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A Fast and Flexible Approach to Developing Content

One of my clients has been experimenting with an innovative and efficient approach to content development and I want you to know about it. The company is in a highly specialized and big-ticket b-to-b industry. Its executives are very busy and very well paid. The VP of marketing wanted to develop some thought leadership white […]

A Mobile Game-Changer

Apple unveiled the iPhone Application List last week and boasted that it sold one million of the new 3G (third generation) devices in the product’s first weekend on the market. More important than the sales figures is the coup that Apple has pulled off: The iPhone 3G looks to be the first mobile device to […]

Envisioning the Future of Journalism

The rapid implosion of the newspaper industry (advertising sales by U.S. newspapers fell a record 14% in the first quarter) has created a storm of debate in the media industry about what journalism will look like when information is free and everyone is a publisher. Here’s my take on the future of journalism. The current […]

Lessons From the Campaign Trail

Businessweek’s Catherine Holahan writes this week about the big lead Barack Obama has built against John McCain in online visibility. While I’m not going to declare a preference for either candidate, I do think it’s worth noting the lessons marketers can learn from the Obama campaign’s success. Political campaigns have long been about the 30-second […]

Web 2.0 Goes Corporate

In my 25 years in the information technology field, I’ve learned how to spot trends that are about to go mainstream. One of my most reliable methods is to attend industry conferences dedicated to some new idea or technology and to look at the name badges of the attendees. Once corporate IT managers start showing […]

Social Media Tools Don’t Matter

Here’s a question I hear from marketers all the time: “We want to launch a corporate blog, but we don’t know how to go about it. Where should we start?” My answer is that you should start a couple of steps back from where you are. Social media tools – whether they’re blogs, online communities, […]

An Online Video Strategy That Hits The Mark

I just returned from my second trip to Toronto in the last two months and was again impressed with the Web-savviness of the Canadian audience. Did you know, for example, that Canadians are the world’s most active users of Facebook? Or that Canadians spend, on average, two more hours per week viewing online video than […]

IDG’s Chairman Sees Brighter Future Online

When I read the story in the New York Times last week about International Data Group’s (IDG) successful transition from a print to an online model, I immediately fired off a congratulatory note to Pat McGovern, IDG’s chairman. I worked for IDG for 15 years and was privileged to get to know him a little […]

Publishing is Now a Beginning, Not an End

The shift from print to online media requires us to change a lot of our assumptions about marketing and publishing, but perhaps no transformation is more powerful than this: In the online world, publishing information is merely a starting point, not an endpoint. If you grew up with mainstream media, this is a difficult concept […]

Secrets of Blogger Relations

Since embracing social media two years ago, Dell Computer has learned a few lessons. One of its key blogger relations people shared some secrets last week in a keynote interview at the New Communications Forum in Santa Rosa, Calif. Richard Binhammer is charged with monitoring and engaging with the active ecosystem of people who blog […]