Originally posted on Logic + Emotion.

I see it weekly if not monthly. Brand or company X goes about their business on a social platform, marketing, putting out fun apps, doling out coupons and yes in some cases, engaging. Then one day, they get attacked by their customers or perhaps an advocacy group. The response tends to always be the same.

Shut it down.

In my estimation, the organization, business or brand in question has not gone through the rigor of…

A recent study by eMarketer found that one-third of U.S. companies now have a blog for marketing purposes, and that number is likely to rise to 43% by 2012. Break those numbers down by industry, however, and pharmaceutical and medical device makers barely make the chart. The biopharma industry is virtually invisible on the Internet, allotting less than 4% of its more than $4 billion direct-to-consumer advertising spend to online outlets in 2008. Unfortunately, this reluctance to move into the Internet…

Originally posted on BlogWorld Expo Blog.

Social media is an ever-shifting industry. There are always new headlines in the news, tools that solve a problem we didn’t know existed, case studies developing everyday and new interest community platforms forming daily. As a community manager it is your job to keep up with not only your community, but all communities as a whole.

Participation in all Forms

Every good community manager should know how to engage…

A day built around great conversation with loved ones and an iconic feast- it should come as no surprise that Thanksgiving is the favorite holiday for many an Edelman team member. Like most people, our spreads are frequently made up of a motley mix of recipes passed down from generation to generation, spiced up classics from favorite food blogs and, in my family’s case, whatever is on the back of the bag of stuffing mix with a little white wine added in (in our defense, plenty is made from scratch as well).

As a way to demonstrate this and as a blog post incarnation…

Originally posted on Harvard Business Review.

Given the recent election results, it’s a good time to think about movements. Wikipedia defines a social movement as “A coordinated group action focused on a political or social issue.” That allows for quite a spectrum of movements. The civil rights movement was designed to bring equality to a system where it was it was lacking. President…

Over here in Europe we come across good data all the time about social media use and trends, so we thought it would be interesting to present the best bits in a map of the region. The first thing to strike us was the growing dominance of Facebook as the most popular social network in the vast majority of countries surveyed. 12 months ago the picture was quite different, but today Russia’s V Kontakte, Poland’s Nasza-klasa and Dutch Hyves are the only remaining local networks to make it on to the map. So why is Facebook so strong? In my view, its versatility is an important…

Originally posted on Edelman Australia’s Posterous

Digital is revolutionising the way we do almost everything in life these days, so it’s no surprise that it’s having such a huge impact on the way we do business – and it’s not just the way we operate – it’s how we engage at each and every interaction long the way. Business as we once knew it has changed irrevocably since the advent of Web…