Welcome to Carnival of the Capitalists for September 20th, 2004.
As long as you all made it here ... does anyone have any idea why I am getting flickering in Mozilla FireFox from the two advertising typelists on the left and right?
E-Commerce
Now that you've got that e-commerce site up and running, OSCommerce Experts offers some "Simple E-Commerce Metrics". It may seem funny to some readers, but to a B-School professor like me it makes perfect sense that these are pretty much the same as for a bricks-and-mortar business. Making profits is always about focusing on the same few numbers.
Rob Sama from this is the samaBlog discusses how much money the big players can make off of blogads in a post entitled "No Web of Wealth?". Hmmm. We'll see how my new click-through scheme works over the next few months.
Wayne Hurlburt of Blog Business World gives us more advice in a post entitled "Search Engine Rankings: No Sleeping". The message is to keep your content relevent, and the rest will take care of itself. Oh ... and no vacations either.
The bricks and mortar places lose another face-to-face customer (and perhaps a hundred more bloggers follow suit) after the bad B2(small)B service detailed in the post entitled "Monthly Gripe" by Sarah Natavidad at Organic Baby Farm. And I thought I was so precious-in-a-big-media-sort-of-way when I wrote about free range kids a few weeks back ... and she's got a whole blog with that theme right up in the title. Damn.
Marketing
Peter Davidson from BeConnected uses the post entitled "Connecting with Birthdays" to look at how a business can collect birthdates from customers and use them in future marketing.
In "Customer Acquisition vs. Retention: A Case Study In Costs", Barry Ritholtz of The Big Picture tells us about his recent experience with cell phone plans. Unable to get a decent deal as an existing customer he dropped his service, and was promptly offered a better deal by the retention department at his old provider. I'd like to have Steve Landsburg explain that one in his next book (and to the right, you can click through to buy one of his old ones)!
Opinion
Ivan Eland from the newsroom at the Independent Institute gives us a post entitled "Have 1,000 U.S. Souls Died for Oil?". He looks at some of the reasons given for the war, and dismisses them in favor of access to oil. Yet, in the end he can't commit to this reason either, and leaves us to wonder if our soldiers are dying in vain.
Brian Gongol's Gongol.com leads us through a dissection of a currently circulating e-mail forward entitled "A Day In the Life of Joe Republican". The forward clearly hit a nerve, but Brian reacted wuth a lot of great links and tidbits of big government trivia to keep you busy. What does it say about my circle of friends that nobody forwarded this to me?
Martin Lindeskog of EGO gives us the new "Surgeon General's Warning: FDA Is Bad for Your Health...". Lots of links on the idea that the FDAs only role is to prevent individuals from making informed decisions.
Russell Buckley of The Mobile Technology Weblog tells us in "Speed of Change" that we probably can't even imagine all the new stuff that will happen by 2025. Try to imagine what you would have thought 21 years ago if someone told you what your life would be like today? In my case that would have entailed telling a college junior on a semester abroad that he'd end up on a hilltop in remote southern Utah writing a glorified diary that was read by hundreds of people every day from all around the world. Sheesh ... I probably I would've asked to try some of what you were smoking.
Management
Jim Stroup brings us the post entitled " Professor John Adair and Individual Strategic Leadership". The post offers a review of a recent book by Professor John Adair on his concept of strategic leadership. This post discusses the principal areas where the book differs from the concepts presented in Jim's book and blog of the same name, Managing Leadership. Adair asked Jim to read his book in order to clarify some of Jim's ideas about the concept of individual leadership which he had criticized.
One of the first supporters of my blog, Anita Campbell of Small Business Trends, tells us that "Big Government Stifles SMEs". Specifically, entrepreneurs in New Zealand (!!!) feel stifled by compliance with regulations. You have to then wonder why people in other countries would even bother with a business.
Chan Eddy of Weekend Pundit cheerleads for "Innovation - The American Way". I wish there were more details in there, but the big picture is that allowing synergies to occur in the first place is one key to innovation.
Craig D. Henry of Lead and Gold wants to highlight the third part in his series on "Competitor Intelligence (III)". Speaking from experience, I can tell you that it is almost impossible to get business students to engage in intelligence gathering in classroom simulations. Put this on the list of things you can't learn in a B-School.
David Foster of Photon Courier draws some interesting analogies between the current evolution of blogs vs. the earlier evolution of steel mini-mills, PCs, and aircraft carriers in a post entitled "Blogs, Media, and Business Strategy". If he's right, the MSM won't know what hit them.
Economics
Tim Worstall dissects a hapless newspaper reporters attempt to quantify Wal-Mart with poor macroeconomics in "The Observer Gets Its Economics Wrong, Again". The method for comparing sales revenue of a company to GDP of a country makes this worth the read.
If your still interested in the types who bash corporations for being good at what they do, go over to the post entitled "Good Business" at King of Fools. There's some interesting stuff in their too about what orthodox rabbi Daniel Lapin thinks of the U.S.
Jeff Cornwall of The Entrepreneurial Mind tell us to "Watch What They Do; Don't Listen to What They Lobby For". He makes the point that there is a message in the fact that public school teachers send their kids to private schools.
Tim Oren from Due Diligence bring us a post entitled "Dissecting the Media: Trust and Transactions". I was laughing by the third word - I'm not sure if Tim coined the phrase "legacy media", but it's the one I'll be using from here on out.
Mike Pechar of Interested-Participant runs through the economic impact of the "NHL Lockout". For my money though, I think they'll be back pretty soon - the margins are just too thin in hockey.
Johnathan Wilde of Catallarchy applies some basic economic insight to the intersection of seperation of powers and limited government in a post entitled "True Separation of Powers". I'm an economist and I had never thought of any of this, so I recommend it to everyone else.
Finance
Professor Bainbridge discusses the "Wealth Effect of Takeovers". In particular, he gives three reasons why acquiring firms perform poorly after takeovers: the winner's curse, empire building, and innappropriate diversification.
Zach Lynch sends us two posts from Corante entitled
"What Is Neurofinance?" and "Neurofinance In Practice (II)". In them he defines and explains neurofinance - the way in which our psychophysiology affects our decisions, and how an informed trader can use that information to make profits.
Lastly, my buddy Karsten Junge of CurryBlog wants to draw everyone's attention to a new series he'll be starting - about the biggest mistakes that investor make - based on this post entitled "Food for Thought".
See you all next week when Carnival of the Capitalists moves on to Crossroads Dispatches.
Through the study of economics one can learn how not to run a business.
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