Found this interesting podcast from Chad Stoller of Three Minds @ Organic. While this isn’t a super complicated look at social media, it does have some of the basics of whats working/not working, where social media may be going, and what companies should do to measure ROI. Twitter, which I’m currently experimenting with, is one of the things Chad talks about. He sees it basically as an [...]

Looks like I wasn’t off my rocker after all. In case you missed it, I previously posted about trouble with Dove’s YouTube strategy as well as their Pro-Age ad that featured naked grannies. You can see the ad here. Basically, I said that while everyone should be allowed to feel good about themselves, Dove was taking the whole thing too far. TV networks felt the same way, and spokespersons [...]

Happy Valentines Day. Now that I got the positive out of the way, let’s talk about what’s going on/wrong in the world of Dove, the skin care/beauty company. First, they try to get in on the user-generated trend. This video was posted on YouTube and explains that if you’ve ever dreamed creating your own commercial, then you can do one for Dove! OMG REALLY!! No other incentives?! Sounds [...]

P & G, the world’s largest advertiser with an annual ad budget of $6.7 million, is launching 2 websites aimed at creating online communities for data mining and market research…essentially online focus groups on a mass-scale. One site will be tied to the People’s Choice Awards and the other site, Capessa, will be a community for women to discuss subjects such as parenting and [...]

NPR did a segment today about how social/user-created content is changing our economics. The segment featured Don Tapscott, co-author of Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything. You can listen to the segment here. Basically the main thing to take from this is that the new way of solving problems, gathering information and reducing costs involves tapping into the world’s human capital, [...]

On Sunday, my gf and her mom were craving a $1 sweet tea from the McDonald’s inside Walmart, only to find that at this particular McDonald’s tea was $1.29. The cashier looked like he wanted to crawl under a rock and die as they questioned why there was no $1 tea, even though it’s always advertised. His excuse didn’t say much but this whole thing is a good lesson. Companies shouldn’t [...]