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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

Originally posted on huffingtonpost.com.
The inaugural One Young World summit that concluded on Wednesday in London wasn’t just a gathering of hundreds of tomorrow’s world leaders. Don’t get me wrong: The energy of the more than 600 delegates from 100-plus countries, the passion of their debates and the progress that their resolutions made toward finding solutions to problems such as economic injustice, climate change and excessive corporate power were all substantial and meaningful.
But the leadership summit wasn’t just about the delegates [...]

First it was bra colors, now it’s celebrity look-alikes, and coming up might be Urban Dictionary. What’s next?
Last week, Facebook became star-studded as people changed their profile pictures and filled in their status to read: “Change your profile picture to someone famous (actor, musician, athlete, etc.) you have been told you look like. After you update your profile with your twin or switched at birth photo then cut/paste this to your status.”
It was Facebook’s newest status update trend: Doppelgänger Week. [...]

Originally posted on huffingtonpost.com.
Every generation assumes it has been handed the world’s problems because the one that preceded it didn’t quite master the agenda. In the rebellious 1960s, the baby boomers demonstrated noisily against established powers and ideas. But in the case of today’s energetic and engaged 20-somethings—the Real-Time Generation—I think assuming responsibility isn’t as much about disappointment in prior leadership (although there’s certainly cause for that) as it is about the power of the new tools. Thanks to the [...]

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 [...]

Social media have helped corporations, retailers and small brands make a name for themselves and maintain sales during one of the toughest economic times ever. But it’s also had a significant impact on the entertainment industry, making unlikely stars and also highlighting flaws in some seemingly perfect icons.
YouTube is probably the best case study of how social media can create and deflate celebrity. Lonely Girl 15 was a realistic but fictional video docu-series that had everyone believing Lonely Girl’s life [...]

I found out this week that a friend of mine died. At age 35, I’m too young to start reading the obituaries; I found out by reading his thread on Facebook.
I’ve reported in the past that each day, I experience something truly phenomenal through social media and networking—but I never even considered that I would experience this, at least not this early in life.
“P”* lived in Dallas and was one of my more than 350 friends on Facebook, spread across [...]