December 7, 2007

These days, everyone and her dog is a social media marketer, or so they tell us. But who’s really an expert? And who’s full of hot air? How do you tell the experts from the snake oil salesmen?

December 3, 2007

Robert Scoble's post today got me thinking about the way some writers have bashed blogs for fun and profit. Let's take a look back at some blog bashing classics. These writers bashed bloggers so we'd write about what pricks they were and drive traffic to their blogs. I fell for a few of them.

November 23, 2007

Guaranteed: This post will make you think before you put information into social network profiles.

November 19, 2007

Dear NBC - Please don't get me wrong: I love you for advertising on my blog. But I want you to get results so you'll keep coming back, and this ad sucks.

November 15, 2007

Below is Runescape, which my way-cool 10-year-old nephew, JH, describes as "Second Life for kids." He left Nicktropolis, which used to be cool among the elementary school set, because "there, you could just stand around."

November 12, 2007

Not to sound like a Pollyanna, but while lots of discussion is going on about the death of Web 2.0. I’m feeling very upbeat and encouraged about social media and marketing.

October 23, 2007

Just when I'd lost faith in flacks, along comes this excellent pitch from Doug Haslam. It's a study in contrasts with this pitch from hell.

October 16, 2007

I spend a lot of time on Twitter every day. If you're a marketer, you should too.

October 4, 2007

A mere few weeks ago, customers wrote love songs and made videos about why they loved their iPhones. All was well in Apple-land. But that all went to hell in a hand-basket when Steve Jobs declared war on customers.

September 21, 2007

Any time any element of an ad distracts from the product, or the ad is so clever that what you remember is the cleverness and not the brand name, you have a failure on your hands.

September 18, 2007

With as many as 1,200 wines on shelf, how do you get consumer to buy yours? Stormhoek Winery does no advertising. Sales will top $5 million this year. It got there on the Cluetrain.

September 14, 2007

What if we don't want to put an enormous amount of time and effort into a company blog? What if we just want to have a blog that's just good enough to help us with search engine rankings, but won't win any bloggies, a client asked me recently. Can't we just do that?

September 11, 2007

Two weeks after declaring war on email overload, I am happily on my way to making email fun again.

September 6, 2007

This conversation on Twitter today sums up the whole story of the new Apple iPod Touch, which really does revolutionize computing. And which I'm not buying until version 3.0. Well, ok, maybe I only wait til 2.0. (I think I can. I think I can....)

August 31, 2007

As a self-employed marketer, I have lived and died by email for the past 10 years. It's been at the center of my business and personal life for everything from sales to socializing. But over the past year or two, the daily flow of email has become totally unmanageable. Something had to be done. I took bold action. So why do I feel guilty?

August 29, 2007

Know anyone with 2,514 friends? If you do, you are probably connected to him or her on Facebook, or Twitter. And that person is probably a bit promiscuous with the "confirm" button. I don't think the nature of friendship is changing because of the Internet. But the nature of conversation -- which often leads to friendships -- has definitely been evolving and the change is positive.

August 22, 2007

So this is what mainstream media (MSM) means when they say "the company was not available for comment at press time." Pretty reckless of Whole Foods PR department if you ask me.

August 17, 2007

Mattel Chairman and CEO Bob Eckert in a video on the Mattel site, says "I sincerely apologize" about the recall of "some toys." The toys were recalled because of life-threatening quality issues in Chinese manufacturing plants. Yeah, I guess 19 million is "some" all right.

August 16, 2007

Would you "friend" a fictional frog on Facebook? Four in 10 Facebook members did, allowing him access to data that could lead to identity theft, according to IT Security firm Sophos.

August 13, 2007

Reports on the death of blogging are greatly exaggerated. While I am distracted, fascinated, and constantly learning from my daily involvement with Twitter and Facebook, among other business/social networks, I am not about to give up daily blogging. And at the C-level, a lot of companies are finally accepting blogging. Blogging has legs, and here's where I think it's headed...

August 9, 2007

Back in the 80s, when I ran my own PR firm, hapless junior account people who worked for powerful Howard Rubenstein PR shared an office that had a baseball diamond on the wall.

August 1, 2007

Predicting the future is the fun part of being a pundit, and a necessary part of giving advice to corporate clients. Thinking about 2008 and beyond, I took a look at my predictions for 2007. Seven months in, I was half right.

July 30, 2007

In 2004, the Kryptonite Lock Company handled a blog storm so badly it was actually awarded Business 2.0 Magazine’s Dumbest Business Moment of the Year Award. Recently, the company again ran into a thorny problem. But this time, Kryptonite handled it in a way that could win them a Smart Way to Handle a Blog Storm award, if there were such a thing.

July 24, 2007

Dear Mattel: You’re blowing it. You had a chance to enrich the way kids learn, interact, and engage their imaginations in play. But MP3 Barbie has absolutely no redeeming social value.

July 19, 2007

Social networks are multiplying like fruit flies! Twitter, Jaiku, Pownce, 8apps, MySpace (out) Facebook, (in), Gleamd, Zaadz, Ning, and Benny Bix’s fave, Dogster... whew!

July 16, 2007

The wildly popular website I Can Has Cheezburger, filled with LOL Cats is a meme that proves several things...

July 9, 2007

What did Live Earth accomplish? Did it just bring together the choir? Did it really raise global awareness of the impending climate crisis? Or was it just an excuse for a party? Depends who you believe.

June 29, 2007

TechNewsWorld says that bloggers who break news stories ahead of mainstream media appear "to be a new and emerging breed of journalist." Actually, that breed has been evolving over the past 10 years, and the result is nothing short of a sea change in how news and information travels.

June 25, 2007

BMW's Club of Pioneers, aims to gather individuals and institutions who care about creating an earth-friendly future. But the site's been around for since 2006, and it still doesn't convince me that that BMW actually gives a crap about clean energy.

June 21, 2007

The Internet, in terms of world-changing technologies, is still in its infancy. Now gene2music raises the bar to new heights.

June 19, 2007

Wish you'd bought furniture.com or weblogs.com or drugstore.com 20 years ago when they were available? You'll have another chance this Thursday at a Manhattan URL auction. Bring your checkbook: URLs like seniors.com and arcade.com are expected to go for more than $5 million.

June 18, 2007

What impact will "I Got a Crush on Obama" -- the semi-salacious, MTV-style video that has been viewed nearly a million times since Thursday -- have on Barack Obama's 2008 campaign?

June 15, 2007

The Republicans are waking up to the importance of blogs and video in what's already being called the YouTube election. “It is critical that Republicans not let Democrats continue the [Internet] edge," Committee Chairman Sen. John Ensign (R-Nev) wrote. “They have had an edge on us.”

June 13, 2007

A June 4th article in Ad Age compiles some useful studies of the blogosphere, but, like most mainstream media articles about blogging, it largely misses the point about what really makes blogs influential. That got me thinking about what really makes a blog popular.

June 11, 2007

To me, the most amazing thing about The Sopranos - which is arguably the best TV show ever -- (except for the way it ended) is that most of us hardcore fans had no idea how it would end. Despite the fact that millions of fans were waiting with baited breath for the final scene, probably 80% of the country has never seen The Sopranos. And therein lies a big lesson for marketers.

June 8, 2007

The roll of pet-owning bloggers who "turned themselves into a news and information collection and dissemination machine" to report on the pet food recall debacle is a clear indicator of why mainstream media (MSM) is losing readers to the Internet in droves. MSM just doesn't understand what people really care about.

June 5, 2007

I'm all for Dove's campaign for real beauty and the real women they use in their ads as self-esteem builders. But the "Are You Sleeveless Ready?" campaign that says their deodorant will make your armpits prettier is just bizarre.

June 1, 2007

Here's something that'll make you sit up straight. Back specialists say as many as four in five patients have chronic nerve damage caused by working on portable PCs and millions more are at risk of injury. Laptops account for 70 percent of all computer sales, according to PC Pro magazine.

May 30, 2007

How often do you allow yourself to go unwired is the question of the day at Jeff Pulver's blog. Interesting question indeed.

May 24, 2007

This is the email that I, and scores of other bloggers, received this afternoon from Tami Queen at VOCUS, a company that claims to make PR management faster and easier. Notice that they didn't say "better."

May 22, 2007

Howard Kurtz's article about interviews in yesterday's Washington Post got me thinking about how we can protect ourselves from being misquoted. The bottom line: often you can't. The best defense is not to say anything stupid, but, as we all know, that's not always possible. :>)

May 18, 2007

ChemNutra, the company that imported melamine-tainted ingredients linked to the death of many thousands of dogs and cats nationwide, has called for a Pet Food Ingredients Safety Summit, tentatively set for July 14 in Las Vegas. They’ve also started a blog called The ChemNutra News and Information Blog. But it's not really a blog. It's a repository for press releases.

May 15, 2007

A year ago, with sales dwindling and its stock in the toilet, (where it remains), Dell started a customer-focused blog.

May 8, 2007

In a hateful piece of yellow journalism South African Sunday Times columnist David Bullard skewers bloggers as "people who wouldn’t stand a hope in hell of getting a job in journalism."

May 1, 2007

Finally! A great idea from a big company about the potential for mobile TV. As Comscore reported, and as I coulda told you, people are not that interested in watching TV shows on their mobile devices. Doh.

April 27, 2007

What is it going to take to make the contamination of our pet and human food supply the number one story in America? A pile of dead babies who drank melamine-contaminated baby formula?

April 24, 2007

Yes folks, it's another Twitter post. Jason Pontin made me do it.

April 12, 2007

There appears to be an insensitivity epidemic. Not only has that total jerk Don Imus insulted the Rutgers Women's Basketball Team, but now Comedy Central and Oddcast have launched the Comedy Central Comedian Constructor which lets you make a comedian avatar who tells pre-recorded jokes or uses ones that you record.

April 10, 2007

A front page story in Monday's New York Times covers the weeks-old story of threats against blogger Kathy Sierra, and describes the blogosphere as a nasty, wild and wooly place filled with vitriolic bloggers. At least they didn't characterize Sierra as a "cute kitty" the way CNN did in their one-dimensional coverage of the story.

April 6, 2007

Pepsi's new "Design Our Pepsi Can Contest" offers $10,000 for the re-design of its soda can. Consumers create and enter their design on the site, where the public will be able to vote on a winning design that will be featured on 500 million Pepsi cans.

April 3, 2007

Eric Kintz of HP posts the top 10 reasons he's still not convinced about marketing in Second Life spurred on by a recent negative article in Brandweek. Several of his reasons are also my reasons why ad agencies (and so many big companies) are failing in their Internet efforts overall.

April 2, 2007

If you want proof positive that Madison Avenue and corporate America still don't get the internet, look no farther than the new website created by TBWA/Chiat/Day for Mars' Uncle Ben's Rice. It's also a great place to learn how to waste $20 million dollars.

March 27, 2007

Wall Street Journal marketing reporter Suzanne Vranica notes that Weiden + Kennedy’s recent dismissal by Nike is “a digital wake-up call for Madison Avenue, which has been slow to embrace digital media.”

March 19, 2007

Gartner analyst Scott Nelson told silicon.com: "Customers can become your worst nightmare if they choose to share a bad experience on the web."

March 9, 2007

Eric Schmidt, CEO of search giant Google, told an investors group this week that the market for targeted advertising is at a very early stage with lots of innovation still to come, according to Internet News.

February 20, 2007

I never thought I'd ever say a thing like this, but I agree with Newt Gingrich. He told Fox News yesterday that it's nuts that politicos have already announced their candidacy for the 2008 Presidential elections.

February 15, 2007

The Wall Street Journal still doesn't get the blogosphere. It doesn't matter how many stories they run about blogs. It doesn't matter that they have some blogs on their site.

February 7, 2007

It's no secret that PR has an image problem. And yesterday's Hagar the Horrible cartoon sums it up very well. Here's Hagar, tied to the stake and about to be killed by multiple enemies. And the boorish Hun's PR man is trying to convince them that Hagar is a nice guy who loves children and animals....

February 5, 2007

If you missed this disgusting Snickers commercial during the Super Bowl, you can view it and all the others on the iFilm Super Bowl ad page....

February 1, 2007

My soon-to-be-10-year-old nephew took me on a tour of Webkinz, today -- the hottest thing since, well, the last hottest thing, for kids from 4 to 14. Webkinz combines the kid appeal of Neopets with a kid-friendly mashup of MySpace and Second Life....

January 16, 2007

1. Be Interesting. Sounds simplistic, but most post aren’t.
2. Share what you know. People like posts they can learn from. Don't worry about giving away ideas. Those are a dime a dozen. People who can make ideas work are rare as hen's teeth....

January 9, 2007

What do you get when you mix IM, blogging, flash, addictive behavior, RSS and fun? Twitter. Everyone who uses it answers one question: "What are you doing...?"

January 2, 2007

This year's going to be a phenomenal year for online marketing and communication. I foresee four major trends for 2007....

December 28, 2006

Edelman PR, the folks who brought you Wal-mart flogs, has a new ethics scandal brewing. And this time they're in bed with Microsoft and a group of high-profile bloggers....

December 22, 2006

Let’s face it, blog advertising is a scary prospect for big companies. Mainstream media varies between praising blogs as the second coming and bashing them as lynch mobs....

December 14, 2006

Forget press releases, 2.0 or traditional. While PR types debate formats for bullshit news distribution, the truth is out. They're useless. (Read that any way you want, PR people are useless; Press releases are worthless....)

December 11, 2006

Many moons ago, I shared an office with a brilliant corporate video and meeting producer named Gerlinde Puchas. She didn't usually do commercials, but she did one about canned ham for a supermarket chain....

November 28, 2006

I've been talking to a lot of very big companies lately about how they can participate in social media; what the viable business models are; and the futility of trying to tightly control a corporate message....

November 21, 2006

The Edelman/Wal-Mart fake blog story keeps rearing its ugly head. And it's not going to go away any time soon....

November 16, 2006

Amanda Congdon, who last week signed a deal to develop a show for HBO, will be video blogging for ABC News, and "turning up occasionally" on Good Morning America and 20/20. You go Amanda...!

October 27, 2006

More than a few Second Lifers are feeling like the owners of mom & pop variety stores in small towns invaded by Wal-mart or Home Depot....

October 25, 2006

It's pretty wonderful that people like Firefox so much that they want to have parties to celebrate the release of version 2.0....

October 19, 2006

I've always thought publishing is a front for something else. After all, why would publishers put out so many books and then do nothing to market them? What's their game...?

October 17, 2006

When it comes to blogging, nobody talks the blah-blah-blog talk like Edelman Public Relations. Now Edelman has but one more strike before their new media credibility is shot forever....

October 10, 2006

The intellectual property question of ownership of material submitted to social media sites is heating up as corporate acquisition talks for YouTube and other startups catch fire....

September 26, 2006

I must have read and heard a hundred times that viral marketing is an inexpensive way to get a message across. Nice idea. But it's not true....

September 22, 2006

As more and more of our lives get locked up in the various electronic boxes we're all attached to all day, we can get along with less and less human contact....

September 14, 2006

Companies large and small, including clients of mine, are running video contests and incorporating social media into their marketing to see if this dog can hunt....

August 30, 2006

What's more lame than a fake blog? A fake MySpace page....

August 17, 2006

Obviously there's been a total lack of crisis planning at Dell ....

August 9, 2006

Technorati chief David Sifry has issued the quarterly state of the blogosphere report....

July 21, 2006

The brouhaha over Dell's terrible customer service is playing out not just in the blogosphere, but also on Wall Street, where Dell stock has plunged....

July 18, 2006

Dell, like a sleeping giant, appears to be waking up....

July 13, 2006

There's a lot of conversation going on about whether bloggers should cut Dell some slack now that they've finally started a (lame) blog. Frankly, no....

July 11, 2006

Watching big ad agencies trying to master new media is a lot like watching people who are having mid-life crises trying to look hip, cool and young by adopting the toys, tools, and language of youth....

July 8, 2006

This YouTube parody...

July 3, 2006

Ford Motor Company's sales are in the toilet, Toyota is whipping their butt, the company is in debt up to its gonads, and the stock has just been downgraded to junk, so if there ever was a time to "rip out the BS," this would be it....

June 29, 2006

While the only way the rest of us can afford to get around on anymore are dogs and ponies, Shell Oil and a bunch of its friendly top executives are bringing a genuine old-fashioned dog and pony show to 50 towns near you this summer....

June 26, 2006

Tech billionaire Mark Cuban, whose forthright communication makes him one of my heroes, has turned off comments on his blog....

June 15, 2006

Jason Calacanis has a brilliant idea by turning AOL-owned Netscape into a hybrid newspaper-blog-social community medium....

June 4, 2006

eBay is exuberantly jumping into social media with the launch eBay Blogs and the eBay Community Wiki and other community tools...

May 26, 2006

Any CMO or corporate attorney still fighting against giving up total message control needs to tape this post to their monitor and read it often...

May 24, 2006

Do you need to translate your entire website if you want to do business globally...?

May 19, 2006

Even if The DaVinci Code is, as Sony's TV advertising claims, "The most controversial thriller of our time," it's not going to generate sales of action figures at Burger King....

May 11, 2006

"Safetytown" a site that contains a melodramatic and droll video about a family whose credit card has been phished for a mysterious purchase in Arkansas...

May 5, 2006

Xu Jing Lei, the Chinese movie celebrity who regularly gets thousands of comments...

Xu Jing Lei, the Chinese movie celebrity who regularly gets thousands of comments...

May 3, 2006

Literally thousands of CEOs, marketing officers, analysts, engineers and other corporate employees are blogging....

April 28, 2006

Firefox Flicks, a video contest that asked Firefox enthusiasts to help promote Firefox through short films...

April 25, 2006

Here's a Chevy Tahoe Apprentice Contest commercial that's helping the Tahoe brand by coming up number 15 in Google results on Chevy Tahoe....

April 13, 2006

The question I am asked more often than any other is "how do you keep up with all the information coming at you from every direction?" So I thought I'd share some of the research tools I can't blog without....

April 7, 2006

This morning I got a rather frantic phone call from a publicist....

April 5, 2006

Machine translations can be quite a hoot. Unless you are depending on them in business. "Misled ladies and horsemen of marketing:" began the advice in the BabelFish translation...

Machine translations can be quite a hoot. Unless you are depending on them in business. "Misled ladies and horsemen of marketing:" began the advice in the BabelFish translation...

March 31, 2006

"Free beer for review!" said the email....

March 29, 2006

If you believe the media reports, just about everyone is either reading or writing a blog at any given moment. You don't have to join them. Here are the top 10 reasons not to start...