Social Media Super Bowl

Our friend Jason Keith noted on Twitter this morning how surprised he was was the lack of talk and debate on the Super Bowl this week. From my perspective, the game isn't the same with my team not in it. As a sports fan, I'll watch it (Go Cards!) -- if anything, for the ads. In the past couple of years, we've seen how advertisers have been using social media to amplify the impact of the ads they spent so...

Why social media matters

[Image from Greg Verdino] Twitter is my best source of content from great thinkers, and Shannon Paul (no relation to my boss - at least I don't think) is one of those. She directs the social media efforts for the Detroit Red Wings, and brings a lot to the table with every post on her blog. I found a path to her latest one through Twitter, and feel it's worth sharing here because it echoes a lot of what I've...

Lighting a Fire Under Clean Tech

Yesterday, President Obama initiated several more steps to help the U.S. become an energy independent country. It is a task several U.S. Presidents have tried to accomplish in the past, yet we all know none of them have had any luck so far. I'm optimistic that we'll see progress in this area over the next few years and anxious to see how this will impact the clean tech sector. Venture capital funding has taken a hit across the boards for...

How to Avoid the "No-Ad-Dollars CMO Blues"

A link to an interesting article in AdAge was in my early morning Twitter feed, courtesy of George Dearing by way of Kate Brodock. The article relayed the findings of a study of 400 CMOs that revealed that few feel they are effectively tracking social media or word of mouth. "For all the talk about listening to consumers, few marketers think their companies are doing so effectively and even fewer are monitoring what people say about their brands in social...

Social Media ROI

It's time to stop and take a breath from two significant client launches this morning to tend to our blog, as it's been neglected in the last week. Today, I'm introducing a new channel for LP&P to communicate with our community -- our Utterli channel. This should give us the ability to share some quick-hitting thoughts with you through another mechanism and ensure we keep our content coming. Look for more content through this channel in the future, and for...

A lesson in plain english from the inauguration

In our current super-heated information environment, everyone is grabbing pieces of news and data at lightning speed and then moving on to our next burning task. Few, if any, have the luxury of intense analysis of information. The onus is on the communicator to simplify messages so they can be readily understood and remembered. When presidential candidate Barack Obama delivered his now-famous speech on race, I blogged about the fact that it was a well written, heartfelt speech, but it...

Advice Worth Taking from Management Guru Tom Peters

Leave it to Tom Peters. As Inc. Magazine pointed out in its December issue: "Among all management gurus, Tom Peters is most associated with managing during bad economic times. His In Search of Excellence was published amid the sharp recession of 1982, and Thriving on Chaos debuted on Black Monday in 1987. On TomPeters.com, he recently wrote about running a business in a time of 'significant and sustained economic disarray.'" The magazine quoted a recent Peters blog post that I...

Less is More and Sometimes No Comment is Best

Roughly one month from pitchers and catchers reporting to Spring Training in much warmer climes than I'm experiencing right now, Roger Clemens is ruefully watching Jim Rice get elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame and seeing his chances for the Hall, as well as his future, spiraling downward. The reason: he spoke first and thought later in the aftermath of last year's Mitchell Report on the use of steroids in baseball in which he was named by a former...

Time for a PR Stimulus Package (at least in thinking)

With the inauguration just a few days away, everyone seems to be anxiously awaiting President-elect Obama's economic stimulus package. Clearly, something broad and bold is needed. Not to just get the economy going again, but to restore people's confidence. In uncertain times its easy to fall into the "let's just wait it out and see what happens mode" of operating. People and companies become so frozen and unsure of what the future will bring that they decide doing nothing, or...

Inside one newspaper's transformation

There is a great feature in the current New York Magazine that takes us inside how the New York Times has been tackling what so many newspapers are struggling with right now -- how to embrace the Web. Emily Nussbaum profiles the "Interactive Newsroom Technologies" team, the 10-person group responsible for carrying out an integration between the print and online operations of the paper, particularly on the editorial side. From my position here leading our social media practice, I've noticed...