Credit: Geekadam While speaking at the intimate and immensely valuable Zappos Insights event (Zappos Live), I shared thoughts of how the culture of any company or brand is as strong as the individual personification of it. Everything starts and fortifies with you. Your actions and words online are indeed extensions to how people interpret, perceive, and react to the brand your represent. Concurrently, you also represent your personal brand – the digital identity that’s established through the collection of digital…
Zappos is Powered by The Empowerment of Employees
Yesterday I spoke at Zappos Insights Live, an inaugural conference that offered a unique opportunity to learn about the spirit and culture of Zappos through a two-day immersion program. To say it was brilliant would be an understatement. And, I believe this is just the beginning. It’s incredibly clear that Tony Hsieh doesn’t just profess his belief in happiness and service; his entire organization lives and breathes it in everything they do. While Zappos the company is indeed “powered by…
Real-Time Conversations Gain in Influence, Hasten Social CRM
This is the unabridged version of my latest post on TechCrunch, “Real-Time Conversations Hasten Social CRM“ At the Real-Time Stream Crunchup on Friday in Redwood City, TechCrunch Editor-in-Chief Erick Schonfeld hosted a panel of industry heavyweights who are either building solutions or defining how they’re used in the world of business communications and customer service. The panel included: – Porter Gale, Virgin America – John Ham, Ustream – Eric Marcoullier, Gnip – Ross Mayfield, SocialText – David Sacks, Yammer –…
The Internet is More Biology Than Technology: The Top 10 Ways to Monetize Twitter
At the Real-Time Stream event in Redwood City, California organized by TechCrunch, industry pioneers and pundits discussed the state and future of the Real-Time Web also increasingly referred to as the “now” Web. When it comes to search, the most notable comparison between traditional and real-time discovery is represented in the difference between human memory and consciousness. The experience of searching for relevant information is personified in the context of what you’re doing and not necessarily that of what you’re…
Facebook Advertising to Surpass MySpace by 2011
MySpace has been losing “face” over the course of the last year. With sliding traffic and attention as well as shifts in management and reductions in staff, MySpace is not only a place for friends, but also a place for skeptics. According to a Compete.com, Facebook received 122,559,672 unique visits in June 2009 twice that of rival MySpace, which realized only 60,973,908 unique visitors. In year-over-year comparisons, Facebook volume skyrocketed with 248.17% while Myspace slightly recoiled, down 5.65%. The good…
Facebook Helps Brands and Personalities Transform Visitors into Fans
Facebook Connect is connecting people across the social graph to fresh content and furthermore it’s channeling outside Web events into individual lifestreams. Essentially, Facebook is solidifying its position as not only your primary social network, it’s also a emerging as a central hub for your attention, updates, news, promotion, and enlightenment. Now, Facebook is extending its network to the World Wide Web, allowing brands and personalities who have or will host Fan Pages to embed a widget version of the…
The Decline of Traditional Advertising and the Rise of Social Media
Forrester Research released its five year forecast that estimates interactive marketing spending from 2009 – 2014. Forrester predicts that interactive marketing in the US will near $55 billion and represent 21% of all marketing spend by 2014 and will include search marketing, display advertising, email marketing, social media, and mobile marketing. More significantly however, overall advertising in traditional media will continue to decline in favor of less expensive, more effective interactive tools and services. Forrester analyst Shar VanBoskirk alerts marketing…
PR Does Not Stand for Press Release: Equalizing Spikes and Valleys
Source Every now and again, a PR meme appears on the Web – almost to the point where you could set your watch by it. This time around, Claire Cain Miller of the New York Times sparked the conversation with an in-depth article, “Spinning the Web: P.R. in Silicon Valley.” I respect Claire and I believe she wrote an extensive article that chronicles the launch of one particular startup and also featured supporting quotes from those PR professionals who are…
Tweet This: Twitter Trademarks Tweets ™
Credit One of the more interesting, albeit not necessarily press-stopping, stories making the rounds in the blogosphere and Twitterverse currently is sure to make you scratch your head or raise your eyebrow in bewilderment. Twitter officially applied to trademark “Tweet” on April 16, 2009 according to Robin Wauters at TechCrunch. The confusion erupted when developers received the following email (h/t to Andy Beal) In its post, “May the Tweets Be With You,” Twitter explains its position this way, “as the…
Unveiling the New Influencers
Traditional influence has followed a systematic top-down process of developing and pushing “controlled” messages to audiences for decades, rooted in one-to-many, faceless broadcast campaigns. Personality wasn’t absent in certain mediums, it was missing from day-to-day communications. For the most part, this pattern seemingly served its purposes, fueling the belief that brands were in control of their messages, from delivery to dissemination, among the demographics to which they were targeted. It scaled very well over the years, until it didn’t… Unbeknown…
