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Can going digital—or hopping to the iPad—save the magazine industry?

To many media types, the future of magazines has been in question for quite some time. Now though apps and partnerships are breathing new life into an industry looking to redefine itself. Savvy women’s mag Allure has incorporated—with great success—mobile scan codes into its issues, offering everything from spendy handbags to lipstick samples. And both Hearst and Conde Nast made deals with Apple this year, allowing [...]

The Multicultural Mainstream
Why a more colorful world is marketers’ best growth target today

With the world getting smaller thanks to global digitization and everyone talking connectivity, marketing folks have wondered if multicultural marketing is still relevant to a sound marketing mix. The answer to anyone paying attention is a very emphatic (insert your version of) “yes.” Multicultural marketing is being called the new mainstream, and mega-brands like Burger King, Home Depot, Kmart, PepsiCo and Walmart are making sure their messaging [...]

The email to me cautioned “Be careful what you tweet” and linked to Chrysler’s recent snafu, in which an employee of an agency hired by the automaker mistakenly posted an obscene tweet to Chrysler’s official Twitter feed. The employee was stuck in traffic and meant to send it to his personal account. Instead, it went to Chrysler’s Twitter feed and cost him his job and his agency the Chrysler account.
That story, and a few others that have made the news [...]

“I would rather entertain and hope that people learned something than educate people and hope they were entertained.” —Walt Disney (1901-1966)
With advertising, people learn what a person, a brand, a service or a product is and has to offer. I don’t think there is any better way to teach, raise awareness and sales than entertaining. Beyond direct marketing, print and online ads, commercials or product placements, one of the best ways to reach your audience and engage it on the [...]

As the dust settles over the debate about whether social media is indeed worth all the hype, the medical fraternity has been slowly pointing the needle (pun intended) towards a yes.
The lure of social media notwithstanding, the medical community has been apprehensive about using it. Lack of clear knowledge of usage and value, skeptical response and industry regulations have combined to turn social media into a Pandora’s Box in the minds of many who have taken the Hippocratic Oath.
Times have [...]

“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 [...]

Hello again from Hamburg! Much has happened during the week—Facebook is again one of the social networks that has released new features. From now on it’ll be easier for admins to filter spam from their Facebook pages. This should be a really helpful tool to provide high quality content.
This week you could hear rumors about another new feature on Facebook: “Social check-in deals.” The Next Web released a blog post that contains an e-mail [...]

There always used to be a difference between the way us “Brits” travel and communicate. In many cases as we travelled the world, it wouldn’t have been unsurprising to hear us being described as reserved and somewhat closed in our approach to new people and cultures.
In fact, I can remember one such event in recent times, when I went on a training course in California and was asked to sit in a circle with a group of people I’d known [...]

More digital. That’s how a plurality of millennials around the world described themselves compared with their parents’ generation in Euro RSCG’s latest global survey. Tellingly, but not too surprisingly, it’s also how a plurality of that older group distinguished the two generations, with millennials’ greater use of digital technology as the most significant distinguishing factor. Euro RSCG surveyed 2,500 millennials and 500 people aged 40 to 55, split equally between men and women and among these five countries: China, France, [...]

“It is the harmony of the diverse parts, their symmetry, their happy balance; in a word it is all that introduces order, all that gives unity, that permits us to see clearly and to comprehend at once both the ensemble and the details.” –Henri Poincare (French mathematician, theoretical physicist and philosopher of science, 1854-1912)
As announced last week, Facebook has now reached 500 millions users. If it were a country, it would be the third largest, behind China and India. Beyond [...]