Facebook has begun rolling out its messages service and while the idea of a social in-box is still in its infancy it is important for all businesses to take note of just what this means for communication with customers and prospects. Just like you felt in high school, being “liked” was never as important as it is right now.

Facebook has tried to position this service as something different than email, sms or chat. The idea is that your social in-box will be full of conversations, threaded messages that work together the way you would speak to someone in the real world. Facebook describes it this way…”To be clear, Messages is not email. There are no subject lines, no cc, no bcc, and you can send a message by hitting the Enter key. We modeled it more closely to chat and reduced the number of things you need to do to send a message. We wanted to make this more like a conversation.” Continue Reading…

If you live in Canada I certainly do not need to tell you about the level of anticipation, excitement, passion and collective hopes that were riding on yesterday’s men’s Olympic hockey team selection. For my non Canuck readership the things I can compare it to include the lead up to a national election or for the techies, speculation on the next product from Apple all with coverage more intense than that of the flight of Balloon Boy. Just the selection of the team is a national moment and one which I’ve decided to turn into 5 business lessons you can learn from Steve Yzerman and crew.

So here goes my attempt at 5 business lessons from Canada’s Olympic Hockey Team selection. Continue Reading…

Public relations is a funny business, many times you are trying to get people to pay attention to a press release or event you are holding and the job is really about creating a buzz. Other times public relations becomes more about either quelling some bad publicity or having the foresight to recognize an opportunity for good press. It’s not always so easy to spot the great public relations efforts (though a company like Zappos does pretty well) but it is certainly easy to spot when your public relations team has failed and even more easy if that failure is on a global stage. In particular I am talking about the utter failure of the corporate PR team at the Marriott Hotel Chain to react to a groundswell of poor press, tweets and blogs after staff at the Times Square location did not recognize that kicking the new fan favorite of the US Open out of their hotel would be a boneheaded move…Allow me to elaborate. Continue Reading…

If you haven’t seen this post by Engadget you missed a good one. Obviously Microsoft got caught with their pants down so to speak. I can understand using different agencies in different countries and thus not having continuity in your marketing from region to region – even though you should. I recommend using the same agency globally for a product and then if called for regionalizing the message. What I do not understand nor recommend is using Photo Shop to crop an African American’s head for a Caucasian person’s head! And let me take it a step further and say even if the designer was going to be that callus and insanely lazy, could they at least have taken the time to change the colour of the man’s arms – cuz he’s pretty tanned on the arms in the second picture, oh wait its the same body as the first…Insanity. Score one for Engadget and another for social media for spreading this post.