The email to me cautioned “Be careful what you tweet” and linked to Chrysler’s recent snafu, in which an employee of an agency hired by the automaker mistakenly posted an obscene tweet to Chrysler’s official Twitter feed. The employee was stuck in traffic and meant to send it to his personal account. Instead, it went to Chrysler’s Twitter feed and cost him his job and his agency the Chrysler account.
That story, and a few others that have made the news [...]

Walking into the Time Warner Center for Adweek’s Social Media Strategies Conference recently (the conference was held Oct. 13-14) was a lot like entering a professional sporting event. I put my bag through a metal detector, got my ticket and then entered a room with several large projection screens—though instead of jumbotrons displaying fans in the stadium, we were seeing live streams of tweets.
And, really, it was fitting, considering that this was the Olympics of social media, with key [...]

“What really decides consumers to buy or not to buy is the content of your advertising, not its form.” —David Ogilvy (1911–1999)

It’s a fact that brands can’t be manipulative or overpromising anymore, at the risk of losing credibility and spending a huge amount of money to get back on their feet. It’s a good thing, as they now have to challenge and re-create themselves, finding new ways to leverage based on authenticity, trust and listening, to engage people and raise [...]

Social media isn’t just a way for friends to stay in touch—smart PR professionals and marketers know that SoMe can be the answer to their prayers. Though beauty is the rare—and lucky—industry that may have bucked the trend of dwindling budgets (because women want to look good no matter how much the economy is suffering!), it still benefits resourceful pros to understand how employing social media in their strategies can have a great impact with a small budget.
We at Euro [...]

The newest internet celebrity isn’t a smoking baby, nor is it middle-aged mousy woman with an incredible singing voice. Meet Zach Anner, a self-described “wheelchair-bound lady magnet,” who is winning hearts as he competes for a chance to host his own talk show on the Oprah Winfrey Network (OWN).
Zach’s contest entry gives his own personal hilarious take on his disability, calling cerebral palsy the “sexiest of the palsies” and discusses his dream to host a travel show for people who [...]

“A return to first principles in a republic is sometimes caused by the simple virtues of one man … His good example has such an influence that the good men strive to imitate him, and the wicked are ashamed to lead a life so contrary to his example.” – Niccolo Machiavelli (Italian philosopher and writer, 1469-1527)
No matter times or places, “influence” has always been the Holy Grail. The social media revolution raised this notion to a new level: Almost everything [...]

Social media has enabled brands to become more human than ever before. Community managers are Facebooking and tweeting on behalf of their brands, and the good ones embody the brand’s essential characteristics and tone.
It’s pretty cool stuff, and a real development in the history of branding.
With the increase in marketing-focused social media, we need new ways to measure the strength of a brand’s social media activity. Since brands are acting a whole lot more like people, it seems worthwhile to [...]

This is the first in a series of three.
We just finished conducting one-on-one interviews with some of the brightest minds in the social Web. Here are some of their insights, which we shared with our general managers yesterday in Paris. Check in tomorrow for more of what these leaders have to say.
B.L. Ochman, president, Whatsnextonline.com:
“For big corporations, this stuff is still very scary…. Anyone who is a consultant must tackle fear.”
“A lot of companies should take their websites down, because [...]

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 [...]

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, [...]