Enabling Runners to Just Do It Clients ask me all the time: “Should we get into social media”? And I say the same thing every time: “Wrong question”! The question isn’t “should” it’s “how”! Almost every brand should participate in social

The Long Tail of Social Media PR In PR 2.0, you don’t have to push product placement on cooking shows. You don’t even have to woo influential mom bloggers. No, social media success can be found further

A Discussion About Personalization and Community At a recent Mediabistro conference, innovative women across diverse industries came together to discuss the state of media today and where it’s headed. From speaker to speaker, two key trends kept working their way into the conversation:

It is a Fundamental and Immutable Law of Marketing: Begin with a Deep Understanding of Your Customer. For years, this concept has been preached as a key ingredient to marketing success and an important means to an end. The idea has been to take whatever the marketer can find out about its customers and leverage [...]

Information Is Not Enough A recent National Grocers Association study confirmed what we already know — 75% of consumers use the Internet on a regular basis to learn about nutrition issues. That’s more than any other source. So, it’s no surprise that nearly every healthy brand has a website,

In my last post about “Podcamp 2010″ I talked about the notion of the unconference for anyone interested in exploring the cutting-edge of social media. I don’t want to be redundant here but If you stick with my slight repetition you’ll see where I’m going with

Branding Beyond the Brief Elsewhere on the world wide web, there is a challenge to state the difference between a brand and a commodity in a sentence or less. Many marketers answered the challenge. After all, most of us think we know the difference. Many of us make a living based on how

Podcamp Offers Fresh Perspectives on Social Media In Mitch Joel’s book “Six Pixels of Separation” he talks about a new kind of conference that is being created by people who are organizing online but meeting up in the real world. Anyone can create an unconference and anyone can speak at an unconference.

Engage the Market, not Just a Hypothesis It is Marketing 101 gospel that you must have a customer target to position a brand or its offerings. Target is one of the four pillars of classical positioning alongside frame of reference, benefit and reasons to believe. But I’m not so sure targeting is necessary

The Brand Platform Comes to Life in the Age of Social Marketing Now more than ever, exercises that develop and fine tune a brand’s fundamentals, or brand platform, are important not only as an internal compass for CPG marketers, but also serve as a concrete blueprint for the brand’s voice and overall approach in social