The digital path to engage, educate, excite and evangelize. By Shari Brickin. (more)

Injecting digital into your brand's DNA. By Michael Dennelly. (more)

Digital media's upside outweighs any downside for brand identities. Featuring: Jane Boulware of Microsoft, Lakish Hatalkar of Novartis, Carole Walker of Mars Chocolate and Mitch Blum of Marketing Drive. (more)

Dissecting "the shopper" can be every bit as complex and nuanced as dissecting "mobile."   By William Rosen. (more)

"The Facebook experience can be better, and if we can do that, we can open up a new market," says Leo Shimizu of Pip.io, reports Jenna Wortham of the New York Times (5/24/10). Facebook, with its half a billion users, probably isn't yet quaking in its boots over Pip.io, which has just 20,000. But Pip.io is one of a gaggle of new social-networking concepts, like Diaspora*, that hope to choke the Facebook juggernaut with stronger privacy controls.

Others are lining up as well, such as OneSocialWeb, Crabgrass and Elgg. Evelyn Castillo-Bach is founder of Collegiate Nation, "a small, subscription-based site exclusively for students." She is now line-extending with a site called UmeNow, which is open to everybody. "My goal is not to become the next Facebook or Twitter but to provide a platform for people who do value their privacy but still want to collect or share information."

Austin Chang is beta-testing a site called The Fridge "that allows people to invite friends from Facebook and Twitter to join a private 'fridge' or group to chitchat and share photos." The idea is to enable sharing without fear that parents or co-workers will be privy to it. Then there's Matthew Milan, who has launched QuitFacebookDay, "which is calling for Facebook users to close their accounts en masse on May 31." Ironically, there's also a Facebook group called Facebook Protest, "which is asking disgruntled users to boycott the website on June 6.

A software program called PlaceLocal is creating display ads for local businesses by aggregating information, endorsements and images from across the web, reports Anne Eisenberg in the New York Times (5/23/10). Developed by an advertising technology company called PaperG, the software scours "the internet for references to a neighborhood restaurant, a grocery store or another local business. Then it combines the photographs it finds with reviews, customer comments and other text" into display ads on local-media websites.

Creating an ad is as simple as entering the enterprise's name and address, and then the program gathers "basics like telephone number, hours of business, maps and directions" while also "adding positive comments from local blogs." This works even for businesses that don't have a website by collecting information from yellow pages listings, for example. For now, local businesses must go through a sales rep to create an ad, but eventually they'll be able to do it themselves. Sales reps say the system not only saves time and money, but also helps them sell more ads.

"Instead of sending customers a rate card, I send them an ad that the program has built," says Shaina Park, a Time Out New York rep. "It's easier to sell ads if customers have an example in front of them." So far, PlaceLocal "is up and running on 32 local-media websites, including Time Out New York and Time Out Chicago" as well as websites for "29 network TV affiliates owned or managed by Heart Television. The McClatchy newspaper chain has also signed up, and will be offering the service soon. Pricing is based on a flat fee, ranging from $150-$500 "based primarily on how often the ad is shown."

"The value proposition of customization at retail prices was a cornerstone of our company from the start," says Fan Bi, 22, founder of Blank Label, reports Amy Wallace in the New York Times (5/16/10). That value proposition, says Fan, is an emotional one -- "how expressive something is." And, he says, you can't buy that off-the-rack. Instead, you buy it online, at blank-label dot-com, where you can design a shirt yourself, put your own label on it, and have it delivered "for about the same price as a mass-produced button-down."

Fan isn't the only one pursuing this particular value proposition: "Web ventures have already popped up that allow shoppers to customize granola (meandgoji), jewlery (gemvara), chocolate (createmychocolate), handbags (laudividni ) and clothing for girls ages 6-12 (fashionplaytes)." Brooks Brothers also offers a design-it-yourself service on its website (link). He says he got the idea for Blank Label while visiting Shanghai, initially thinking he would offer "custom-tailored suits to college students at a bargain price," using old-fashioned on-campus reps rather than the web as his principal sales channel.

That changed when Fan met Danny Wong, 19, who persuaded him to try "bridging the gap between consumer and manufacturer" on the web. The duo bootstrapped the business on $10,000 of their own money, "vowing to making leanness a strength, not a weakness." Blank Label has "no storefront, no office other than a borrowed space at Babson College" where Fan used to be a student. So far, his venture has turned out some 450 shirts -- all of which are returnable -- taking orders on 10 shirts per day, and Fan "says the company makes money on every shirt."

If you're the parent of a middle-school child, you might want to ask him or her about Formspring, suggests Tamar Lewin in the New York Times (5/6/10). That is, if your child hasn't already come crying to you about it. Formspring is a website that enables users to ask questions of friends, anonymously or not. These could be innocent or purely informational questions, but usually they are not -- they are hyper-personal or just plain mean.

Questions typically center on how you look, dress or behave. You do have the option to refuse anonymous questions and nothing is posted publicly unless you choose to answer the question. Why anyone would choose to answer -- and make public -- a question that's hurtful might be puzzling to parents, but not to Ariane Barrie-Stern, a high-school freshman. "I think it's interesting to find out what people really think that they don't have the guts to say to you," she says.

Formspring "recently raised $2.5 million" in venture capital, and claims that "more than three million questions have been asked and answered on the site." Its co-founder, Ade Olonoh, says the company doesn't know how many of its users are teens. This is more than a little unsettling to one mom, whose daughter came to her sobbing after receiving nasty questions about her teeth and body. "...I don't think I could take away her internet access," she says. "But I do think this whole online social media thing is a huge experiment on our children."

"It's almost like being able to read their minds, because they're confessing to the search engine what they're looking for," says Don Batsford Jr. in a New York Times piece by Stephanie Clifford (4/17/10). "You can really key into who they are," adds Don, who is involved in online advertising for Jackson Hewitt, a tax preparation company that is among those packing its online coupons with all kinds of information about those who download and use them. Jackson Hewitt's main intent is to target its coupons better, but privacy mavens don't like it.

"There is a feeling that anonymity in this space is kind of dead," says Chris Jay Hoofnagle of the Berkeley Center for Law and Technology. The fact is that if you use a search engine to find, download and the redeem a coupon, the retailer can, in some instances, identify you and your search behavior by name. The same is true of coupons offered on Facebook Fan pages: "When someone joins a fan club, the user's Facebook ID becomes visible to the merchandiser," says Jonathan Trieber of RevTrax, the company that makes this possible. "We take that and embed it in a bar code or promotion code."

RevTrax does not make the matches itself, but it does enable retailers to do so. Google, for its part, says it never reports on how individual users use search. But that doesn't stop retailers from getting "to an individual level by sending different keyword searches to different web addresses," and then tracking your moves from there. The retailers say this is the best way to make sure "their marketing is working" but Ed Mierzwinski, a privacy advocate, is pushing the Federal Trade Commission for more stringent regulations. "There really have been no rules set up for this ecosystem," he says.

Research reveals the digital tools that work best for shoppers.  By Jason Katz. (more)