Beware marketing truisms
I’m increasingly getting worried (and bored) about the rise and rise of new marketing truisms, especially in the context of the social web. There seems to be to many (or too little?) ‘It’s all about X’, with X being the marketing buzz word of the moment: social ideas, experience, marketing, engagement, conversation, twitter, bonfires etc… If you want to see HERD in action come look at my RSS feed. All of these Xs are usually great (but not new) ideas, sometimes they are no more than empty memes but they can’t just be EVERYTHING. It can’t be all just about X. It can’t be that simple. Actually it’s a quite natural quest to make the

Monitoring Social Media conference
This rant has earned me few haterz in the industry and an invite to speak in a panel at the monitoring social media conference. Whether client or agency side, PR, market research or marketing if listening and monitoring ‘the conversations’ is something you should know about I highly recommend you to come along. There

Caramel bunny digital pop up shop
Peeew what a day…Today we launched what I want to believe is the first ever digital pop up shop(s) to give away the limited edition Giles Deacon scarf he designed for the bunny. It went completely nuts (Actually, the shop just popped up at www.handbag.com…so it’s still going) You can read all about it

First / Last person wins (please help)
I’ve been fascinated for a while now by a not so new social behaviour which I believe Faris will agree with the wanky term status-affirming-Phatic-group-interactions. It appears in different contexts but facebook is where i spotted it most. Following EVERY post on a branded fan page (or any other social platform), dozens of people will leave a comment just for the sake of leaving a comment, regardless of the post content - just

IPA Social: Social media measurement - mummy are we there yet?
This is my long overdue contribution to the IPA social CIP (conversation in progress). For the purpose of simplifying a debate that by now can be written into a 500 pages book, I will try to delineate the core challenges. Oh wait, someone rather clever have already done it, albeit in a different context : “Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted.” (Albert Einstein) How easy life was before the (social) interweb, hey? Creative agencies created. Media agencies distributed. All based on clear briefs, targets and