Can Mountain Dew Make You Smarter than Pinot Noir?

When can a Mountain Dew make you smarter than a glass of a nice Pinot Noir? Well, beyond the short-term cognitive boost from the caffeine-rich soft drink, being seen holding a glass of wine can reduce your intelligence – not in real terms, but in the eyes of others. As I posted on Forbes.com the [...]

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Why Business is Different Now

People toss around the terms “thought leader” and “social media expert” lightly these days, but Brian Solis is one of the few people who actually lives up to those names. In The End of Business as Usual, Solis shows how the widespread use of social media is fundamentally changing the business environment.

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Our Brains Make Facebook Worth $90 Billion

Those of us involved in social media know that people love to talk about themselves. They seemingly enjoy sharing the trivial, the personal, and occasionally the weird, details of their lives. Sometimes they overshare – as a longtime online community builder, I’ve found that “poster’s remorse” is common – people post something too personal and [...]

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Forget Evil, Don’t Be Creepy!

Three Ways to Avoid Creepiness Marketers are being offered unprecedented new capabilities to target consumers by interests and behavior. There’s growing evidence, though, that consumers are finding these personalized pitches off-putting. A new survey of UK social media users showed that nearly half “don’t like having ads targeted to them based on information included in [...]

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Social Personalization and the Doppelganger Effect

Are you overlooking a way to personalize your ads that goes far beyond the usual “Dear Roger” salutation? In my recent article, Put Your Customer in the Ad, I mentioned that LinkedIn was using profile pictures for targeted ads. Since then, I’ve been able to capture a couple of examples. The first one surprised me [...]

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Zarrella’s Hierarchy of Contagiousness

Book Review: Zarrella’s Hiearchy of Contagiousness: The Science, Design, and Engineering of Contagious Ideas by Dan Zarrella I like Dan Zarrella’s approach to social media. Amidst a horde of social media gurus, experts, mavens, and missionaries, Zarrella relies on crunching numbers to create his insights. Instead of thinking up “10 Ways to Get Retweets,” he [...]

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Can Twitter Make You Skinny?

Could having many connections on social media sites like Twitter and Facebook cause you to lose more weight than, say, running on a treadmill? The answer is… maybe. Research on mice showed that those individuals who socialized with other mice lost more weight than less social mice even when they ate more food. From the [...]

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Person of Interest Billboard Interacts, Adds Social Media

How do you create buzz for a new show about citizen surveillance, CBS’s Person of Interest? How about a billboard that homes in on a pedestrian face, snaps a photo, displays it, and then provides a number to send a text message to. If the person does that, they can access their “classified file” and [...]

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The Twitter Spot in Your Brain

These days, you can’t go online without bumping into someone styling himself as a social media guru, a Facebook expert, or a power user of Twitter. And, if you check their online profiles, they actually do have thousands of friends and followers. But are these real friends, or did the supposed expert socializers simply crank [...]

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