From the monthly archives:

November 2009

Social – Mainstream Marketing?

November 25, 2009

When you get a social networking invitation from your single-brew coffee maker, you know that social media is now mainstream.
Today’s email in-box featured this invitation from Tassimo, to follow their “taste master” on Twitter or become a fan on Facebook. I was happy to see how well they interact with customers via Facebook and [...]

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Conflict Looms: Your Organization’s Social Media Voice vs. The Power of Personal Brands

November 17, 2009

Social media experts like Shiv Singh recommend that you designate one or more people to serve as your organization’s social media voice.

The challenge with this recommendation is that such people are in short supply and high demand. If you’re lucky enough to employ people with authentic SIM voices, you’re vulnerable to poaching if you can’t motivate them to stay with your organization.

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Building a Great Community Online

November 13, 2009

One of the best examples of a thriving online community is I Love Typography. Almost 50,000 people subscribe to its RSS feeds. There are many voices: multiple authors and lots of people who care enough to respond. It feels vibrant and live. People share experiences and point to great examples of typography in use.

But what makes this such a vibrant community? What lessons can we take away from this example and apply elsewhere?

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Learning from Parisian Shop Windows

November 13, 2009

I love strolling and window shopping in Paris. There’s a special mystique that window dressers in Paris employ that brand teams and marketers everywhere would do well to emulate.
Shop windows in Paris do a wonderful job of conveying the idea of what’s being sold — of conveying the brand essence, helping you envision how you [...]

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Women: The World’s Biggest Untapped Market

November 10, 2009

How will your business address the enormous business opportunity that lies within the so-called “female economy?” Did you know that (according to the HBR, 9/09):

Women now drive the world economy.

As a market, women represent a bigger opportunity than China and India combined — more than twice as big.

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Windows 7: Results So Far

November 10, 2009

Yesterday I took the leap and upgraded my primary PC from Vista Ultimate to Windows 7 Ultimate. The upgrade took 3 hours, given the large number of applications and data files on my tower PC. (I also upgraded two Macs to Snow Leopard 10.6.2 while waiting for the Windows 7 upgrade to complete.)

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Sparking “Sidebar” Conversations

November 3, 2009

Today I received one of the best-ever comments on a blog posting; however, the person who responded to my post took the time to track down my address and then sent me a very thoughtful message via email. Given the trouble he took to communicate in this manner, I surmise that he did not want [...]

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