After a few weeks of controversy over a change in their terms of service (TOS) agreement, Facebook today has announced it has apparently learned from its mistakes and will open this process up to the users. It is hard for me to fathom why this has taken such a long time given that this is what socia...

Well, not you personally (I hope). A recent CMO Council study, however showed that only 16% of 400 executives they surveyed have an online listening plan in place. 56% have no plan to track of drive word-of-mouth and only 30% thought they had the ability to resolve complaints quickly. Why such a low...

Over the past couple of weeks I have seen a number of people on Twitter who seem to forget that transparency extends to micromedia platforms. I think we've been through this drill with blogs and social media profiles, but the need for honesty and transparency does not diminish with the number of cha...

Reaction time is a major competitive advantage in social media. What I mean by reaction time is the difference between an event or popular meme and the opportunity for your brand. This is one of the reasons that a comprehensive listening plan is so vitally important to any company. It takes one blog...

One of the most confounding issues in social media for most people/companies is finding, tracking and staying in the conversation. Backtype is a service that I've found helpful in monitoring comments that I leave, as well as reviewing comments that others have made. As most of the value in blogs com...

Bruce Haines is the President and Global COO of Cheil Worldwide. Bruce just relocated to Seoul and brings a traditional advertising perspective to next generation technologies Key takeaways: Global economy is having an impact on all marketers Changes are happening rapidly Consumer messaging bombardm...

One of the most important aspects of online conversations is the sentiment of what the author is saying. Are they positive about you, negative or apathetic? The difference is vitally important, but very hard to determine due to the complexity of language. Let's look at what I mean by complexity of l...

Personas are an extremely valuable tool for marketers in any field. If you're not familiar with the term, personas are representations of your target audience based on research and interviews. From PR to digital to advertising, any marketing team or agency can benefit from developing client- and/or ...

Setting foot into the blogosphere can be a paralyzing task for many marketers. Despite the technological ease of entry, there are major psychological and organizational hurdles that have to be overcome. This new series will look at the brave marketers who overcome internal and external forces to joi...

Easily the most value that I receive from writing this blog is the interaction with you in the comments. Yesterday's challenge to marketers to wake up and start looking for ways to leverage new media (instead of shutting it down) was no exception. Great comments like those always lead me to new idea...