Mourning In The Age Of Social Media

Relationships – whether physical or virtual– are essential components of life, and one inevitable thing in life and relationships is death. So it is natural that the mourning process – not yet intuitively associated by most people with the Web – will increasingly expand online.Read the rest

My Adventures In MySpace…Chapter 6…Am I In Danger?

(An advertisement on MySpace)

Maybe I’m sleeping under a rock, or maybe I’m just crazy. At my recent workshop at the Conference Board communications confab I shared my point of view about how important it is for marketing communications people to not only pay attention and listen to consumer-generated media, but to participate.Read the rest

The Great Thing About Consumer-Generated Media: The Conversation Doesn’t Have To Die

Regular readers of AttentionMax know there’s been an open debate which began last Friday between research guru Nigel Hollis of Millward Brown, and me. Nigel sparked it with his post, Great Idea, Wrong Brand. He argued, in context of the Chevy Tahoe (consumers-create-your-own tv-ad) campaign, that the problem with consumer-generated media is just that: the consumer generates it.Read the rest

PR Pros Beware: Don’t Disregard Consumer-Generated Media

I spoke at a Conference Board corporate-communications confab today with Vickee Adams, media guru from Hill & Knowlton. We did an old-school-meets-new-school workshop, with Vickee the established media relations and PR counselor and me the enthusiastic new-media guy, underscoring the power of consumer-generated media and the dichotomy with search engines, brand reputation and stakeholder relations.Read the rest

My Adventures In MySpace…Chapter 5…How Big Is MySpace?

How big is MySpace? Pretty damn big and it continues to grow fast! The folks over at Hitwise sent me this chart, which trends the market share of U.S. Internet visits to some of the largest Web domains. MySpace is the dark blue line; the others are Google, Ebay and Yahoo.Read the rest