originally published in Adweek The specter of fake news debatably made an impact on the past presidential election, forced Google to take new steps to mitigate the problem and spurred Facebook to make changes to its Trending section. Now brands are starting to feel the effects. There’s little doubt that the influence of social media […]
Category: Flubs, Gaffes, and Blunders
Beware of eDreams Scams: Nightmares from a 3rd-Party Travel Provider
[A quick point of clarity in case anyone comes to this site by searching for words like ‘Aeromexico’ and ‘scam’ or anything of the sort: Aeromexico is an excellent travel provider, and I had a fantastic experience with them booking travel, flying, and in a subequent customer service inquiry. eDreams is the guilty party here, […]
How to Break Free from the 10 Plagues of Marketing
Months after initially delivering a version of this as a talk to an Israeli VC firm, I finally published this story in VentureBeat called The 10 Plagues of Marketing (and How to Cure Them). As the article notes: There’s a war raging in the marketing and advertising field. It’s a clash of ideologies. There are […]
My Conversation With Spammy App Nomad’s CEO
A lot of folks today are getting spammed by the app Nomad. Below's my exchange with the CEO, in case it's helpful. No, I'm not linking to the app to give it any remote SEO benefit. If you see someone share Nomad though, don't download it. Spamming contacts John Trabelsi <john@…> Thu, Mar 13, 2014 at […]
How Do Brands View Vendor Pitches?
Digiday has a fantastic post this week featuring Brian Maynard, director of marketing for Jenn-Air at Whirlpool, on what he thinks of vendors pitching him all the time. It seems like every single vendor knows how to find him: I can tell you that every day, every single day, I receive somewhere between 50-75 touches […]
Buzzfeed, Interesting Word Choice in Your Meme Coverage…
Buzzfeed just posted about the "Ignore Hitler" meme spreading through Draw Something. I'm not really offended by the meme, but there has to be a better subheader for the story than saying "They've lost 6 million…" That's an unfortunate Holocaust reference, used in the context here of an app losing some users.
TripIt’s Questionable Billing Practices Tarnish Travel App
I've been a big fan of TripIt for years, logging more than 292,000 miles of trips through the travel service that organizes travel plans into useful itineraries easily accessible via mobile devices. My enthusiasm for them was greatly diminished though recently due to their billing practices and clear lack of understanding why what they're doing […]
The Chosen Media
The Chosen Media originally published in MediaPost’s Social Media Insider (update: for the benefit of the Walgreens representative who commented below, and the benefit of anyone else who may be confused, this entire column is an opinion, as is everything else on this blog) “Now therefore, if You will obey our voices, and keep our […]
Netflix In Netflux Flunks Recommendations
Qwikster can come soon enough Netflix In Netflux Flunks Recommendations originally published in MediaPost's Social Media Insider I wouldn't have predicted that I'd be seeking a new entertainment recommendation service right at the time that I've been using Netflix the most. Sadly, with its forthcoming split into two companies, Netflix has lost any concept of […]
Don’t Be a Weiner
originally published in MediaPost's Social Media Insider Congressman Anthony Weiner, representing New York's 9th district, has many accomplishments under his belt, from putting at-risk teens to work removing graffiti in a program he called "Weiner's Cleaners" to getting elected "Whip" of his Congressional class. Marketers will be wise to pay attention to something else that […]