Facebook has filed for an initial public offering hoping to raise in the neighborhood of $10 Billion. The IPO would value the social network between $75 – 100 Billion. In US stock market history, this puts the launch ahead of Google in size, with only Visa, General Motors, and ATT Wireless coming out with larger [...]

Of all the social media communications channels I invest in, Twitter is the most enigmatic to me.
I use it and find value in posts from both followers and those I follow. At the same time, I encounter quizzical looks from friends who think I am somehow child-like and time-wasting to be spending time writing updates [...]

Speak the word Loyalty and you get a range of predictable reactions. If you’re at any number of marketing conferences, the word association game leads to responses of “points”, “miles”, or “discounts”. If you mention loyalty to your friends on the golf course, the reactions range from conversation about one’s dog to “those crummy punch [...]

One of the primary reasons for a company to be on social media is to build relationships and engage customers in a dialogue. So why are a lot of big-time pharmaceutical companies about to walk away from their Facebook pages?
It seems that up to this point, Facebook gave pharma companies the ability to “turn off” [...]

I borrowed the headline above from a recent B-to-B article by Jeff Ernst, a principal analyst at Forrester Research. I think it perfectly underscores something I’ve been saying for a while now: It’s about the power of the idea, not the tactic. (My compadre @billhanifin has a similar mantra: Technology enables. Imagination wins.)
While most companies [...]

It was recently reported in the trade press that Pepsi had slipped to the #3 soft drink in sales, behind Coke and new #2 Diet Coke. But most interesting was the speculation behind the drop. In an Ad Age article titled “How Pepsi Blinked, Fell Behind Diet Coke”, it was hinted that Pepsi had put [...]

When I first saw a QR code, I shrugged my shoulders and thought “one more piece of technology looking for a solution”.
I’m not cynical … I’ve just lived through years of expectation for smart cards and contactless cards only to see the technologists and vendors more excited about the product than consumers ever were.
Now I [...]

There are two forms of brilliance in business – one displayed by people who invent things we haven’t thought about before (Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare) and those that find a way to incorporate these new communications channels into mainstream business to generate revenue.
In many aspects of social media, we are waiting for the dots to be [...]

According to USA Today, on Monday, pizza chain Papa Johns will announce plans to give a free large pizza to every American — if the Super Bowl goes into its first-ever overtime. The catch: You must sign up for its online loyalty program before game day (Feb. 6).
“We’d rather give away millions in free pizzas than [...]

Social shopping is one of the new terms being circulated today among business people and consumers. Shopping has always been a social activity, so the name doesn’t define anything that we don’t understand intuitively.
Not so long ago, the term might have conjured up images of two friends going to the mall together, discussing stores, brands [...]