I have to say I’ve had an awesome week. I was able to do a rare presentation here in Greenville to the GSATC folks. It really was exciting to see a packed out house to hear about Word of Mouth Marketing. The funny thing is I leave Tuesday the 19th for a speaking engagement in [...]

There’s a concept I learned as a Sociology major at the University of Richmond that has stayed with me…Charles Horton Cooley’s concept of the “looking-glass self”. He came up with this somewhere around 1902, and it essentially boils down to three main components:

1. We determine how we must appear to others.
2. We evaluate the judgment [...]

Yes, you should vote in the upcoming presidential election. But you should ALSO vote in SXSW’s Interactive Panel Picker. And in particular, if you feel so inclined, you should vote for Geno and his “Offline Isn’t Dead: How to Integrate Online Strategies” topic so the Brains on Fire crew can join the party in Austin [...]

So — yeah. Friday Joe decided to practice what we preach.
From the Brains on Fire Tequila Shots: 12 Things to Believe in book: (You can download the entire thing from the Flash Papers to the right if you’re interested.)
“If it ain’t fun, we must be doing it wrong. This could apply to a lot of [...]

Ahhh…the Brains on Fire Blog. To think that my thoughts will be right along side of the ruminations of Spike, Geno, Robbin, Justine and Cordell…it’s quite the honor. But it’s a whole heck of a lot more than that. It’s a statement. It says that no matter how good you are, and how respected you [...]

I’ve written about Chick-Fil-A’s fans before, but for our third addition to the “You Don’t Need Us” awards, along with USAA and Arborwear, is an incredible company doing SO many things right.
So what does Chick-Fil-A going for them? A lot. Besides a Net Promoter score of 72% (which is rockstar status), they have legions [...]

John Moore is doing an experiment on his blog this week. For a week he’s going to share his thoughts on a book he’s reading with his followers. Donald Keough’s Ten Commandments for Business Failure.
Hmm. Interesting use of Twitter.
I am by no means a Twitter expert, but I’ve been pondering Twitter uses for a [...]

You can’t turn around these days without getting smacked in the face with another online community/social media contest. It’s “submit your video” over here or “tell us your story” over there and the “how tos” are endless. And that’s a GOOD thing. Involvement. Participation. Interaction with the brand. It seems everyone and their mother are [...]

Or so says a recent article in Wired. A PhD student at MIT has been doing some comparisons on the ways groups interact socially.
What I found most interesting about the article is that when you have a problem and go online to solve it, you usually depend on an extensive network full of people you [...]

And people love to know that companies are human. Or at least made up of humans.
Our own Identity Ignition Specialist, Amanda Long, received the following last week:

Nobody’s perfect. And when you pretend to be, not only do people resent you for it and go to extreme measures to point out that you are, in fact, [...]