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, [...]

I’ve been talking for years about how we’re all living online. But as Paul Briand, who writes the “Baby Boomer Examiner” column for Examiner.com, points out, we aren’t just living online but also dying online.
Let me explain. I’m talking about obituaries, and here’s why: A new study from the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University warns newspapers to “adapt to changes in audience behavior and technology that will alter the way Americans memorialize the dead. Already, interactive memorial pages [...]

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.”

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]