Dick McGlinchey Memorial Service set for March 28 in Boston area

The Boston area memorial service will be held at the Larz Anderson Auto Museum in Brookline, MA at 2 p.m. on Sunday, March 28. Dick McGlinchey, the co-founder of Lois Paul & Partners (then McGlinchey & Paul) with me in 1986, loved antique race cars and fabulous automobiles in general, so this is a perfect location for his friends to gather to remember him and celebrate his life. For those of you who did not read the post I wrote...

Google's quest to create a meta social network

I caught this in my Feedly reader this morning: Google moved its social search feature from its labs to beta. This means that Google will show within its mainstream search results the opinions of those in your larger social graph about the keyword or topic on which you are searching. I wrote about the implication of this for marketers back when it first rolled out. It is noteworthy how quickly this moved from labs to beta, which shows me how...

State of social media (part 2)

Not surprisingly, the iPad reality has not met the hype. Ah, well. Arguably, there is more anticipation for tonight's State of the Union, so to coincide with that I'd like to conclude our two-part series on the state of social media -- particularly from where we sit in the B2B tech and life sciences work. Yesterday, I wrote about how our clients should approach their company-level social networking efforts and how to take action on the listening they have been...

State of social media (Part 1)

I'm going to go out on a limb and predict tomorrow will be the busiest day the Fail Whale has had in a long time. Between an Apple event so monumental that bloggers are pre-live blogging, "Snoracle" and SAP earnings - it'll be enough to test Twitter's capacity. But, I think it will be the State of the Union address that will put it more at risk. In the spirit of this January tradition, I'd like to start a two-part...

Using the internet to stop texting and driving

My name is Lois Paul and I have talked on my cell phone while driving and have checked email messages while in stalled traffic or at traffic lights. I've admitted it. I've used a Bluetooth headset and hands-free connections in my Acura, but I've definitely talked and driven at the same time. Texting, not so much. Since I also listen to the radio while driving, I heard about Oprah Winfrey's No Phone Pledge that she launched with a stirring edition...

Do readers want their news local and personal?

Every week my husband scours our local town newspaper, primarily to get a sense for discussion about town initiatives that he can glean from the surprisingly active editorial page, particularly the letters to the editor. We live in a town that has the most basic system of democracy you can imagine -- we vote in town elections and then we converge on the high school gym for sometimes interminable town meetings to ratify amendments and, as needed, stand and be...

Forrester broadens its social technographics profiles

Our conversations with clients about social media typically includes a strategy component. An important part of this is understanding the way in which a company's buying public uses social media as part of their jobs. Forrester refers to this as social technographics, and we have often referred to a framework it's used for more than two years in which it depicts different profiles in a ladder. Each rung represents increasing amounts of participation and interaction with social technologies, ranging from...

Why reputation management is as important as ever (hint: because Google says so)

Google changed the game for marketers and communicators last month when it became a real-time search engine. Little was known about how Google's algorithms changed to integrate social media-based content into its search results. But MIT's Technology Review got the scoop on that this week in an interview with Google Fellow Amit Singhal. In essence, Google adapted its core algorithm to rank information like Tweets in much the same way it has ranked web pages for a long time. Here...

Clearing the Slates before Baseball Season, Mark?

I can see the scene now. Former MLB slugger Mark McGwire is sitting down with his agent and publicist or a PR team they recommended and tells them he needs to clear the air publicly so he can move forward with his new hitting coach gig for the St. Louis Cardinals without any distractions to the team. The communications pros in the room start asking him what he needs to clear up and quickly learn that McGwire needs to make...

2010 Resolutions

New year, new decade. What, if any, new resolutions should the year bring with it for communications professionals? Looking back over the past ten years, it's remarkable to see how much has changed. In 2000, the media world was operating like so many of the speculative market bubbles we've seen. Maybe it was actually the first, and harbinger of what was to come. Fueled by a unique combination of factors -- the Internet, innovation, companies living on borrowed money not...