“Run easy” vs. “A little less pain”. Reebok’s vs. Nike’s motto. Turning running into a sport anybody can enjoy is the claim of the new campaign or “movement” started by Reebok. A slightly different consumer approach from Nike’s running brand image (that is about efforts, pain, and aiming at the performance) but which can change the deal if the campaign isn’t just a campaign and moves to become the way to engage consumers in running. Read More

Gasoline price rising and loss of $15,5 billion in the second quarter have pushed GM to move forward and try new things. And the new thing is the relaunch of the social media strategy with the release of the new GMnext.com platform. Featuring executive blogs, consumer generated content, and social media tools (like Twitter and Youtube), the so-called social platform aims at targeting young car buyers. This is the context. But GM is missing the important part of the way it works with social media … Read More

Branding is made of interactions and (gut) feelings from consumers. Interactions between brands and consumers generate the brand reputation and then feelings are spread by consumers through word of mouth. Which means the key vector of branding are people. Consumer influence is then the base from where brands build their image. Knowing that, Internet is now the essential channel of communication companies have to use to get in touch with consumers, since that is where they have the most important information spreading power. Read More

Inbound marketing vs. Outbound marketing. Said differently: Appealing people vs. Interrupting people. That is the core challenge of the Internet. Internet users are active users, they don’t wait for companies to show their products but they’re looking for stuff they need. Interrupting them while they’re searching won’t change anything because they don’t care about you online; worse, if you manage to catch their attention they feel bothered you do it and you should have a really interesting thing to say otherwise you would have spent money to get negative image. Read More

Marketing as changed a lot since its debuts back in early 20th century; after the move from local newspapers to national one and the need of print advertising localization (that has created the communication and marketing agencies), TV has largely moved the needle providing to marketers a 30 sec spot of attention. Since then all has gone the same until 2005 and the rise of the Internet due to the change of who’s to be the attention decision-maker between brands and consumers. Tom Fishburne has well defined it in this following cartoon. Read More

Internet users are focused on content. That statement is more and more relevant with the rise of all kind of activities available on the web: instant messaging, Facebook-ing, content aggregator reading, Youtube-ing, Skype-ing, content sharing, emailing … users don’t read, they share. Meaning they don’t care anymore about content not aiming at sharing, and utlimately they do share more than actually read because they don’t know what to read. If companies want to get back the attention from the Internet users, who are a fast growing population, they have to set up strategies to be the content, and no more the advertising. Read More

Leveraging the social media is what all the companies dealing with online communication and advertising are looking for. At the moment they’re testing things using advertising campaigns on FaceBook, creating blogs, and initiating conversation over the different social media platforms. Only a few have tried to develop a real social media strategy to engage people and generate business. But as the community manager job is becoming a must-have, strategies to develop a communication using social media tools would rise. Here are some ideas to make it work. Read More

Sun Tzu, author of the famous Art of War, has been one of the most interesting author of marketing book, more interesting than Seth Godin (I do believe he’s the best web marketer). The statements he’s providing are basics of communication and marketing and much more relevant in the web environment. Google seems to have well read that book too since their strategy and tactics that accompany the launch of their latest product are based and leverage the fundamental points of the Art of War, turning it into a Art of Story Telling. Read More

Internet has become the new mass media but has also become a new field with specific rules companies still defy instead of taking them into account. The result is that companies are still measuring success or fail regarding key performance indicators like page views, click-through, and subscription rates, which are adapted from the offline world. Internet being a content pool from where users do choose what they want to read and see, thing is the easy way is aiming at pages and hope for visibility to transform into business, meaning such low rates as we can see wathever support you use. Which means you have to take more care about users, and aim at them, as Andrew Chen explains it in the following presentation. Read More

Blogging is still in its amateur stage but now we’ve got some interesting feedbacks and case studies we can analyze to know more on what’s to do or not. To get reviews of some interesting corporate US blogs, go on Viral Garden blog to read “The Company blog checkup top 10“. There you can have reviews of 21 corporate blogs. To these 21 reviews, we can add many other ones, like the ones of Twitter, Google, Facebook, Boeing, Delta, StonyField farms blog, Johnson & Johnson BTW (By the Way), Kodak, Accenture blogs, Microsoft blog, and many products or service blogs. Which can then help to build 10 recommendations/ rules to follow for company blogging. Read More