• Parade To Nowhere: When Real-Time Marketing Isn't Relevant
    Early on Monday morning, at the start of Advertising Week, I came up from the Times Square subway station and walked straight into the parade of brand characters coming down the street. There, in a fleet of convertible Mini-Coopers, rode the Kool-Aid pitcher, the Keebler Elf, and other spokes-symbols, tailed by an open-air double-decker bus containing even more of them. Some people in Times Square took pictures, while many of them scratched their heads, as if to say, "What, exactly, are they all doing here?" It's a question I've asked myself a lot lately, since the quest for relevance has …
  • Marketing Requires A Childlike Heart
    Bryan writes a poem about the need to keep a childlike attitude to foster creativity.
  • Pinterest: The Latest Social Network to Suffer from FOA (Fear of Advertising)
    If you've been reading this week's headlines, maybe the headline of this column threw you off. After all, isn't this the week that Pinterest - after several years of pinning digital images with no revenue to show for it - unveiled its first ad product?
  • Building vs. Fostering Community In Social
    Social media is all about community. Without community, there is no social - unless you're having schizophrenic conversations with yourself. But, there's a big difference between BUILDING a community and FOSTERING a community.
  • Four Reasons Why Twitter's Going Public Doesn't Make It Facebook
    Once again, it's time for the Social Media Insider to give out investment advice, which pretty much means you should click away from this column as fast as your fingers can take you. For the two of you who didn't follow that advice: I'm going to let you in on a few reasons why Twitter isn't Facebook, despite the comparisons.
  • How Visual Networks Are Transforming Social Media
    Social media, which has proven to be a very powerful way for brands to build authentic connections with their audience, is going through a metamorphosis. Social Media 1.0 was about the quest to acquire fans on Facebook at any cost and in any way. It turned out that most of those fans were neither brand advocates nor prospective customers. Social Media 2.0 is about quality and relevance, not volume. It's happening via images, hashtags, user-generated content and curation -- and it's taking place on new public, visual and inter-connected interest-based networks like Pinterest, Instagram, Tumblr, Polyvore, Houzz, Vine and WeHeartIt.
  • Is Line The Next Big Social Network? Your Pundit-in-Residence Says 'YES!'
    As much as I'm known for my conviction that Facebook won't go away any time soon, I also like to pretend I know what the next big thing in social media is going to be. So, in that spirit, I'm going to predict it is Line, a mobile social app from South Korea, that first came to my attention during our Social Media Insider Summit last month.
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