Getting “iced”…It sounds illicit, slightly illegal and definitely uncomfortable. Actually, it is the most recent viral interactive phenomenon sweeping the nation’s post-grads.
Icing is the alcoholic equivalent to putting a whoopee cushion on somebody’s chair. I have heard tales of both friends and strangers getting iced. It runs so rampant among my circle that I can expect at least one person to get iced per gathering. The inspiration for this blog post came as I [...]

The whole idea behind new media and social networking is to form deeper relationships with customers, which can be cultivated into a strong bond and hopefully brand loyalty. We use Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, e-mail, blogs, direct mail and other media to stay connected to them. We spend millions to form and cultivate the relationships. But in the process, do we forget about the relationship itself?
Every Saturday my town holds a farmer’s market in the town hall parking lot. Local farms [...]

These days we zip text documents and photos and videos and fling them across the country in seconds without a thought. We can compress our TV so we can watch it on our mobile phones, using tools such as Sling Media.
And, of course, there’s Twitter. This ever-present microblogging tool forces us to compress our thoughts and experiences into 140 characters. In this realm, we no longer think big; we think small. But that might not be a bad thing.
The [...]

I just read a brilliant interview with music visionary Brian Eno in The Guardian. The last section, “On the end of an era,” made me think about the advertising business.
“I think records were just a little bubble through time, and those who made a living from them for a while were lucky. There is no reason why anyone should have made so much money from selling records except that everything was right for this period of time. I always knew [...]

Made to Stick, a book by Chip and Dan Heath, considers the concept of “tappers” and “listeners” with respect to marketing. The authors contend that marketers have too much information to adequately convey their message to prospective customers—it’s like an inside joke meant for the world that only we get. But what if the reverse was true? What if the customers are the tappers? Then we’re the ones without all the information, and we’re missing the message the world is trying to tell us.
For [...]

People used to conduct business through conversation, discussing the weather, family and politics before finally bartering their way to a deal. Not so today. The book The Cluetrain Manifesto is based around the concept of markets as conversations and says the most important feature of the Internet is that it allows people to have conversations directly.
The book was the first that encouraged businesses to move from “What does my website need to look like?” to “How can we use online [...]

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 [...]