While the advent of the Internet and social media has certainly democratized brand building, it’s also introduced a wealth of unknowns into the equation. Given my background in analytics, I sometimes wonder how social listening and analytics might have been used by these ad men (mostly men back in those days) to better their campaigns and save potentially damaging ones from the fire of public assault. The brand had a pancake mix widely available, and its brand recognition led many people to claim during the focus group that they’d recently purchased Aunt Jemima syrup. MORE >>

To all Marketing Voices listeners and readers, you may have noticed the Social Media Informer badge on my site. was asked to participate in the launch of the new site which appears to have an interesting strategy for aggregating and distributing social media content. As a supporter of their site, I find myself in the company of social media experts Tom Pick, Paul Dunay, J-P De Clerck, Tony Karrer and Chris Brogan as well as many others. Social Media Informer seems unique in several respects. suggest you check out social media informer. MORE >>

periodically find it helpful to put together a list of the top questions I’m asked by people, corporations and the media.  1]  Do most companies seem to have clear strategies and direction with social media or does it seem like people are still trying to figure out what to do with it and how it can help them? The key with social media is to fail fast, fail forward and fail better.  The beauty of social media is that your customers are very forgiving and at the same time, helpful at expressing exactly what they need from you as a company.  to $11.  MORE >>

Amid all of the hype, conferences, and rapid adoption of social media marketing by organizations from sole proprietors to the Fortune 100, there remains an undercurrent of skepticism. This surfaces in posts like Social Media Skepticism , 5 reasons why social media skeptics maybe right and Business social networking: where’s the ROI? It’s why a search for “social media sucks&# on Google yields almost 12 million results (so much for my SEO on this post, oh well). Reasons Social Media Sucks. No question. MORE >>

In thinking of what you can do with social media data, I find it helpful to think about three buckets of social media data : content, activity, and people data. If you look at social media from one angle, that's what it is: lots of content. Analyzing Content Data Remember consumer-generated media? That was the mindset in 2006 when I started looking for companies that worked with social media data. The companies they talked about suddenly needed to pay attention, and the existing paradigm with the closest fit was media analysis. MORE >>