The following article was previously published on Thinking Aloud.
Through the eyes of a marketer who sees the foundations of success starting with A, B, C…
In a world where social media has freed the reins of expression and hugely democratized it, and technology and mobility has put the power to express with a click in the hands of millions and millions of people, a question topmost in the minds of marketers is how they can ensure the success of their [...]

“Powerful Social Expressions” is a series showcasing some of ERWW PR’s most successful uses of social media in the past year.
Headstrong: A Four-Part Series
Since agency president Marian Salzman’s successful brain tumor removal in July 2007, she’s donated her time and PR expertise to Massachusetts General—the hospital where she had the operation—and to several organizations that assist soldiers who’ve endured brain injury.
She also commemorated the milestone in a personal and moving multipart blog series, entitled “Headstrong” and featured on the Huffington [...]

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 [...]

Social media is ____________.
Absolutely social. Becoming antisocial media. A great tool that needs to be handled carefully. A connector that allows people to become more sociable. Strongly linked to the media itself. Showing, shouting and bragging. Invading every generation.
Euro RSCG executives around the globe used those words when talking about the state of social media today. You’ll have your own opinion depending on where you live, what you do for a living, how old you are, how you use social [...]

“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 [...]

“Genius is present in every age, but the men carrying it within them remain benumbed unless extraordinary events occur to heat up and melt the mass so that it flows forth.” – Denis Diderot (French philosopher, 1713-1784)
Among all social media platforms, Facebook is clearly the one that currently leads the game. Despite privacy concerns, the popularity of Mark Zuckerberg’s creation is constantly growing, with a movie about him and the beginnings of Facebook coming up next October. Let’s first take [...]

“Change is the law of life. And those who look only to the past or present are certain to miss the future.” –John F. Kennedy (1917-1963)
We’re currently living in an exciting period, where everything is moving fast and changing: It’s totally true that what’s right today might be wrong tomorrow. Anyway, we need to see where we are heading, to create and to adapt. Perhaps it was a side effect of the amazing powers of prediction of Paul the Octopus, [...]

It’s a truism that hardly bears repeating that technology and the infinite choice it has fostered have turned the old one-to-many communications model on its head. That’s a fact for advertising, where it’s laughable to imagine businesses being able to survive simply by broadcasting their brand messages to captive audiences. It’s a fact for pop culture, as a generation that all grew up watching “Seinfeld” and “Friends” together realizes that their children will have no such shared, universal touchstones.
And it’s [...]

“Infinite growth of material consumption in a finite world is an impossibility.” –Ernst Friedrich Schumacher (economic thinker, 1911-1977)
What is totally new with the digital era is that we are freeing a part of ourselves from material consumption. I’m not saying that virtual consumption will replace its material counterpart, but it’s obvious that a part of what we used to do offline is now moving online, completely virtual—like news, music, books, videos, games, applications, virtual goods, etc. Losing a part of the contact [...]

As marketers work around the clock to leverage the newest social media platform, I can’t help but reflect on my first uses of social media. I’m a firm believer that you can’t evolve or grow without knowing your roots and learning from your past—and I realize now that in my past, I was engaged in social media before there was such a thing as “social media.”
It was about 13 years ago when I created my first site—a “Power Rangers” fan [...]