Let’s start with Twitter this week instead of my usual (Facebook).
During the last few weeks there were some management changes at the top of the micro-blogging service (which is now worth more than $5 billion, by the way). And I recently found different stories about how it was started. For one version, Business Insider’s article called “The real history of Twitter” is a very interesting read.
How do I get people to watch my video and to talk about it? I [...]

Oh. My. God. Becky, look at her butt.
Actually, don’t. Stop checking out the bubble-licious booty in this ad and reread the text…come on, focus this time! “Ambassador” is spelled wrong. (Focus a little more intensely, and you might even catch that “has” should be “have” and both “thats” should have apostrophes.)
How could Nike publish an ad with such a Kardashian-size spelling error? And why does this ad feel so familiar?
Well, actually, Nike isn’t responsible for the typo because the ad [...]

Passion and greed. Those two words account for so much failure in new media, I can’t even begin to tell you. But I can tell you why, and you can fix it.
We’ve all been there. Sitting in the brainstorming meeting feeling the energy. Organizing ideas, turning ideas into goals and building plans to meet those goals. And it’s good: 500 Twitter followers, 750 Facebook friends and 1,000 blog readers by the third quarter of next year. Plans turn to implementation, and you slowly begin notice it. You [...]

One of the things my first mentor and boss, Kitty Bundy, who is the director of lifestyle at Elite Model Management, told me was to tell a story in every project. As an intern then, I would assist with photo shoots, lookbooks and prepping models for go-sees, and Kitty would also ask me, “What is the story you’re trying to tell?” At first I didn’t understand what she meant, but I soon learned that she wanted me to help the [...]

The whole idea behind new media and social networking is to form deeper relationships with customers, which can be cultivated into a strong bond and hopefully brand loyalty. We use Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, e-mail, blogs, direct mail and other media to stay connected to them. We spend millions to form and cultivate the relationships. But in the process, do we forget about the relationship itself?
Every Saturday my town holds a farmer’s market in the town hall parking lot. Local farms [...]

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 [...]