When you talk about combining men and machines, you usually think “Borg.” In the Borg model, technology is added to man, resulting in a human that is more like a machine. We’re about to cross over into more of a “Tron” age, though, kind of the opposite of Borg. In the T...

This is a blog about the intersection of branding and social media. I promise I’ll get there if you’ll indulge me in a little big picture. These are dark days. My cable news habit has dropped off since the election, but even the half hour I spend with Brian Williams each night is enough ...

I need to get out more. Sitting here with a 40 terabyte direct cranial link to people who agree with me, it’s easy to forget that lot’s of people out there still have good reasons for deciding NOT to take advantage of all that social media has to offer, at either the personal or professi...

A business school sage once advised me, or more properly a roomful of Type-A hyper-achievers with one foot out the door, to seek balance in our lives. “Measure your successes by what you sacrifice to achieve them,” he said. It was good advice then, and it’s stuck with me. I was rem...

This was inevitable, but it’s still nice to see (hat tip to Alison Driscoll for the find.) Retailer-of-the-moment Madewell is giving it’s facebook fans 15% off. To the unenlightened, this is proof positive of the folly of social media. <Stupidity> “So what you’re saying...

Clearly this does not matter to Luxor. I mean… as of this writing, it’s been viewed less than 250 times. It’s not going to impact their sales in any meaningful way, right? And who’s this Berkowitz guy anyway? Some loser who comes to Vegas for the WiFi? Yea. This penny ante st...

Been checking out CoTweet, a new player in the dedicated social media client space. Clear that it’s early for them, but both the idea and the execution are smart. Co Tweet is for brands who want to get multiple people engaged in the management of a single Twitter identity. Rather than Frank ru...

Image via Wikipedia Great post from JP Holecka here, on what happened to Audi brand mentions after a simple question was asked by Jedi Master Chris Brogan: Chris posed this question: “ What’s the difference, to you, between BMW and Audi ? Which do you feel more strongly about and why? &#...

(This post is the third in a series defining “enterprise social relationship management” that starts here.) Been reflecting on the two Uber-Bowl related Twitter incidents I compared in yesterday’s post - one in which advertisers tracked favorable reactions to their own commercials,...

As with most things in life, you can learn more about social media in the first ten minutes of The Godfather than you can by reading whatever business book is being shilled by this week’s paper guru. Un-commented on, out of respect for both you the reader, and for the sistine chapel of contemp...