Twitter for Sharing and Syndication

Many misunderstand the current power and relevant scale of Twitter. It is not about how Twitter has scaled to the general public. The most important thing about News, Content, and anything else published via Twitter, is that a great deal of the influencer community “is” utilizing Twitter for news, communication, and discovery. This information then finds its way to other publishing mediums be it Blogs, Traditional News Media, Facebook, Pinterest, Google+, the water cooler, or whatever other mediums exist. Twitter is a tool that leads into other forms of social sharing.

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What Mobile Marketers Can Learn From The Papa John’s Lawsuit

“With nearly 86 million Americans now shopping on their smartphones, this pronounced shift in consumer behavior is simply too large for retailers to ignore, with the future of their business depending on how well they adapt to the new environment.”

The above quote is from an article I penned back in September titled appropriately enough Mobile Marketing Too Large For Brands To Ignore.mobile marketing

It was said by Mark DonovancomScore SVP of mobile and I found it so telling I repeated in a column I wrote about a month later Mobile Marketing – The Elephant In The Room For Marketers.

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What Are You Doing to Connect Women with Your Brand/Product/Service?

What is happening now, as more women spend more time on more social networking sites for more reasons, is that women’s purchasing power now goes well beyond the purse … into women’s relationships.

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Do Brands Have A Responsibility When It Comes To Packaging?

Last year I wrote a story about The Most Misleading Packaging Design I Have Ever Seen. The inspiration for my article came from a text message my wife had sent me while at our kids’ school.

The text message include a picture and, as I wrote originally “What I thought was one thing turned out to be something completely different entirely and made me want to openly question the motives behind brand packaging design.”

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Freedom in a digital world

For a long time, there was alignment between what we wanted when it came to privacy and what was possible for the government to do. We relished our privacy and got used to the freedom to act anonymously at the same time that the government and marketers really couldn’t keep track even if they wanted to.

In the pre-internet world, there was just no way to imagine a useful database of every citizen’s fingerprints. The thought that a store would know every item you’ve ever purchased (and not just at their store) was crazy. Freedom from intrusion existed largely because the alternative was impossible.

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Relationship Building on Social Platforms

So can you maintain meaningful relationships with thousands of people at a time? No, but every touch is important, no matter how small. Think of it this way… individual touches are like relationship seeds. You have a much better likelihood of reaping a good harvest when you sow widely, but only if you prepare the ground with value and nurture with authenticity.

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Even More Brands Jumping On The Instagram Bandwagon

In case you don’t know this about me I am a huge sports fan. Huge. The reason I bring this up is because the word “bandwagon” is often bandied about in the sports world as in “more and more fans are jumping on the [[insert name of team here]] bandwagon.” This jumping is associated with said team’s fortunes rising thus the sudden popularity therein.

Make sense?

Now normally these same fans who were once so eager to grab a seat on the bandwagon, will just as quickly jump ship if and when the given team’s fortunes begin to head in the opposite direction. These of course are not true fans for any real fan stays the course and supports their teams through good times and bad.

But I digress.

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The Social Path to Purchase… ~via @CollectiveBias

The Collective Bias influencer community creates shopper content By Stuart Feil

Septemer 10, 2012 ADWEEK

Shopping is, by its very nature, a social activity—people always want to know what other people are buying or discuss what they’ve bought themselves with friends and other shoppers. Nowhere is this more evident than in the blogosphere, where brand ambassadors (such as the ubiquitous Mom-blogger) share information and advice about what they buy and use. There’s power in this user-generated content, and brands and retailers want to take advantage of these influencers to drive excitement for—and sales of—their products.

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Why vote? The marketing dynamics of apathy


Here’s what political marketers learn from people who don’t vote:

Nothing.

If you don’t vote because you’re disappointed with your choices, disgusted by tactics like lying and spin, or merely turned off by the process, you’ve opted out of the marketplace.

The goal of political marketers isn’t to get you to vote. Their goal is to get more votes than the other guy. So they obsess about pleasing those that vote. Everyone else is invisible.

Steakhouses do nothing to please vegetarians who don’t visit them, and politicians and their handlers don’t care at all about non-voters.

The magic of voting is that by opting in to the system, you magically begin to count. A lot.

If you don’t like negative ads, for example, then vote for the candidate who ran even 1% fewer negative ads. Magically, within a cycle or two, the number of negative ads begins to go down.

One reason that people don’t vote (a real, usually unspoken reason) is that they don’t want to feel responsible for the person who wins. The other reason is that they don’t want to live with the disappointment of voting for someone who loses. Both of these reasons ignore the marketing reality: not voting doesn’t make marketing or politics go away. It merely changes the person the marketers are trying to please.

Vote today. Bring a friend. If enough smart people start voting again, things will improve, because billions of dollars in political marketing will suddenly be trying to please you.

Seth Godin

The Message That Connects

Marshall McLuhan — a godfather of 20th-century communication theory — characterized one of the challenges inherent in connecting when he coined the phrase “the medium is the message.”Seth Godin hit on it from a different angle in his timely post today, Get Over Yourself.Given the timing — the 1960’s, in North America — many interpreted McLuhan’s theorizing as particularly pertinent to advertising and the increasing reach of mass media. The idea — that the channel is not just acarrier, but part-and-parcel of the message — has been the subject of countless debates and scholastic examinations.

On far less lofty ground, marketers, advertisers and media types have for decades hypothesized about McLuhan’s precise inference, and the implications for which medium best fit what message.

And in the process, we often theorize right over the real point.

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