Passion and greed. Those two words account for so much failure in new media, I can’t even begin to tell you. But I can tell you why, and you can fix it.
We’ve all been there. Sitting in the brainstorming meeting feeling the energy. Organizing ideas, turning ideas into goals and building plans to meet those goals. And it’s good: 500 Twitter followers, 750 Facebook friends and 1,000 blog readers by the third quarter of next year. Plans turn to implementation, and you slowly begin notice it. You [...]

As a Washington Post experiment, Joshua Bell, one of the finest violinists in the world, stood against a wall in a crowded Washington subway during the morning rush and played for 43 minutes. A total of 1,097 people passed by; seven paused to take notice. Three days earlier, Bell had filled the house at Boston’s stately Symphony Hall, where the pretty good seats went for $100 each. In the subway he earned $32.
This is the power of context. What great things are your customers [...]

The whole idea behind new media and social networking is to form deeper relationships with customers, which can be cultivated into a strong bond and hopefully brand loyalty. We use Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, e-mail, blogs, direct mail and other media to stay connected to them. We spend millions to form and cultivate the relationships. But in the process, do we forget about the relationship itself?
Every Saturday my town holds a farmer’s market in the town hall parking lot. Local farms [...]

What is the value of an ad not seen? Worse yet, the value of an ad seen but not acted upon? For years marketers have worked hard to turn the Internet into a place where ads are proactively blocked, filtered and ignored. Agencies are paid to increase list size, not list quality. Rather than put time into properly segmenting our prospects and compiling relevant offerings, we collect information in any way possible and blast e-mails to everyone. We choose quantity over quality, thinking we’re [...]

Lately I’ve been hearing a lot about loyalty programs, their goals and their objectives, so it’s got me thinking about loyalty in the age of new media marketing. Traditionally, loyalty has been about repeat business—getting happy customers to come back. But in the age of information, optimization and saturation, I see it going a different way.
Friend #1 is a coffee drinker. Sure, most of us drink coffee, but when I say she’s a “coffee drinker,” what I mean is that she’s a [...]

Made to Stick, a book by Chip and Dan Heath, considers the concept of “tappers” and “listeners” with respect to marketing. The authors contend that marketers have too much information to adequately convey their message to prospective customers—it’s like an inside joke meant for the world that only we get. But what if the reverse was true? What if the customers are the tappers? Then we’re the ones without all the information, and we’re missing the message the world is trying to tell us.
For [...]

Cred—short for street credit, slang for your reputation. Defined as “commanding a level of respect due to experience or knowledge.” Cred is traditionally associated with young, trendy people in urban areas. In Marketing 2.0, however, it’s a unit of exchange within the emerging reputation-based economy. Simple terms: more cred equals more value; more value equals more dedicated customers; more dedicated customers equals more money. 
So, how’s your cred?
There are several different types of reputations on the Internet, each impacting and impacted by new media differently. Google, [...]

The other day someone asked me where I think the future of social media in marketing is for 2010 and beyond. What an interesting question. Here’s my answer.
Accept and Embrace
As we enter 2010, I look around at budgetary predictions and the first thing I see is something awesome—social media has real money behind it. In 2010 eMarketer.com estimates 35 percent growth in conversational marketing spending over 2009, leading it to break the $1 billion mark for the first time. The [...]