Rich Fleck's blog

As consumers have embraced social media, they have discovered new ways to connect with friends, comment on products, interact with brands, and make buying decisions.  This explosion in social behavior has resulted in an increase in data for marketers to leverage in gaining new insights about their customers.  In response to the consumer adoption of social media, marketers now have: Read more about Data, Data, Data Everywhere

We’re smiling here at Merkle Connect.  Social Amp is now officially part of Merkle Connect – adding a group of wicked smart, socially-passionate marketers to our team.  We’re excited because this integration of services and technology will help drive new marketing opportunities for marketers.  Here’s how. Read more about Merkle Connect + Social Amp = New Social CRM ♥pportunities

It’s a fear we all have as social marketers.  Bad Facebook comments.  Negative tweets.  A disgruntled blog post.  No matter how hard we try, we can’t prevent negative comments from popping up.  Our automatic reaction is that these negative posts are horrible – and this feeling often prevents marketers from fully embracing social as a consumer engagement medium.   As we’ve seen in the marketplace, there are effective ways to deal with negative posts - unfortunately, marketers are still making mistakes here.  The recent Chapstick example highlights some of the ways social innovation can go wrong. Read more about Are Bad Social Posts Good or Bad?

It’s impossible to be part of a marketing discussion today without hearing the word “social” several times.  After being a part of many of these conversations during ad:tech NYC in early November, it was astounding to me how many times marketers use the words social and Facebook inter-changeably.  Social audience = Facebook Fans.  Social media = Facebook ads.  Social content = Facebook posts.  Social measurement = number of Facebook Fans.   Read more about Thinking Beyond Facebook - Three Easy Ways to Expand Your Social Strategy

It feels like everyone has caught a little Facebook app fever.  Apps are sprouting up all over the place – and have become a de facto standard as part of a social strategy.  But in the rush to launch, it’s often easy to make mistakes and design an app that might look good but doesn’t engage the audience.  To design an app that acquires and engages your audience, we came up with this Top 5 list. Read more about Prevent Facebook App Failure: Top 5 Ways to Build a Better App Experience