Your browser does not support JavaScript. This media can be viewed at http://www.podtech.net/home/5018/brand-engagement-social-media-storytelling This definition of social media is hard to beat. It boils to three steps: 1. Listen to the conversations that people are having about your brand, the brands of your competitors and the issues that you both address; 2. Ask yourself how you can be useful to those conversations, either by making changes to your product or Continue reading →

XP – that stable, reliable operating system we have pretty much gotten used to – is going to be killed off in 73 days time, on 30th June. Windows users will then only have the choice of “upgrading” to Vista, an OS which has proved troublesome for pretty much all its users. You can sign the online petition to ask Microsoft to keep XP alive here. There are 153,000 so Continue reading →

Joe Marchese over at MediaPost has a good post on the Watts vs. Keller controversy. He, too, thinks that the truth lies in a middle ground. Influencers are important, but not for viral marketing. Hubs/mavens/folks with high “betweenness centrality” scores are helpful in that case. The experience of our client the UK confectionery manufacturer Cadbury in two separate 2007 campaigns would seem to support this. In one campaign we helped Continue reading →

Duncan Watts is a Yahoo researcher who has done detailed work looking at the best strategy to launch a viral campaign – the kind of campaign which is aimed at getting the consumer to pass the idea along. Watts compares campaigns which targeted viral communications via “influentials” in the social network with campaigns which simply seeded the viral in the maximum number of places in the network. Watts found that Continue reading →

Our competitor Umbria – Boulder, Colorado based text mining company – has been acquired by J.D. Power/McGraw Hill. J.D. Power’s customer satisfaction focus links nicely with the kind of opinion-mining methodology used by Umbria. A good deal for both.