MarCom Professional

Bradley C. Bower for The New York Times
Frank Eliason, digital care manager at Comcast

There's certainly no shortage of discussions in the blogosphere that examine and spotlight companies that are listening to brand-related conversations across the Social Web to improve customer service, retention, and loyalty. But, when the New York Times decides to profile the emerging and critically important trend of two-way dialog between company representatives and stakeholders, we actually begin the process of crossing the chasm into the mainstream.

Continued attention of this caliber represents a significant and momentous opportunity to educate businesses on how to socialize their service and marketing departments and expedite the process of improving relationships with their customers, partners, and prospects. More...

I attended the Facebook f8 developer conference yesterday in San Francisco and I’m still recovering from the overwhelming experience.

Thousands of developers flocked to the San Francisco Design Center to see their Social Sherpa in person and calibrate with his vision for the next year of propagating the social graph. It’s indeed a movement and his influence can not be underestimated. Comparisons to Steve Jobs were broadcast as freely as the ideas for new apps that were exchanged in almost every conversation.

I was lucky enough to get a front row seat for Zuckerberg’s state of the social network and his plans for making Facebook more pervasive in the socialization of online content and relationships. More...

In the era of the social Web, communications is evolving back to its origins of communicating with people, not at them. It may seem implied, but communications does not, for the most part, embody two-way discussions.

Over the years, communications has evolved into a one-way distribution channel that broadcasts messages at target audiences. In the process, communications stopped being about communication, focusing instead on the marketing aspects of top-down message push and control, what we now commonly refer to as marketing communications aka marcom. Marcom embodies traditional and new marketing branches that include advertising, PR, Web/interactive, event, among many other disciplines (depending on the organization). More...

Broadcast and print media and the services the support the creation and distribution of information are not dead and Social Media is not going to get indicted for holding the smoking gun.

These powerful, influential, and age-old industries are however, undergoing some of their most radical transformations and metamorphoses in order to adapt to the elusive and rapidly shifting information landscape.

Money is migrating away from traditional media as well as the industries and services that support it - from creation to distribution.

Is Social Media to blame?

Any expert, thought leader, or analyst will claim that this transition was christened in the 90s with the popularization of the Internet aka Web 1.0. More...

Broadcast and print media and the services that support the creation and distribution of information are not dead and Social Media is not going to get indicted for holding the smoking gun.

These powerful, influential, and age-old industries are however, undergoing some of their most radical transformations and metamorphoses in order to adapt to the elusive and rapidly shifting information landscape.

Money is migrating away from traditional media as well as the industries and services that support it - from creation to distribution.

Is Social Media to blame?

Any expert, thought leader, or analyst will claim that this transition was christened in the 90s with the popularization of the Internet aka Web 1.0. More...

Sprout is a new, very cool service that lets everyday people create portable widgets for embedding on Web sites, blogs, and in social networks.

I was originally introduced to the service at DEMO08 in January and was immediately blown away.

We live in the widget economy and people today are empowered and compelled to lift and place encapsulated content and experiences from one place to another, however and whenever they'd like. With SproutBuilder, you can now build your own custom, portable and embeddable widgets featuring the Web content, links, gadgets, and capabilities you desire as simply as designing a flyer in Word. More...

Francois Ramaget of Aspect Consulting translated The Essential Guide to Social Media into French and has made it available as a free download here. Thank you Francois!

The Essential Guide to Social Media is a "quick start" overview of how to listen and participate in social media and new media marketing.

Last year, Yuri Aksyonov translated The Social Media Manifesto into Russian. You can find it here.

If you haven't already had a chance, be sure to read, The Art of Conversation - It's About Listening Not Marketing.

Connect with me on Twitter, Jaiku, LinkedIn, Tumblr, Pownce, Plaxo, FriendFeed, or Facebook. More...

Discussions and debates on the viability, necessity, and effectiveness of conversational aka social media marketing continue to roar across the Social Web.

There are three sides to this equation:

- New media pioneers and practitioners who defend and evangelize the art of conversations because they're investing in people and their feedback.

- Social Media marketers who embrace social tools and promote their use in corporate/brand marketing and Public Relations - most without using them in such applications.

- Some experienced business and marketing professionals view conversations as distractions that are immeasurable, expensive, not scalable, and ineffective in purporting corporate messages to their "target audiences." To them, Conversational Marketing and Social Media are overused buzz words without substance or statistics to support their reason for being. More...

It's inevitable. As Twitter experiences growing pains, new entrants will seize the opportunity to provide a more complete and open experience to communicating with, and at, the people you may or may not know.

Few will succeed, while others force evolution to inspire new features and capabilities in existing services.

The truth is that the Twitterati are frustrated, worn, and undoubtedly impatient. At this point, any and all alternatives are starting to look attractive. When you're starving, all food appears appetizing, including the options that you wouldn't normally consider consuming. More...

Social Media is our genre's Industrial Revolution. It is the era of new influencers and the ability for every day people to share their creativity, expertise, thoughts, ideas, and passions in order to participate in and build a community around common interests.

People are taking their destiny into their own hands and evolving their online, personal or professional persona and brands online.

While there are many user-generated or people-driven social networks today, none generate the traffic or exposure possible at YouTube.

It has created stars, launched careers, extended brand reach and resonance, cultivated communities, promoted causes, and even helped politicians garner votes. More...