Quick thought on ‘there is no tribe of normal’

April 16, 2010

I spent some time reading through Seth Godin’s blog today – noticing that I particularly appreciated all the thought provoking, but very short, blog posts, and realizing that while I also aim to do the former, I often forget about the latter. So today I’m doing a relatively short post in response to the most [...]

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Update on Starbucks, and the incredibly shrinking marcom expense line

April 14, 2010

About a month ago I wrote a blog post entitled “social media and the incredibly shrinking marcom expense line“. The basic idea was that, thanks to (among other things) ambient intimacy, marketers can increasingly connect directly with millions of customers, for free – or at a very low cost. Because of this, questions like “what’s [...]

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Loyal customers vs. prosumers, evangelists vs. influencers (Part 2)

March 30, 2010

Last week I provided a brief introduction to the difference between loyal customers and prosumers, and evangelists and influencers. The basic idea is that while I might be tempting to look at the latter as “Web 2.0″ versions of the former, the reality is far different. It is not simply a case of using new [...]

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Loyal customers vs. prosumers, evangelists vs. influencers (Part 1)

March 26, 2010

In a previous life as a branding analyst, I spent a lot of time focusing on loyal customers – and particularly the “evangelists” among them who just might recommend us to friends and family. In my current life as Director of Marketing Insight at nGenera, I spend a lot of time focusing on prosumers (customers [...]

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Social media strategy: attracting influencers by ignoring them

March 19, 2010

My research on the incredibly shrinking marcom expense line has focused heavily on the power of ambient intimacy – the ability to maintain far more weak tie relationships then ever before. Part of this story is that customers are allowing brands into their “ambient networks”; another aspect is that customers are so well connected together.
Often [...]

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Bud Light Lime, and the incredibly shrinking marcom expense line

March 17, 2010

Yesterday I offered some of my thoughts around my favorite research topic – the incredibly shrinking marcom expense line. About an hour later, I grabbed my copy of the latest Canadian business. The cover title was “An insider’s guide to the future” – including “your marketing department will disappear (pg. 40)”. Intrigued, I flipped to [...]

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Social media, and the incredibly shrinking marcom expense line

March 16, 2010

A couple of weeks ago Media post published an article called “what’s holding back social network advertising?” In it were what appeared to be some rather jarring statistics – notably that not only do social network ad revenues fall significantly lower than their search and display counterparts, but they are actually forecast to grow much [...]

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Is topix REALLY becoming the local, online watering hole?

March 5, 2010

TechCrunch had an interesting article yesterday on Topix. The central message was that it had quietly become the “local watering hole” for small towns, as evidenced by the total comments on the site (now in the 100 M range).  It then went on to make the claim that the reason people like myself haven’t been [...]

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A prosumer approach to brand as movement

March 2, 2010

Many companies have been pursuing various ways to connect their brands with charitable causes – a subset of what we call “brand as movement.” In some cases, doing so seems easy – say, a bookstore supporting literacy programs. But for many organizations, such obvious connection points do not exist, and it’s a big challenge to [...]

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Thinking about some Facebook usage statistics

February 4, 2010

I spend most of my working life researching how collaborative technologies – particularly social media – are impacting business strategy. My academic background is in economics. So when The Economist does a special report on something like social networking, it always gets my attention. And as with most articles in the publication, I always find [...]

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