Wide Angle

One of the best things about working in social media is memes – the tracking and analysis of the periodic hilarious stories that spread virally throughout the internet. The story of Stephen Slater was one such meme; the riotous “Double Rainbow” video from earlier this summer was another. These memes, for a fleeting moment, sew the far-flung reaches of the web into a single fabric of mutual laughter and/or mockery; in a time of sharp public and political divisions, they’re a welcome respite from the norm. Read More »

Last month, the Altimeter Group, a social media consultancy, released a report titled “The 8 Success Criteria For Facebook Page Marketing” – a set of common behaviors and attributes of corporate Facebook pages that they correlated with a high degree of social media success. Here are the eight criteria: Read More »

Marketing is about creativity, punchy language, and ad campaigns, right?  Not in social media. This post summarizes 5 outdated marketing beliefs and offers quick tips for adapting to the new world of ‘unmarketing.’ Read More »

I met with a retail-industry member last week that’s in the midst of growing one of their businesses from a regional brand focused on Latin America to a global brand with a strong footprint in the US and the UK.  As we talked about what it will take to enter a crowded retail space, our member expressed it this way, “we need to be very clear what are our brand standards and what are our brand standouts.”

I loved the simplicity of the statement and the depth of the insight. Given the increasing prevalence of mobile/social/location technologies like Foursquare, it can be awfully tough for retailers to differentiate, so the customer experience has never been more important.  Do you know the difference between your brand standards and your brand standouts?  If you are like most businesses, the truthful answer is “no”. Read More »

To be a high-tech marketer these days is to have it slightly better than most – small degrees in a recessionary economy, but better nonetheless. Tech companies are outperforming analysts’ earnings estimates as Droids, iPhones, and Torches find thumbs more than willing to take the first step toward carpal tunnel. But how do the best high-tech companies – particularly those in the B2B space – keep positive momentum while douple-dip fears stoke market stagnation? Read More »

Ah, the good old United States of America. Home of mom, baseball, apple pie, the Mustang and the Corvette. It stands to reason that the most auto-dense country in the world would be leading the charge of automotive innovation, and we covered some of the innovative products coming from domestic manufacturers here.

But that’s not stopping the rest of the world from employing their resources to make car ownership easier, cheaper and greener. Our friends at Iconoculture have rounded up some of the best examples of how car ownership is changing throughout the world. Read More »

(Editor’s note: for the uninitiated, BlogHer and BlogHer Business are annual conferences of women in social media, typically held back-to-back. BlogHer is a conference of female social media participants, while BlogHer business is a conference on marketing to women via social media. Our guest poster, Jennifer Polk, attended both, and shares her thoughts here. Thanks, Jennifer!)

I was fortunate to attend both BlogHer and BlogHer Business for the first time. As a marketer, blogger and conversationalist, I relished the opportunity to influence and be influenced by other marketers and bloggers and learn from some of the most passionate women bloggers of today. Read More »

We just came back from an innovation session kindly hosted by W.L. Gore and Associates (best known by consumers for the GORE-TEX fabric).  We spent a half day discussing the challenges of pre-funnel product and service innovation, and we were treated to a tour of Gore’s Capabilities Center.

One of the big lessons for me was the importance of organizing for innovation – but not the way you think.  Yes, one of the big questions we hear is about organizational structure, but what became clear during our session was that changing the way you look at your world, including your existing products and services and assumed customer needs, is a critical step to being more creative — even more than how you organize your people. Read More »

Chunky aloe vera cooler, anyone? According to a recent Reuters article, Coca-Cola is trying “drink texture” innovation along these lines, in hopes of finding the next billion-dollar brand.  In another development, earlier this summer, P&G launched its eStore, enabling it to sell everything from Fusion razors to Regenerist micro-sculpting cream (whatever that is…bet it could double as a dessert topping).

Seemingly unrelated developments—but if you look closer, there’s an interesting link in these two anecdotes that reveals an opportunity for consumer packaged goods (CPG) companies to think differently about innovation.  That is, the rise of digital and social media should enable CPGs to relax some important constraints on their innovation strategies—namely, the tyranny of fixed shelf space in retail stores.

That’s where the P&G anecdote comes in.  What if you relaxed that shelf space constraint, along the lines of what P&G is doing with its eStore? If you do that, you have to worry less about giving up some of the shelf space of tried-and-true, mass appeal, high earnings products in return for stocking untried, new products that may not deliver the same earnings per-square-foot.  That’s because with a virtual storefront, warehouse space for stocking physical product is cheap and plentiful.  This opens up the opportunity for brands to increase the mix of ideas in their innovation portfolios that are of a more niche profile, because they can stock the product without the fixed shelf space constraint. Read More »

Here in Washington, the community is abuzz with news that Wikileaks, a non-profit organization dedicated to providing whistleblowers a safe place to publish sensitive information, has released a gargantuan store of documents related to the war in Afghanistan. The documents paint a picture that is decidedly at odds with more official portrayals of the war.

The same day, the Library of Congress’ Copyright Office determined that “jailbreaking” the iPhone – a process that allows users to access apps not available in Apple’s App Store – does not violate copyright laws. Apple contends that jailbreaking can harm the phone’s user experience, and leave it vulnerable to viruses; the company voids warranties of jailbroken phones. The Copyright Office, however, said in its ruling that jailbreaking is “innocuous at worst and beneficial at best.”

Regardless of your opinion on the war in Afghanistan, the ethics of leaking sensitive information to the public, or the use of products in ways that weren’t intended, these examples serve to illustrate one principle of the changing information economy: You are not in control. Read More »