New blog location

For two significant reasons, I have moved my blog from Google Blogger to Wordpress:

1. Wordpress's only business is blogging (and CMS, though they have a ways to go on that to catch up to the glorious Drupal). They invest in their blogging platform. It works, and it's good.

2. Transferring DNS from Network Solutions to Blogger is a joke. It ain't happening. So hopefully my blog now resides at http://www.lankester.com.  If not, you can find it at http://bigchiefalice.wordpress.com.

See you there! This one is closing down!

Forbes Magazine covers Friend2Friend's Outside Magazine engagement

Delighted to have secured a great article in Forbes Magazine, 'Creating Scalable, Engaging Editorial Content with MaaS -- 'Media as a Service.'

Forbes Magazine has published a review of how our Best Town Ever 2013 Social Voting Contest for Outside Magazine contributed editorial content for their September 2013 issue. The article outlines why Outside Magazine chose a Friend2Friend social engagement app and how the app worked.

Mastering content marketing on LinkedIn

Social strategies and content marketing strategies must be closely coupled in order to work. This is where LinkedIn has emerged as a huge business marketing opportunity. Jeff Weiner, CEO of LinkedIn, talked recently of his plans for LinkedIn to become “the definitive professional publishing platform, where professionals come to consume relevant content and publishers come to share it.” One out of every three professionals on the planet is now on LinkedIn. As a place where businesses and professionals connect, LinkedIn is uniquely positioned to support professional communication, and it is building the hooks and systems to cultivate the sharing of content organically based on communities’ specific interests. Read more in this article written and placed in iMedia.

3 Critical investment opportunities for brands

Now that the dust has settled over Facebook's Q2 earnings results and the resulting share price changes, let's look at what the latest results mean for brand marketers. No, not whether brand owners should speculate in Facebook stock, but instead what user behavior trends and which successful Facebook products should brands be investing in over the next six months?

Read some thoughts in an article written and placed in ClickZ this month.

I'm glad Google Reader has gone...

I have been lazily using Google Reader for years ... probably since it first came out, though I'm not sure. But it wasn't until I was forced to abandon the tool that I realized what I'd been putting up with. The experience was just as unpleasant as the Google GMail experience (solved recently with Postbox -- excellent). I've now transitioned to Feedly and what a joy it is. So I'm going to ignore all the griping and whingeing and applaud Google for letting me go.

No more B2C Marketing Envy

I love being in the consumer marketing business. I spent 6 months at BEA Systems once back in the early 90s, helping with the worldwide launch of a middleware product. When I asked "can I get a demo?" the team looked at me blankly. "A demo? No. It's middleware." That was when I finally decided I'd never work on marketing something I couldn't use, play with, get the feel of and have fun with. And consumer tech marketing was where I could do all that. But it's changing. B2B marketing is getting more entertaining. B2B marketing is definitely getting the zing of B2C. And content marketing will be the way it happens. Instead of blasting out one-to-many messages to consumers, businesses are forced consider what they can offer to help those consumers do their job better. Content creation is a challenge, but a good one. It forces businesses to think about their consumers -- to focus on what's important to them, and what they can offer that helps. Read this recent article written for, and placed last week in ClickZ "No More B2C Marketing Envy." .

B2C marketing on social gets more complex every day — what social fragmentation means

Recent article written and promoted through the ClickZ network -- What Social Fragmentation Means for Marketers -- speaks to the increasingly fragmented story for brands for marketing on social. We have had considerable success encouraging our brand clients to bring multiple B2C social channel content efforts into a single space on Facebook, where content can be promoted and aggregated through the largest audience network.  Fanalog from SmartWool is a great example of work here.

The rising value of LinkedIn

Listening to the quarterly earnings report from LinkedIn this past week, I was really struck by the massive future value of LinkedIn as a hub for professionals worldwide.  This article was written and submitted to Adotas the same day. "Social media landscape: LinkedIn could rival Facebook's dominance."

Moving on from clicks to community

Working with large global consumer brands on Facebook I am reminded daily that success on social is all about community, not about clicks. This is particularly true when it comes to a successful advertising strategy on social.

Here's an excerpt:

Every single fan has the potential of helping a brand create authentic content, and Facebook’s engagement-driven advertising products are designed to amplify great content. It’s that powerful triumvirate of owned media (the page) encouraging the content to be created; to earned media (the fans responding, sharing, participating); to paid media (the brand amplifying those conversations and interactions to a wider audience). Without the first two, the third is just a one-to-many, reach-oriented broadcast message. And it will resonate less authentically on social platforms.

 Article written and placed for ClickZ: "Advertising on Facebook Is About Community, Not Clicks."

10 Ways to Boost Engagement on Facebook with Social Engagement Apps

This month, we released a White Paper that documented our best practices when it comes to social engagement apps on Facebook.  You can read the results in this article published on ClickZ -- "10 Ways to boost Engagement on Facebook with Social Engagement Apps," and download the Social Engagement Best Practices White Paper here.

ClickZ here we come!

Just be asked to write a blog post every month this year for ClickZ, the leading brand blog. Excited! First article due next week. Think I'll work with Roger Katz on continuing the mobile social thread ... it's important, and there's plenty left to say.

2013 is the Mobile Social Marketing

Mobile Social Marketing.  It's what I live and breathe. Here's an article written and placed in ADOTAS this week.  Everything I need to say is in here. No need to repeat!

"2013: The Year of Mobile Social Marketing."