Brand sponsored social media campaigns are popping up everywhere. From SeaWorld, Starbucks, and Dunkin’ Donuts, to Cadbury, A&E, and even Universal, it’s officially the hot trend to replace or supplement traditional marketing campaigns with social media.
According to Forrester Research’s  Social Technographics update 76% of all US Internet users are active on social media and 93 [...]

Listening to the online conversations can give you insights into what people are interested in. It should also give you a bright idea about what kind of content you can produce that brings value to that conversation. How you present that content  determines whether you’re successful. You need to find the content about your cause, [...]

What is multicultural social media? Last night I spoke at a PRSA LA event on reaching diverse audiences with social media. One point came across clearly from all four speakers on the panel:  people gravitate to like-minded people. They form communities around some common bond, but it’s not necessarily around language,  ethnics or culture.  It [...]

A new study from the CMO Council and the Pointer Media Network shows that the recession has had a major impact on brand loyalty. The truth about brand loyalty, and its frequently transient nature, may surprise many seasoned brand marketers and  retailers, says the report.  Only 48% of the high-loyalty consumers identified in 2007 remained [...]

Never have CEOs been under so much scrutiny.  Nearly half of a company’s reputation is attributable to its CEO, says the Burson-Marstellar “Building CEO Capital” report.  And ninety-two percent of business decision makers who view a CEO favorably are also likely to maintain confidence in a company, even if its share price lags.
During difficult and [...]

Social Media moves at a rapid pace.  Changes in behavior happen much faster than we’re accustomed to.  It’s important to stay ahead of the curve and have your finger on the social media pulse, so that you don’t make mistakes in your planning due to operating off old numbers.
Augie Ray calls out a few marketers [...]

At the PRSA T3 conference Greg Jarboe of  SEO-PR moderated the  panel “Boosting PR Results with SEO, SEM & RSS,” and by a show of hands about one third of the audience said they are optimizing press releases for search.  And while that might sound like a small percentage, theadoption of SEO tactics by PR [...]

Dell made a statement on their Direct2Dell blog this week that they can attribute more than $2 million in revenue to their @DellOutlet Twitter feed.  They now have over 600,000 followers on this feed. In addition Dell is also seeing that this Twitter feed is driving interest in new product. People come from  @DellOutlet on [...]

One of the most important activities in doing a social media strategy is listening to the online conversations to determine where the most buzz is about you, your company, your products, your services, your competitors. Understanding where people are gathering month to month can give insights  into consumer trends. Compete’s figures for May are out [...]

Matt Cutts of Google shared some interesting ideas about where search is going in 2009 with Mike McDonald of WebProNews.

Watch the video interview
“Pay attention to traffic, pay attention to conversions and keep building good content,” said Cutts.  He noted that people will continue to pay attention to video and images in 2009 and that submitting [...]