CMO.com

A recent followup study found community participation has mixed effects on customers’ likelihoods of participating in buying and selling behaviors. In fact, they found that community participation had a negative impact on the number of listings and amount spent.

Facebook's current status won't last forever. In fact, it's user growth has already slowed, though whether that's temporary or not remains to be seen. But marketers should be ready for any eventuality.

Nine out of ten word-of-mouth conversations still happen offline. Don't neglect them in the current obsession with social (online) media.

Have you thought about optimizing usability and curating your user-generated to better engage and monetize your community in a platform-agnostic environment, while ensuring your users' privacy? Yeah, we have, too.

As you’ll see, some of the strategies I am recommending are tried and true—they have been working since day one and will probably continue to for the considerable future. However, there may be a few here that you’ve never considered—or may even be surprised by.

Congrats. There's an ad agency handling the MySpace brand -- and a repositioning, a new clever message, and maybe even a new logo just across the horizon. Now it's time for a new owner.

The vast majority of companies are now not only using social media in some form, but also have an actual social media strategy behind their online presence, according to a new King Fish Media research study.

A Purpose-Idea, or brand, doesn’t live in a vacuum. It needs to be articulated via a Social Object, so the idea can spread. Ideas spread not on their own steam, but as social objects.

Using social media tools and understanding their strategic applications are two different things

Savvy consumer products brands and are increasingly shifting resources to build stronger, more meaningful relationships with their consumers.

Here are some thoughts on the evolution of advertising to focus on digital and social media from a 20-year veteran of the business.

If you read the recent statistic about how few brand tweets are conversational, you might have concluded that brands aren't doing the right thing. But it's important to remember that social media is still something only a small number of the population uses and fully understands.

I can't see what Google expects to gain by launching and operating a new social network, even if it succeeds in toppling Facebook, or at least taking some of its market share (a big if, given Facebook's scale and momentum).

CMOs have to use metrics, but which ones? Net Promoter Score (NPS), based on comparing promoters and detractors, is gaining in popularity among companies of all sizes.

Internet “marketing” doesn’t work because it’s really hard to interrupt people on the Internet. Don’t use the Internet to hype, pitch, or sell. Instead, give away great content and have conversations with real people.

As a recent Forrester Research report warns, in too many cases, digital agencies focus on driving a rush of new fans, without much thought re: how to keep those fans engaged on a long-term basis.

MarkNet, a private online social network, has overhauled the way we do marketing at GE.

As much as success is great, there are a lot of valuable lessons that can be learned from examining efforts that didn’t work.

Here are five lessons about social video learned from work Razorfish recently did with JCPenney.

Crowdsourcing, in the broadest terms, can refer to any contribution of the audience to the production of content of some type. Most interestingly, however, is the rise of advertising crowdsourcing. The most recent, and possibly the most successful advertising crowdsourcing to date, is the recent Old Spice campaign.

It can be difficult not to either get lost in the mayhem or choose a one-dimensional approach, but a directed Internet marketing strategy is crucial for avoiding both and effectively connecting.

CMOs live under a lot of stress, and they're constantly pushed to turn around flagging campaigns in days or weeks. It makes them do some, er, quirky things.

The half-life of viral fame is short. Last week's video phenomenon mau make it more likely that the Old Spice logo will jump out when shoppers next face that wall of otherwise identical deodorant options at their favorite stores, but the question for marketers has to be: So now what?

We all have a lot to learn about how to use these tools – young and old alike.