Last week, Sears Holding Corporation announced it will launch two social networking sites for its Sears and Kmart brands. At MySears.com and MyKmart.com, participants will be able to “share their insights, experiences and product reviews” with one another. The “two-way dialogue” (The Marketing Consigliere always thought that dialogues were by default at least “two-way”) will include forums, blogs, ratings, reviews, polls and surveys and a “suggestion” area (this last feature could prove very valuable to the Sears powers that be with its own Reddit-style peer rating system).
Pure Genius is Not Necessarily Rocket Science
April 27, 2009 By Leave a Comment
The power of the Internet is evident with a Bethesda, Maryland company that leverages “crowdsourcing” for creative talent. GeniusRocket, whom the Marketing Consigliere has mentioned in passing before, offers graphic design, video, and copywriting services to clients at extremely affordable prices.
OMS Whistle Stop Tour – Don’t Miss the Train!
April 21, 2009 By Leave a Comment
The Online Marketing Summit is back and bigger than ever. This year, they’re calling it the “Whistle Stop Tour” because the producers of the OMS actually are traveling city to city by train.
Wanted in DC – More Metrics-Driven Marketers
March 17, 2009 By Leave a Comment
AMA-DC is the third largest chapter of the American Marketing Association in the country with more than 1,000 members representing more than 600 organizations, many of which are in the ecosystem that supports Uncle Sam. It is a vibrant community and because of its location is unlike any other AMA chapter in the United States.
Intelligence 2.0 – Much Smarter Than You Think
February 17, 2009 By Leave a Comment
The Marketing Consigliere likes to take examples from our nation’s honored warriors and apply them to business and marketing problems. He also wants to recognize things which can be publicized from the impressive United States Intelligence Community that are relevant to Network-Centric Marketers.
Yesterday, the Adobe Intelligence Community Executive Forum, sponsored by Adobe and Carahsoft Technology Corporation, a Washington, DC based government IT solutions provider, was held with a gathering of over one hundred professionals from Federal agencies and contractors. Bob Gourley, CTO of Crucial Point LLC, a well-respected security technology consulting and program management firm, served as a panel moderator for some very good talks on what Federal agencies were doing with regard to collaboration, information sharing, and Web 2.0.
The Keynote Speaker, John E. Hale of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) Intelligence Community Enterprise Services (ICES), enlightened the audience with ODNI’s embracing of technologies that help his internal customers accomplish their missions. He and his team help enable the Intelligence Community by giving them many of the capabilities that the private sector is trying to give its people, albeit in an extremely secure computing environment.
They have a wiki for user generated content known as Intellipedia, which in less than three years has grown into “the” repository of information that allows authorized intelligence employeess to create, edit, and have dialogue on content in a way that was previously impossible due to physical and logical silos of data. Datawarehousing and security remain top priorities, but within the confines of their closed networks. They allow IMs, del.icio.us type bookmarking, self-service hosting, and blogging, using WordPress MU. There is also the capabilities for mashups, tagging, and user profiles stating interests. Of course, there is document sharing including terabytes worth of documents, images, and video.
All this and more to be better able to “connect the dots” for the safety of all Americans. Let’s hope more leaders in the private sector take a cue from the Intelligence Community and empower their employees to internally use social network technologies to better gather, store, analyze, share, and act upon data.
SuperAds XLIII
February 1, 2009 By Leave a Comment
The Marketing Consigliere prepared himself for Superbowl XLIII by reviewing his guest blog at Scott White’s blog, The Big Kahuna. He thought it would be interesting to see how far Marketing has come in a year.
This year’s Superbowl had some well announced changes such as GM pulling out of its long time sponsorship. Fine – not everyone was willing to pay $3,000,000 for a spot this year. While no agency stood out significantly among the crowd, there were definitely some bombs. Brand management professionals may need to think hard for next year. [Read more...]
