John Bell, who heads up Ogilvy PR's global 360° Digital Influence team, touches on the difficulty of selling social media plans to mainstream clients. Many brands and businesses want to take advantage of social media - influencer outreach, activation of networks or communities and radical visibility - to fill out their marcom plan. They are not ready, or maybe even suitable for organizational change. They need to …
About Time
According to Chicago Tribune, HBO is rolling out a new service today to allow subscribers to watch HBO programs, movies and sports shows on their computers. The service will be offered first in Milwaukee and Green Bay, Wis., through HBO's sister company Time Warner Cable, which is also part of the Time Warner Inc. media conglomerate. The service is only available to HBO subscribers who also use Time Warner Cable for …
Everyone Breathe Easy, Mass Marketing Still Works
Duncan Watts is causing a ruckus. Just as Madison Avenue gets its head around niche marketing on a macro scale, the academic Aussie says marketing to so-called Influentials doesn't work. He says the whole idea is bunk and that he has the data to prove it. Watts has performed a series of controversial, barn-burning experiments challenging the whole Influentials thesis. He has analyzed email patterns and found that …
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Soc Nets Are The New Portals
The New York Times is running an interesting piece on MySpace, which receives more than 1.3 billion page views a day and has 110 million members. For instance, I now know that Chris DeWolfe, the business face of the company, and co-founder Tom Anderson, 37, the product specialist, both recently signed new contracts reported to be worth $7.5 million a year. But the thing that stands out for me is the realization that …
It’s Raining Splog Pings
According to BusinessWeek, over 99% of all the pings and updates pouring into Technorati’s servers come from spam blogs. Technorati CEO, David Sifry’s take: “All healthy ecosystems have parasites.” Wikipedia's definition of spam blog: Spam blogs, sometimes referred to by the neologism splogs, are artificially created weblog sites which the author uses to promote affiliated websites or to increase the search engine …
Armano On Armano
David Armano of Critical Mass knows how to talk the talk. We’re focused on relevant, groundbreaking solutions that fuse style and substance—insight driven creative, supported by technology, which ultimately leads to measurable results. Not merely flashy creative or fleeting viral campaigns, but rather, applications that shift consumer behavior, brand experiences that deepen customer relationships and game-changing …
GSP 2.0
Ad Age chose Goodby Silverstein and Partners as its agency of the year. Two things jumped out at me from the article. GSP's understanding of content's central role in our business. "Content is an evolution of where agencies are going," Mr. Silverstein says. "We have become a content house. We, in a sense, are our own Pixar. [In 2008] I hope to evolve to a point where we make more content for our clients and …
Union Airs WAPO’s Dirty Laundry
According to The New York Times, The Communications Workers of America union is seeking to restart stalled contract talks with The Washington Post. The union represents 400 manufacturing workers at the Post. The union is running a radio, print and outdoor campaign that seeks to embarrass the paper's management and bring them to the bargaining table for the first time in five years. …