Don’t yawn. This is important.
Behaviour change is fast becoming the Holy Grail of communications. Marketing strategy used to be all about “awareness” and about finding a sustainable USP for our clients; you’d interrogate a product until it confessed its strengths. Now the big idea is to put it on the psychiatrist’s couch and use behavioural economics to find the real reasons why customers buy or act.
Neoclassical economics has taught us to believe that people make predictable, rational decisions. Pay them [...]

As a Washington Post experiment, Joshua Bell, one of the finest violinists in the world, stood against a wall in a crowded Washington subway during the morning rush and played for 43 minutes. A total of 1,097 people passed by; seven paused to take notice. Three days earlier, Bell had filled the house at Boston’s stately Symphony Hall, where the pretty good seats went for $100 each. In the subway he earned $32.
This is the power of context. What great things are your customers [...]

From designers and stylists to publicists and event managers, Fashion Week in New York is one of the most important platforms for fashion hopefuls. They all get a chance to make a name for themselves and obtain a following to help sell their designs or services. But like a good PR strategy, they’ve got to do it right.
Just because you’ve already got a presence online via social media doesn’t mean you’ll get results similar to your competitors. A brand can’t [...]

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 [...]

The other day someone asked me where I think the future of social media in marketing is for 2010 and beyond. What an interesting question. Here’s my answer.
Accept and Embrace
As we enter 2010, I look around at budgetary predictions and the first thing I see is something awesome—social media has real money behind it. In 2010 eMarketer.com estimates 35 percent growth in conversational marketing spending over 2009, leading it to break the $1 billion mark for the first time. The [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]