A few months ago, I stumbled upon Pinterest, an image-sharing, link-loving social network.  I loved the site’s simplicity and visual beauty.   The beautiful imagery that pinners post hooked me immediately.
It turns out, I was not alone in discovering the site.  While Pinterest has been around for two years, it wasn’t until the end of 2011 that the site started to catch on — and in 2012, it started to grow exponentially seeing over 11 million unique visitors in January 2012 alone according to … Read more

It’s no news that marketers are often guilty of Shiny Object Syndrome — i.e., being mesmerized by the latest technology at the expense of business objectives. QR codes, scannable two dimensional bar codes, appear to be the latest shiny object for digital marketers.  In NYC, it is difficult to travel more than a few blocks before you encounter a QR code — on billboards, on a store window, in a cab, on a bus shelter or in a subway car.

But the ubiquity doesn’t mean that QR codes are effective.  A recent Twitter exchange with Uwe Hook (@uwehook), co-founder of … Read more

This past summer I had the great fortune of meeting Mike Schneider, SVP, Digital Incubator at Allen & Gerritsen.  We co-authored this piece which first appeared on the Harvard Business Review blog as well as a white paper “Loyalty in 4-D: How Brands and Consumers Can Win at Location-Based Services” that you can download here.

Thanks to the emergence of location-based services such as Foursquare, Gowalla, and now Facebook Places, millions of users are recording their daily adventures and broadcasting digital breadcrumbs to their social graph. However, the brand value of a check-in on a location-based … Read more

In real estate, the mantra has always been “location, location, location” to underscore the value of being in the right place.  Now, with the advent of geo-location social networks like FourSquare, GoWalla, Hot Potato and CauseWorld that mantra extends to the digitally connected world.  Only now, the physical location takes a back seat to the sharing of physically being at the location.  And, that sharing of location check-ins is valuable for both the providers of these services and marketers.  Which is why Twitter began … Read more

It started as a simple tweet: can you help and fill out this survey?  We’ll share results to all who participate.  Interested in the topic, I clicked on the link only to find a very short, poorly designed survey.  The survey had seven questions (not counting the email capture for results sharing) of which several were closed ended essentially binary questions — i.e, “yes”, “no” and “maybe” were the only answer options.  There were two open ends to collect unaided recall of favorite cause marketing programs and past participation in cause marketing programs.

I … Read more

In last Sunday’s New York Times Magazine, Wired Magazine contributing editor Guy Wolf profiled self-trackers — individuals who track their daily habits, whatever they may be — in The Data Driven Life.  Wolf acknowledges that people have long tracked their behavior — e.g., recording checks, noting their weight, caloric intake and output, etc.  But, in the past, that tracking was done by paper and pen. And, it was private.  Now, self-trackers have no shortage of web and mobile applications and devices that allow them to not only digitally record … Read more

The other night while watching CBS’s “The Good Wife,” I saw Apple’s newest iPhone television spot, “First Steps.” In the storyline, a young mother is talking about her child’s first steps, which she then records and sends to her mother and grandfather. The tagline, “We would never have shared all that without the iPhone,” brilliantly signals key multi-generational benefits of the 3GS iPhones: capturing and sharing important family milestones…. Read more

I have been a huge fan of Jesse Thomas since first seeing his work on the conversation prism last year.  A creative designer, he has a knack for visually representing data — and in doing so, telling a compelling story.

This video, which he posted on Vimeo last week, tells the tale of our very networked, digital lives — how it started, how far it reaches and how rapidly it has grown.  While some of the data is … Read more

A week after launching Buzz, Google’s new social network product, the company faced an avalanche of criticism for its privacy violations and forced them to make changes on the fly, set up a war room to monitor the negative feedback and issue this public apology on the Gmail blog this weekend:
“We’ve heard your feedback loud and clear, and since we launched Google Buzz four days ago, we’ve been working around the clock to address the concerns you’ve raised. Today, we wanted to let you know … Read more

Seth Godin, who describes himself pithily as a “writer, speaker, agent of change,” invited 69 smart folks to contribute observations on What Matters Now and then made the e-book available for free.

As we close out this decade that Time Magazine called the Decade From Hell, it is refreshing to read so many optimistic entries of What Matters Now.  Here are a few of my favorite excerpts:

Mitch Joel on Compassion: Make compassion a core business value.
Howard Mann on Connected: More megaphones don’t equal a better dialogue.
Michael Hyatt on … Read more