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 [...]

Consider the facts: Your staff, your clients, your competitors, your investors, your advocates and your detractors are all socially engaged. They all have voices.
Some have created a “personal brand.” Others are speaking with association to a company’s brand. This rise of the unofficial spokesperson has significant potential repercussions.
These voices, in the physical world, are mostly weak. In the social world, they can be powerful and influential. In the social world, there is noise and signal. Noise is retweeted, thoughtless, unconnected [...]

Social media isn’t just a way for friends to stay in touch—smart PR professionals and marketers know that SoMe can be the answer to their prayers. Though beauty is the rare—and lucky—industry that may have bucked the trend of dwindling budgets (because women want to look good no matter how much the economy is suffering!), it still benefits resourceful pros to understand how employing social media in their strategies can have a great impact with a small budget.
We at Euro [...]

It’s undeniable that more brands are catering to green causes. Car manufacturers are building hybrid cars, while other companies focus on how much carbon people produce.
At the South by Southwest Interactive Festival (SXSW) this week, green programming and presentations are definitely popular. On Monday, Nita Rollins, a trendspotter for Resource Interactive, gave a presentation on Digital’s Emerging Role in Unconsumption, to help educate brands on how they can promote “unconsumption” (being green) in their practices. She says that “buy one, [...]

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 [...]

Lately I’ve been hearing a lot about loyalty programs, their goals and their objectives, so it’s got me thinking about loyalty in the age of new media marketing. Traditionally, loyalty has been about repeat business—getting happy customers to come back. But in the age of information, optimization and saturation, I see it going a different way.
Friend #1 is a coffee drinker. Sure, most of us drink coffee, but when I say she’s a “coffee drinker,” what I mean is that she’s a [...]

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 [...]

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. [...]

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.”