Our Safety Net
As our social media connections grow deeper and stronger, it’s getting easier to extend a helping hand

As social networks play an increasingly integral role in all our lives, we’re learning how to use them not just to communicate with friends and family but also to help one another. Sometimes it can be for fun—like aiding a fellow linguist in learning a new language through a networking site. Or it can be life-changing: One man in South Korea [...]

Can We Talk Privacy?
It is the Internet issue that won’t go away: how companies protect (or don’t protect) consumer data

The recent massive security breaches at Sony, and revelations that iPhone and iPad owners are being tracked by their devices and that Google is still heavily invested in the location-tracking business (even after the brouhaha that revealed it was transmitting location data over unsecured Wi-Fi connections in compiling its Street View mapping service), have thrust online privacy back into the [...]

We Like to Watch
For TV, content might still be king, but the medium is becoming ever more important as viewing increasingly goes mobile—and social

In terms of high-profile tech acquisitions, Yahoo’s buying the social-viewing service IntoNow for somewhere between $20 mil and $30 mil is noteworthy for more than just the purchase price (which is impressive when you realize that IntoNow launched only about 12 weeks ago). It’s a clear indicator that Yahoo is thinking seriously about the social-viewing space—an [...]

Virtual Reality
Avatars have long been a part of many gamers’ recreational activities, but now the virtual models are infiltrating classrooms and offices

World of Warcraft players—and others who inhabit the world of massive multiplayer online games—are intimately familiar with the use of avatars in their leisure-time pursuits. It hasn’t been terribly uncommon, in fact, for game play to evolve into romantic parrying, both online and off. But now avatars are being introduced into other areas of our lives, and one [...]

There’s a certain set of consumers who don’t just passively consume goods and services; they proactively seek them out, help to produce them and help to propagate them. Alvin Toffler coined the term Prosumers in his 1980 book The Third Wave to label people similar to the leading-edge consumers we were studying at Euro RSCG Worldwide, the parent company of the PR agency I head up. When we started using the term later, it [...]

“What really decides consumers to buy or not to buy is the content of your advertising, not its form.” —David Ogilvy (1911–1999)

It’s a fact that brands can’t be manipulative or overpromising anymore, at the risk of losing credibility and spending a huge amount of money to get back on their feet. It’s a good thing, as they now have to challenge and re-create themselves, finding new ways to leverage based on authenticity, trust and listening, to engage people and raise [...]

Power from the People
“Icing” went viral—and it might be the rare case of a genuine consumer-backed movement

“Icing,” a drinking game involving the chugging of Smirnoff Ice, exploded in popularity earlier this year, first on Southern U.S. college campuses, then spreading to such diverse arenas as the indie music world and the Wall Street sector, while spawning an accompanying Internet meme. The New York Times questioned the authenticity of the movement, while Smirnoff and its parent company, Diageo, denied any [...]

After 20 years of leading indicators (prosumers) telling us they want companies and brands to be more honest and transparent, finally they have the way to ensure it happens: social media.
As businesses and brands experiment in this new terrain, let’s first agree that social media is wreaking havoc inside traditionally structured brands and businesses. As it should.
For decades, businesses have sought control over four conversations: the company and the market (corporate communications/media relations); the brand and consumer (sales, marketing and [...]

Don’t yawn. This is important.
Behaviour change is fast becoming the Holy Grail of communications. Marketing strategy used to be all about “awareness” and about finding a sustainable USP for our clients; you’d interrogate a product until it confessed its strengths. Now the big idea is to put it on the psychiatrist’s couch and use behavioural economics to find the real reasons why customers buy or act.
Neoclassical economics has taught us to believe that people make predictable, rational decisions. Pay them [...]

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, [...]