Consumers and buyers increasingly want companies to engage them in Social Media. Our experience has shown (and others too have noted this) that when we’re relly angry at a service or product we tell our friends and colleagues and not always the company we’re angry at. We might call the company’s customer service, but is [...]

What makes our world so incredible is the mix of cultures on this little planet. This diversity is exemplified and amplified in Social Media applications. One might ponder that Social Media could be a way of uniting us, resulting in less wars, greater societal wealth and more. Coming back to earth for a moment, there [...]

Facing the issue of dealing with foreign languages in Social Media engagement as a business is going to come up at some point. In the U.S. it’s dealing with Spanish, in Canada with French and increasingly Mandarin, Hindi or other dialects. Dealing with other languages is something Europeans are very familiar with, often either French, [...]

We believe there is now a clear divide on the Web. That of the Commerce Web and the Social Web. Many a business has invested heavily in a Web presence, from site creation and design, to carefully planned navigation and search engine optimization. We term this as the Commerce Web. It is where commerce takes [...]

A point of challenge for business looking to engage in Social Media, whether for marketing, sales or customer service, is one word; emtions. Having read an excellent post today on the Collective Thoughts blog about “empathy” in Social Media engagement, this brought to light the emotional element of Social Media.
As marketers and communicators in business [...]

If you’re looking to engage your company or organization in Social Media and you think Facebook is the place to start, you could be wrong. If you also think a some advertising on Facebook or MySpace and maybe a cool application in Facebook is the way to go, you may end up wondering why it [...]

There is a lot of discussion around monetizing Social Media, and rightly so. Our experience however, is that the approach and thinking around monetization of Social Media has been focused from the wrong frame of reference - that of Web 1.0 and the expectation of fast revenues via advertising. Businesses often anticipate that Social Media [...]

Rightfully,many businesses are looking at Social Media with a wary eye, as if it were some giant monster that might drag them out into the bright daylight and leave them helpless and stricken. It has happened. The CEO of JetBlue lost his job after bloggers and consumers watched their every move following a crisis with [...]

Technology has absolutely nothing to do with Social Media. While you might use certain technology to access Social Media, it actually much the same as a car. You don’t have to be a mechanic to drive a car. All you need to do is learn to turn the keys, shift the gears and steer. Cars [...]

What could laundry soap possibly have to do with Social Media and change? Everything. It started back in the early 1920’s when advertising started to become a little more sophisticated. Then in the 1950’s, manufacturers woke up to the fact that women actually had more buying power than men. As TV adoption grew, manufacturers, like [...]