There’s a very insightful article by Simon Dumenco over at Ad Age about the significance of the fact that Ashton Kutcher won the race with CNN to be the first with 1 million followers on Twitter. Go read the article but here’s the bottom line. Social media was supposed to level the playing field (which [...]

A Twitter Ad Agency? Twitter Awards? It’s a rare day when I wake up and DON’T hear something surprising and new. Things are changing SO fast nowadays that even if you think you sort of get it when you go to bed, you wake up the next day and everything has changed. The exponential growth [...]

After the fiesty debate about my recent blog post about Microsoft throwing in the towel by positioning its laptop as the cheap alternative to Mac, I was happy to see The Monarch of Marketing, The Baron of Branding, The Pope of Positioning, (I promise, I’ll stop now…), Al Ries, saying “Don’t Damage Your Brand for [...]

Cheaper? Are you kidding me? MAC came up with a branding strategy years ago and stuck with it. Microsoft has been flailing all over the place. From Seinfeld to “I’m a PC” to this??? The recession is temporary. The damage from positioning itself as the cheap computer could be permanent. Video: Laptop Hunters $1000 – [...]

It’s so great when a Top Marketing Blogger like Gavin Heaton tells us that he once felt like we feel– I’ll let him tell it… I can remember it like it was yesterday. I had been writing my own blog for several months and had begun to receive about 30 or 40 visits a day [...]

A Reality Check from Guy Kawasaki We’re celebrating 50 Top Marketing Bloggers this year at Step Into The Spotlight! and this Guy is certainly one of them. When my review copy of Reality Check arrived, I was surprised by how heavy it was. This from a man who says that the ideal length of an [...]

Here’s another one of our Top Marketing Bloggers, David Jones, answering the question: What does a social media consultant really do all day? There have been loads of blog posts written by well-meaning folks explaining how to tell if your social media consultant is selling you a bill-of-goods or if they really have the knowledge, [...]

Say It Ain’t So! Those of you who who’ve read Step Into The Spotlight! know that I got my marketing degree from the 19 Inch Institute of Higher Learning. It was a pretty rigorous program back then. You had to actually get up off the couch and walk all the way over to the TV [...]

I’m a fan of David Meerman Scott. (And it’s not only because of his glowing endorsement of Step Into The Spotlight!) His book, The New Rules of Marketing & P.R., is a wake-up call to people like me and McCain and others who are woefully behind the times in the technology department. I remember refusing [...]

We haven’t seen a sparring like this since the Cola Wars. Although personally, I gotta say “Hey Microsoft, Methinks Thou Dost Protest Too Much.” After a short series of seriously weird Seinfeld-Gates spots, Microsoft has decided to take Apple head on with a montage of “I’m a PC” declarations–(The first step is admitting it…) Despite [...]