Goodwill Cooks up a Social Controversy

Goodwill has joined the ranks of major chain stores experimenting with local micro-brands, opening a pilot boutique for high-end recycled clothes in little San Anselmo, California. And now it finds itself in the spotlight for what they feel is a little creative license, but some locals feel is a cynical lie.
Goodwill recently opened Georgi [...]

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AT&T’s Clueless Approach to Mobile Marketing

This is the unedited transcript of an SMS exchange I had with AT&T after upgrading my iPhone. Note the time and date of this exchange.

Jul 2, 2011 7:51 PM
Christopher, thanks for upgrading your phone with James at our AT&T store. We’ll text you shortly for some feedback. (SURVEY TEXTS FREE)
July 2, 2011 9:15 PM
Q1 [...]

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Remembering Maya

I attended the memorial last Saturday of a former employee, a young woman named Maya Machnicova. Memorials are always a reminder of basic truths we tend to ignore, or simply forget, and Maya’s passing in particular has made me think a lot about the subtle ways people impact my life. The push and pull of [...]

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Turning Customers Into Social Shills

Originally posted at SocialRep
One of the core imperatives of social marketing is engaging your customers in conversation—instead of just blanketing the market with offers and collecting conversions, social marketing focuses on active market dialog to better understand and meet the needs of customers. Your customers are already talking, the theory goes, so join the conversation. [...]

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Is Social Media Making Gender Roles Obsolete?

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The best thing about staring at web data all day is that I get to see trends as they emerge. Usually it’s just little shifts in the drift and flow of online dialog. But sometimes I get a front-row seat to a tectonic change that points toward some unexpected and emerging truth. A clear view [...]

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Livestreaming Bioneers Social Media Panel

I’ll be moderating a panel on Sustainable Social Media at the Bioneers Conference in San Rafael. We’ll be streaming the session live, tying in more than 20 remote conference locations. If you have questions during the panel, feel free to post them on Twitter, tagged as “#bioneers” and I’ll pick them up and weave them [...]

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Is Cision Accountable for PR Spam?

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As a blogger, I receive a fair amount of PR spam–5-10 emails every day pitching crap I would never write about. And 9 times out of 10 this spam is illegal. It’s unsolicited commercial email in blatant violation of numerous provisions of the CAN-SPAM act. Day after day, week after week, the crap just rolls [...]

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Bioneers Panel on Social Media

I‘m thrilled to have been invited to moderate a panel on Social Media at the upcoming Bioneers Conference, October 16-18th at the Marin Civic Center, just north of San Francisco. The conference is a 20-year old forum featuring many of the world’s leading social and scientific innovators on issues of the environment and social justice–artists [...]

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Kodak’s Social Media Strategy: Backfiring Already?

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Last week I wrote a short analysis of Kodak’s surprising move with the Zi8 pocket camera, explaining how Kodak had obviously been listening intently to consumer discussions about pocket video cameras, and rather than making the usual incremental upgrade to one or two features for their next release, they threw down the gauntlet and upgraded [...]

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Kodak Throws Down the Social Media Gauntlet

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Over the past few months I’ve been analyzing social media marketing data produced by our alter-ego/partner SocialRep. One of the industries SocialRep tracks is consumer electronics, which includes endless sub-sectors where pitched battles for the hearts and minds of consumers play out every day. Many companies in this industry have become savvy about social media–few [...]

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