One of the reasons traditional marketers have struggled with how social media fits into their planning is a simple fact: You can’t manufacture reputation in a public forum that is permanently on the record. This is a fundamental aspect of the social media revolution that overturns virtually everything we know about marketing. Let’s look at [...]

Great guest post on Techcrunch today by Vivek Wadhwa about the amount of university research that languishes on shelves in labs:
“In 2007, U.S. universities performed $48.8 billion of research and filed 17,589 U.S. patent applications. In that same year universities received back revenues for licensing and royalties on patents of less than $2 billion. Those [...]

This summer I took a long break from blogging and much of social media with one big exception: Facebook. FB has, in just a few months, become the default communications medium for my wide range of friends, replacing email completely. It is also the central place for announcing events, sharing photos, images, articles and video [...]

Catherine Taylor of Social Media Insider makes a point that no marketer should ignore. In her observation of the mommy blogger summit Blogher she notes that brands are building relationships with influencers rather than running ads.
Money quote:
“I’m going to quote a competitor to Mediapost, Advertising Age, but its packaged-goods reporter, Jack Neff, said it best: [...]

I’ve backed away from commenting on social media marketing recently for two reasons that are interrelated. First I’ve been busy actually doing social media marketing as opposed to talking about it. Second, I am fed up with ’social media gurus’ who talk, appear at conferences, tweet, blog etc., but do not actually do social media [...]

Digital Sky Technologies, a Russian Internet company has invested $200 million into Facebook for 1.96% of the company. Facebook is a privately held company which claims that it is increasing revenue 70% year over year.
This deal interests me because I believe that Facebook will be at least as dominant a force as Google in the [...]

The conversational marketing model is not really new at all, vis a vis Seth Godin and many others, but it is a major change: When we buy, we discuss the choices with friends and, as Godin points out, we have a lot more friends because of social media. If I’m buying an LED monitor, I’ll [...]

Business success in a recession?
Recessions have the effect of showing up poorly conceived business models. It’s one the reasons that more long term successful businesses are started during downturns. When the economy is giddy and people are spending, businesses that are providing luxury products or services will thrive as will businesses providing incremental improvements to [...]

One of the primary goals of social media marketing is generating motivated and qualified leads. This is accomplished by tracking your keyword phrases and initiating conversations with those who mention your keywords- whether they are in a Tweet, on a blog or anywhere else in social media. To turn these conversations into leads you need [...]

As you might know from my rant about firing your ad agency, I think the agency business model is broken and that social media is the nail in the coffin. In the interest of offering something positive, I’m going to explore a few of the issues and opportunities that social media offers agencies enlightened enough [...]