After taking a look at TOMS’ social media efforts for the most recent issue of Orange, Imagination’s custom media and marketing magazine, two of our staffers—Rene Ryan and Kelley Hunsburger—were eager to get their hands on (and feet in) a pair of the charitable slip-ons. As a company of marketers and content developers, we are [...]

It appears that television executives are attempting to solve the problem that has plagued the music and publishing industries for years: with so much available free access to songs, articles and videos, how do you charge online audiences for professionally produced content? Last week, insiders close to Hulu, the free streaming video service, reported that [...]

Social media has revolutionized the way companies and customers interact.  It’s provided an exposed platform for consumers to voice their opinions about brands and products—a terrifying thought for most, if not all companies. In an interview entitled Customer Service is the New Marketing (see video) Lane Becker provides insight on the power of building relationships [...]

Crowdsourcing is a term popularly used to describe the content-creating method of using customer submitted ideas to direct the creation of new products and/or services. There has always been a customer component directing new products, the concept is not new.

Loyalty—especially in today’s economy—doesn’t always go to the organization with the biggest name or reputation. Instead, it’s all about who you trust. As Peter Bregman, CEO of Bregman Partners Inc., says, “Trust is the new competitive advantage.” And this is where small businesses may have an advantage over their bigger counterparts: a face, a name [...]

A dying girl’s last wish is to see Up. It becomes clear she might not live long enough to see the premiere, nor would she be in shape to go to a theater. So Pixar flies an employee to her hometown to deliver her a DVD copy of the movie so that she can watch [...]

Ramon De Leon owns serveral Domino’s Pizza stores in Chicago. He’s on Twitter. A couple nights ago a customer named Amy, who is also on Twitter, placed an order at his store in Lincoln Park and they messed up her order. So he apologies in the video below, both for messing up the order and [...]

When nurses are fired mid-surgery you must ask yourself how much worse things can get before they get better.

The Church of the Customer blog has a nice writeup of how bad word of mouth can spread like a virus on the internet. On Sunday at 2am a blogger posted about Amazon’s new policy of de-ranking “adult” themed books, which includes any book dealing with gay and lesbian themes. A few hours later the [...]

The Conference Board (woot!) Consumer Confidence Index hit an all-time low in December. The Consumer Confidence Index measures how Says Lynn Franco, Director of The Conference Board Consumer Research Center: “The further erosion of the Consumer Confidence Index™ reflects the rapid and steep deterioration of economic conditions that occurred in the fourth quarter of 2008. [...]