Sometimes an ad is just an ad, and sometimes you screw up in ways that will resonate for a long time. My mother still talks about one particularly awful promotion: a local department store which, at the height of the 1968 riots, ran ads to alert customers that while...
Have you ever gone through Twitter withdrawal? I've been a bit quiet the last two weeks, and really didn't mind being mostly offline. But solitude only lasts so long. So I officially re-energized today with what I termed my "social media catch-up morning." Friday's my...
What do a feminist author and a soap opera star have in common? You can do a lot of free association when you're on cold meds. I was talking to a friend of mine the other day about something related to advertising. That got me thinking about a book I once read for a...
Like many people, I was impressed yesterday by how effectively the Obama transition team had worked behind the scenes to rebrand the U.S. government. By 12:02 p.m., the first tweets were showing up alerting people that whitehouse.gov now belonged to the new president....
Companies make mistakes. After all, they're run by people--and we're not perfect. But those that "get" customer service understand that it's how you respond after the fact that truly leaves an impact. Good or bad. Yesterday, Comcast responded in a way that says: We're...
I once gave a talk to a group of independent consultants about how losing a big client can be a good thing. I've been thinking about the topic a lot lately as I see more and more people lose jobs or clients, or feel the pinch of shrinking marcomm budgets. As many of...
I read a very interesting post earlier today in which Matt McDonald threw out some ideas about how Twitter might monetize. One idea he suggested was to create tweet clouds that could help advertisers create targeted tweet blasts. So here's mine, drawn from my tweets...
Have you ever deleted a tweet because you were afraid it might be taken out of context? I did, and I'm not sure I made the right decision. But I have seen enough mob mentality on Twitter recently that I didn't want to make lots of people mad at me on January 2. Not...
I went to see Pompeii yesterday. Not the Roman city buried after Mount Vesuvius erupted in AD 79, but the traveling exhibit of sculpture and other artifacts recovered from homes around the Bay of Naples. As I walked through the rooms looking at the pieces of people's...
When I wrote my post about the value of LinkedIn, I called it a "must have" element of every professional's online presence. I still believe that. So why are so many people devaluing their profiles with endless drivel? I belong to several LinkedIn Groups, and they are...