Branding Expansion Or Dilution: Train Wine Club

Co-op advertising and business partnerships are nothing new, but some upcoming pairings will certainly feel that way. San Francisco-based rockers Train have recently paired with K&D Wines and Spirits in New York to create the Train Wine Club."Hey all. My name is Jimmy Stafford. I’m in that band Train, and I happen to like wine. Welcome to our wine club! We talk about our favorite wine, the places we find it, what...

Learning The Hard Way: Three Anti-Case Studies

There is another side of measurement that people are sometimes afraid to talk about. It can best be described as reverse benchmarking — what happens when companies experiment with social, over focus on numbers, and then prematurely cut programs?Sometimes they find out months later that their decision was a bad one. And sometimes, not always, it's too late to recapture the momentum. Here are three case studies and some...

Finding Mobile: Smart Phones Make The Web Mobile

On Friday, comScore, Inc. released its quarterly key trends in the U.S. mobile phone industry during the three-month average period ending October 2010. The report ranked the leading mobile original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) and smartphone operating system (OS) platforms in the U.S. Some of the findings are surprising. Some are not. In October, 234 million Americans ages 13 and older used mobile devices; 60.7 million...

Moving Backward: Fresh Content Project

While the old saying "the more things change, the more they stay the same" has reached a cliche-like status, there is some truth to it. For all the good social media provides, it cannot fix problems that occur at the core. It can however, amplify them. The government can still be among the most ineffective communicators despite having the best tools to do it right. People are still mesmerized by popularity, whether or...

Shopping Psychology: Why Retailers Attract Bargain Hunters

According to an article in The Wall Street Journal, shop owners are leaving lures around their stores to attract more holiday spending. Many of them are placing inexpensive items in the windows that lead toward more expensive fashions in the back."No one wants to buy anything for themselves anymore, you've got to get them through the door," one store owner told The Wall Street Journal. He's not alone. Another one says...

Studying Social Media: A Bacardi Survey Didn't Mix

In what seems to be a solid survey from a least likely source, Bacardi released some interesting findings about social media. The survey, called the Bacardi Together Index, asked 5,000 adults (ages 21+) more than 146 questions to provide a glimpse of online and offline social connections.But before getting into the release of the study and why you never heard about it, it might be worthwhile to take a look at the findings....