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 [...]

Reviewing a pr firm’s social campaign pitch for a client, and it is sound as a pound: Influential bloggers in the category write stories with comment giveaways Influencer Satellite Media Tour interviews (like an interview on Today) Facebook application with badges for people to post on their timeline Marketplace and sponsored stories ad buys And [...]

Now, I just became acquainted with epic mealtime a few minutes ago, but this panel seems interesting, talking about how a few friends became massive Internet food celebrities: taking large quantities of fast food and creating massive dishes, which then they demonstrate eating these monstrosities. Why has epic mealtime been so successful? Seems because they [...]

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:

Not sure if this has rolled out to everyone yet, but there’s new functionality that pops-up photos in Facebook instead of taking people away to a different screen. As mentioned in this cool, detailed post showing how they got to this design, it’s also worth looking at the all-new ad space provided in an area [...]