Ten Best Websites For Free Audio Books

Busy times call for some workarounds. One of the distinct advantages of audio books over its more physical form is that it saves time. Audio books take away a sliver of fun from the enjoyment of a book, but if the voiceover is well done, it makes up for it.

With the explosion of personal media players like iPods and even mobile phones which can carry media files, even a routine walk can be turned into an education.  Make Use Of

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Check Out These Sites For Free Audio Books

Who says story time has to stop when you exit kindergarten? Audio books provide all the stimulation of reading without that annoying reading part. And the internet is full of avenues to get them for free without having to resort to piracy. Consumerist

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Twitter builds out sales team

Twitter has evolved from a scrappy start-up just trying to keep its service from being crushed by an explosion of Twitter-happy users into a maturing company with 145 million registered users and $160 million in venture capital that is focusing on how it will generate revenue. It has rolled out advertising products that seem to be picking up steam and it’s working on tools to be part of commercial accounts for businesses.  L A Times

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Jet Blue used social media to handle the crisis

There will be endless social media and crisis communications case studies written about JetBlue’s response to flight attendant Steven Slater’s unauthorized slide, amusement-park style, down a jet’s emergency chute.

But, one thing is clear so far: While some companies choose to ignore thorny issues in social media when the news is especially dire or legal investigations hamper communications, JetBlue is answering virtually every tweet about the issue — even if it is to say that it can’t comment about ongoing investigations.

The mantra seems to be: Let no tweet go unanswered.  TNooz

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Email use drops 28 percent in one year

In a surprising twist, recent data released by Nielsen finds that email use as a percentage of time spent on the web, dropped by 28 percent between June 2009 and June 2010. What replaced all of this email? Social networking use was up 43 percent for the same time period, while gaming was up 10 percent. What does it mean and can you extrapolate the data for business interaction?  Fierce Content Management

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How Former Ringtone Giants Are Faring As That Market Crumbles

At the height of the ringtone business, carriers, music labels, artists and third party companies, like Jamba, Thumbplay and others, were making piles of easy money—selling a snippet of a song for three times what a whole track sells for today. John Fletcher, an analyst at SNL Kagan, said ringtone sales in the U.S. peaked in 2007 at $714 million, and today are closer to 2005 levels. “It’s been a depressing story for a couple of years.” As consumers have transitioned to smartphones, users can often load a full-track MP3 to their phone and designate a portion for a ringtone. Paid Content

What’s the ROI of social networking?

The equations  to calculate an ROI for social networking: essentially boiling it down to the cost of doing the networking (for example an employee spends an hour a day sending tweets so that’s an hour of their salary) divided by the tangible benefit deriving from those tweets or other social networking activities.So the simple equation is something like this:

adl x algc
———-
abt x ehw

Where adl is the average number of daily leads you think your Tweeting or Facebook activity generates, and algc is average lead gen cost (for your company). Abt is average blogging time/tweeting time/Facebook time spent per day in hours, and ehw is executive’s hourly wage.  CBR Online

Tough summer for events promoter

Promoter wants to forget the last few months, including a canceled L.A. show and fallout from a mega-rave that he was not involved in.

As recently as June, summer 2010 was looking good for event promoter Gary Richards. In just three years, Richards had built his Hard music festivals from what he calls a “career Hail Mary” into a lucrative national brand featuring eclectic lineups of emerging acts, most of which make electronic dance music.

Warner Music CEO looks beyond iTunes amid losses

Digital download sales growth slowed further for Warner Music Group Corp. in its fiscal third quarter, prompting CEO Edgar Bronfman Jr. to say Thursday that the company was looking “beyond the iTunes model” to return to growth.

After the company reported a wider loss, Bronfman pointed to new “access models” based on monthly music subscription plans, and the entry of Google Inc. and others into the business to reverse a decade of declining CD sales. Washington Post

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Report says 65 percent follow a company or brand on Facebook

A recent survey of 300 “active social media users” that 65 percent follow a company or brand on Facebook and 47 percent have posted a comment on a company’s Facebook page.

Invoke calls Facebook the “epicenter” of the social networking universe, but also notes that Twitter is gaining ground in “relation to company/customer interactions.”

On Twitter, more than 31 percent of social networkers said they follow a brand or a company’s tweets.  Boston Business Journal

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