I spend most of my time counseling clients on content marketing strategies to achieve measurable business objectives. The rise of social media and other factors like the decline of the technology trade press has totally changed the focus of my firm over the past 4-5 years. That said, some of my agency’s engagements still involve […]
Tech
Stories on the tech industry, content marketing and online sales enablement

As you may have heard last week, Google has proposed major changes to its privacy policies. The company is billing it as a consolidation and simplification of over 60 separate service policies — Gmail, YouTube, AdWords, Google Search — into one policy. Consumer groups are concerned, and some lawmakers have questions. Here’s coverage from Cecilia […]

Danny Sullivan has been the go-to guy for understanding the world of search for over 15 years. This week he published a really good story on Google Plus Your World. A group of engineers have launched a site called Focus on the User that shows exactly how the new Google service could be including other […]
Last week I came across a new survey on corporate social media adoption. It was published by SHRM, the Society for Human Resource Management. To my read it contained both encouraging and sobering statistics on how companies are trying to incorporate social media into their operations. The survey universe was a randomized sampling of 532 […]

There is a battle going on now among technology companies. They all want to be the online entry point for consumers, the operating system for everything we do digitally. I’ve written previously on this topic, calling it an updated version of the old portal strategy from early Web days. I think that comparison is accurate […]
According to the login page for WordPress.com, there are almost 385,000 bloggers using WordPress.com (and hundreds of thousands more using WP software). Considering those numbers, the end of year report from WordPress is impressive. It’s got to be an investment to send this report to every WordPress.com blogger. Here’s a link to the presentation of […]
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 […]

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 […]

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, […]