In the last two weeks I’ve run a half marathon, been to five airports, three cities, five client on-sites, two conferences and a football game. If someone would be so kind, I’d like to get off this ride now.

I’m not recounting my exploits to complain or to engender the “oh my gosh look how

When I started podcasting back in 2005 my intentions were pretty simple. I wanted to tell the story about all the things you never know you needed to know, right out of college in an effort to pay it forward. Six years later, blogs have become more than just a hobby – they’re part of

Just because you’re a great writer doesn’t necessarily mean you’ll be an effective blogger.

Don’t get me wrong – it’s possible to excel at both, but stylistically these two categories are quite different.  The first step to becoming an effective blogger is to understand some fundamental differences:

Difference #1 – Blog writing is more personal.

Traditional writers hate using “you” and “I,” but personalizing the tone of a blog is critical to establishing a credible relationship with the reader.

Difference #2 – Blog writing is more concise.

Text-heavy articles are really hard to read online. Stick to anywhere from 200 to 500 words and think about breaking up your text with shorter paragraphs, block quotes and bulleted points.  That way, you might keep your reader on-site long enough to deliver your message.

Difference #3 – Blog writing relies just as heavily on rich media as it …

Back in high school everyone knew who the “cool kids” were.  They hung out in right corner of the lunchroom, they spoke to only the right people and no matter how badly they treated us, we all wanted to be them.

Flash-forward 10+ years later and the dynamics really haven’t shifted that much, particularly in what most of us call “social media.” Sure, the food is better (thank you, scoutmob) but we’re still ruled by cliques and quirks we always were back in high school. In fact, the stakes are now higher because the “cool kids” have power in the form of influence over others’ buying behaviors.

Given this continued dynamic, I set about trying to deconstruct influence from both sides of the electronic divide.   Perhaps, I thought, if I could explain the influence equation it would be easier for us to …

Let me first say that if anyone tells you that they can solidly predict what’s going to happen in 2011 in social media, they’re full of it. As for this post and the one that will follow, the point is not to make predictions but to explain two current, major trends that will continue to shape social media in 2011.

With the economy poised to make some sort of comeback in 2011 new entrants to the social marketplace are already creating increased competition for consumer attention. If you look at the players that were really hot in the latter part of 2010, like Groupon and Instagram, you start to see patterns. These patterns are what I believe will play a big role in in social for the next 12 months.

Let’s start with the most topical one: consumer pay-to-play.

Particularly in the last …

Creating a corporate blog is a lot like adopting a puppy. At first, it sounds like a great idea. Then, the reality of what it takes to keep it sets in.

If done right, corporate blogs can be incredibly valuable to a business. However, much like puppies, maintaining an active corporate blog requires a commitment of time and resources, not to mention the tolerance of a certain amount of unintended frustration.

Before you start picking out blog designs (and before we run the puppy analogy into the ground) here are three ways to tell if a corporate blog makes sense for your business:

1. Do you have anything unique to say?

At first, every business answers “yes.” However, when we ask them to explain why, or to cite specific examples, we hear far fewer affirmatives. The fact of the matter is that thousands of …

Anyone that’s ever been in a relationship will tell you there’s an enormous difference in what you will do for someone you “like” vs. someone you truly “love.”  The same goes for consumers and their relationships with brands and causes.

Just ask a company like JetBlue.   Last week, they were staring down the barrel at a public relations nightmare.  JetBlue has over 1.5 million followers on Twitter and over 300,000 fans that “Like” them on Facebook. Had it been any other airline, it would be easy to envision an uprising that would paralyze the brand in social media and characterize Steven Slater’s behavior as endemic of the state of the service levels of airline industry, in general.  Why didn’t that happen in this instance? Because JetBlue’s fans don’t just “like” the brand, they love the brand.

Sure, it’s great to have a …

Only the truly geeky would do this kind of analysis but over the last couple of months, I have been running correlation matrices against various pieces of data on Facebook.

For those of you with, you know…lives; correlation matrices essentially tell you how much a various metric syncs up with other metrics.  In this case, I was looking at fan growth and engagement versus various types of consumer behavior on Facebook Fan Pages.

The amazingly consistent element across all industries, products and strategies was the effect of user-generated content on overall fan growth and engagement.   When users post either videos or photos to a brand’s Facebook wall, I saw consistently higher numbers of comments, likes and, most importantly, new fans.

Explaining the Data

At first, this appears to be rather self-evident; if a brand excites a fan enough to create and post their own …

Don’t look now but your favorite restaurant may be stalking you.  Or at least that’s certainly the feeling I got when I checked into a local DC movie theater on foursquare and saw an unusual asset on the top-right corner of the screen.

In case you’re not familiar with it, foursquare is a location-based game for mobile devices like the iPhone and Droid.  You play by whipping out your device whenever you go to an event, a local business or even your office and “checking in.”  Accrue more check-ins than anyone else and you become “Mayor” of a given location.  Along the way, players can unlock “Badges” for patterns of check-ins (for instance, go out four nights and a row and you get a “Bender”) or you can even play against your friends and see who gets out on the town …

In terms of progress in social media, 2009 was a rough one for Consumer Packaged Goods Brands – otherwise known as CPGs. From Motrin Moms to the Skittles Interweb, it’s no wonder some CPG marketers are apt to describe their relationship with their product’s social media strategy as “complicated.”

On one hand, CPG marketers have always been wary of social media because they love control and predictability.  They are used to drawing on decades of market data to tell them that if they put X amount of dollars into a traditional ad buy on television, radio and/or print, they have a pretty good chance of getting Y level of return. Social media, as a relatively young and evolving channel, doesn’t have that kind of predictability.  That tradeoff tends to weigh heavily when it comes to determining marketing spend for a brand …