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, [...]

Marketers have started to use contests and promotions in an increasingly frequent way to build fans for their brands on Facebook. What they may be doing (and expensively, too) is creating a collection of contest enthusiasts rather a database of fans in the true sense of the word. 
Genuine fans have a high level of emotion about and empathy toward a brand and are unswerving in their loyalty to it. However, most contests and promotions are not designed to attract brand enthusiasts [...]

Originally posted on lifestory2010.com.
As Euro RSCG Life’s first-ever chief digital officer—and one of the newest members of the network’s team, having joined just a few months ago—I’m charged to further the “digital at the core” philosophy across Life.
There is much to work with: Life was one of the early pioneers in digital health-care marketing, having built the first brand website for Pfizer’s Lipitor in 1998, and it continues to build an enviable list of digital firsts.
Today, as the pace of [...]

Social media monitoring is high on everyone’s agenda. Technology companies have been quick to respond (they always are; they’re the guys who gave us CRM and Y2K, remember!). They’ve now introduced tools that do everything from capturing conversations to segmenting them by sentiment—negative, positive, neutral.
The way I see it, though, the real challenge for brands is not capturing conversations but doing something about and with them. This is not as simple as it sounds.
Social media conversations often relate to the [...]

Social media have helped corporations, retailers and small brands make a name for themselves and maintain sales during one of the toughest economic times ever. But it’s also had a significant impact on the entertainment industry, making unlikely stars and also highlighting flaws in some seemingly perfect icons.
YouTube is probably the best case study of how social media can create and deflate celebrity. Lonely Girl 15 was a realistic but fictional video docu-series that had everyone believing Lonely Girl’s life [...]

Online marketers and social media influencers have come under the microscope after the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) released guidelines on how they should disclose their working relationships in order not to misinform or falsely persuade consumers. (Here are some details about the guidelines.) It appeared that so-called mommy bloggers had been targeted as the main suspects for accepting bribes (e.g., money, products, free services) in exchange for positive postings.
Based, however, on my observation of the webinar called “Blog with Integrity,” [...]

This is the third in a series of three.
My last two posts addressed social media, present and future. The social media thought leaders we spoke with also had some notions about the social Web’s global impact:
George Gallate, global chairman, Euro RSCG 4D:
“Social media has made fundamental changes to the community. Huge effect on children all around the world.”

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 [...]

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, [...]

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 [...]