by Pamela Parker on January 9, 2012

Really insightful post by Jason Calacanis about the “cult” of Amazon Prime, and why it’s so attractive.
When you take the $79 leap into Prime, Amazon has you for life.
Once you’re in the cult you’re not leaving because leaving means you have the drudgery of having to drive to the store, finding the item you want, seeing if it’s in stock and then dealing with the most horrifying experience of all: retail employees.
I’ve been a Prime member since the beginning, and it’s only become more essential to me now that it comes with free videos for my Kindle Fire and one free book to “borrow” a month. Amazon has brilliantly made itself indispensable through services. Now that’s brand building.
by Pamela Parker on December 1, 2011
I’m both pleased and sad to have said goodbye today to my tenure as a Federated Media employee. I’d been at the company since 2006 — I was employee 18 — and I’ve watched the company grow from a scrappy start-up to a seasoned professional organization. It’s been quite a ride and I’ve met some amazing folks along the way that I hope will be friends for a long time to come.
And now it’s time for a new adventure. I’m going back to my first love, journalism, and will be joining Third Door Media — publisher of Search Engine Land and producer of the SMX Conferences. I will be Executive Features Editor of the just-launched-in-beta Marketing Land, which will follow the SEL model but expand into a wide variety of disciplines in digital marketing — with a heavy dose, at the start, of social media marketing. I’ll also be writing news here and there for both Marketing Land and Search Engine Land.
I’m thrilled to be working with such a great group of people at Third Door, many of whom I worked with back in the day. And I’m especially excited to start my full-time work with them at the SMX Social Media conference in Scottsdale, which starts on Monday.
All this to say that I hope I see some of you at the conference, and at future conferences! Meanwhile, I bid a fond farewell to the great crew at FM, who I know are bound for bigger adventures themselves. Maybe in my new gig I’ll even have more to say on this very-neglected spot in the blogosphere. We’ll see…