The AI Marketing Companion

My friend Justin Levy just had brain surgery. He went into the operation not quite knowing what would be on the other side. Despite this personal nightmare, Justin's social media presence was extraordinarily brave, honest, and revealing. Through his timely and detailed posts, his friends and followers could get a daily peek into every aspect of his trial. His successful operation was finally trump...

One of the most interesting aspects about being an observer in this particular time and place in the history of marketing is watching the continuous cycle of innovation, experimentation, and maturity. The dynamics of our age are unprecedented and exciting. For example, let's say we were in the 1970s. In that entire decade, what innovation caused us to re-think marketing strategy? There was probabl...

Is there any greater source of emotional debate and mis-information on the web today than Facebook reach? I recently had a little debate on this subject with a person who wrote a glowing article on the promise of Facebook reach -- despite what appears to be pretty bad news in this corner of the web. I challenged him -- Why write an article that seems to be so counter to the facts? "I'm tired of so...

  Are you using Twitter for your business? Maybe the time for Twitter is now if you consider some of the trends on this popular social media platform: Twitter has momentum. Revenue jumped 124 percent in the latest quarter, and it "beat the Street" estimates for user growth. Twitter shined during the World Cup, owning the online conversation for the planet's biggest sporting event. It appears that...

Have you tried The Marketing Companion podcast yet? People seem to love the humor and intelligence of our audio marketing adventures. If you have not listened in yet, this would be a great edition to begin with. In this show, Tom Webster and I were far too caffeinated to stick to one subject so we decided to go through a grab bag of current topics including: E rasing yourself from Google. New Euro...

Complaining about Facebook has become one of the web's favorite spectator sports. But if you were the king of Facebook, what would you do to fix it? Well, Tom Webster and I decided to do something about it. We appointed ourselves the potentate and caliph of Facebook for a day and solved all of the company's problems in 30 minutes. Impossible you say? Well, we can cover a heck of a lot of ground in...

It seems everywhere you go these days people are talking about Disruption as the next big business "thing." There are packed  disruption conferences , disruption books, disruption consultants. But here is the nagging question I've had tumbling through my mind. Is it really possible to be strategic around disruption?  Is it possible for disruption to be a plan ... or is disruption the explanation o...

There are so many shifting sands on the marketing landscape that it might seem overwhelming. But there are two trends that deserve to be on your radar screen and that is the topic of the latest scintillating edition of The Marketing Companion. After Tom and I enjoy a non-traditional gift exchange for the one-year anniversary of the podcast, we dissect what we believe to be important trends to cons...

By Mark Schaefer My friend and podcast co-host Tom Webster recently penned a really honest and thought-provoking post called " Authorship ." In the post, Tom laments that the more he guest posts and syndicates his writing, the less relevant he may become. I know that sounds counter-intuitive but he makes some good points. The web cares about CONTENT, not necessarily authors, and Tom postulates tha...

How do you get it all done? If I had a nickel for every time I heard this question ... well, I wouldn't be rich (let's be honest) but I could probably treat you to lunch. It seems that people have an endless curiosity about how I get things done. Tom Webster and I thought marketing lifehacks would be a very interesting podcast topic -- and it was, because Tom and I had some pretty divergent views...

Whether you think Google+ is dead, dying, or still on the rise, one thing is certain: something has to change. This post will tell you what and why. Google+ was meant to take on Facebook. This is an economic imperative for a company built on: a) collecting personal information that can be turned into ads and b) finding ways to have you spend more time on their sites so you can see those ads. Faceb...

A few months ago, my blog was a target for a denial of service attack. What this meant was that a "bot" was set up by somebody (in this case a person in The Netherlands) to hit my site over and over so many times that readers cannot access the blog. It was a random attack and this might seem like a pretty dumb business plan, but apparently a lot of companies are obsessed with breaking into my site...

In the newest episode of The Marketing Companion Tom Webster and I examine a brand new study from Edison that reveals some eye-popping new insights on podcasting, online radio and social media consumption. Some of the highlights of this podcast episode include: Introducing "Poodle King" Webster and Social Media Explained The explosion of online radio and the implications for content consumption Ex...

I go to a lot of marketing conferences and they are undeniably a great way to learn, network and stay up to speed on the human and technological breakthroughs that are transforming our business. But how are they changing? How important are they? Does it make sense to attend? To sponsor? This is probably a topic on a lot of minds as our personal time is compressed and travel budgets are slashed so...

As many of our channels for reaching customers are getting strangled, brands are turning to new ways to connect and communicate with customers. One natural opportunity is to align with the authentic advocacy represented by bloggers and other powerful content creators. In an information-dense world where it is more difficult to become the signal instead of the noise, blogger outreach is escalating,...

A number of news items coalesced recently and made me wonder ... what is the true role of social media in the marketing mix today? How has it changed? Is it really about connection? Is it still a way to engage with customers? Or, has it been so overrun by agencies and programmed content that it is little more than advertising? Maybe you have been wondering the same thing? This is such a vital topi...

Over the past decade, companies and executives have re-discovered the power of incorporating public speaking into the marketing mix. Some of the advantages include: Creating high-quality content that can be leveraged in many places Cost-effective way to reach a targeted audience with a message Good PR opportunities. Building a personal brand that also can accentuate a product and company brand (th...

When I was in graduate school I took a class that examined the qualities of leadership. I have to make a confession ... the only reason I took it was because I thought it was going to be an easy blow-off class! I was completely wrong. This turned out to be one of the most interesting and inspiring classes of my career and it ignited a lifetime of study on the subject. It turned me into a leadershi...

Over the past few weeks the interweb airwaves have been humming and buzzing with data pointing to the increasing costs of getting your content seen and distributed through an over-crowded web. In a recent  Advertising Age  article , Facebook reports: "Content that is eligible to be shown in our news feed is increasing at a faster rate than people's ability to consume it." A  study by InboundWriter...

In our latest Marketing Companion Podcas t, Tom Webster and I examine three ripped-from-the-headlines topics critical to digital marketing: A decline in Facebook reach? -- New research from several sources indicates that Facebook algorithmic tweaks could be dramatically depressing the visibility of brand posts to their audiences. We dissect this data and discuss whether this is real or something t...

This not your normal 2014 forecast post about Facebook advertising and "the year of mobile" (yawn). Tom Webster and I put our heads together to really think through some of the implications of what we're seeing out there and the six projections we developed are not exactly run of the mill social media fare. I think you are going to really enjoy our latest Marketing Companion podcast. It is going t...

Sponsored content is probably the hottest -- and most controversial -- marketing trend around. Embedding advertising messages in the editorial portion of online properties is an act of desperation -- Traditional advertising is in decline as technology allows people to avoid ads The fact of the matter is that sponsored content works best when you don't know it's an ad. This raises so many questions...

An early Google Pants sighting[/caption] Companies like Forrester and Gartner -- who used to make their money providing expensive and exclusive research reports -- are finding it impossible to "contain" the data. If somebody buys just one report, it's likely to very soon be distributed widely on the web for free. As a result, there is a very subtle but important change going on in the world of res...

Podcasting, which traces its roots back to "audioblogging" in the 1980s, has enjoyed a renaissance as smart phones have become nearly ubiquitous. But what does the future hold? The great hope for podcasting might be the emotional, immersive nature of the medium. It's a rich content relationship, not a digital "snack" and a unique opportunity to provide both entertainment and information. A podcast...

Here's the number one business opportunity in marketing today: Teach marketing leaders, social media gurus and SEO professionals how to ask the right questions about data. I'm serious. There is a golden opportunity here because many businesses leaders don't seem to know enough about basic marketing analytics to know whether their programs are growing or not. We are leading "by our gut" in a world...