Christos Visvardis

Why is Twitter not as successful as Instagram although the platform has basically the same features use hashtags, to post images and short videos like Instagram? A user on Quora asked me the very interesting question above. Here’s my two cents. You could argue that Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn and other social networks all have… Continue reading On Twitter’s mistakes and Instagram’s success

Take a loot at the picture below. Who would win in a hot dog eating competition? The answer is that both the 300+lb Steve Keiner and the 100lb Kazutoyo Arai have won the most famous hot dog competition in the world. And it wasn’t uncommon for lean, small Japanese contestants to win in the 80s… Continue reading What incumbent companies can learn from a Japanese competitive eater

I recently wrote a post about how sports seems to be big business but when compared to other industries it can’t really compete in terms of revenue. However, it’s still one of our most important cultural phenomena and it obviously keeps growing as a business every year. Case in point, in 2012 there was only… Continue reading How to do a (un)sponsorship

Having worked as an analyst for many years I’ve developed a special relationship with data. First, I’m always cautious when someone mentions a “fact”, a “study” or a “data point”. Especially, if that someone is a politician or a news / media organization. Remember, that their job is to evoke emotions and tell a story… Continue reading Fertility data, religion and temperature: or how analysts spend their free time

A Quora user asked me the question above and, quite frankly, I often see businesses making a lot of mistakes on how and why they use social media. Social Media should be a part of your Digital Marketing strategy. That means you should not do social media just for the sake of it; but make sure… Continue reading What should businesses not do on social media?

Currently, there is a heated debate on abortions. Whichever side you’re on you probably base your support of said side on some moral argument. What if you had some facts about abortions? Would you use them. Did I hear you saying yes? What if I told you that legalizing abortions leads to a reduction in… Continue reading Why we can’t have fact-based arguments in politics (unfortunately)

Looking at the multi-million dollar contracts that star athletes sign, we regularly fall into the fallacy of assuming that sports teams and leagues are quite lucrative organizations. Forbes just released a list of the most valuable sports teams and one might think that sports is big business considering that each of those 50 teams is… Continue reading Sports is not big business

Unless you’re living in a cave with no WiFi, you’ve probably heard of the Storm Area 51 Facebook event. The whole thing garnered a lot of traction and as per the lifecycle of popular Internet phenomena it became a meme. As it was expected, brands like Bud or Lego tried to capitalize on the popularity… Continue reading Brands jumping on the meme bandwagon

So, you’ve decided to call some people and ask them a few questions, let’s say about the next election. It’s not 1936 anymore so you won’t repeat the polling mistake of the Literary Digest assuming that if they call people on the phone they will have a random sample. It was the Great Depression after… Continue reading It’s really hard to carry out unbiased polls

Sometimes you need some inspiration for your content and your SEO strategy or you just want to be trendy and see what’s hot right now on the Internet. The tools that I find more useful for this are the below ones but remember that following popular websites (e.g. BuzzFeed) also helps you find out the… Continue reading Tools to see what’s trending on the Internet