As has been noted both in this space and elsewhere, traditional news media is in trouble. Not only have papers like the Seattle Post Intelligencer and the Rocky Mountain News shut down their presses, but other big names are cutting…

This is the slogan of a regional coffee company, Dutch Bros.  This article isn’t about their great coffee, instead it is about how Dutch Bros.’ innovative marketing strategy has helped them thrive in a slow economy.

As people struggle to make…

You read them; you comment on them; and you might even write one every once in a while. But as passé as blogs have become  to those of us in the industry, the fact remains that the technology is just…

Seth Godin is a smart man. Partially out of necessity he has resorted to posting in sound bites: little well packaged morsels of pop culture references that he can spin out quickly and readers can digest easily.

His blog post “Which comes first, the product or the marketing?” is a prime example of this. Godin bounces from Captain Crunch, through a YouTube clip of Mad Men, before stumbling into the Toyota Prius and onto Jones Soda. The sound bites he delivers chime like the bumpers in a pinball machine.

Allstate had a unique problem in the creation of its social media efforts. Its attorneys had concerns that legal precedent might mean that user-generated content could expose the corporation to significant liability.

For example, one customer in a forum could offer insurance “advice” to another customer that could somehow make Allstate responsible to pay for some large loss that they otherwise would not have had to cover.

H&R Block had a very successful initial foray into social media marketing. Their first effort: a 2007 sponsored YouTube video contest called “Me and My Super Sweet Refund Video Contest”, whose launch video earned over 1.6 million views and set a YouTube record that held for over six months.

Stan Joosten, Director of Holistic Consumer Communications for Proctor & Gamble began his presentation at BlogWell by emphasizing the importance of not treating social media as “shiny object media”. In other words, don’t be fooled by the latest and greatest fancy new thing. Instead have one or more goals in mind before you start any social media initiative.

The following is part of a series covering the BlogWell conference which took place at Chicago’s Gleacher Center on Thursday, January 22.

Andy Sernovitz, CEO of GasPedal, stated in his introduction to the over 230 attendees at the BlogWell, “Starting a…

With peer-to-peer marketing and advertising now ubiquitous online, new platforms designed to create sociable widgets and embeddable media rich content are propagating across the web. Widgetbox, SpringWidgets, and Sprout are among countless new applications empowering users to create personalized widgets, social…

In an era when we’re all interacting with the world through our gadgets, be they mobile devices or GPS systems, our relationship with information and each another is drastically changing. The old media model of one-way broadcast communication has morphed…