Happy new year all. I hope you enjoyed your holiday season, and drank some good wine. My wife and I are big red drinkers, but we had fun with the white Viognier grape last week. The catalyst for this was my Mom. She has been enjoying 2007 Bonterra Voignier as a nice change from Chardonnay […]
2011 is almost in the books, and it delivered plenty of good material for Work, Wine and Wheels. I’ve a lot to be thankful for, including an increased number of readers. Here’s a look back at some content that proved popular with them. For Work posts, I tried to discuss important trends in technology communications. […]
It’s been a good 2011 for my firm Strategic Communications Group. Our brand of b2b and b2g social media marketing has been adopted by clients such as Microsoft, British Telecom, Neustar, Polycom, EMC and Pitney Bowes, plus many fast growth companies that aren’t (yet) familiar names. All this despite an uncertain economic climate and the […]
A pretty big story broke last week in the world of wine. But you wouldn’t know about unless you read wine blogs. On November 30, Jim Budd published a story on his wine blog Jim’s Loire. In it he includes emails that suggest that Pancho Campo, a well connected wine professional in Spain, was charging […]
John Battelle wrote an excellent piece today. George Colony of Forrester grabbed some headlines by explaining how the Web is dead, and being replaced by a hybrid of applications linked by the Internet. Battelle lays out how what most people mean by the Web is made up of principles, not protocols. How the online world […]
Last week the FTC announced a settlement with Facebook stemming from charges it misled users about the use of their personal information. The agreement calls for the company to submit to independent privacy audits for the next 20 years. Here’s coverage from Mashable and the Wall Street Journal. Another interesting take on the news was […]
Here’s a post for anyone out there considering the new BMW 3-Series, due to arrive on these shores in February. I’m happy to report some uneventful driving in my cars, so I’ve no DIY story to share. I’ve got a lot planned for the M3 come spring. Even though the miles are still very low […]
If you’re in any type of communications role, you know every vertical has influencers. How to automate finding them, scoring them and cultivating them is a rapidly expanding cottage market within the broader social media marketing space. Marc Benioff of Salesforce.com has brought his formidable promotion skills to this space. Salesforce acquired social media monitoring […]
Last week I had two online services fail, and I needed customer service fast. The experiences made me stop and think about how much I use free (or almost free )services daily, and if them being free changed my service expectations as a user. On 11/17 this WordPress blog, which I’ve published for four years, […]
One of the great things about owning a BMW is that it is virtually impossible to know everything about the car. The amount of esoteric knowledge seems infinite, and its possible to turn the ownership experience into a full-scale hobby rather than just transportation. A case in point is the ability to access lots of […]
It’s been fascinating this week to read coverage of congressional hearings around the SOPA bill, or Stop Online Privacy Act. The bill has strong support from the Motion Picture Association of America, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and big pharmaceutical companies. It’s opposed by most technology and telecom companies, plus consumer advocate groups like the […]
One of the things I do regularly for clients is drive awareness of their news through social media channels. So I read with interest an article from Mediabistro’s PR Newser about comparing Facebook vs. Twitter for driving traffic. PRNewswire worked with the social media company CrowdFactory to analyze activity around press releases over a period […]