• ONLINE SPIN
    The Little Things Can Offer The Greatest Lessons And Inspiration
    My 18-month-old son has been obsessed with hinges since the age of six months. It's awesome to watch such a simple apparatus fascinate such an early yet fast-developing mind. Any door or large object empowered with a hinge will captivate my son longer than any toy specifically designed to entertain or stimulate. A future engineer? Maybe.
  • ONLINE SPIN
    Branding In An Age Of Authenticity
    In the new world of marketing communication, the future will be a lot less about what you say and much more about what you do. Thus, brands now live and die by how they perform for their customers, because the Internet permits those customers service stories to be amplified and shared. The power of those experiences is already starting to eclipse anything that marketers can do with advertising. We've seen this in the positive case of Zappos sending flowers to a bereaving customer and we've seen it in the negative, as in Jeff Jarvis's Dell Hell.
  • ONLINE SPIN
    Intelligent Data And The Semantic Web
    Last year I started writing about Web 3.0 -- the concept of the Semantic Web -- and over the last few weeks I've seen more and read more on this topic, which leads me to believe that it's gaining steam. The Semantic Web refers to a layer of intelligence that could be applied over the Internet and tailored in a manner that would deliver a fully customized experience to users, providing them with what they would want, based on a set of algorithms that hypothesize what they like, want and need.
  • ONLINE SPIN
    Why Web Sites And Online Marketing Suck
    I have long been convinced that standard online marketing metrics were not only ineffective and inefficient for marketers, but were also destroying the quality of content on the Internet. Over a year ago I wrote about "Advertising's Role In Crippling The Internet As A Medium" and again in "The Online Advertising Conundrum - More Metrics, Less Meaning." The basic gist was this: because marketers were demanding metrics (i.e. impressions, clicks) that did not necessarily equate to value for a marketer, and could be faked or gamed, traditional media metrics were creating a lose-lose-lose eco-system on the Internet for publishers, advertisers …
  • ONLINE SPIN
    How To Make Conferences Great
    As a regular attendee, speaker and occasional programmer and sponsor at a range of interactive marketing events, I've become sensitive to several facets that can make or break the conference experience. Most of these are obvious, but the obvious too often is neglected or ignored altogether. Conference producers, take note! Here are my top ten recommendations to be great...
  • ONLINE SPIN
    Coming Fast: True Multi-Platform Media Marketing
    At least since the early days of radio, when newspaper companies tried to leverage their local print franchises into local multi-platform media franchises -- or some might say, leverage their print monopolies into multi-platform monopolies -- folks have been thinking about how to make different forms of media work together to create more power. For all of the talk of "360 degree media and marketing," true multi-platform media marketing is still largely just a lot of talk and not a lot of tangible action. However, I think that we are going to see a lot of change here very soon. …
  • ONLINE SPIN
    Leveraging Social Media To Create Social Commerce
    If you recall, way back in November of last year, I laid out my predictions for 2008. Among those predictions, of which I have to say I'm not doing too well, there was one for the "killer app" in social media -- and I want to revisit that topic because I'm still flabbergasted that no one has come up with it yet!
  • ONLINE SPIN
    Social Media For Social Good
    Social media's awesome power can really take your breath away when you take a second to step back and see the change that it can cause in the world. Many brands and traditional media companies are focused on social media's effects on their relationships with consumers. Yet it is social media's ability to fundamentally shift how people discover, connect, communicate and interact with each other that what makes the space so powerful.
  • ONLINE SPIN
    Can't Get No Satisfaction?
    It seems ironic to me to be looking at consumer satisfaction here in the States. With gas prices over $4 per gallon and rising, the housing market at an all-time low and a recession looming (if not here already) can consumers be confident? Well, according to a recent Spring 2008 Top 100 Online Retail Satisfaction Index report by ForSee Results, consumer confidence is up 1.4% from last year.
  • ONLINE SPIN
    Marketers: Beware Of Blogging Simply For SEO
    SEO professionals should be fluent in social media; however, I'm deeply troubled by the philosophy of blogging for the foremost objective of SEO. As a marketer, with accountability for my company's brand and reputation, I would never recommend this approach. In fact, I urge all marketers to go out of their way to avoid being led into social media when the motivation is rooted primarily in the SEO results you may achieve.
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