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Category Archives: Social Media

Three problems more pressing that your social media strategy.

*Note: This is a cross-posting of a post I wrote for AdFarm. Check it out here. For some companies, social networks are kind of like monsters under the bed. Instead of thinking about the great upsides, these folks worry about over-sharing by employees, losing control over intellectual property, damaging their brands, losing productivity, fielding sensitive [...]

We all need more receptors

Something stuck me today while reading this article on bacterial decision-making. We all need more receptors. Now, that statement doesn’t make a whole lot of sense without the context, so here’s the context: “As bacteria’s ability to make decisions goes, E. coli is kind of dumb, which makes it easy for researchers to study sensing [...]

Crop the Vote – Michele Payn-Knoper for Twitter User of the Year

If you don’t live under a rock, you’ve likely heard of or visited Mashable. As far as I’m concerned, there’s no better news bureau for the happenings in the social media realm. Mashable articles rack up scads of retweets and Diggs on a regular basis, and the site’s founder, Pete Cashmore, is a regular contributor [...]

Birthday Wishes and Twitter Trends

Last week, messages started showing up in my Twitter stream with a birthday wish from @FarmerHaley (Mike Haley), an Ohio grain farmer and Simmental breeder. The wish: get the hashtag #moo into the top 10 Twitter trends at 1:00 p.m. EDT on Sunday, August 2. The reason: bring some much-needed attention to the economic plight [...]

Because there aren’t directions

The best days are the ones where we come up with an idea that makes people scratch their heads and ask, “How the hell are we going to do this?” or, “Aren’t there any case studies that we can show?” This job is about novel communications. When we do something that doesn’t have directions already [...]

The Cow Goes Tweet?

I’ll admit it. I’ve anthropomorphized a time or two. In any creative profession, it’s an easy fix to ascribe a like mind to an object or creature. It helps make old stories new again or create a more compelling interpersonal narrative where one doesn’t naturally exist (see: Cars, WALL-E, Toy Story, the entire Looney Toons [...]

Mams Taylor’s “United For Neda”

Lest one forget the lager concerns of the larger world, Mams Taylor, LA Producer and Iranian ex-pat, brought together a collective of other performers, poets and thinkers to produce this song and music video for the people fighting and laying down lives in support of a more representative democracy in Iran. United For Neda by [...]

Schrodinger’s Cat : Your Brand :: Photons : Different Quantum States

That’s an analogy, for my my fellow word nerds. My folks made me do those before I was allowed to play outside as a child. Hated it then. Glad for it now. Anyway, The idea is, your brand can (and should) be different things to different people. The trick is making that quantum state look [...]

Confusing message control with branding, part 2

Part 2 – Paying to be ignored OR how I learned to stop worrying and love the angry letters: People who write angry letters (or E-mails or tweets or posts) are an interesting breed. I’ve met a few, and I don’t think there’s any unifying personality type there. I think, generally, they’re just people who’ve [...]

Confusing message control with branding, part 1

This one’s going to be a series. A subject so widely misunderstood deserves some space and some dialogue. Part 1 – The behavior model: I’ve run across far, far too many people who think branding success can be boiled down to message recall. This misconception costs companies innumerable opportunities to do the actual work of [...]