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Back to Where It All Began

Posted by Michael Burke in Opinions on January 27th, 2012 at 10:32 am

One of my favorite songs of all time is playing in my head, “Back to Where it All Began” by the Allman Brothers. Why? Because Facebook's announcement recently of more than 60 new apps into the Open Graph, including Pinterest, eBay and Foursquare, among dozens of others, enabling users to add anything they want, including their activities, into their timelines, is the most exciting opportunity for non-gaming developers to take advantage of the Facebook platform since its launch in 2007.

Over the years we've seen "Lifestyle" applications on Facebook lose ground to games, those with huge ad budgets or incredible viral loops. The day-to-day applications about family, travel, entertainment and pets that were so exciting in 2008 had begun to fade into oblivion. Until, last week and moving forward. These types of applications just got a new breath of fresh air.

While social gaming has been a phenomenon in and of itself, I've always wondered why Facebook didn't encourage more lifestyle and interest-based activity to be built-up on their platform. Not having this has forced many developers to focus on their web strategy instead of their Facebook strategy, and given way to the...

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Does Your Company Need Reputation Insurance?

Posted by Jennifer Bilotta in Opinions Social Media on January 27th, 2012 at 10:28 am

In today's hyperactive, always-on-the-go digital-crazed world we live in... where one misplaced Tweet can undo a lifetime of brand equity, having a crisis management plan in place is imperative. But does it make sense to pay an added expense for proper reputation management?

Chartis, a division of AIG, recently launched a new insurance product that would cover the cost of crisis communications counsel for companies facing a public relations debacle. No stranger to bad press, it seems AIG now understands the importance of outside help during a crisis. AIG claims the policy would cover services rendered even before a crisis has hit the press. It requires policy holders to use one of two mega firms and surely charges mega premiums to match. While I’m doubtful reputation insurance is a worthwhile investment, planning ahead for a crisis that hasn’t happened yet and selecting the outside company or consultant you would work with in the event one did is a terrific idea.

Once a crisis hits, it is critical to respond immediately. If the window for responding to a crisis used to be hours, given today’s social media and 24-hour news environment, it now has to be minutes. And of course it’s...

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What Brand Managers Can Learn From The Music Industry

Posted by adamleiter in Emerging Platforms Entertainment Opinions Social Media on January 27th, 2012 at 10:12 am

Engaging your customers across a wide array of channels and in the process offering the chance to buy your product at the same time... that's a winning recipe for the music industry, and brand managers and product managers would be wise to do the same.

After multiple years of declining music sales, 2011 finally saw a stabilization and slight growth, but most reports trying to decipher the reason have it all wrong. By trying to match the industry’s success to the success of certain artists, even experts are missing the point. The music that artists created wasn’t necessarily more compelling… but through more engaging delivery channels, the industry made a better connection in the way that it could be purchased.

No, musicians last year, yes even the much-lauded Adele and Katy Perry, did anything so radically different than in years past to be the cause of better music sales. The music didn’t suddenly become better in 2011, but the channels in which we can get music certainly did. It all comes down to the downloads, and the increased adoption of smartphones along with better delivery systems like Spotify and Pandora. Analyst Philip Leigh hits the nail on the head in a 

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3 Brand Benefits of Klout

Posted by Tom Edwards in Social Media on January 27th, 2012 at 9:56 am

Identifying topical influencers has been a key to driving awareness and activation for many socially progressive brands over the past few years. One of the measurement variables many brands have come to rely on is Klout.

Much has been written about Klout since it's founding in 2008. Some praise & swear by the service, others question the validity of the score and ability to "game" the system. Regardless, users work each day to increase their Klout score and brands are eager to reward those indiviuduals.

At it's core, Klout provides social media analytics to measure a user's influence across their social networks such as Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Linkedin, Foursquare, and many more and assigns a score to the user. This daily score is meant to reflect the influence that individual has to drive action in social networks.

Currently, Klout boasts over 100 million profiles, 2.7 billion+ pieces of content & connections analyzed daily and 5,000+ partners & developers with over 45 billion+ API calls.

From a brand perspective, there are multiple ways to leverage this data and audience to drive action. From the Klout Perks program, to leveraging Klout's API to the...

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Hybrid Contact Centers: The Cloud Will Set You Free

Posted by Jim Milton in Opinions on January 27th, 2012 at 8:47 am

“Rip and replace” is a term that is all too familiar to the manager that is responsible for upgrading and modernizing their company’s infrastructure. Contact center infrastructure vendors have worked hard to convince these decision makers that there is no time like the present to move to a “unified communications” on-premises solution that encompasses all of the critical components of the modern contact center. An integrated solution will improve productivity, reduce costs and help take you to the “promised land”. Sound familiar?

What these same vendors don’t want you to know is that, once you make this move, you are now locked into their proprietary environment — although they will claim that it is open — for another 5 to 10 years. New features aren’t free or actually even new, they are paid for and not leading edge so, essentially, you have sub-optimized functionality at the component level in order to have an integrated solution. The whole might be greater than the sum of the parts but the parts are not best of breed. Also, implementation time, or time to value, for these deployments is measured in months, if not years. Wait until you receive the annual maintenance bill –...

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