And the blurring of news and pop culture rages on. … What’s been a hotter global news story lately than Michael Jackson, the pop star of all pop stars? Our culture has even turned our journalists into pop personalities, speculating on their dating habits, their political leanings, questioning their fashion choices, even flagrantly invading their [...]

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. [...]

CNN: Twitter Mania

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 [...]

One of the hot-hot-hot topics of the past few months–alongside the economic crisis and the Obamas–has been the explosive rise of social media and whether and how corporations and corporate executives can make smart use of it.
Back in the mid-1990s, getting clients to take the Internet at all seriously was like pulling teeth. They used [...]

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 [...]

Less is more, for words too. Short and simple says much more.  But right now I want to take up a little more space to argue the case for the power of brevity.
 
First, a few words for intellectual snobs who think only diatribes deserve respect: Of course Russian novels and great operas and even [...]

A CBS News/New York Times poll finds that 6 of every 10 Americans feel people’s lives will be better in the future. Americans appear to have grown more optimistic over the past 30 years; in 1979, only 6 percent of Americans thought the future would be better. The recent poll, conducted as part of the [...]