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Justin Bieber has become the latest celebrity brand spokesman to find himself in brand trouble. Advertising Age wrings its hands at the damage his prank could do to his power as a celebrity endorser for brands such as Best Buy, Proactiv, and Google Chrome. We’ve covered celebrity brand woes and the impact of personal scandals on [...] August 10th, 2011 | Leave a comment
When Old Spice announced that Fabio would be replacing Mustafa, the outcry was instantaneous. Was Old Spice going to end up like The Gap and quickly backtrack when customers on social media screamed loudly enough?
Not so fast. It was a set up from the beginning—a set up perfect for generating buzz and involving fans. Fabio [...] July 26th, 2011 | Leave a comment
I was right in the middle of writing a blog entry on how the well-documented trust problems of the Facebook brand have left a gaping strategic hole that could have allowed Google+ to topple the social media giant. But then Google+ messed up in a big way. They no longer can claim trustworthiness and may [...] July 25th, 2011 | 5 comments
ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers) has voted to allow an unlimited number of new Top Level Domains. That means companies won’t be limited to just .com, but can go for.mcdonalds and .starbucks. On the face of it, the decision looks good for brands. But think again. The result could just be more [...] June 21st, 2011 | 3 comments
Advertising Age reports the launch today of Consumr, a new social media ratings site. It’s meant to be Yelp-meets-Foursquare to rate consumer packaged goods like Cheerios and Tide. This is a service without a need. Consumr is working with publisher Rodale to import Yelp-style product reviews for some 50,000 products you can find on grocery store, [...] June 15th, 2011 | 2 comments
“Don’t use the F-Bomb” is a seemingly common sense rule when using social media for corporate purposes. But, common sense is not as common as you might hope. A purported social media expert working for a leading social media agency tweeted this for Chrysler: “I find it ironic that Detroit is known as the Motorcity and yet [...] March 14th, 2011 | Leave a comment
Gawker.com fans were in full rebellion. Some threatened to never visit the site again. The Twittering class hated Gawker’s redesign launched February 7th. On February 9th, that all changed. Gawker.com broke the story of the “classy” Congressman showing off his flabby torso and traffic boomed. Consumers pretty much always hate change–witness the initial flack when the [...] February 11th, 2011 | One comment
The media universe is in a tizzy (and a-Twitter) about AOL’s acquisition of the Huffington Post. The Wall Street Journal interviews top media buyers who are worried that the liberal voice will hurt AOL’s brand. The problem is that AOL doesn’t really have much of a brand. The company’s move away from an “access” business [...] February 11th, 2011 | One comment
More and more Web sites are offering the “Connect with Facebook” option. It appears Facebook Connect is succeeding where others have failed (most notably Microsoft’s Passport product). They are becoming the default internet ID card, saving users from having to create user names and passwords for every site they interact with. Facebook Connect’s success is partly due [...] January 24th, 2011 | Leave a comment
Burson-Marsteller released a study that claims 76% of blogs were off message. They analyzed more than 150 messages sent out by companies listed in the Financial Times Global 100 and discovered a large gap between the official brand messages and how they were reflected on blogs, in tweets, and on other social media posts. The brand [...] January 13th, 2011 | Leave a comment
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