We Are Not Immune…

Posted on January 30, 2009 by Aaron Strout

Bad news today. Really bad news. We had to lay off a number of our employees. What makes the bad news worse is that not only are these people good friends but they are smart, hard working people. People that would go to battle for you. People that had your back. An easy question to [...]

Filed under: Uncategorized | 2 Comments »

Slides from Today’s “Building a Business Case for Social Marketing” Webcast

Posted on January 28, 2009 by Aaron Strout

In the event that you missed today’s webcast with: Bill Johnston, Chief Community Officer of ForumOne (and former community manager of Autodesk) Rob Harles, SVP of community and customer engagement at Sears Holdings Kate Niederhoffer, Sr. Partner at the Dachis Group (formerly of Nielsen/Buzzmetrics) Here are the goods. To that end, there will be an [...]

Filed under: ROI and Marketing Measurement, Social Marketing | Tagged: , , , | 4 Comments »

The Value of Social Media – ForumOne’s Interview with Aaron

Posted on January 22, 2009 by Aaron Strout

Earlier this week, my friend, Bill Johston at ForumOne Communications was kind enough to interview me for an article on their Online Community Summit Report. The interview is cross-posted below. At the end of the day, companies will enjoy the greatest success when they are coordinating all of their efforts and driving their customers to [...]

Filed under: Community, Content Marketing, Social Marketing, Social Media | Tagged: , , , | 1 Comment »

Your Brand: The Bridge to Community

Posted on January 19, 2009 by Doug Wick

My colleagues Aaron Strout and Bill Fanning have gotten a great conversation started around the difficulty of connecting community with a brand that seems not quite as “community ready,” starting with a recent post titled “Would you join a Toothpaste Community?“ This is a question we get all the time in initial sales calls with [...]

Filed under: Engagement Marketing, Social Branding, Social Marketing | Tagged: , | 2 Comments »

The Loyalty Effect

Posted on January 16, 2009 by Aaron Strout

  If the title of this post sounds familiar, that’s because it’s the title of a well-known book by Bain & Company fellow, Fred Reichheld. While I’m not planning on talking about Fred or his book, I do want to dig into the concept of customer loyalty – a topic that is more important to marketers now more than ever [...]

Filed under: Engagement Marketing | Tagged: , , , , | 4 Comments »

How Important is Authenticity? Just Ask Bear Grylls.

Posted on January 12, 2009 by Aaron Strout

A few weeks ago, my friend, Chris Brogan, who just happens to be a well-known blogger and president of New Marketing Labs, wrote a paid for post for K-Mart. In spite of Chris’ up front disclosures about the relationship, a fire storm erupted in the blogosphere over the ethics of paid for content. As you can [...]

Filed under: content, Content Marketing, Social Marketing | Tagged: | 9 Comments »

From Flat to Round: The New Brand

Posted on January 5, 2009 by Doug Wick

I draw a lot of parallels between marketing and storytelling, and I’m certainly not the only one. But recently, I’ve been giving some thought (mostly as a result of it being a hot conversation on the web) to the branding dimension of marketing, how it’s changing, and how it relates to the art of telling [...]

Filed under: Social Branding, Social Marketing, Word of Mouth / Viral Marketing | Tagged: , , , , , | 5 Comments »

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