We are permission-seeking creatures. We want permission to act, to pursue, to create, to engage. We look for permission from bosses, civil authorities, spouses, parents. The concept of social proof has at its core the idea of permission: that seeing someone like us behave a certain way gives us permission to do the same.

I'm still in a glow from my past week, having had the good fortune to spend four-and-a-half days of it in London watching the Olympics games. It was an extraordinary experience that I will not soon forget.

The marketing business is all about generating and utilizing customer insights through data. I'm certainly a firm believer in the power of insights, but let's not forget that sometimes the best way to uncover value is to examine the opposite of something and see what value that brings. In that vein, what's the opposite of a customer insight? Maybe it's contextual outsights?

Fan generation is perhaps the most common goal for advertising on Facebook. In fact, Facebook itself recommends always-on fan-generation campaigns through its Marketplace ads, while using its Premium ads for other time-sensitive spot campaigns. While Facebook advertising for fan generation is a foundational activity, what other goals should marketers embrace when it comes to Facebook Ads?

Frankly, being at a company that is getting pummeled by the press daily isn't pleasant. It's the professional equivalent of being in an intensive care unit. Colleagues will ask you about your company in hushed tones. "So... how's it going over there?" they will ask you tentatively.

1. The movement is not about you. It is not about its leaders, or even about its followers. It is about itself. Like all complex systems, a movement has emergent properties that cannot be explained through its component parts.

Data is fast becoming the center of the marketing universe. A marketer's future career now depends very heavily on his ability to understand how to use data and implement it for his needs. You can still buy premium contextual placements, but data should be informing everything you do, from the decision to purchase that media, to the messaging you place there, to the optimized landing page where you drive users dependent on the data you have available about them.

"Wow, your Facebook News Feed is filled with pictures of your friends' kids!" said my 26-year-old brother-in-law after glimpsing my phone's Facebook News Feed. I never thought of my Facebook News Feed as a mecca for pictures of my friends' kids. To me, it's a blur of status updates from family, friends, work peers, and more distant industry colleagues. Nonetheless, the contrast observed by my brother-in-law is a good example of how our opt-in social connections and social network algorithms (like Facebook's EdgeRank) give the sense of mass-shared experiences when, in fact, they are more personalized and niche

New York City's media industry is the largest and most vibrant in the world. The city has more billion-dollar-plus media companies and employs more people than any other metropolis. But as the New York City Economic Development Corporation (NYCEDC) pointed out in a study earlier this year, there are steps that the city needs to take to maintain its leadership position. Silicon Valley-based companies like Google, Facebook and Twitter have eclipsed New York over the past decade, at least in terms of digital media. Because of this, most of the steps recommended by the NYCEDC involve spurring entrepreneurship and helping …

"We need to be on Facebook," they tell me. "Everyone's on Facebook." "Yes," I say, "but you're a B2B company. When people are on Facebook they want to hang out with friends and family -- they're there to avoid their job, not do more of it." "Yes," they say, "but our chief competitor is on Facebook." "Yes," I say, "but they have 12 Likes. Nine of them are staff, and the other three are teenagers."