Love in the Time of Passwords
There’s a new source of peer pressure on the block as teens in love share their passwords

Coughing up the password to an email address or social media site is the newest test of young love. With this top-secret data in hand, modern high school sweethearts scour one another’s exchanges for clues about faithfulness—often storing ammunition for post-breakup warfare while they’re at it. Adults, too, grapple with the issue of disclosing passwords to [...]

Turn the Page
Top retailers pry open our wallets with an array of comely iPad apps

Consumers worldwide are expected to fork over $466 billion during the 2011 holidays—up nearly 3 percent from last year—and experts say the way we’ll spend much of this money may signal the biggest shift in shopping habits since the catalog was introduced in the late 1870s. This season, interactive tablet apps like Catalog Spree, Coffee Table and TheFind are soaring in popularity. They [...]

The Brave Neuro World
Can the latest in brain imaging reveal much about why and how we buy?

“Neuromarketing” is a topic of interest to marketers the world over (if you don’t believe us, check out the multilingual Google News results). This burgeoning field continues to stir debate—a recent New York Times op-ed on the subject inspired an impassioned response from a group of 45 neuroscientists from seven countries, challenging the claim that consumers are feeling something like romantic love when [...]

Service with a Smile
How customer service is evolving to satisfy a digitally savvy world

We all know what a bad customer-experience story can do to a brand. And in this economy, the hit can be especially damaging. A recent survey shows that consumers are split in how they prefer to engage with companies for service. So it makes sense that companies are working harder than ever to make customer satisfaction a top priority—in China, brands are adding an online component [...]

Illegal Search?
Google’s legal woes continue to multiply—as does the number of sectors it touches

Many players in numerous industries are claiming the Joseph role opposite search engine giant Google’s Goliath these days. Though the company’s credo is “Do no harm,” a growing number of critics are questioning if that’s really how it operates. Google CEO Eric Schmidt will testify before a U.S. Senate antitrust panel, in a scenario being compared to Microsoft’s similar appearance in the ’90s—before it was hit [...]

Play Time
It’s not a new phenomenon, but “gamification” is sweeping the digital nation

All the world’s a game—or it may be soon, given the popularity of transforming workaday activities into fun. Obviously, gaming is a popular pastime; Google+ has added games (including the überpopular Angry Birds), presumably to entice the bazillions of FarmVille enthusiasts from Facebook. A new site, Loffles, is making ad watching more than a spectator sport; visitors answer questions about the spots they’ve viewed to up their [...]

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 [...]

The Sound and the Fury
Will the music industry be able to leverage e-business to turn itself around, as the publishing world has in recent years?

The music business has been struggling with how to monetize digital since…well, since the beginning of digital. But that’s not stopping companies from trying to get their own piece of the pie; following the success of Spotify, new music services are popping up from giants Amazon, Google and BlackBerry’s maker, RIM, not to mention startups [...]

A recent survey by Bloomberg and YouGov found that Google+ is on track to become the second largest social networking site within the next 12 months. I’ve been a member of Google+ since it launched about a month ago, but I’m just not buying it—the survey, that is.
The survey (which only interviewed 1,003 adults, not quite a representative sample in my opinion) claims that Google+ is “chipping away at engagement levels on Facebook and Twitter” based on the following statistics:

30 [...]

The following article was originally published on Campaign Asia.
Everyone and every brand today wants to do social.
By embracing social media. By creating home pages on popular social networks. By reaching out to their consumers. Drawing them to their social avatars. And then attempting to engage and influence them. To “like” them. To interact with them. To hopefully at some point turn them into buyers. Brand loyalists. And ardent brand advocates.
That’s all very well. And noble in intent, too. But [...]