Since the news first broke of Philip Markoff’s arrest, I’ve become increasingly obsessed that we’ve reached the tipping point in the trend of real life blurring with online. That particular crime hit me hard when it came across the news scroll. The murders took place in cities I’ve frequented: Warwick, R.I. [...]

Online brand-bashing is a reality all companies face, just ask Domino’s. Companies can help guard against it by opening up an honest dialogue with consumers and by maintaining transparency, but if in fact they get hit, they had better react fast.
I started this discussion among industry colleagues and consumers (we are all consumers, after [...]

As if the recession weren’t challenge enough for business, brand execs have a new scenario to keep them awake at night: random, viral brand-trashing via social media.

The recent victim: Domino’s Pizza. Two employees in Conover, N.C., filmed an unsanitary prank in the restaurant’s kitchen and posted it to YouTube. In a matter of days [...]

Recently, a steamy online romance between bullet-scarred bad boy Tommy, 18, and hot 17-year-old jailbait Jessica ended badly. After exchanging countless e-mails full of intimate details and passionate promises of what they would do when they finally met in person, it turned out that Tommy was actually an overweight, lonely 45-year-old bachelor and Jessica was [...]

We’re seeing the rise of the $104 giver. It’s the new philanthropy, put in the hands of you and me. It’s the power to make real moves via laptop or Blackberry or iPhone—and via small donations of a couple of dollars per week that gain strength from the momentum of massive virtual networks. These givers [...]

Since the World As We Knew It morphed from Dalí painting to disaster movie last year, there has been a subdued but detectable undertone to the ever-present anxiety. Though many people contemplate the future with fear and dread, a few are feeling excited. The stress is stimulating them, and I don’t mean government stimulus, I mean [...]

After months of talk of bank bailouts and auto-industry rescues, along came Larry Flynt. The long-embattled porn purveyor had a cheeky message to Congress, requesting a bailout for the adult entertainment industry, to recover losses stemming from the nation’s low libido. “People are too depressed to be sexually active,” Flynt reasoned. “This is very unhealthy.”
 
Whatever [...]

Am pulling together a quirky look-see over what has really changed these thirty years, beyond the obvious inventions: from the ‘net and personal computing to Viagra and new modes of birth control. What do you associate with the greatest changes? Please post away and give me your view of these three decades of bold change. [...]

Apparently growing numbers of marketers are sick of hearing Web-related buzzwords such as “Web 2.0,” “blog” and “social networking.” Come again? The second annual survey of marketers by Marketing Executives Networking Group (MENG) reported that twice as many marketers as last year claimed to be tired of hearing these terms. It reminds me of the [...]

This is a guest blog from my colleague Danny at Porter Novelli in Brussels.