Ogilvy's Rory Sutherland: Life Lessons from an Ad Man

Great talk regarding advertising, value-creation and persuasion as a whole. Generally speaking, advertising adds value to a product by altering it's perception, rather than the product itself. Rory Sutherland makes the daring assertion that a change in perceived value can be just as satisfying as what we consider real value.

Learn more about Rory Sutherland.

Who's driving the Social Media bus in the Enterprise Space?

Interesting clip by Olivier Blanchard discussing the evolution of social media, as well as who's been jumping on the social media band wagon. Many agencies especially have been largely unsuccessfully because of lack of true understanding around how to do it in a scalable fashion. He observes after reading a post by @jowyang that the Big 4 firms are moving in as well but wondering how they intend to actually do this effectively. At the same time, how will they address issues of strategy, implementation, execution and measurement.

Good Morning Marketers: Intro to Social Media Strategy

Why Hoteliers / Travel Companies Should Use Social Media

The Travel industry is no stranger to online marketing, and many are now starting to consider integrating social media into their marketing strategies.

Steve's 5 Starter Steps for Twitter

Great video from Steve Isaacs on 5 tips he wishes he knew when he was just getting started. Hope you find it useful as well!

Marketing a Start-up

Donna Novitsky discusses marketing strategies for start-ups. She addresses the importance of competitive positioning, as well as early client selection.

Hootsuite Video Tutorial

Hootsuite is the professional platform for professional Twitter clients and it is UNBELIEVABLY useful. Not only does it let you schedule future updates, it also allows you to manage multiple Twitter accounts and even provides you with statistics. What else do you need?

Twitter Tips for Newbies

Great video by Chad where he explains how to use Twitter in a simple and easy-to-understand fashion.

Here are the quick take-aways:

1.) Define your purpose - what are you hoping to use Twitter for?

2.) Start following people, because many of them will follow you back.

3.) Start tweeting immediately - the sooner the better - but don't overdo it!

4.) Use the @Reply function to engage in conversations.

5.) Don't send spammy messages.

Twitter Raises $100b to Install Gold-encrusted Toilet Bowls.

Just joking. Twitter announced that it's raising $100b USD to fund the next phase of its development. By all accounts, the micro-blogging platform has had an excellent year with massive growth in the months of April (+ 13 million uniques, ~70% m/m) and June (+ 7 million uniques, ~20% m/m).

An interesting detail is that news worthy events (often times violent or shocking) typically spur user signup and usage, as the application becomes a crucial source of real-time information sharing as events are unfolding. Twitter saw spikes in usage and signup following the tragic Delhi bombings in September of last year as well as the June elections in Iran. As more of the world's population comes online to use social media to share what's happening in their lives, it will change the way we experience events (both good or bad).

Bwana.TV on Ping.fm

Bwana discusses using Ping.fm, a nifty little platform that lets you update to multiple networks simultaneously, which can save you LOTS of time especially if you're on all these networks.