Michael Leis

The start of another Mad Men season reminds me of the shift in marketing strategy that I most often discuss with colleagues and clients now, but have yet to expressly write about. What separates great brands and marketing from good, or even bad ones can be boiled down to this one thought I first heard [...]

In this latest era of social media, many brand presences have either been originating from, or spanning to include the customer service department. On the surface, it makes sense: this is the department of the company that handles communication with individuals. In practice, though, it’s usually a shortcut that lacks a real content strategy for [...]

Got to see an excellent talk this weekend called Facing Up to the Uncanny Valley. If you’re not familiar with the term, it is a feeling of creepyness you get when a computer created person gets between 96% and 99% indistinguishably real. While we can project empathy and emotion on a simpler figure (think stick [...]

More and more I’m getting the feeling brand marketers hold the assumption that when a person clicks “like” on your page or site that it is the equivalent of subscribing to you, like email or Twitter. In reality, it’s a lot like this Flight of the Conchords song:

There’s a real significant possibility that 2012 might be the year people started searching Twitter as their entryway to making decisions instead of Google. There are two reasons why this could actually happen: t.co links and Korea:

What started as an innocent-enough giveaway app on Facebook blew up into a fascinating story of understanding just how important social capital is to people. Here’s how it goes:

Now months removed from the presentation that Brian Reynolds (Zynga’s senior strategist) delivered at sxsw, his main points are still resonant and useful. Here’s what I’ve boiled down, which I hope helps you think differently, critically about what and how you approach your next social effort:

There are a lot of discussions going on about how to create loyalty in a world where the next best offer is a click away. Should we change the cadence or targeting or content of our emails? How can we add badges? Do we need a redesign? Then, towards the end of the year, it [...]

Whether it’s social media or UX or any new technology / methodology that companies need to adapt, there’s always someone getting attention for making divisive statements about what something isn’t. How behind someone or some idea is. While this may be a great way to get attention, it’s an awful way to lead people forward [...]

There’s been a lot of consolidation in the advertising industry, and for good reason: at the Forrester Consumer Forum two weeks ago, Kellogg’s mentioned that it had over 100 agencies across the globe. Wow. Brands have become so large that their agency relationships grew into overly complex and unwieldy problems, forcing brands to simplify their [...]