• Digging For Digg's Revenue Model
    It seems somehow fitting that I'm ending the downbeat year of 2008 pondering a BusinessWeek story that highlighted how Digg, in particular, is struggling to be profitable. You didn't expect I was going to end on an upbeat note, did you?
  • AOL and Yahoo Show that for Social Media, It's Still Open Season
    The last time I wrote about open social -- well, actually it was more about data portability, or the ability to carry your social network data with you all over the Web -- was May 7. Since then, the topic had mostly gone quiet, until two recent announcements by Yahoo and AOL countered the trend. Not coincidentally, they are both portals that have lost much of their online buzz, and both announcements are clear attempts to hitch onto the social networking train before it gets too far away.
  • In An Unscientific Survey, Looks Like My Contemporaries Are Finally Discovering Facebook
    Without totally giving away my age, let's just say I'm old enough to have asked for one of the later Beatles albums as a present at the time of its release. (While you digest that fact, you should know I was an early bloomer in growing a music collection.) Thus, with my advancing age in mind, I've been conducting an unscientific demographic experiment over the last year or so concerning my Facebook account. It centered on the following question: When would my suburban mom contemporaries, and the people I knew from college and high school who don't write a social …
  • Pondering The End Of Pownce -- Or, How Many Social Nets Does One Columnist Need?
    I'm pretty sure that I never went to the Pownce.com site until today, the day after it was announced that the Twitter competitor was going to transmit its last micro-post a week from Monday. Never having been part of the community, visiting the site only now felt a little bit like rubber-necking at the site of a car crash. It's interesting to watch, as long as the cars are totaled, but all the humans walk away from the wreckage with nary a scratch
  • Parkay Could Have Used Social Media To, Well, Pass The Parkay
    Maybe I've been focusing on this social media thing for too long, because lately I seem to look for a social media aspect to every ad campaign I read about. And so it was, yesterday morning, that I came across a story in Marketing Daily about the resurrection of the famed "Talking Tub" campaign for Parkay. The good news -- for ad nostalgia enthusiasts -- is that the campaign is back. The bad news, is that, from what I can tell, the brand missed one of the most obvious, and admittedly silly, social media opportunities since the first spoof commercial …
  • Making Sense Of Social Media
    When your 80-year-old mother forwards a video to you each day and your mother-in-law writes a blog, you can't help but pay attention to the growth, acceptance and utility of social media. According to Forrester's 2008 Social Technographic Profile, three out of four U.S. adults use web technologies and tools to connect with other people and to share information. Adoption has grown from 56% just a year ago.
  • Social Media And The Motrin Controversy: Or, Will Social Media Kill Advertising Creativity?
    Perhaps, even if your brand preference is Advil, you spent the early part of the week mired in the Motrin controversy. If not, I'll recap, and then we can turn to my big question of the day.
  • President-Elect Obama, Don't Let Your Social Media Channels Grow Cold
    Now that the fairy dust has settled on last week's historic election, it's time to contemplate how president-elect Obama will translate the communications channels he honed during the campaign into ones that serve his presidency. I'm certainly not the first person to write about this, but as the alleged Social Media Insider, I'm fascinated by how he might use social media going forward.
  • Call For Submissions On What Twitter's Biz Model Should Be: I'm Serious!
    As anyone who reads this column knows, I am a Twitter-aholic, a condition that was most recently brought home to me last night when I found myself constantly checking tweets as the election results rolled in. But part of that obsession is something most of you never see. I wonder, as do many of us, what Twitter's business model is to be. I want it to eventually figure out how to make money so that my habit can continue to be fed.
  • Drinking In The New Pepsi's Social Media Strategy
    Ever since the failure of new Coke several decades ago, I've been fascinated by how much time and brain cells people are willing to invest in their choice of soda. So my curiosity was piqued when Edelman's Steve Rubel let it be known to his Twitter-verse the other day that one of the agency's clients, Pepsi, had set up a room on Friendfeed called the Pepsi Cooler, which asks consumers to "Join us as together we shape Pepsi's social media future. We're changing the way we do things and want to have you along for the ride."
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