12/02/07

With the rapid growth of social networking phenom Facebook—and note that this growth is fastest in the 35 and older age group—its impact on the workplace is only becoming more and more apparent. How do you feel about Facebook? Are you using it at work and, in particular, for work—meaning for professional or business-related networking, whether within your own company, or to connect with customers, partners, or colleagues at other companies?  Running a small company, I personally find it a valuable networking tool, especially to stay in touch with my highly dispersed network of contacts.  And I find it so much more enjoyable—okay, FUN!—than alternatives such as LinkedIn, which I’ve used for years.  Yes, the latter is a useful service, but what’s wrong with a little fun in one’s day in the course of staying in touch with colleagues?

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11/21/07

Viral marketing. So many aspire, so few succeed. It’s like humor. The percentage of viral marketing campaigns, like attempts at humor, that actually work—get results—is painfully small. That’s the real joke. But I propose we just kill off the term now and start over.  Herewith, my treatise to call bullshitake (with thanks to Guy K) on two words that have been massively over-served upon us all.  Here are my five reasons:

1) It’s based on a really bad analogy. I mean, I love Steve Jurvetsen, who flogged the term incessantly after his VC firm scored bigtime when Hotmail was sold to Microsoft back in ‘98 or whenever it was. But who wants marketing that’s associated with disease-bearing organisms?  I don’t want to be sneezed on, slobbered on, or otherwise infected, thank you very much.  A decade is enough of this.

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11/15/07

It’s no secret that the online category is where the big growth will be happening in the advertising industry. But, as a percentage of the total ad spend—about 5% last year—it’s definitely been lagging the percentage of time people spend online these days, which is about 20% of the total time spent with all media. Thus, you don’t have to be a rocket scientist to realize we have a major disparity here crying out for adjustment!  But that adjustment has been slow to happen. And that’s because big agencies are just plain slow in adopting new technology, and big advertisers are equally slow in changing their budgets. Basically, the ad industry has been too tied to the past. Well, take notice—because we’re now seeing promising signs of change. Online is definitely picking up steam.

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11/14/07

Did you know that spending for social media and conversational marketing will outpace that of traditional marketing by 2012?  That’s the key finding of a survey of marketing professionals conducted recently on behalf of the Society for New Communications Research (SNCR). The purpose of the study was to assess senior PR and marketing communications professionals’ awareness and knowledge of social media and conversational marketing, and their priorities for including it in their strategies and initiatives.

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Minneapolis, MN - 11/13/07

Welcome to the inaugural post of my new blog.  It’s great to have you here!  I launched my NewMediaWise practice this year as an extension of my longtime tech-marketing and startup-advisory consultancy, GT&A;Strategic Marketing.  Now it’s high time for me to begin a new blog to support it and communicate with my friends, colleagues, and clients—old and new. Some of you who land here have known me for years. To those of you who are new, I hope to get to know you, and that this new blog proves useful to you.

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