Everyone who begins the journey of writing a marketing plan usually looks at the Executive Summary section early on in the process. A Marketing Plan Summary is usually 1-3 pages long and the goal is to summarize the entire marketing and possibly sales plan into something digestible by new readers an...

Meet the "Royal Caribbean Champions," a group of fifty prolific posters to popular online communities that Royal Caribbean rewards with special access and free cruises in exchange for their frequent and positive commentary. The Champions were outed by their creators, the Customer Insight Group, whic...

People are really a lot like sheep.  Not in a necessarily bad way, like they really are like sheep.  But they do prefer to travel in herds.  That fact is pretty well represented throughout history.  If you prefer a modern reference, I give you the millions of members of social sites. Herds follo...

In Australia, which is best - traditional agencies doing social vs social media consultancies? What is the marketing mix - online, offline, direct, TV, social - that is optimum for brands? Note for overseas readers: Tony Thomas runs a small agency The Population specializing in social media marketin...

Tonight I had the pleasure of speaking to an inaugural event of Techmakers, the first industry-specific branch of Rainmakers. Having lived in Indianapolis for 7 years and slowly making the rounds of the technology sector, it was great to see this take shape. I did a skit tonight and think it worked ...

Growing traffic. Everyone seems obsessed with getting their content out there to as many places and searches they possibly can. For a business, it’s always cool to get national or regional recognition that gets some interest flowing in your company. Is it the right traffic, though? Working in ...

Michael O’Leary has already been named among the worst corporate leaders of 2006 and if you want learn a quick lesson on ‘what not to do as a company head and how not to deal with PR issues’, then the latest controversy coming from Ryanair Airlines is a fine example to look at. Image courtesy ...

Many marketers leverage one piece of technology that they enjoy or are comfortable with and ignore the others. I’m a huge proponent of automation and the marketer leveraging their messaging in any way, shape, or form - so much as it never does harm to their marketing efforts. With regard to a comp...

Many new blogs pop up almost every single day. Some are good and some just a train wreck. I think many people that launch a blog are under the impression that once you launch you write some posts and your famous! It really doesn’t work that way. We do see some really great blogs with quality work ...

Ryanair responded to a blogger’s post about a glitch on their website with juvenile, aggressive comments. (You can read the full Times story of Ryanair’s peculiar response to a blogger’s innocuous post here: Ryanair, best for cheap.) Ryanair are a budget airline. The entire busines...