The rapid ascension of social media as a force in marketing and public relations has produced a nasty culture shock among communications professionals.  For those of us who came of age in a time when controlling the message through strategic positioning (sometimes called lying, by commission or omission), the reality that customers now have talk-back tools […]

Now we know why Whole Foods CEO John Mackey has starting updating his blog again after a long hiatus between posts:  he’s been gearing up to defend himself from the revelation that on several occasions he tried to drive down the stock price of his smaller rival Wild Oats by leaving unflattering pseudononymous comments on online investor forums.  Whole Foods has since acquired Wild Oats. 
Both […]

Is Linkedin in play? 
Most of the recent flurry of reporting about Facebook has focused on the impact that its wildly successful foray into the world of adult membership is having on MySpace but there are signs that it is also having an effect on LinkedIn, the original social network for business users. 
The signs are there, […]

A hot topic among social media bloggers these days is exactly which big companies “get” the value of connectedness, community and emergent technologies and which don’t.  A subsidiary discussion to that is around which traditionally managed corporations are jumping on the bandwagon for PR reasons because they want to be seen as one of the cool kids and which ones are actually […]

Jigsaw is a fast-growing, controversial online marketplace that lets people trade their business contacts for more contacts or cash.  Co-founded by veteran sales executive Jim Fowler, Jigsaw aims to become the world’s largest Rolodex.  Before Jigsaw, Fowler spent more 12 years selling marketing and collaboration software.
1. What is Jigsaw? Give us the elevator speech.
Jigsaw is the world’s […]

Let’s be honest for a moment: FAST is not the first company you think about when you think of search. If you’re like me, four days ago, you probably thought the whole competitive landscape for search technology had already been definitively settled. Google won. Game. Set. Match.
But, like me, you’d be wrong. The FASTForward Conference […]

Back on July 30 I posted a piece called 5 Good Reasons Not All CEOs Should Blog.  Thanks to Jason Goldberg of Jobster, the online recruiting site, I now have a sixth good reason:  You might be exposed as the baldfaced liar that you really are.
When rumors started flying last month that Jobster was in trouble and layoffs were imminent, Goldberg […]

Jakob Nielsen has issued his annual 10 Best-Designed Intranets list. I guess we’ll have to take his word for it since you have to pay $174 to download the pdf to see the screenshots.  But, his post explaining why he selected these particular intranets is peculiarly unconvincing and in some cases downright scary. He seems to think, […]

I have a post on l’affaire Spocko over at the FastForward Blog today.  Nathan Gilliatt has an even better follow up here.

You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows and you sure don’t have to count circulation figures and ad pages to know that internet has been a disasterous paradigm buster for newspapers in particular and print journalism in general.
Last week’s fire sale of the Minneapolis Star Tribune was only the latest ominous cloud of smoke to rise over the […]