Building Social to Mean More: Using personality as a branding tool

As I (finally) finish up my last semester of college, I have been closely studying the association between social media use and its relationship to the, “Big Five” personality traits, as categorized by Coasta and McCrae (1992). The (too massive) pile of research I’ve read, in coordination with my findings on the relationship between individuals’ [...]

Walmart’s PR Woes: Lessons in Crisis Communications

Shares of Walmart Stores Inc. dropped 5 percent on Monday after The New York Times uncovered a massive, half-decade scandal in an in-depth report alleging key executives at Wal-Mart de Mexico, the corporation’s largest subsidiary, carried out and covered up a nearly incomprehensible bribery scheme. Retail mammoth Walmart, already up against a sometimes negative perception among [...]

Rebranding Burger King: Why you can’t reinvent the wheel, or the Whopper

If, like me, your world revolves around a meal schedule and you turn into a significantly tougher person to be around when your blood sugar dips, then you probably follow food news as closely (but probably closer) than the stock market’s pulse. For the past week, Burger King has infiltrated the news cycle with their [...]

Using Pinterest as a Marketing Tool

Pinterest, the pinboard-style social photo sharing website, has been the talk of the social media community in recent months. In January, Pinterest had 11.2 million unique monthly visitors, making it the fastest site ever to break the 10 million mark. The average user (70 percent) is a woman between the age of 25 and 44 [...]

Rick Santorum’s Search Engine PR Nightmare

Rick Santorum faces an uphill battle against people who don’t want to see him winning elections, but having Google fix the search engine results isn’t the answer. How to prevent your brand from facing the same problems.

Google Plus for Marketing

Is Google+ going to be the perfect social media for marketing? Well, until we see what the business pages are going to look like and how they will work, we don’t really know.

Four Big Brands Making Big Use of Foursquare

Foursquare, a location-based social networking platform, has been making a splash since its 2009 inception. At the beginning of the year foursquare released its very own infographic highlighting the company’s enormous growth. In 2010 alone, foursquare grew an unprecedented 3400 percent, with “check-ins” in every single country on the globe, and even one from space. [...]

Color theory and branding: Is pink the right color for fighting breast cancer?

Some of history’s strongest brands are inextricably linked to specific colors that are both bold and unique. Can you imagine Coca-Cola’s identity without its trademark red? In more recent decades, the fight against breast cancer has built a strong association with a pale shade of pink. The fact that initiatives such as Susan G. Komen [...]

Developing a Creative Social Media Strategy

Our favorite Old Spice Man is back, and he is bringing his A game. The Old Spice YouTube videos first aired earlier this year and have been declared the most creative social media strategy for a brand. The first campaign was a hit, taking on everyone from celebrity super stars to tech geeks. Now after taking some [...]

The Forgotten Social Media Platform

I think media marketers often overlook one social medium that they shouldn’t – flickr. When most people develop a social media campaign, more often than not they go to Facebook and Twitter. This is done with good reason since marketing through these mediums is simple and the total number of people invested in these communities [...]