Just over 20 years ago, when I first got into marketing, professional reviews were the lead driver of foot traffic to storefronts.

Magazines like Consumer Review and reviews from other print publications, as well as television review shows, would often dictate how well a product would be received once in the open.

It led to a booming industry of professional reviewers, some of whom made a very nice living being known as The Review Person.

But things change.

Jump forward 20 years, and the swan song for the professional reviewer could be about to play out, at least in the tech sector.

It’s All About the Peer

In a...

One of the things many social media purists will tell us is that we can’t “monetize” social media communities. A social media community is a warm, fuzzy place where no marketing should occur, and we simply talk about how cool social media is for individuals and brands alike.

The problem with this is that it’s impossible for any business to remain afloat without sales – and a smart business knows this along with another key point: their social media community can drive these sales.

By identifying who’s driving traffic to a product page, and which community members are the most respected and listened to, a brand can react to this new information, improve their product and/or adapt their own messaging to better serve that community. Do that, and your return on investment becomes truly measurable and scalable.

So how do we...

When social media first began gaining popularity with brands, the first thing they wanted to know was, “What are people saying about us?”

It’s understandable – whereas before brands would only get to find out what the public’s perception of them was when the cash registers slowed down, now they could get insights on what was being said before it became a problem, and the perception of their response to that conversation (positive or negative).

This led to a booming market in social monitoring platforms. Companies sprung up with technologies that could monitor millions of conversations, send alerts to brand managers, and define the changing sentiment around a brand and the subsequent buzz that went with it.

All for a very nice premium, too, with licenses running into thousands of dollars per month for just a single license.

But the truth of the matter is social monitoring is flawed, and will continue to be flawed, while we still think in bits and...

If you follow any kind of tech or social media news, you’ll know about the announcement from mobile photo app Instagram and its new Terms of Service that come into play on January 16.

If you haven’t seen any of the stories, the main gist of it is this:

• Instagram’s owners, Facebook, will have the perpetual right to license all public Instagram photos to companies or any other organization, including for advertising purposes.
• Ads may or may not be disclosed to the user.
• A business may take your uploaded photo, use it in an ad, and not have to compensate you.
• If you continue to upload images after January 16 and then decide to delete your account...