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