Facebook Is Going for Some Twitter Sensibility

Facebook groups friends and relatives, while Twitter pools the collective. Facebook is trying to offer a bit more of that larger group, in real time.

New York Times, September 14, 2009 — Like a balding hipster who imitates a young trendsetter’s style, Facebook is updating itself to look a lot more like Twitter.

Unlike Facebook, where friends mutually agree to let one another into their online lives, Twitter lets people share updates and links with anyone who cares to read them.

Social Media Not Yet Core Feedback Tools

Marketing Daily, September 2, 2009 — While the focus on harnessing social media continues, at this stage, customer feedback from other channels still has considerably more influence on actual business decisions, according to new research with "voice of the customer" (VOC) practitioners.

Zappos Review Incites Reproach From Agency Creative†

Ignited's Mike Wolfsohn Says Online-Retail Darling Exemplifies What's Wrong With the Process

Advertising Age, July 14, 2009 — Zappos is known for stellar customer service, but when it comes to dealing with adland, the marketer is portrayed in a blog post by a creative at ad shop Ignited as the poster child for a flawed agency review process.

Social Media Fails To Manifest As Marketing Medium, Report Likens Twitter To TiVo: More Hype Than Re

MediaPost Publications, May 20, 2009 — Social media has reached critical mass, with 83% of the Internet population now using it - and more than half doing so on a regular basis - according to new research being released today by Knowledge Networks. But for all the media industry's hype and buzz surrounding social networks, microblogs, and other social networking platforms, the genre has failed to become much of a marketing medium, and in the opinion of the Knowledge Networks' analysts, likely never will.

Marketers Search For Social Media Metric

MediaPost Publications, May 7, 2009 — Marketers place a lifetime value on customers with addresses on its email list based on their purchasing activity. For Netflix, it could be $9. At US Airways, maybe $2. But how do you place a similar value on a person who is active on a company's Facebook or MySpace page? With social-networking booming, marketers are now in hot pursuit of the metric.

Kodak Develops as Modern Brand With Digital Shift†

CMO Hayzlett Takes on Active Social-Media Approach to Marketing

Advertising Age, April 27, 2009 — Kodak CMO Jeffrey Hayzlett has more than 2,500 friends on Facebook and more than 3,200 followers on Twitter. He recently presided over the first-annual Streamy Awards for web TV, sponsored by Kodak, and both blogs and tweets about Kodak's coming involvement in the May 10 episode of "Celebrity Apprentice."

A new style of CMO has arrived.

The Future of Social Media Monitoring

ReadWriteWeb, April 15, 2009 — Ten years ago the ClueTrain manifesto said that "markets are conversations" but today a more pertinent statement could be that conversations are becoming markets - or that there's a market for monitoring conversations. A whole class of technologies are emerging to help companies keep track of the conversations exploding online.

Amazon's Silent Mistake in the Face of a Social-Media Firestorm†

Incident Demonstrates -- Again -- the Need to Monitor Your Brand 24/7

Advertising Age, April 13, 2009 — "Amazon: the Internet company that doesn't understand the Internet" is my favorite of thousands of tweets on the subject of Amazon's sudden censorship of gay- or lesbian-themed books. The episode proved that even a well-liked, household-name company can pay a high price for not monitoring its brand in social media.

Over the weekend, thousands of people on Twitter, in blogs, on Facebook and in forums angrily noted that gay- and/or lesbian-themed books by James Baldwin, Gore Vidal, Jeanette Winterson and scores of others had been suddenly removed from Amazon listings and search results.

What Orangutans Taught Simon Clift About Social Media†

CMO Says Unilever Is Still Trying to Shake Mind-set of One-Way Communications

Advertising Age, April 8, 2009 — Unilever is only starting to understand social media, but it's already learned plenty about its capability to make and break brands — sometimes the hard way, said Chief Marketing Officer Simon Clift at the Advertising Age Digital Conference today.

Forrester: Social Media Reaches 'Empowered Women'

MediaPost Publications, April 7, 2009 — In order to effectively engage "empowered women" online, consumer packaged goods brands must design campaigns that enhance communication and aid in consumers' decision-making and influence. And that, according to a new report by Forrester Media, means social media.

In particular, 42% of this prized demographic reported visiting social networks like Facebook and MySpace, compared to just 33% of all U.S. adults online engaging in such activity.