The other day someone asked me where I think the future of social media in marketing is for 2010 and the future beyond that.  What an interesting question.  Here’s my answer. Read the rest of this entry >>

The holidays often get me thinking about extraordinary people — those I know and those I do not.  Some are well known, some will never be known, and some are not yet heroes.  It’s this last group that got me thinking organizationally.  Who’s your best customer, who were they before they were your best customer, and what was the experience that made them your best customer?  Heroes, like customers, are all around us if you give them the chance. Read the rest of this entry >>

Some twitterers have thousands of followers and, likewise, follow thousands.  What are the implications of this?  Are they really taking an active interest in each other, or is this us just lots of people being polite at first and ignoring each other later?  If we assume 5,000 friends with a normal 8 hours sleep we can take the 960 minutes left in the day and simply divide.  Conversing with each of 5,000 friends would leave about 11 seconds for each of them.  11 seconds per. day.  If that’s the scope of your relationship, how deep could it really be? Read the rest of this entry >>

Lately I’ve been hearing a lot about loyalty programs, their goals, and their objectives so it’s got me thinking about loyalty in the age of new media marketing.  Traditionally loyalty has been about repeat business — getting happy customers to come back — however, in the age of information, optimization, and saturation, I see it going a different way. Read the rest of this entry >>