Branding Employees: Chapel vs. Dell

While Tamera Kremer at Wildfire was covering the debate between RichardatDell and the fictional AmandaChapel on the value of making brand ambassadors out of employees, Adweek was covering Zappos.com. Zappos has already moved full steam ahead and is one of many companies that already consider employees brand ambassadors online. In fact, according to the story, the vast majority of trial and repeat business at Zappos.com...

Advertising Online: Intel & Everybody

Advertising online is the only medium that has seen substantial gains in spending. According to the Internet Advertising Bureau and PricewaterhouseCoopers, Internet ad revenue totaled almost $10 billion, which represents an increase of nearly 27 percent from the same period a year ago.This is one of the reasons that Intel is bringing a larger portion of its extremely successful co-op advertising budget to the Internet...

Walking Planks: Social Media Pirates

I first heard about the dreaded black spot while reading Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson. It’s a coming of age story about swashbuckling adventures, treasure maps, one-legged seamen with parrots, and the dreaded “Black Spot.”Hey! That almost sounds like social media when I read Eric Eggerston’s beautifully summed take away of Paull Young’s post, entitled “Young PR’s - Know Your Place.”“Don’t needlessly or...

Calculating Identity: Career Distinction

After visiting Career Distinction and running its Online Identity Calculator on Tom Cruise yesterday (check the comments on the post), we started to wonder what would happen if we plugged in more people, ranging from notable bloggers to CEO bloggers to CEOs with no direct social media presence.The mix is pretty eclectic, but it provides some interesting results. Keep in mind that our formula is less than scientific:...