This February I wrote a piece that looked at wine purchases in 2012 by age group. Last week Gallup came out with some new numbers on U.S. wine consumption. As is often the case with surveys, any conclusions depend on which numbers you choose to highlight. For the most part the trend is very positive. […]
How do you get good value from the wine you buy? It’s a very natural question that many people have asked me. It’s also a very subjective question with no hard and fast answer. That said, the popularity of wine continues to increase, and so does the number of choices available to consumers. So despite […]
Sponsored content is a major and often controversial trend in online publishing. Traditional revenue streams have been greatly reduced, and publishers are looking for ways to make publishing make money online. Last month the PR firm Edelman published a study and some suggested guidelines for sponsored content. Sponsored content differs from content marketing, which is […]
Last Saturday I was feeling particularly good about my 2002 M5. Over the past few weeks every fluid (minus power steering) has been refreshed on the car. Brake, coolant, oil, transmission and differential fluids have all been replaced. I had just removed an old and faded clear bra from the car the week before. Then a […]
Every week I work with clients to produce high quality content for their online properties. It’s not easy consistently producing content that accomplishes business objectives via thought leadership rather than overt promotion. When done well, a content marketing strategy can deliver most of the benefits of a traditional PR campaign. These include brand awareness, closer […]
This weekend I tackled clear bra removal on my BMW M5. The bra had come with the car, and over the past two years had become dingy looking. It had been on the car since at least 2009. I had removed the small pieces of film on the front of the side mirrors first as […]
I’ve been a subscriber to Esquire for many years. I really enjoy the quality of the writing, though I took the magazine to task for a poor QR code experience back in 2010. Clearly Hearst, parent company to Esquire, is continuing to experiment with ways to monetize content online. Last week MediaBistro and John Battelle […]
Recently I got together with a group of local E39 M5 owners in Fairfax, Virginia. I’ve gotten to know most of them in online forums, and this was a repeat of a meet we had back in late 2011. One of the best things about owning a BMW is connecting with fellow enthusiast owners. Everyone […]
Part of my consulting role to clients is keeping an eye on marketing trends. While doing that recently I found an excellent presentation on B2B content marketing trends produced by the UK based agency Velocity Partners. The deck outlines five trends, which the authors call “Beyonds,” showing how B2B content marketing is evolving. Tactically these […]
Over the weekend I did an oil change on my E39 M5, and I also changed the differential oil. This is an important and often overlooked fluid change. The E39 M5 differential is a limited slip differential, allowing for different amounts of power to be directed to the wheels based on driving conditions. The car […]
Today WashingtonExec published my latest Wine and Dine column. Last month the Washington Post jumped into the wine business with a new wine club offering. The combination was intriguing, but it wasn’t immediately clear to me why the Post launched this business. So I reached out to a media contact for more information. In my […]
Have you noticed some of your Twitter applications failing recently? On June 11 Twitter retired the original version of its API, the one used by countless third party applications to present Twitter information. The Twitter API changes have been going on for over a year — here’s an August 2012 PC World story with good […]