million for Vitrue, a cloud-based firm that handles social media communications for McDonald’s, American Express and Gillette, among others. Oracle followed that acquisition by snapping up social media monitoring firm

Collective Intellect in early June. That same month, Salesforce.com paid $745 million for Buddy Media, and Syncapse bought a smaller social media firm, Clickable. It was long rumored that Facebook was interested in buying Wildfire.

The terms of the deal were not disclosed, but AllThingsD‘s Peter Kafka‘s sources tell him its around $250 million a third of the price Salesforce paid for Buddy Media, which Google was reportedly once interested in purchasing.

In a blog post, Google’s Jason Miller said that Wildfire would be integrated into its suite of website and ad management tools, including Google Analytics, Admeld and DoubleClick. It’s Google’s way of ensuring that advertisers continue to come to Google to purchase and manage their display advertising campaigns, whether they’re looking to do it on Google or on another social network.

Startup Finds Fame After Tangling With Facebook

A Long Island-based startup has very publicly picked a fight with Facebook, penning a bitter goodbye note on the site that charges 80% of the clicks it paid for in ads were from bots.

Though the company Limited Run had only 400 or so fans when the note went up on Monday, the spat became national news. Tom Mango, co-founder of the company, which hosts stores for labels, designers and artists, said the entry got picked up by Hacker News, which led to press reports elsewhere. The notoriety by the incident may be the small business equivalent to General Motors’s decision to pull its ads from Facebook in May. The allegation is especially damaging since it comes after a BBC probe also found Facebook was teeming with fake spam accounts.

In the post, Limited Run announced the reasoning behind its decision to delete its Facebook Page in “the next couple of weeks.” The company reasoned that it was getting charged for clicks that were not coming from actual users. “Facebook was charging us for clicks, yet we could only verify about 20% of them actually showing up on our site,” the post reads. The company then tried other analytics software and found it couldn’t verify more than 15%-20% of clicks. So, Limited Run made its own software.

“Here’s what we found: on about 80% of the clicks Facebook was charging us for, JavaScript wasn’t on. And if the person clicking the ad doesn’t have JavaScript, it’s very difficult for an analytics service to verify the click. What’s important here is that in all of our years of experience, only about 1-2% of people coming to us have JavaScript disabled, not 80% like these clicks coming from Facebook. So we did what any good developers would do. We built a page logger. Any time a page was loaded, we’d keep track of it. You know what we found? The 80% of clicks we were paying for were from bots. That’s correct. Bots were loading pages and driving up our advertising costs.”

After that, the company contacted Facebook, but didn’t hear back. Meanwhile, the company wanted to change its name from “Limited Pressing” to the current Limited Run. A Facebook rep, however, told them that the company would do so only if Limited Run agreed to pay $2,000 or more in advertising per month, leading Limited Run to write, “This is why we need to delete this page and move away from Facebook. They’re scumbags and we just don’t have the patience for scumbags.”

A Facebook rep says that the company is investigating the matter. As for the name change: “There seems to be some sort of miscommunication. We do not charge Pages to have their names changed. Our team is reaching out about this now.” Mango says that a Facebook rep got back to the company after the matter became public and offered to change the name to Limited Run. Mango said thanks but no thanks.

Ironically, Limited Run got more marketing from picking a fight with Facebook than it would have by buying ads. However, Mango says there was nothing calculated about his actions. For instance, if he knew the matter would be reported so widely, he probably wouldn’t have called Facebook “scumbags.” Mango is similarly philosophic about Limited Run’s newfound fame. “I haven’t Googled us, but I’m sure what comes up now is this Facebook thing,” he says, adding that the company still plans to delete its Facebook Page. “We don’t want this to drag on. We want to move on from this. We don’t want them to be linking to this forever.”

StockTwits CEO ‘Disappointed’ With Twitter’s Cashtags

The CEO of StockTwits is accusing Twitter of ripping off one of his company’s innovations clickable “cashtags” based on company ticker symbols.

Such symbols will be distinguished by a dollar sign in front of the symbol. The company announced the introduction Monday night via a tweet.

However, Howard Lindzon, co-founder and CEO of StockTwits, pointed out in a blog post that his company has been doing the same for four years:

I am disappointed of course that Twitter is hijacking our idea and time (will only confuse the masses), but Stocktwits moved beyond that basic functionality four years ago. In a dirty way, it’s the ultimate compliment so we will take it as such for the moment and keep rolling out functionality that makes us the best real-time communication platform for people that love stocks and markets.

Lindzon added that, “You can hijack a plane but it does not mean you know how to fly it.” Twitter reps could not be reached for comment, however it should be noted that other Twitter innovations, like hashtags, were started by users, rather than the compay itself. Meanwhile, some users were debating the issue on Twitter Tuesday morning.

Digg is Returning with Bigger Images, Human Editors

Digg is emerging after a six-week hiatus with an image-heavy design devoid of advertising and stories chosen by editors that will be based on shares on Facebook and Twitter as well as Diggs.

“The final version is close to complete,” the new Digg team wrote on Monday. “When you visit Digg.com later this week, you’ll find a beautiful, image-friendly, and ad-free experience.”

The team didn’t provide any actual images from the site, which is set to launch Aug. 1, but did supply some mockups. Judging from those, the new design will provide more space to bigger stories and some articles without photos. “Some stories are bigger and have more impact than others; some stories are actually components of other ones. Some stories can be told with text; others are best told through images,” the team wrote.

Gone is the traditional blog design of the old Digg, which represented each story the same way — with a headline and a picture. The new Digg looks more like a news site with one lead story and nine to 11 off-leads and then a progression of smaller items. The design was based on a version 1 (v1) survey Digg gave to users a few weeks ago. The results showed 92% of respondents wouldn’t recommend Digg to a friend. Comments from users showed they wanted something different from the previous design, but also different from Reddit.

Aside from the design, a major new change is less emphasis on Diggs and a new weighting system for stories that takes into account shares on Facebook and Twitter as well. In addition, actual human editors will choose stories. “We learned, while building News.me at betaworks, that finding really great stories requires a mix of smart algorithms, smart networks and, not least, smart people to parse the two,” the blog continues.

The redesign comes after New York startup Betaworks bought Digg for a reported $500,000 last month. The purchase came after the 8-year-old site had been valued as high as $200 million.

‘New Yorker’ Staff Writer Resigns Following Fabrication Scandal

Jonah Lehrer, popular speaker, journalist and author of three books on psychology and neuroscience, has resigned his position as staff writer for The New Yorker after admitting that he fabricated quotes in his most recent book, Imagine: How Creativity Works.

In a statement given to The New York Times, Lehrer wrote, “Three weeks ago, I received an email from journalist Michael Moynihan asking about Bob Dylan quotes in my book ‘Imagine.’ The quotes in question either did not exist, were unintentional misquotations, or represented improper combinations of previously existing quotes. But I told Mr. Moynihan that they were from archival interview footage provided to me by Dylan’s representatives. This was a lie spoken in a moment of panic. When Mr. Moynihan followed up, I continued to lie, and say things I should not have said.”

“The lies are over now. I understand the gravity of my position. I want to apologize to everyone I have let down, especially my editors and readers. I also owe a sincere apology to Mr. Moynihan. I will do my best to correct the record and ensure that my misquotations and mistakes are fixed. I have resigned my position as staff writer at The New Yorker.”

Lehrer joined The New Yorker as a staff writer in early June, bringing his Wired blog, Frontal Cortex, with him. A few weeks after he joined, media blogger Jim Romensko pointed out that one of Lehrer’s first contributions to his newly moved blog borrowed from an earlier piece he had written for The Wall Street Journal.

Following that revelation were a landslide of others, as multiple journalists compiled other instances of self-plagarism. Editors at both Wired and The New Yorker began appending notes to Lehrer’s posts (see below), pointing out where he had borrowed from previous work.

But his crimes, by journalism standards, were worse. Writing for online magazine Tablet, Michael Moynihan published Monday an admission from Lehrer that he had fabricated quotes from Bob Dylan in his last book, Imagine, which was published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Lehrer released the statement above following the publication of that story.

The New Yorker could not be reached for comment. UPDATE: Editor-in-chief David Remnick wrote, “This is a terrifically sad situation, but, in the end, what is most important is the integrity of what we publish and what we stand for.”

Ross Levinsohn Leaves Yahoo

A little less than two weeks after Marissa Mayer was appointed as Yahoo’s new CEO, the company’s former top exec and interim CEO, Ross Levinsohn, is on his way out.

The news was originally reported by AllThingsD.

Before becoming interim CEO — a post he was named to after Yahoo’s last CEO, Scott Thompson, was pushed out by the company’s board — he served as Yahoo’s executive vice president of the Americas. Many thought he would be instated as the company’s long-term CEO before Mayer was named to the post, especially since he did so well in the interim period, negotiating the sale of the company’s stake in Alibaba and handling a difficult patent dispute with Facebook.

Levinsohn served as interim CEO from May 13 to July 17. He joined Yahoo in late 2010 under then-CEO Carol Bartz. Before Yahoo, he worked at Fuse Capital, a digital media fund. Before that, he worked at News Corp.