Ubiquitous Marketing

I had the pleasure of talking with Paul Rand, formerly of Ketchum/currently of Zocalo Group, for this exact story.

The most interesting thing he said was about how customer relationship management historically focussed on the biggest spenders, not necessarily the biggest advocates. Forward thinking WOM specialists are trying to change that.
That commentary came to mind when [...]

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There’s an interesting article on Starbucks in BusinessWeek, with CEO Howard Schultz walking the magazine through his vision of Starbucks 2007 and beyond.
Let me state that Schultz is a visionary on par with Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and Google co-founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page. How Starbucks grew is the stuff of legends. He’s brilliant. [...]

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Lots of JetBlue stuff at (or soon to be at) PRWeek. I will say this: for people you know who abhor marketing (especially PR) - the failure at JetBlue - was a failure of communications. Also a failure of flights to get off the ground, sure.
If you have a favorable (or mostly favorable) opinion about [...]

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Both Netflix and Blockbuster, bitter rivals, have made news recently for two completely different (and very similar) ways.
Netflix is living up to its role as a “dot-com-only, therefore able to be more nimble” provider by starting to offer streamed movies over the Internet. The postal service can breathe; users can only stream one hour per [...]

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We all know YouTube is the place to get your early 90s music videos…
But there’s also the opportunity to use the site for your business functions. Here are ten ways to use the new Google toy for marketing functions.1) Put your thirty-second spots there. I know a lot of forward-thinking, new media experts recoil at [...]

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Despite a lingering fear that I resorted to too many cliches (though I hope the slight tweaks made it bearable), I really enjoyed writing my recent PRWeek column - to appear both online and in print. Here’s
a snippet:
What Renegade was getting at - and what bears repeating - is that marketing is not spackle, and [...]

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In a December 2005 post, Steve Rubel discussed upcoming trends for 2006. Quasi-related, I asked for new media experts to predict second-half trends here.
One of the trends Rubel predicted (or, rather, hoped for) was the establishment of a worthwhile comment search function.
He wrote, "
Blog comments have perhaps more collective wisdom inside them than [...]

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I am what you would call a minor MySpace user. I set up an account to learn about the space for work and enjoy the occasional "friend" requests from people I see weekly and those who I haven’t seen in years.
And I think corporations have a great opportunity to set up a presence. The [...]

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The blog launch had its bumps (all do); but Dell is slowly winning kudos for its frank discussions on the exploding laptop in Osaka, Japan and its spotty customer service.
While initial progress and plaudits are likely good for their team, eventually Dell and indeed every company needs to stop trying to win over each [...]

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I’ll admit: I’ve never thought of AOL as a gutsy company; but that changes today.
They have a lot of work ahead of them if they are, as the NYT reports, going to eliminate the marketing behind their subscription model and likely morph into a free portal competing directly with Google, Yahoo, et. al. (and [...]

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