I wasn’t supposed to go to Coachella (which, if you are over 30 you might not know is a music festival of about 100,000 people in the desert outside of LA showcasing a huge lineup of bands, mostly indie) but ended up there because of some good luck (thanks Christina and Asos.com!), in 97 degree heat, with a lot of sweaty people.
So, the first thing I did was of course, look up the sponsors and see who was doing what.  100,000 music fans are a good group to be able …

I have to say, I’ve been really enthralled by all of the logos making headlines over the last few months.  Seems like everyone wants a logo makeover and we’ve seen the good, the bad, the Gap, and now even Starbucks is joining in with it’s newest logo where they’ve opted to remove their name entirely.  Like Prince.
So why are all of these brands so eager to shed their logos in favor of something trendier, cleaner, more or less colorful, and just plain different?
I thought about it while I got my …

The minute I saw this simple site I started thinking of all the ways that different industries could use the concept. It’s a site that’s set up so that the default is ‘dear Copenhagen’ and then visitors can use 250 characters to tell Copenhagen what they think of their city.
Here’s the best part:
Comments are divided by category into colors – so traffic comments are yellow, talk about social issues (like noisy streets) are blue, and so on. This way viewers can see at a glance what the most …

I am sort of a phone addict.  Not in the ‘can’t have a conversation with you because I’m too busy eyeing up my phone’ kind of way (I cannot believe how many professional people do this incredibly rude thing) but definitely in the ‘check it when I’m bored’ kind of way.  Obviously, I’m not the only one that’s doing this sort of thing but here’s a scary graph to back it up:
The rest of the article goes on to outline all sorts of horrors about how tons of people are …

I haven’t pointed out any social media projects that stand out lately but this one from Tiger Beer has definite style points.  First, they made an artsy video about rewarding curiosity while they spray paint a guy that blends in with the wall.  Then they connected it with their Facebook that focuses on ‘knowing the not known’ and while the philosophic verbage on it is slightly confusing it is a great new way to offer ‘special deals’ to their fans without using the tired language of ‘special deals and offers’.
It …

Everyone has seen the good, the bad, and the really, really bad on basically every online platform. The Twitter feed that reads:
“We’re having a sale 50% off”
“Stop in today – big sale”
“35% off everything”
It’s like someone taking out a huge cartoon Acme sledgehammer and hitting you over the head while calling you dumb. It’s annoying and the brand typically has under 100 followers to show for their efforts. I kind of feel bad, they’re trying…..
So since we don’t want to hit our clients and beloved customers over …

photo credit – from moon to moon
When I saw author of “Eat,Pray,Love” Elizabeth Gilbert speak this spring she said “every afternoon I take a silence bath” in which she basically just sits in a room quietly and hangs out with her cat or falls asleep.  “Rough life” I thought “must be nice to be an author with a gazillion readers so that you can take silence baths every day”.  Sometimes I don’t even get to take a real bath every day and  the only silence I get is after …

Photo by Erin Dollar
The topic of Facebook Fan Pages is coming up more and more regularly as people and brands try to decide whether they should spend a lot of time and money to have an amazing fan page and how they are going to get it above 6 fans that aren’t married to or otherwise related to them.
Now there’s research out there that suggests that people that fan your brand are also much more likely to recommend or buy from you.  Then there’s research that tries to figure out …

Having an event used to involve getting out the stamps and sending invitations but now there are so many online resources that help you manage your guest list (and some even make them look really pretty) that it’s difficult to imagine life without them.  With summer in full swing and events galore I thought it might be helpful to do a quick overview of the tools out there that I have used to coordinate an event (wish I had these when I had an actual events company).  Here’s the cream …

I create social media strategies for a living.  I have clients that are big companies, small companies, and everything in between and one of my jobs is usually helping brands figure out where they should spend their money online.  We look for specific sites and online audiences, spend a lot of brainpower on how we might be able to help or be a resource, convince CEO’s that conversations online are important, and then collect our budgets to ask these communities how we can help them.
One of the BIGGEST roadblocks to …