Just finished reading a report by the IAB that defines social advertising and lays out some best practices. In the past I’ve posted about businesses partnering with customers to enable personalized advertising (also known as “ads customers actually want”). I’ve also recommended that business need to create tool kits that enable customers to create quality ads. This is a...
I read a post on TechCrunch about one of the Twitter founders, Jack Dorsey starting a company, code-named squirrel that is going to enable individuals the ability to collect payments like merchants. The system is enabled by the iPhone and a physical piece that allows the user to swipe (not steal) a persons credit card. This physical part of this offering is powered by the actual swiping and looks...
In these economically conscious times (aren’t they always?!?!?), I keep hearing; How do I monetize my time on a social network? Well aside from advertising (which is the one obvious answer) there are several ways to ways to think about spending time and effort on social networks. To keep it simple and akin to something that the old guard is familiar with; think of it as a branding exercise...
By now we all know that as businesses, we don’t own our brand quite the way we used to. (Actually we never did it just wasn’t as easy to spread the word about brands as it is today via the internet.) We also know that if you aren’t participating in the conversation then you’re losing out on an opportunity to build brand equity through transparency. The question becomes;...
No. You’re not looking at a post from two months ago. Read on . . . So as I look through the analytics for this site I see that a lot of traffic from search results with users looking for Michael Myers of the Halloween movie series, which has a total of 8 movies (if you don’t include Halloween 3; and you shouldn’t). The searches within Michael Myers are varied. Some examples...
I’ve posted about the potential for the browser to become a users online persona or shadow; the representation/summation of that person’s preferences. I’ve also talked about the future of OpenID and dataportability and how these two concepts together will create a marketers dream, which is an online persona that a person can plug into a companies environment (as long as that...
This past Friday, I had the good fortune of speaking with the founders of Brightkite, Brady Becker and Martin May. I got the ball rolling by walking through the front door and accusing Brady of being Martin . . . Fortunately things got better from there. Once we sat down, they told me they had just finished an interview with the Wall Street Journal the day before and had also made a TechCrunch...
 I pick up the phone and say hello. I then hear; “What the hell is a social object?” I check the number and realize it is a friend of mine (not at all involved in online marketing) and told him that my definition comes from Hugh MacLeod that states a social object is: . . . the reason two people are talking to each other, as opposed to talking to somebody else He then says;...
I’ve been listening to DJ Danger Mouse’ Grey Album lately and thinking about how the mash-up culture Wired Magazine discussed several years ago will impact businesses. Wikipedia defines a mash-up in regards to music as: A mash-up or bootleg is a song or composition created from the combination of the music from one song with the a cappella from another The Grey album is an amazing...
I was recently having a conversation with a client about digital signage and how this could be used in different types of venues. Everything from retail to hotels could easily find a clever usage for this technology as it is. We then started to talk about the potential of digital signage as the “anchor” for location based services. In brief, these are marketing efforts provided by...