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 [...]

When Facebook was opened to the public, I had read a lot about it. Being the geek that I am, I had read numerous pieces of news and had even tried faking a Harvard e-mail to try and register for it. But when it finally opened to everyone, I resisted for a few months before going in.
I knew it wasn’t anything new. We had tried a similar model at Loquesea.com, one of the many Internet companies from pre–bubble times that [...]

Hello from Chicago! It is time again for “The Week in Social Media,” by Baptiste Limb and me—this time from Chicago because I’m on vacation in this amazing city. So let’s face the latest social media news and trends.
Social media is becoming even more popular than e-mail—at least on mobile devices. A recent study by research company TNS shows that mobile users spend 1.4 times as many hours using social networking sites than reading and responding to e-mail. Read more [...]

I was browsing the clearance racks the other day and bought a t-shirt that caught my eye immediately. Not only because it was $5, and I’m cheap like that. The shirt read: “My Space, Fun for the Whole Family.”
Given my propensity for taking notice of anything social-media related, whether it’s on a clearance rack of last season’s clothes or a billboard in Times Square, my eyes gleamed with delight, because it confirmed my prediction of more than a year [...]

As marketers work around the clock to leverage the newest social media platform, I can’t help but reflect on my first uses of social media. I’m a firm believer that you can’t evolve or grow without knowing your roots and learning from your past—and I realize now that in my past, I was engaged in social media before there was such a thing as “social media.”
It was about 13 years ago when I created my first site—a “Power Rangers” fan [...]

Originally posted on eurorscgpr.com/blog.
During the protracted health-care debate, it quickly became clear that the media put a premium on accessing information: Even C-SPAN, the cable industry’s nonstop outlet for televised government affairs, had to challenge the Obama administration to open the doors to the process. In the meantime, Americans would have to make do with the networks—Fox News, CNN, The Washington Post and other major media outlets—to get the juice on health care.
Just as the media seems to be at [...]

This is the first installment of a weekly list by Baptiste Limb, interactive art director at Euro RSCG 360 in Lyon, France, of social media links he finds interesting and relevant. “My vision is mostly that advertising strategy has to be more creative than ever,” he says. “Creative people can’t be just TV/print or Web, but on all current and future media.”

“Ideas Are Core to Enterprise 2.0” on Blogging Innovation

“The Top 5 Reasons Brands Fear Social Media” on Socialmedia.biz

“54% of [...]

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 [...]

In the PR business, we’re all constantly thinking about social marketing, social networks, the social Web and social media. But we don’t think as often as we should about what those terms actually mean. Where does one end and another begin?
As Trebor Scholz, assistant professor in the Department of Media Study at the New School, lays out in an info-packed online slide show, the roots of our collective digital society are long and tangled: from an e-mail progenitor in 1965, [...]

As I was pulling together a white paper about social media I came across an article that Adweek published about me in 1996, when my role as head of TBWA’s Department of the Future took me to Amsterdam. Having already been central in setting up the agency’s efforts to use new media tools for market research, I moved to the Netherlands to develop interactive research capabilities for the agency’s European offices.
Around the same time, I worked on a campaign strategy [...]