Today's guest post is written by Michael Schechter. Last week, C.C. Chapman blogged about the latest example of poor social media marketing - Ragu Hates Dads. The brand had reached out to him on Twitter with a campaign that admittedly is in pretty poor taste, and C.C. took to his blog to respond. It wasn’t the fact [...]

Read More: Brand Bullying: A Tale of Ragu and Social Media

There seems to be some confusion in the market place about the difference between a social brand and a social business. First, let’s explore the definitions. A social brand is any company, product, individual, politician that uses social technologies in order to communicate with the social customer, their partners and constituencies or the general public. A social business is any company that has integrated and operationalized social media within every job function internally. A social business [...]

Read More: Social Business, Social Brand: Completely Different yet Exactly the Same

On the morning of June 10, Kristen Jacobs was monitoring the Twitterverse for mentions of her employer, Creative Memories, as she usually does. One tweet in particular stood out. Upon closer inspection of the tweet and link, Jacobs discovered that Creative Memories was going head-to-head with one of America's biggest retailers, Target, in a "Minnesota [...]

Read More: How a Scrapbooking Company Used Social Media to Beat Target as Best Brand in Minnesota

This guest post is by Matthew Kepnes of Nomadic Matt’s Travel Site. Let’s begin with some word association: Disney World Nike Apple McDonald's BP Goldman Sachs. What did you think about when I mentioned these brands? What words came to mind? Thoughts? Feelings? Images? Whatever it is that came to your mind is the brand [...]

Read More: Why Your Brand Is Everything

Back in 2002, an old brand was reborn, taking those that thought they controlled it completely by surprise. Pass the Courvoisier Part Two, by Busta Rhymes and P. Diddy had climbed the charts, and made a huge splash in the cognac manufacturer’s sales, according to Precedent: “It is true, when Monsieur Busta Rhymes featured Courvoisier [...]

Read More: Catching up to the brand your customers are creating for you

A new service has launched that allows brands to take a unique approach in how they rank their customers online. While services such as Klout attempt to rank people in terms of their social influence (number of followers, retweetability etc), ShopIgniter’s new commerce platform takes it one step further by analysing which of your customers are using their social networks most effectively to promote your products and services by word of mouth.It extends influence measurement by looking at how spe [...]

Read More: ShopIgniter finds your brand's most social media savvy customers

Today's guest post is written by Amber Avines. Want your company to attract more business, secure greater exposure, and reach new customers? Look no further than your employee base to give you that critical advantage! Empowering your staff with the inside scoop on what’s happening, why it’s important, and how it benefits customers can be [...]

Read More: 7 Ways to Turn Employees into Brand Ambassadors

Compassion International recently attempted to takeover the Twitter account of Water.org. We were unsuccessful in our bid, coming in second by 190 votes, after three weeks of campaigning. However, we still view the outcome as a success because … well, more on that later. For now, before committing your brand and its supporters to an [...]

Read More: 6 Steps to Success When Entering Your Brand Into An Online Contest

Rob Fuggetta, Founder & CEO, ZuberanceGuest blogger Rob Fuggetta is founder and CEO of online Word of Mouth marketing company Zuberance. What follows is an excerpt from his soon-to-be-published book, “Energize! How to Turn Fans, Followers, and Enthusiastic Customers into Social Media Marketing Machines.” Join Fuggetta’s conversation on Twitter or reach him by email.If your company sells or makes consumer products like video games, flat panel TVs, computers, clothing, or jewelry, you know how [...]

Read More: 5 Ways to Boost Holiday Sales by Unleashing your Brand Army

Instagram, a photo-sharing app for iPhone users, has become a widespread sensation among individual users, and now big brands are following their lead. I love using the app. It can be addictive and give you added inspiration for taking more interesting photos with your phone. Instagram allows the photo taker to have a little fun [...]

Read More: 5 Ways Brands Are Using Instagram For Brand Awareness

In a report released last week by Altimeter Group, they studied more than fifty social media case studies gone wrong and discovered some surprising insights, among which was 76% of the crises could have been avoided by having proper training, staff, and a response process in place. Some of the examples used to measure in this Altimeter Group study are enterprise level, who often have resources at their disposal that SMB's or entrepreneurs do not. So what someone not on the enterprise level [...]

Read More: Altimeter Group Shares Brand Preparedness of Social Media Crisis

Managing and growing any personal brand online can be a difficult task. For those of us looking to curate a respectable following, we simply can't afford to miss any stops as nowadays, as our online reputation means almost everything. Luckily, there are several tools we can use online that make this process easy and, in some cases, fun.In some case studies, personal brands that founded their online presence through small, community-based sites were then able to use the connections formed [...]

Read More: 14 must-haves for your online personal brand building toolkit

F-commerce is expanding at a rapid pace as more and more brands are opening stores on their Facebook pages and understanding the value of social commerce.  But what measures can a brand take to ensure that their Facebook commerce initiatives are a success?  I had the opportunity to hear from Doron Simovitch, CEO and Co-founder of SortPrice, and he let me in on the two factors that he believes, above all, are imperative to a brand’s F-commerce success.  Read on to find out what they are.


Read More: The 2 Factors That Determine A Brand’s Success In F-Commerce

We are proud to nominate our client, Discover, for a 2011 Forrester Groundswell Award. View the official nomination here, and be sure to give it a quick rating or review and check out other entries!  When it comes to listening to customers, the credit card industry has been slow to embrace customer conversations. Faced with stricter [...]

Read More: Customer feedback helps Discover live their brand promise

foursquare is looking to ramp up the use of its brand pages, ramping up some cash flow for itself in the process.

Read More: foursquare Tweaking Brand Pages with an Eye Toward Monetization

Guest post by Kyle Monson, a former technology journalist and editor at PC Magazine, is Content Strategy Director at JWT. Follow him on Twitter @kmonson You probably already know this, but we marketers are the bad guys in the battle of good versus evil. One commonly employed metaphor—“The Dark Side”—is particularly apt: we hunt down [...]

Read More: Dispelling the Darkness with Brand Journalism

Guest post by Matt Polsky.

Prior to the rise of social networks, online brand management solely focused on common SEO techniques such as keywords, content, and proper HTML code. These techniques were used to secure and maintain the top positions on the search engines, and to ensure that only content a company wanted to remain visible regarding its product, services, or mission did so.

However, those days are over. A company can no longer rely only
Read More: The New Wave of Online Brand Management

When we first covered Empire Avenue, it was an obscure, but interesting, game based around the idea of trading visrtual stocks in users' social media presence – Klout crossed with the NASDAQ, if you like. Since then it's picked up a lot of steam. Now the Canadian startup is taking things a step further with its first commercial partnership.The deal with Microsoft's Xbox brand means that users will be able to trade their virtual social value on the site for a ‘virtua [...]

Read More: Empire Avenue ties up with Microsoft's Xbox brand to offer virtual goods

When we first covered Empire Avenue, it was an obscure, but interesting, game based around the idea of trading visrtual stocks in users' social media presence – Klout crossed with the NASDAQ, if you like. Since then it's picked up a lot of steam. Now the Canadian startup is taking things a step further with its first commercial partnership.The deal with Microsoft's Xbox brand means that users will be able to trade their virtual social value on the site for a ‘virtua [...]

Read More: Empire Avenue ties up with Microsoft's Xbox brand to offer virtual goods

A nice deck from Forrester's Nate Elliott looking at some of the findings of his recent report, the Interactive Brand Ecosystem: It’s time for marketers to start taking the brand-building power of interactive channels more seriously [...] Your online content and experiences should be the first piece of the brand campaign you develop, and not [...]

Read More: The Interactive Brand Ecosystem