After 20 years of leading indicators (prosumers) telling us they want companies and brands to be more honest and transparent, finally they have the way to ensure it happens: social media.
As businesses and brands experiment in this new terrain, let’s first agree that social media is wreaking havoc inside traditionally structured brands and businesses. As it should.
For decades, businesses have sought control over four conversations: the company and the market (corporate communications/media relations); the brand and consumer (sales, marketing and [...]

The main topic of my links this week is “hyper personalization.”
Graphics, names, statistics…the Social Media Revolution video has been updated. Here’s the new one to bookmark: 

“Social Media Revolution 2 (Refresh)” on YouTube

Does having lots of followers on Twitter make you an influencer? Let’s get some answers and draw some tips from this interview with Meeyoung Cha of Germany’s Max Planck Institute for Software Systems.

“On Twitter, Followers Don’t Equal Influence” on Harvard Business Review

Yet more on the most evolving social platform [...]

Originally posted on huffingtonpost.com.
Would it be an exaggeration to say teenagers are running popular culture? We don’t think so. And, if anything, we’re willing to up the bet. Take a look at teenagers today—their habits, their purchasing power, their mastery of media—and momentarily suspend your belief in the stereotypes or hollow assumptions about them. What you’ll uncover is a group of people who are changing the world of marketing, altering communications, inventing new lexicons and adopting still-embryonic innovations.
The teens of [...]

Let’s start with an article by Brian Solis that I believe might be one of his most important I’ve posted here so far.

“With Social Media Comes Great Opportunity” on Brian Solis’ blog

Next let’s focus on rising trends and behaviors. 

“A Decade of Digital: 10 things for 2010” on the Marketing Society

With the emergence of the mobility trend, I think it’s important to look at Foursquare and the use we can make of it to create and/or maintain interactions between people and [...]

As social media participation continues to accelerate, it’s now widely understood that most brands should be involved. Yet there remains a level of confusion about the degree of involvement brands should use to engage with consumers or constituents. This gray area is due in part to a paradox that many are either unaware of or ignore: that the success of brand’s social media story should happen at the intersection of timeliness and timelessness.
Timeliness
Quarterly audits of the social media sphere create [...]

These past few weeks I’ve focused on Twitter’s and Facebook’s new features and the importance of promoted tweets and open graph in the process of creating, expanding and managing online communities. This week, let’s think on a larger scale about what’s been happening so far and consider the current and future implications.

“Will Payovich Interview—Social Media for Business” on Facebook Advertising/Social Media Marketing
“The Social Media Effect” on Infographic World
“Q&A: Social Media Continues to Rewrite the New Rules of Advertising and Marketing” on [...]

The announcements last week at F8 (Facebook’s developers conference) got me thinking about how the nuances of what we do in the online world. For most people, whether you become a “fan” of something or a “follower”—or you “like” something instead of “become a fan,” per Facebook’s latest update—doesn’t play a big part in your decision to click. The action is often automatic.
But there is something deeper going on here, I think—a new form of consumerism, if you will. For decades since [...]

Several weeks ago Twitter launched promoted tweets, which offer a good opportunity for brands to expand and share with their Twitter community. I believe we need to make our clients early adopters, to maximize their visibility and interaction. Like Starbucks or Red Bull, a few of them are already using it, and I take no risk in telling you that thousands will be soon. Here’s a good link about exactly what promoted tweets are, plus another about jazzing up said [...]

Twitter finally announced its business model, with a major innovation: the “promoted tweet.” Tweets can be purchased by a brand and then appear on search pages as sponsored. This will no doubt change the way brands use Twitter. I believe it’s as revolutionary as the Google AdWords launch. Speaking of Google, its platforms, such as YouTube and Google Maps, can be used in some pretty creative interactive ways, as you’ll see if you click on the second link below.
But what [...]

Don’t yawn. This is important.
Behaviour change is fast becoming the Holy Grail of communications. Marketing strategy used to be all about “awareness” and about finding a sustainable USP for our clients; you’d interrogate a product until it confessed its strengths. Now the big idea is to put it on the psychiatrist’s couch and use behavioural economics to find the real reasons why customers buy or act.
Neoclassical economics has taught us to believe that people make predictable, rational decisions. Pay them [...]