In these recessionary times, the stock market doesn’t get nearly the attention that it did back in 1997 when Netflix was founded and every dotcom was looking for a big initial public offering. But if you’re the head of a publicly traded company stock price still matters a lot.

Just ask Reed Hastings, the CEO and co-founder of Netflix. On Sunday, he attempted to address the decline in stock value his company has undergone since announcing a new pricing structure in July. Following what’s become the standard social media playbook for restoring customer trust after a corporate blunder, he wrote a post that sought to be contrite about past mistakes and transparent about future plans.

The result? On Monday Netflix stock dropped a whopping 7.37% on a day when the exchange it’s traded on only dropped 0.36%.

On second thought, maybe that blog post didn’t actually matter since the last three days of trading saw Netflix stock drop 31.56%. That’s part of a total decrease in stock value of 43.36% since the company announced its new pricing scheme. Granted, this time period includes some big drops in the the composite stock indexes too, but nothing approaching the drubbing Netflix has taken.

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Last month, Wolfire Games, an independent game developer and distributor, unleashed a pay-what-you-want campaign for a bundle of indie games that seemed to take a play from the famous Radiohead pay-what-you-want experiment. The Humble Indie Bundle, as it was called, was offered from May 4 through May 11, and generated over $1.2 million in revenue for the game developers who participated, as well as two charities.

The bundle initially consisted of five indie games: World of Goo (2D Boy), Aquaria (Bit Blot), Gish (Edmund McMillen), Lugaru (Wolfire Games), and Penumbra: Overture (Frictional Games ). Later, Amanita Design kicked in a sixth game, Samorost 2. All the  games run on PC, Mac, and Linux platforms.

People could literally pay anything they wanted for the Humble Indie Bundle, starting at $.01. The largest single donation rang in at $3,333.33. I personally paid $10.01. You could choose to allot part or all of the price to the two charities, Child’s Play and the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF). While you could have bought the games or donated to the charities separately, the combination of the two made the bundle appealing. You can’t deny the power of one -stop shopping.

John Graham, Chief Operating Officer of Wolfire Games, was kind enough to answer some of my questions about the Humble Indie Bundle campaign in a post-promotion debriefing.

How did the idea for the pay-what-you-want Humble Indie Bundle come about?
Ever since the success of 2DBoy’s pay-what-you-want experiment and our Organic Indie Preorder Pack [a game bundle of Wolfire’s Overgrowth and the Unknown Worlds’ Natural Selection 2], we had this feeling that independent developers could really do a lot to promote themselves.
How did you decide what games to put in the bundle?

Our main requirement for this bundle was that we needed awesome indie games available for Mac, Linux, and Windows.  We didn’t have a fancy rubric, and weren’t maximizing any kind of bundle hotness equation, but I think it’s fair to say that we ended up with a group of games that are all different but very awesome.
Have you ever tried anything like this before? Did you learn anything from the Radiohead pay-what-you-want experiment?

Well, our theory was that a pay-what-you-want bundle would maximize participation and also allow people to feel like they were getting their money’s worth, and I think this proved true.  With pirated copies already easily available for all the games, we figured our biggest risk was not piracy but rather that we would spend a lot of time on this promotion, and then no one would hear about it. Read more…

Twitter raises a few red flags in my mind. Not the concept. Not its popularity. Not how it is used. But I do have questions about  the speculative vagueness of its valuation.

So far, investors have put about $150 million into Twitter. A month ago, the Associated Press reported that Twitter is still sitting on a significant portion of this nest egg and is no a rush to expand its advertising base. So far. its only two revenue streams consist of:

• Selling its internal analytical data. I’ve seen no detailed information on what data are sold to whom—and how much Twitter is making from this revenue stream.
• Promoting Tweets–an innovative concept announced on April 13. This experiment in advertisingmay or may not work; it’s impossible to tell, because there’s no track record to go on. Plus, the Wall Street Journal reported that Twitter will split those “advertising revenues equally with smartphone and Web partners”, which will cut into this new income stream.

Twitter’s revenues so far may be minimal, but that’s not reflected in its valuation—according to the most commonly cited figure, the company is worth—1 billion dollars.

This valuation is not based on publicly scrutinized or audited figures, but on numbers floated to the media by Twitter and its potential suitors. Read more…

Social media has made today’s marketing less about controlling the message and more about asking questions. While Twitter and Facebook want to know what’s happening, Foursquare and other location-based social networks wonder, “Where are you?”

For those unfamiliar with Foursquare, the service lets users “check in” to a location via their smartphones or laptops and logs their positions on a map that others can see. The more you check in, the more badges and bragging rights you earn.

“The X-factor appeal of Foursquare is in its social currency,” says David Berkowitz, senior director of emerging media and innovation at digital agency 360i. “Giving Foursquare users these badges for completing explicit tasks adds an element of surprise, like a scavenger hunt.”  The badges also help users show off their interests to others, enabling them to connect with like-minded people and keep the “game” going.

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The recession may be hurting the pocketbooks of people and businesses, but a new study shows that few companies that currently spend money on social media plan to cut back next year. The 2009 Tribalization of Business Study by Deloitte, Beeline Labs and the Society for New Communications Research reveals that 94 percent of the 400 companies surveyed intend to maintain or increase investment in their communities.

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Not that long ago, media companies were easy to define. A media company could be a movie studio, television network, newspaper or magazine publisher, radio station or really any company that controlled a means of distributing content. But technology has brought about an enormous shift that many companies don’t yet recognize. Most companies are now enormously invested in media as a part of their everyday business, but few of them realize it.

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