b r a n t s

The world seems to have loved the Old Spice guy horsing around. Even though the campaign had been around for a while, (via Surekha) the last couple of weeks took it to a completely different level, with the Old Spice guy (actor Isaiah Mustafa) sending unique video responses to people who had blogged/tweeted/written to him  [...]

Despite a healthy skepticism for all things Google attempts with social, Wave and Buzz not having helped very much, I was quite excited after I saw the presentation below by Google’s Paul Adams. (the link which I had shared last week) It meant that Google Me was worth keeping a watch on. No, not the [...]

The term ‘influencer’ is a recurring one in social media. Mahendra had a tongue-in-click post last week on the subject, and Surekha and I ended up taking it on a tangent, and it reminded me once again of the way ‘influence’ is changing, for all parties concerned – influenced, influencer, the object that links them [...]

Even as the first trailer of ‘The Social Network‘ was released last week, and even as fresh rounds of humour/angst on Facebook’s privacy algo (Google’s too) are unleashed regularly, I found that the amount of things I share on Facebook has vastly increased, though the time spent hasn’t increased in proportion. Its probably the ease [...]

Despite my niggle with location based services (specifically Foursquare) – that the game part is taking away from the social/utility part of it, I still believe that they’re an excellent step towards bringing reality and the virtual social networks closer. And hence, I do pay attention to the developments in the domain – from how [...]

There was an article recently at PSFK, which, in addition to the impending data explosion, also talks of the need for brands to invest in technology to mine, analyse and identify changing consumer needs and opportunities. Though probably, at a later stage, the automatic ’sensors’ mentioned in the article would beat the self-expression media [...]

The control a brand has, or rather the lack of it, was evident in two examples I saw recently. Both became viral, one at a very small level, and the other, a huge global one. You must’ve guessed the second one easily enough. Meanwhile, the first was ‘Bros Icing Bros‘ and linked to the Smirnoff [...]

A few weeks back, @gkjohn and I were  invited to Chandu’s Military hotel in Malleswaram by the inimitable @parthajha . After an amazing meal, we walked back to where I’d parked my vehicle – Mantri Square, the new mall that had sprung up in the locality. It was new enough to be regarded as a [...]

A few weeks back, I’d mentioned Tac Anderson’s ‘3 types of social media strategy‘ . To quickly summarise, the first is the ‘toe-in-the-water’ approach (not really a strategy), the second is ‘optimising social media for business’ and the third is ‘optimising business for social media’. That happens to be the decreasing order in terms of [...]

We’ll start the thought from the easiest place. Facebook. From industry leaders quitting Facebook to TC stating that media attacks on FB are getting out of hand, to Facebook deciding to launch ’simplistic’ privacy options, there’s a ton of reading material out there. (I liked Danah Boyd’s ‘rant‘ quite a bit) But let’s [...]