July, 2006 | Marketing Darwinism

How GM leveraged the Blogosphere for Buzz

On May 31, New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman lambasted General Motors on the Times’ op-ed page. Likening GM to a “crack dealer” feeding Americans’ addictions to SUVs, he concluded that GM is “more dangerous to America’s future” than any other company. The day after the Friedman column ran, GM communications executive Steven Harris posted [...] [...]

Fast Forward 10 years for a look at Buzz

Red Herring recently did a story (The Future of the Internet) that gave us a glimpse of the year 2016 through the eyes of Vint Cerf, father of the Internet TCP/IP protocol and now Chief Evangelist at Google, along with two-dozen other pundits. Clearly the line between traditional tech firms and commercial firms is going [...] [...]

Buzz KILL – A conversation with a company’s ethics officer

The Sarbanes-Oxley Act has been a Buzz Kill for finance and legal people for several years, while we in marketing have watched the action. Lately, though, some of that Buzz Kill is working its way over to us. It’s the Age of Regulatory Hyperawareness. That means companies are getting stricter about how contracts are evaluated [...] [...]

Lenovo goes for a viral Buzz!

The Lenovo Group is trying something that would have been completely out of character for staid IBM: viral marketing. Lenovo created a spoof Web site, The Lenovo Tapes (www.lenovo-tapes.com), which pretends to let viewers in on some super-advanced technologies being tested by the company. The site’s anonymous producer has supposedly received some purloined videotapes revealing [...] [...]

iPods are more popular than beer!

Despite what mom may think, college life isn’t just about drinking beer anymore. In an exceptional Buzz instance, the iconic iPod music player has surpassed beer drinking as the most “in” thing among undergraduate college students, according to the latest biannual market research study by Ridgewood, N.J.-based Student Monitor. Nearly three quarters (73 percent) of [...] [...]