I came across this article two weeks ago, which was originally written by Matt Hartley of the Globe and Mail, and have condensed it for your perusing benefit…

… Microsoft’s new strategy is to turn to its marketing department to get people interested in trying Live Search by borrowing a page from frequent-flyer and gas-station loyalty programs.

Earlier this year, the company rolled out four initiatives, each designed to place marketing before technology by offering users and advertisers perks to try out Live Search. Microsoft believes that by offering financial incentives to try Live Search through prizes, offline advertising and discounts with online retailers, more users will be willing to try the service, giving marketers a reason to buy more ads…. (more…)

… but apparently not always at work…

Forget six degrees of separation. How about three degrees of happiness? Researchers from Harvard University and the University of California, San Diego have mapped the relationships of happy people and found that happiness is a collective phenomenon that spreads like a virus through social networks - affecting even strangers three times removed from each other. Here is the article.

The theory builds on the notion of emotional contagion, the process at work when a person smiles back at someone who smiles at him. Human emotions appear in clusters, behaving like stampeding animals, says study co-author Nicholas Christakis.

“You would never think to ask a particular buffalo in a herd, ‘Why are you running to the left?’ ” says the Harvard Medical School sociology professor. “The whole herd is running to the left.”

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