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 [...]

Loyalty is Social and American Express knows it.
The credit card issuer launched its “Social Currency” campaign back in March and I have to admit that upon first review, I thought it was more show than go. Since that time, the multiple campaigns launched in market with partners including Foursquare, SCVNGR, and Facebook validate their commitment [...]

Shopping has always been a social activity, shared between people, so pairing “Social” with “Shopping” shouldn’t define anything that we don’t intuitively understand.
Except that it does.
Social Shopping is a term with different meanings depending on who’s talking and what they are selling. The mainstream definition of Social Shopping from a web point of view is [...]

Watching the Miami Heat and Boston Celtics kickoff their playoff series this weekend, I saw the latest in gratuitous advertising from a beer company, in this case Miller Light.
I’m not sure if I should be complemented or insulted that I’m among the demographic targeted by the ads. Consistent with past campaigns, Miller clearly trades on [...]

Communication is at the center of human interaction. Marketers are well aware of the importance of communication and it’s no surprise that customer engagement, customer experience, and lifecycle management are  popular keywords today. We have to communicate well to engage our customers and to deepen relationships over time.
Marketers have plenty of collected data residing behind [...]

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 [...]

While I’m a firm believer that you shouldn’t post anything online that you wouldn’t want everyone to see, many might be happy to know that Facebook’s privacy capabilities are getting stronger. This week, Facebook announced a new feature called Groups, which will allow users to divide their network into smaller sub-networks, like friends, relatives, classmates [...]

Would the owner of a blue Honda Civic please come to the front desk…Your lights are on. It’s situations like these that Bump.com is trying to help resolve more efficiently. Theservice, touted as “AAA meets Foursquare” by founder Michael Thrower, is essentially a social networking tool that links drivers through their automobile’s license plates.
The idea [...]

Relationships are challenging. But navigating relationships in the new era of social media brings with it a whole new set of challenges (and now a whole new host of web sites.)
In the past few days, I’ve had two friends change their relationship status on Facebook to announce a new relationship that has been going on [...]

Suppose you’re a local craft brewery, without the marketing resources of a Coors, Miller or Sam Adams. You don’t have money in the budget for national TV commercials—or any TV spots for that matter. So how do you get the word out about your award-winning brews?
If you’re Delaware-based Dogfish Head, you [...]