On Wednesday, February 29th, Facebook announced several exciting changes to the Pages platform and the rollout of Timeline for Pages that will dramatically impact how users interact with brand/business pages on both desktops and mobile devices. I tuned into the Livestream of the event in New York City to get all the details for my own clients and thought others – clients or not – could benefit from the low down.  

Need a ready-made reminder of the pitfalls that accompany putting advertising before your overall marketing strategy? Look no further.  

Up until this month’s Super Bowl XLVI, Budweiser.com was a content graveyard. I’d closely watched Bud’s homepage for weeks to see how long it would take them to do an update after a coworker told me she’d been on the site and was surprised at the lack of relevant content leading up to the big game. In fact, not just a dearth of content but no content.  

Are dogs the center of your financial life? If your answer is “Yes”—or even “Huh?—you may want to check out Wag, which explores the intersection of content, affinity and financial services marketing.

With articles such as “Find the Best Veterinarian for Your Budget” and “Fidos and Fiduciaries,” Wag says it plans to become “a complete financial resource for…people who are fanatical about dogs” by providing financial expertise “by dog fanatics, for dog fanatics,” special deals and offers for dog lovers, a directory of “dog-friendly financial service providers” and Internet-based banking services for dog lovers.

China’s answer to Carrie Bradshaw is sexy, doe-eyed and smart enough to dig a guy who drives a Chevrolet Cruze.

“Miss Puff,” an animated online series about a tech-happy single woman in Beijing, is co-produced by Chevrolet-maker GM and the video website Youku. As of July the first episodes had attracted 20 million views, according to one media-watching China blog, ChinaSmack.

I hope you can stick with me for an interesting marketing conundrum transposed to the surprisingly comparable world of boutique music retail. Here goes!

If you were to think of musicians – and specifically guitar players – as simply a representative sample of the larger U.S. consumer base (which they are), you’d see that their needs and desires span across the spectrum from touring arena rockers to teens working out the opening chords to “Stairway to Heaven” in their bedrooms. And, much like that larger consumer world, a select few “big box” brands dominate the massively lucrative industry of instruments, amplifiers, effects, etc that supposes to cater to all these diverse needs. So, as a marketer, how do you break past the big leagues and find traction? How do you develop a niche or even compete?

“I can’t talk about a football game in my office anymore without someone reciting his Fantasy players’ points back to me,” a ‘real sports’ fanatic friend recently complained to me. “Who cares how many made-up points they have — what happened to actual sports?”

I can commiserate; as a long-time musician, the first time I saw one of my 10-year-old cousins rip off blistering solos on a 4-button plastic guitar I was a little crestfallen. Who cares about a fake solo and all those pop-up point counters?

Unfortunately for both of us, a lot of people care quite a bit.

If you’re an attentive marketer or just a sharp-eyed consumer, you’ve probably noticed the increasing number and variety of those funky dot matrix barcodes in your mail, on billboards and at public transit stations.

Going commonly by the moniker “QR codes” (quick-response) or “2D barcodes” (two-dimensional), these mobile tagging formats have picked up major marketing momentum in the U.S. and Europe with the explosion of smartphone adoption (camera + phone = scanner).

But what’s the realistic staying power of mobile barcodes for marketing?