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Digital Influence Mapping Project

Digital Influence Mapping project: How are we influenced and how do we influence in the digital age. This is about the intersection social media, word of mouth and digital marketing and how it is impactive marketing, advertising and public relations.

Future PR Skills: Integrate new technologies into our own livesYesterday

This is Part of a series: The 13 Skills of the Public Relations Professional of the Future. It's also the subject of a panel we ran at PR Week's Next Conference a couple of weeks ago.

You Gotta Walk the Walk

It's one thing to know or talk about social media. You can gather the right graphics from Slideshare that articulate the world of social media in a clever way. But if you are not trying the platforms, the technology and the behaviors, you will not completely understand nor likely be able to translate the business communications value of different trends in social media.

We recently published the Business Guide to Twitter. This seminar looks at 8 key business uses of Twitter from Customer Service to Crisis Management. The only way we could do this with confidence and insight is by using Twitter ourselves over the past few years.   

You cannot fully understand the possibilities of del.icio.us, FriendFeed, Yammer or, even, facebook until you have started to use these platforms. And the best place to start is in your own life.

There are three great steps to embracing technology:

1. Create a Social Foundation: take care of three essentials

2. Publish Yourself: Tr

Social Media and the Mumbai AttacksNovember 27

This is terrible and unfolding even as my family and I drive relatively safely up the east Coast of the US. Disatisfied with the brief radio reports, I dialed up CNN.com in the car. Quickly moved over to Twitter and began following the #mumbai hashtag. This has become a bit of a chaotic single channel for tweets from those in India and around the world. Some have truly insightful details. Some just express their heart for the people suffering. Some are reweeting rumor. Some are saying stupid things.

Chaos Sorting Itself Out

Like a lot of social media, the worldwide "we" are just figuring out how to use social media in events like this and it is incredibly compelling. Will we spin off multiple hashtags to allow for those with local, factual knowledge and others for well wishers?

Already there is a list of phone numbers at MumbaiHelp that may be helpful for people trying to get information about loved ones and the situation.

Tim Malbon has an excellent blog post that explores how Twitter is being used as of this morning (EST). Here's a bit:

"There were no doubt many well-meaning people Twittering. Some on the ground were no doubt using the service to share their personal horror and to connect with the outside world must h

Marketing in a Recession: Change the Meaning of Brand-buildingNovember 26

AdAge headlines their 3-minute video today featuring Nick Brien, CEO of Interpublic's Mediabrands - "Brand building must give way to hard sell during recession."

I agree with almost everything Mr. Brien says in the video. The headline misses the mark. It makes it sound like brand-building is superfluous in a recession/depression. Just as Mr. Brien says, the Chinese symbol for crisis has some double meaning in danger and opportunity, our opportunity is to redefine what we mean by "brand-building."

It should not be about "awareness." Awareness in an attention economy is fleeting at best. I constantly remark that I have a 60Gb brain in a 1 Terabyte world. I don't attempt to hold onto massive amounts of information anymore. I don't assume that if I am "unaware" of  a brand that it is no-good. I do what we all do - I Google it and off I go to "learning" about a brand or product.

Redefine Brand-building

Brand-building should be about relevance and being "of-use" to people. Or rather, being useful is more relevant today than being entertaining. Brand-building should not be thrown out in place of the had sell. We need to redefine the new, essential approach to brand-building. Most brands cannot accomplish hard sell without a lot of branding. Otherwise this becomes as Mr. Brien says, all about promotion - lower prices, free gifts, points for some other brand. Tha

State of Word of Mouth MarketingNovember 25

The following is my speech from this month's Word of Mouth Marketing Summit 2008. It captures my POV on where we are at as a discipline and relects my role as the President of the WOMMA Board.

And yes, I started delivering it while inside the Weinermobile.

Welcome to the 2008 Word of Mouth Marketing Summit. Welcome to the Tipping Point!

This is the year when Word of Mouth marketing goes mainstream – it’s already on everybody’s lips, so-to-speak. There isn’t a CMO, a Communications Executive, a CEO at a big brand, a mid-size or small business that isn’t creating and getting smart on social media and word of mouth programs.

Word of Mouth Marketing is bigger than social media but it’s also what happens when you use social media well.

Isn’t that social media’s main goal  –  activate and amplify word of mouth, participation, contribution, recommendation and action. We are the social media marketing champions and leaders. The promise of social media is not about targeting ad buys in MySpace. It’s not simply technology. It’s about getting people talking and sharing.

It’s bigger than just blogs. Bigger than Facebook. Bigger than Twitter, FriendFeed or Yammer. Word of Mouth includes all of social media – the big tent. And so much more. It’s offline and online.....

Can Bloggers Drive Peaceful Dialogue in the Middle East?November 24

Our Johns Hopkins graduate class is doing a project with the group Seeds of Peace. They are trying to bring peace to the Middle East by hosting leadership programs for the next generation of Israeli and Palestinian leaders. Their model involves very immersive dialogue through camp experiences and a sustained conversation between people whose politics or culture stresses suspicion, hatred and intolerance. They belong in social media. Can they bring their sober approach to promoting discussion to the global blogs and social networks or is that such an uncontrolled environment that their careful and thoughtful approach won't work?

I am no political expert. No expert on world peace or on Mideast culture or politics. I am a citizen of the US, aspiring citizen of the world, blogger and marketing and communications expert. So understand that is my POV in my comments (which do not reflect the POVs of any of my affiliations or employers).

I remember watching the WeMedia conference from London in 2006. An Iranian blogger joined the session via satellite feed and spoke of tens of thousands of Iranian bloggers. I loved the idea that so many people within what we, in the West, always considerd a repressive regime, could be finding a way to express their personal opinions online. Having met many bloggers from around t