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

This was originally written for, and posted on, MediaPost: Engage: Boomers.

Last week, scheduling a dinner meeting, I tried to recall the name of a restaurant where I had recently eaten a phenomenal cacio e pepe dish.  I could see the restaurant in my mind and even the approximate location but for the life of me I couldn’t remember its name.  I could have googled it or just described the location to my dinner guest had it not dawned on me: I could just log into … 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

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

Last month Nielsen’s Claritas division released data profiling the users of various social networks — which has been picked up by bloggers, social media consultants, like my friends at ClickMarkets, and now, today, by NPR.

In the piece, produced by Laura Sydell, teenagers talked about the social differences of social networks.

MySpace vs. Facebook

Sixteen-year-old Nico Kurt (who attends an elite, private high school) lays out his view of the MySpace users this way: “It seems trashy to me. The only people who use it are trashy people.”
“No one uses MySpace,” says 17-year-old Halie Pacheco, a student at The Urban … Read more

In the early days of my marketing career, I spent a fair amount of time both in front of, and behind, focus group room mirrors, leading or observing consumers play a brand personification game.  The game is simple: the moderator provides the name of a brand.  The consumers create a profile — using words, photos or other prompts to represent the brand as a person — complete with gender, … Read more

That’s what almost 400 attendees learned at social media blog Mashable’s first Social Good Conference at the 92nd Street Y in Manhattan last Friday.  The conference closed out Mashable’s Summer of Social Good initiative to raise $35,000 via social media for the Humane Society of the United States, World Wildlife Fund (WWF), Oxfam, and LIVESTRONG.

Instead, presenters from these four organizations, along with Facebook’s Randi Zuckerberg, non-profit … Read more

via blog.friendfeed.com
Today, Bret Taylor, a co-founder of FriendFeed announced that Facebook acquired his company on the FriendFeed Blog although he titled it cutely FriendFeed accepts Facebook friend request
The Twitterati have made “Facebook Acquires” a trending topic.  Some love it; some hate it.  Personally, I’m wondering how or if Facebook — with its large, mainstream following (some have called it “Grandma’s social network”) is going to incorporate the realtime features of FriendFeed that the “geeks” so adore.  Robert Scoble wrote in his blog that Facebook gained, among other things, … Read more

I think this is one of the best — and funniest — presentations on social media I have seen. Marta Kagan, the author, is a genius. And, I need to thank Bryan Fuhr, from AKQA, for turning me onto it.

While you may not want to use this with a client, there are certainly some wonderful insights and stats worth sharing.

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