
The Future of Marketing: Business As Unusual
Over the last few months, I’ve been asked to speak more and more about the emerging strategic role of marketing, particularly as it relates to technology, something I first started to explore in 2012. The […]

How the ultimate selfie changed everything.
You need to know who you are, otherwise it’s impossible to change. Sounds like a leadership slogan, but it’s also a perfect way to sum up how the environmental movement got started in North America in the late 1960′s and early 70′s. It wasn’t a great political announcement that kicked things off. It wasn’t a […]

Sales pipelines and non-linear pharmokinetics
When I ran my own business, I had a solid, tried-and-true, 3x pipeline. That was absolutely, 100% the math. For every $3 in prospective sales, we would see $1 in booked revenue, and this was the case for years. Until it abruptly wasn’t. For whatever reason, the ratio started to shift, and we began closing […]

The Next Chapter: Pushing the Digital Envelope at SAP
As you may know, after seven years of running Social Media Group, which was one of the first (if not the first) pure-play social media agencies in the world, this spring I made the decision to downsize. It was time to do something new. Saying goodbye to our amazing team and clients was not easy […]

Big Data, Attribution and The End of “Spray & Pray”
What kind of ROI do your online ad dollars deliver? If you have no idea, you’re not alone – according to OptiMine, an online analytics company, 61% of advertisers say that they are challenged to reliably measure the ROI of digital advertising. This is not a small problem – it’s foundational to the way advertising […]

Without a proper value exchange, social media is just a channel
And it doesn’t work a whole lot better than the ones we already have. While doing some research for a client project, I came across this great post from Chad Warren on the Adobe Digital Marketing blog. In it, Chad discusses (in an admittedly creative mixed metaphor) the “serious dose of reality [dropped] on everybody’s […]

Is GetGlue in the Middle of a Customer Service Meltdown?
And if they are – do they even know it? Since Friday afternoon, I have received 108 notification emails from the social networking site for TV fans (it works by allowing users “check in” to shows they’re watching and share that information with their friends). Turns out, I’m not the only one – a quick […]

Yahoo and Tumblr – Avoiding Commoditization by Association
So, it’s official – while many of us (especially on Twitter) waited and watched over the weekend after All Things D broke the story, Yahoo has agreed to buy content sharing platform Tumblr for $1.1 billion in cash. The analysis has been varied and thoughtful: why Tumblr’s exit is about 30% of what it might […]

Planning to be Spontaneous: Oreo and Realtime Marketing
Success in real-time marketing is as much operations as creativity Ever since Oreo suggested that you could “still dunk in the dark” during the 2013 Super Bowl blackout, real-time marketing (RTM) has become the new black. Never mind that the phrase was first coined in 1995 by Apple marketing guru Regis McKenna; this winter, breathless […]

I disliked Sheryl Sandberg because she is successful.
I have long expressed strong opinions about the importance of diversity in the workplace, was the co-founder of an organization devoted to making technology more accessible to women and believe the “likability double standard” almost all of us hold about ambitious women vs. men needs to be smashed into a million pieces. And yet, I’m […]