Cause marketing is one of the biggest trends shaping our industry these days, right up there with social media. Can the two work together? Can social networking support social responsibility?
A growing chorus of advocates would say yes. (I count myself among them: I spearheaded Tweet to ReMIND, a Twitter-based fundraising effort for the Bob Woodruff Foundation that brought in more than $172,000 for helping wounded military personnel transition back into society.) USA Today reported earlier this year about a new [...]

You can have all the bandwidth in the world, a site loaded with bells and whistles, apps that run on every new platform—but that’s no guarantee of social media success. This point was brought home to me at the Internet Marketing Summit in London last week, during a presentation given by Andrew Gerrard, a social and digital media strategist at d-marketing.
The No. 1 social media tool companies should invest in is their people.
By now, we all know the buzzwords of [...]

As I’ve been traveling and researching the ways people socialize online around the world, I’ve been interested in the differences in users’ attitudes and behaviors. This is a case where the old adage “Think globally, act locally” rings true. It’s not just about various venues for social networking (for instance, Facebook in the U.S. versus Orkut most everywhere else); it’s about fundamentally different expectations and approaches to navigating the social Web.
As British tech-trendspotter Tom Smith put it in a presentation [...]

In the PR business, we’re all constantly thinking about social marketing, social networks, the social Web and social media. But we don’t think as often as we should about what those terms actually mean. Where does one end and another begin?
As Trebor Scholz, assistant professor in the Department of Media Study at the New School, lays out in an info-packed online slide show, the roots of our collective digital society are long and tangled: from an e-mail progenitor in 1965, [...]

It’s a gray line between your corporate presence and your personal brand when it comes to social media.
As the name implies, social media is about people—not just your customers, but also you and your colleagues. As such, it’s as much a personal branding tool as a corporate branding one.
When you set up a Twitter account to build relationships and (gently) talk about your company/product/service/event, you’re also building your own profile. If you’re writing for your corporate blog (as I am [...]

I wrote in my last post about the changing social media landscape and what the future might hold. The results of MicroDialogue’s survey for Euro RSCG of 1,228 social media users and analysis of thousands of conversations in online communities, along with a number of recent news articles, point to a major shift in user attitudes—and to some serious challenges.
It’s remarkable how much people have changed in last five years. They have new definitions of what’s normal and sociable, and [...]

The numbers are impressive: Facebook added its 300 millionth member in September, and the site accounted for 58.6 percent of all U.S. visits to social networking sites in September, an increase of 194 percent over the year before. Twitter is taking off even more dramatically: That site has 20.8 million members and received 1.8 percent of all U.S. visits in September 2009, up from 0.15 percent a year earlier—that’s a growth rate of 1,170 percent. And that doesn’t even count [...]

As I was pulling together a white paper about social media I came across an article that Adweek published about me in 1996, when my role as head of TBWA’s Department of the Future took me to Amsterdam. Having already been central in setting up the agency’s efforts to use new media tools for market research, I moved to the Netherlands to develop interactive research capabilities for the agency’s European offices.
Around the same time, I worked on a campaign strategy [...]