Recently I’ve run into a number of companies who call themselves a  “social media agency”.  Here are some examples (this is not a joke):
1.) Company A
This company sells “engagement marketing” services.  They use an ASP Buzz Monitoring tool (a pretty good one) to identify brand mentions in Blogs, Forums, etc.  When they see a brand mention (positive [...]

One of the biggest complaints about social media, or rather reasons companies give for not getting involved in it, that I hear time and time again is that they are afraid of what people will say about them, and fear they have no control over that. Unfortunately for these companies what they don’t realize [...]

A couple of posts ago I wrote about a gentleman from the UK who had made some mistakes that had been captured and spread across the web. How did he get caught up in his situation?  Two men were masquerading as a woman online, basically sitting behind a fake persona.  Is this ethical? No [...]

Social media isn’t a fad, and it’s no longer for the early adopters.
 Companies have realized the benefits of integrating social media into their communications strategy, and the downsides of not doing so.  But, there are bound to be companies that make mistakes, running out and implementing ideas that seem great rather than sitting down and [...]

So, who’s Stuart Slann, why does he need advice, and why from us?
Stuart is an Englishman who decided to cheat on his wife with a Scottish woman he met on Facebook.  Affairs of the heart are things that happen all of the time, the world over, so what’s special about this one?  Well, the ‘woman’ [...]

The pitfalls of gaming as a marketing technique

Facebook owns you!! That’s right.  Everything you’ve ever put on Facebook can be used by Facebook however they please.  Think by closing your account everything will go away?  Wrong.  It’s now property of Facebook FOREVER!!
On February 4th, Facebook updated its Terms of Service (TOS) to basically take away any rights you have to any content [...]

Pete Blackshaw’s recent interview with HHS Web Manager Andrew P Wilson (which took place on Twitter) is an interesting and informative look into how social media can/should be used and the mindset required for success.  Maybe it is because the goal of HHS  in this instance was focused on public service (getting timely information to the [...]

So, you stopped getting the newspapers delivered to your house because it was so much easier getting your news online.  But, now you wonder if there’s an even easier way of finding out about news events without having to type in all those troublesome URLs.
Well, have no fear….Twitter’s here!
All you need to do is sign [...]

Twitter is a 140 character micro-blogging platform that has so far generated over 1.41 billion (that’s billion with a b) messages between users.  Those message run the gammut from insightful to inane, from brand bashing to content sharing, from personal to events of worldwide importance.  Politicians have, and in some cases still do, used twitter [...]