Since 2005 and the rise of the “Web 2.0″ term from O’Reilly, technology has been leading the Internet with new opportunities with companies charging into content streaming and download (Youtube, Joost, FFWD, iTunes, Vuze for example) and social networks (Bebo, FaceBook, MySpace, LinkedIn, Second Life, Habbo Hotel, …). But for about 1 year another groundswell has started. Thanks to or due to, the fact is social media has kicked off a new way of thinking for the Internet, and more globally has set up a new way of working for companies. Stepping back a moment to get the big picture, here are some takeaways from the web 2.0 thing for marketing and communication. Read More

Working on a social media strategy isn’t just a button you can push to add value to your communication and marketing plan after having done everything you can. It has to be core to your customer care strategy to perform fast and accurate word spreading. If not you’d have to face issues that can’t be solved because of the customer care way of working. 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

Enhancing user experience leveraging the spamming feedbacks, word of mouth is based on the sharing concept, LinkedIn creating a new breed of ad network, Guerilla marketing initiates online word of mouth, basics of the attention marketing, and Microsoft new advertising campaign story. Plus a twitter video. Here are the links. Read More

Marketing is subjected to the product it has to help selling. Telling a story and raising interest about the product among potential customers is then related to the product, that’s the art of Marketing. But when looking deeper at products, there’s an item that may help facilitate the marketing process: the sharing value inside every product. Read More

Brand building can come from advertising, there are a lot of examples out there and best-in-class brand image advertising can be found for most of the worldwide companies like Nike, L’Oreal or Microsoft (though the almighty Richmond company may have missed the point). Brand building can also come from people: customers and people refering to companies who share their personal/ professional brand image as they’re advocating for them. But the best way keeps being when it comes from the company employees. That makes more sense and leads much more business. Zappos may have found the fine tuning to make it an important asset. Read More

The dark side of Facebook, Newspaper still not adapting to the new needs, LinkedIn competing with professional magazines, FlickR tactic for business, and Amazon proving again they’re a step ahead. Here are the links. Read More

I’ve been walking around the Mashable! post “How to measure social media ROI for Business” for 2 days, being irritated by the fact people say we can’t measure ROI of social media efforts. Aaron Uhrmacher, author of that post, is telling (you should be reading that post if not done already) there’s no accepted metrics, statistics-based ones, to measure social media ROI. How can it be possible there’s no accepted metrics? Return on investment concept is clear: for $1 I invest, how many comes up? Applied to social media efforts, for $1 I invest how much do I earn? or maybe a better way to say, how can I measure impact of social media on my company bottom line, directly or indirectly? Which then is possible. Read More