Huawei will be the latest in a now long line of MyTouch suppliers – the others being HTC and LG – but the deal is a significant one for the Chinese vendor. It has been scraping and clawing its way into the U.S. handset market for the last several years, and while its logo will be superseded by the T-Mobile brand, these phones aren’t bottom-of-the-portfolio placeholders. T-Mobile has invested considerably in promoting the MyTouch line over the years, making them its carrier-branded flagship phones in every iteration.

That’s exact kind of attention Huawei is looking as it seeks to broaden its scope in the U.S., said VP of external affairs Bill Plummer, when we spoke earlier this week. Huawei has never been in the “drive slot” of a major U.S. carrier’s device portfolio. If Huawei – with the help of T-Mobile’s considerable MyTouch marketing budget – can make a success of its two new Android smartphones, then bigger and better opportunities await, Plummer said.

In fact, the way Plummer described it, Huawei is taking the first steps in a bizarre mating dance with operators, which will ultimately lead to the consummation of a much tighter-knit relationship. Success with a carrier-branded lower-tier device (the MyTouches sell for $50 with rebate and contract) begets invitations to supply mid-range and high-end devices. Success with pricier smartphones begets the opportunity to sell Huawei-branded phones. Once a high-end Huawei device gets into that so-called drive slot, Plummer said, Huawei then enjoys the full force of the carrier’s marketing machine, which would then propel the Huawei brand into the mass consumer mindset.

“You’ll increasingly start to see more branded devices from us,” Plummer said. “That’s the natural path, but first you have to gain an operator’s trust.”

In the meantime, Huawei is hoping to bump up its own image through social media and targeted events tailored to highlight its product lines. On Wednesday, Huawei will host a tent at Chicago’s biggest summer festival, Taste of Chicago. Plummer said it would exhibit at similar high-profile events around the country as it announces new devices and new carrier deals.

Still Huawei has a long road ahead. Very few people have heard of Huawei among U.S. population, and those who do recognize Huawei know it primarily as an infrastructure company. Samsung, Motorola, LG, HTC, BlackBerry and Nokia have name recognition not only because their logos are emblazoned on our handsets, but also because we constantly encounter their brands in ads.

Plummer didn’t rule out the possibility of promoting itself through mass media advertising in the future, but he added you would be surprised how little marketing handset makers actually pay for.

“Taking Apple out of the mix, if you take all of the vendor marketing budgets and add them up, they still wouldn’t equal the marketing budget of a single big operator,” Plummer said. “We’re slowly building some consumer awareness, but the best thing we can do is become more deeply represented in the carriers’ portfolios.”

Photo courtesy of Shutterstock user Elnur

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A Wall Street Journal (NSDQ: NWS) report says the micro-blogging service has finally come to an agreement with an advertising minnow, Twittad, that will clear the way for it to obtain “tweet.” In 2008, Twittad obtained trademark rights to “Let Your Ad Meet Tweets,” a development that led the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office to refuse Twitter’s repeated attempts to trademark “tweet.” Twitter last month sued Twittad in California federal court, accusing the smaller company of unfairly interfering with Twitter’s attempt to own the mark.

The two parties are subject to a confidentiality agreement that prevents them from disclosing whether cash changed hands, according to the Journal report. But it is a safe bet that Twittad made out just fine. The small company had a strong hand given the roadblock at the trademark office and the need for Twitter to secure rights to an essential part of its brand identity (it would be like Ford allowing another car company to use the word Mustang).

The case appears to fall into a category of cases in which small companies come into a windfall when, by luck or design, they obtain rights to a famous brand. In some cases, such as the fight between Timelines.com and Facebook, the small company appears to be using the name in an honest attempt to build a business. In others, such as the trademark fights over iPad, iBooks or i-just-about-anything, the owner of the mark may have scooped the name in hopes of a later windfall.

The case of Twittad seems to fall somewhere in between. On one hand, the small company did build a business in which it paid 27,000 users to send advertising tweets en masse. But on the other hand, Twittad’s blog has been fallow for almost a year, suggesting it may have been more pre-occupied with a settlement agreement than a business plan.

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Apple’s rise propelled it to eighth overall on the list, a spot occupied by Nokia last year. Nokia’s brand value suffered, causing it to fall four spots, to No. 14 on the list. Microsoft also fell (down three percent), and it is now ranked third, with an estimated value of $59 billion.

While seven of the top ten are tech companies, Coca-Cola still retains the No. 1 spot overall. Another fast riser in the rankings was Amazon, which saw its brand value climb 32 percent versus last year. It still has a ways to go to catch up to Apple, however, since it currently sits at 26th overall. We’ll see if the new Kindles can light a fire under that growth.

Interbrand’s methodology for the report involves looking at financial performance data, the role of the brand in purchase decisions and the overall strength of the brand (basically, its ability to continue to make lots of money).

Based on these measures, you can see why Apple would excel. The success of the iPad, iPad 2 and iPhone 4 during the past year are undeniable, and Apple’s Mac presence continues to demonstrate strong growth, as the company showed us on Tuesday during its iPhone 4S media event. It’s also worth noting that both Nintendo and Sony fell in the rankings, which could be a sign that Apple’s mobile gaming success (another thing it crowed about on Tuesday) is also helping to fuel its brand strength and erode that of others.

Despite a mixed reception to the iPhone 4S, I think we’ll see it continue to build Apple’s brand in the coming year. The 3GS was met with a somewhat similar reaction, and we all know how that turned out. What do you think? Will Apple ever take the Coca-Cola crown?

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If you want to reach the Millennial generation — loosely defined as people born between 1980 and 2000 — it probably won’t come as a surprise that you should use the Internet: some 93 percent of Millennials spend regular and extended periods of time online, according to recent research from Pew. And since Millennials also have the highest labor-force participation by age bracket in the US, it’s a lucrative segment of the population for brands to target.

According to new research from MTV, however, companies run the risk of alienating the very audience they mean to attract if they go about social media marketing in the wrong way. “Extraordinarily nuanced codes and informal rules of behavior are emerging in social media,” MTV’s Nick Shore wrote in a report about his study’s findings published in AdAge this week.

Here are a few takeaways from the research for brands looking to reach Millennials on the web:

• Be quotable: Teens and young adults are hyper-aware of every thing they say online. Often, they’re much more comfortable conveying their feelings by quoting or linking to someone else — as shown by the abundance of song lyrics and quotes on any given teenager’s Facebook wall. “What we observed many of the millennials doing… was being controversial by proxy,” MTV reported. In fact, fully 54 percent of the survey respondents said they posted video clips or articles they agreed with in lieu of posting their own opinion as a status update. If a brand can make somewhat racy yet quotable content, Millennials may do their viral marketing for them.
• Ask and answer: Millennials don’t like to wait — and they can’t stand to be ignored. More than 60 percent of MTV’s survey respondents said they demand immediate feedback for text messages, and 70 percent for IM and Facebook chat. That may be because 58 percent of them said they get a boost in confidence when they get feedback online. If brands want to really engage with Millennials, their communications can’t just be a one-way street. Responding to Tweets and Facebook wall postings could go a long way toward winning over today’s young consumers.
• Reinvent — again and again: Young people are constantly tweaking their online personas. Ninety percent of survey respondents told MTV that it is important how others view them on Facebook, and a third said they “always” modify their photos before posting online. “They constantly and fluidly shift between chosen identities in order to present their ‘best selves and lives’,” MTV said. So while an older generation may have wanted their brands to project an air of consistency, Millennials crave just the opposite. MTV pointed to Google as a key example of a brand successfully co-opting this, with its daily changes to its homepage logo.

If you have any other ideas for connecting with Millennials, please chime in using the comments.

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There’s been a lot of sound and fury about the way Google has approached branded (i.e., non-personal) pages on its new Google+ social network. Much of it is a symptom of internecine warfare among the big tech blogs, some of whom waited to launch branded pages and got sandbagged by what they say is the web giant’s flip-flopping. But there is a serious issue underneath the griping, which is that Google can make or break a company’s presence online by virtue of its control over the web-search market — something Google+ is almost certain to become an integral part of.

When Google first launched its new social platform a couple of weeks ago, a number of media brands — including Sesame Street and the tech blog Mashable — rushed to set up pages on the network as a way of staking their claim, in the same way that many have set up what used to be called Facebook “fan” pages. But while Facebook allows corporate entities to have a presence on its network, Google said that it wasn’t ready for branded pages just yet. Instead, it asked most companies to wait, and said it would be rolling them out over the next couple of months after a trial with a few select entities such as Ford.

The Google+ land rush

Not surprisingly, perhaps, some companies didn’t feel like waiting, or taking down the pages they already had, so they just left them there. This caused a lot of confusion about what Google’s strategy was going to be exactly — would it grandfather the pages that already existed, or would it simply nuke them and force those companies to create new pages and build up their follower base from scratch again?

The confusion was compounded when Google started deleting branded or non-personal pages this week: some pages, including the page belonging to Mashable, remained in place while others vanished. Then the blog executed a clever trick by changing the name of its page to the name of founder and CEO Pete Cashmore — something that allowed it to retain all of its followers. This sent competitor TechCrunch into a frenzy of outrage, and caused Google-watcher Danny Sullivan of Search Engine Land to write an open letter about the ill will caused by its Google+ screwup (TechCrunch’s fake personal page has already been deleted).

This may all seem a little like the cool kids fighting over who gets the parking spot closest to the door of the high school, but there is a serious issue at the center of the dispute, which TechCrunch writer MG Siegler hinted at in his post — and that is Google’s ability to create what amounts to a “suggested user list” for companies on its new social network. The SUL was something that Twitter created early on as a way of trying to help new users find accounts to follow, but it caused a lot of controversy because it led to some users getting millions of followers very quickly.

Google+ already a major player

A list of preferred accounts may not have seemed like a big deal when Twitter was just a tiny plaything for nerds, but it became a big benefit when the network grew to become a significant distribution platform for news and other content. The issue for brands is that Google+ could recreate that problem — or opportunity — in spades, because in just a few weeks it has already become so massive.

Depending on how you measure it, the speed at which Google+ has grown dwarfs just about any other social network, including Facebook and Twitter, and that’s because Google has been able to unleash a giant, built-in promotional engine via its various services such as Gmail, Picasa and so on. Integration with email was undoubtedly a huge launchpad, and the toolbar that appears at the top of Google pages when users are signed in, directing them to their Google+ feed, keeps the engagement levels high.

image via Leon Haland

With 20 million users or so already, Google has gone from zero to being a potential strong contender in the social networking game. But it’s not just the size of the network that’s important — it’s how the activity on those Google+ pages get interpreted by Google search, and how that affects page rank and all the other parts of the company’s black-box algorithms. It’s not clear how much the social signals coming from Google+ will be integrated, but there is no question that doing this was a big driver behind the company’s interest in doing social at all.

In other words, Google’s missteps or tweaking of Google+ features aren’t just of interest to a few tech-obsessed social-networking nerds. Could the way it has handled corporate pages even become an issue in the FTC inquiry into the company’s monopolistic and/or anti-competitive behavior? Possibly. But make no mistake — while some may see Google+ as just another copycat social network, it has the potential to affect the bread and butter of companies that do business online, and that is not a trivial issue.

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr user Mark Strozier and Leon Haland

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One company that’s a perfect example of how to do Apple-based brand extension right is Wacom. The iPad, arguably, represents a considerable threat to their consumer drawing tablet business. The iPad can’t replicate the pressure sensitivity of Wacom pen tablets, of course, but for users that may otherwise have opted for Wacom’s entry-level Bamboo product, that may not be that much of an issue.

Rather than try to fight encroachment by Apple’s tablet, Wacom has embraced the device, releasing a Wacom-branded Bamboo Stylus for use with the iPad’s capacitive touchscreen. There’s also now a complementary app called Bamboo Paper that furthers the brand and acts as a marketing tool for the Bamboo Stylus.

A similar app called Moleskine is an example of how brands need to be really careful about how they represent themselves in the App Store. Moleskine is the maker of pocket paper notebooks and sketchbooks that take their design from the kind of notebooks used by people like Oscar Wilde and Ernest Hemingway. The app is a digital notebook, but it dilutes the brand rather than serving it by not living up to the quality expectations customer associate with Moleskine.

The lesson is that if you aren’t willing to put any real time or effort into your brand extension, you’re better off not trying it at all. Unless, that is, you opt for something small, pretty and clever instead of something ambitious and useful. For brands that don’t need to worry about whether or not they need to rethink their business model down the road (as Wacom and Moleskine may have to do if consumer tablets catch on and continue adding features), a little goes a long way.

Such is the case for Vipp, whose iconic metal waste bin is a design classic. Vipp wisely recognized that the interests of Mac buyers are closely in line with their target customer base, and so released a tiny app that does just one thing: replaces the OS X trash can in the Dock with a Vipp pedal waste bin. It’s animated, installs and uninstalls with just a single click, and it looks great.

An Apple tie-in is a good way to build a brand, but putting an ugly product or one that doesn’t work well on hardware that excels in both categories will only hurt, not help. Instead, brands that take the time to come up with something clever or useful will be the ones that successfully reach out to the lucrative market segment made up of Apple customers.

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Huddle co-founders Alastair Mitchell and Andy McLoughlin

One of the many features Google debuted in its highly anticipated Google+ social product last week was a group chat application named “Huddle.” At least one company was particularly nonplussed by Google’s big launch: Huddle, a London-based startup that provides cloud-based communication software.

Interestingly, this is not the first time Google has stepped on Huddle’s brand name turf. A few years back, Google launched an internally developed cloud collaboration app called “Huddlechat.” The app was promptly pulled entirely after some pretty intense criticism surfaced in the press about Huddlechat’s similarities to both Huddle and 37Signals’ Campfire product.

Huddle, the company, which has raised $14.2 million in its five years in business, issued a blog post today about its second brush with a Google-owned doppelganger. Overall, it seems that the startup is not exactly pleased with the situation — and it is not taking it lightly:

“There has been much speculation on Twitter and in the press as to whether the feature in Google+ is a joint venture between us and Google.  While the Huddle feature in Google+ appears designed to foster personal collaboration based on relationships and consumers’ interests, the Huddle feature in Google+ is not associated with Huddle, the leader in enterprise cloud collaboration and content management. There have also been suggestions that Google has, in fact, acquired us. There is no basis to such speculation.

…The Huddle team has worked hard to build its brand visibility worldwide and maintaining this is extremely important.  We have contacted Google about this matter, and our hope and preference, of course, is that this issue reaches a timely and amicable resolution.”

But while it was easy for Google to retract a small, quickly deployed proof-of-concept app like HuddleChat, the latest mixup will probably not be corrected so simply. Google+ is such a massive project that it seems unlikely Google will backpedal on the Huddle app unless there is a real legal problem with the way it uses the name. Huddle is a word in the common vernacular, so by putting the word “Google” in front of it, the app is probably in the clear from a legal standpoint.

It is unclear if the Google+ team was aware of Huddle the startup, or of the earlier Huddlechat debacle, at the time that it named the group chat application. This could simply be a classic case of what can happen at a very large corporation: Often, the left hand doesn’t know what the right hand is doing — or has already done in the past. Unfortunately for Huddle and other companies like it, it’s often the industry’s smaller players who feel the negative effects of that miscommunication the most.

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Here is a breakdown of how to use Quora, Focus and Namesake to enhance your professional reputation.

Quora

I recently wrote about using Quora for getting answers to business-related questions. While I think the quality of conversation on Quora can be good, sometimes you feel like you are posting a question into a big, black hole. Still, with the amount of buzz happening around the site, getting in now to “stake your claim” in your areas of expertise isn’t a bad idea.

When starting to use Quora as a reputation-builder, make sure to fill out your profile information thoroughly, including the sections on the site where you can include your “bio” for various topics. Even if you aren’t ready to spend time answering questions, you want to make sure your expertise is showcased concisely, otherwise people will arrive at your Quora profile page and have no idea who you are or what you do. Keep the length down and make sure the first handful of words convey something meaningful because this is what others will see when you answer questions in a given topic area.

To get more out of Quora, follow the topics that you believe you can contribute meaningfully to. Respond to questions when you have a specific point of view or expertise that hasn’t yet been demonstrated. Follow the people with whom you are truly interested in getting on their radar, learning from, or interacting with.

Quora has a section in your profile where you can post content. This can be a good place to re-purpose some of your relevant content and tagging it with specific topic keywords to add your two cents without specifically answering a question. You can also answer a question and link to your content elsewhere, although do this sparingly as this can appear gratuitous if you simply use Quora to point people to your blog or site. Don’t think of Quora as a “gateway” to your other presences, like your blog, but instead think of it as an opportunity to provide a snapshot of who you are and what you do on a site where people are paying attention.

Because of Quora’s breadth of topics, you can choose almost any area and set of topics to show what you know. However, the most active areas are the tech, new and social media, and mobile spaces.

Focus

If your expertise is useful to small business owners, you may want to head over to Focus. This site has been around a few years now and while Quora came out of beta with a bang, Focus has been building a rich database of information and experts a little under the radar and now boasts over a million active users. While Quora tackles a broad range of topics, Focus looks to help business owners make better decisions, so expect to find more business topics and technology topics related to business.

On Focus, Q&A is only one of the site’s features. Think of it as an expert network or “expert market” where business owners can not only get answers to their questions but download published research and attend live teleconference events.

As you fill out your Focus profile, you can opt to check a box to apply to become an official “expert” on the site, but there is no guarantee you’ll be chosen. Focus takes a careful look at several criteria to assess if you are actually an expert in your field and if you have a proclivity for sharing your knowledge with others in a longer format such as on a blog versus Twitter. They also look at your interactions and the retweets your content generates to see if what you write resonates with your community of followers.

If interested in having you as an official expert on their site, Focus will conduct a phone interview. Some experts providing long form research are compensated but not those solely participating in the community Q&A. Otherwise, you can contribute to the Q&A section in basically the same way you might on Quora. The site is constantly undergoing incremental changes to improve how it works, so expect to see better integration of features over time.

Namesake

Namesake calls itself a “community for real conversation.” Namesake takes a more “live” approach to conversations on topics, with announcements of conversations happening on the site, and the people participating and watching.. The conversations are then archived and can be added to over time.

There is a little more chaos on Namesake compared to Quora or Focus.com; every response isn’t carefully composed and the best aren’t always “endorsed” or voted up to the top. These are “conversations” after all. Namesake groups people, conversations and experts by topic, so like Quora and Focus, you should follow the topics that are most interesting and relevant to you, to find experts and to identify conversations where you can be an expert.

The site claims experts in broad topic areas, from technology to entertainment to politics. You can claim your areas of expertise (up to 10) when you are filling out your bio, but you gain expert credibility and status through endorsements from others for your conversation contributions. A nice feature on your Namesake bio is the ability to add video to showcase who you are and what you know.

Whereas Quora might feel like a place for tech insiders, and Focus is more business-oriented and straightforward, Namesake has a scrappier feel where tech hipsters are jumping into a sandbox to play and experiment.

Tips for Q&A Site Success

As you can see, all of these sites have Q&A as a feature, but Quora emphasizes this aspect the most. Regardless of which site you choose as your platform for showcasing your expertise, know that the process can be time-consuming (and possibly addicting). Here are a few tips for making the most of your efforts:

1. Pick one site. Be great. While you might dabble in all three sites to get a feel for them and to make sure they offer you the best audience for your information, to get more out of a Q&A site, you really need to pick one where you’ll spend most of your time and energy. Be thoughtful, and take care to get a feel for the community and learn the etiquette of the site. Be helpful.
2. Incorporate the site into your content production. If you’re already blogging and tweeting, participating actively in a Q&A site can feel like a burden. Look for ways to incorporate a little time each day on the Q&A site of your choice so you can be present, pay attention and add value. Over the long haul, you’ll find it easier and easier to make the time to contribute, but don’t get carried away and let it dominate your time unless it is proving to be a fruitful outlet.
3. Add to your content sharing. When you blog, find an appropriate way to share that in your profile or in an answer or as a post or update on a Q&A site. Make sure not to use the Q&A site as nothing more than a gateway or traffic driver to your blog or site, but do think of it as an additional place to archive examples of your work.
4. Go narrow, not broad. You can’t be all things to all people. You can’t be a true “expert” in many, many things. Part of building your reputation is knowing who you are, what you can offer others, and then focusing on providing consistent, valuable information. Sure, you can provide the occasional answer to a random topic (for example, I’ve responded to questions about RVing and parenting on Quora) because this shows you’re human and multidimensional. But when building your reputation and your brand, consistency is key.

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Cost

About.me is completely free, while Flavors.me has a free plan and a $20 per year version. Many of Flavors.me’s features are only available on the paid plan, including some that probably should be free but aren’t, like the font faces you can choose from.

Design Features

I found About.me slightly easier to make a good-looking page; the basic layout was more professional and better designed. Flavors.me, however, has four different page layouts available with its free plan, while About.me only has one. However, you can drag your main information box anywhere on the screen.

About.me offers users a variety of fonts, while Flavors.me makes you upgrade to get the more interesting ones.

Content Options

In About.me you can add links to any site (such as your own website), instead of being limited to popular networking services. Linking to your own site is a must if you want to use one of these splash pages as a business card. But as far as I can tell, the only way to add a link to your site from Flavors.me is to add it to your “About” section, where it can’t be styled to stand out from the rest of your description. However, Flavors.me offers linking to more services than About.me, and paid users can add custom content.

When you add a service in About.me, what’s displayed, whether you like it or not, is the icon of the platform and no other information. I think that this is a major problem. Besides wanting the clever name of your blog or your Twitter handle to be spelled out, I have found that many educated, professional people don’t have the slightest idea what any of those icons represent. So if you want to make a client-facing page, and your clients aren’t necessarily fluent in Web hieroglyphics, this is something to consider.

About.me also doesn’t allow more than one account on any of these services. I have three Twitter accounts and several blogs on the two platforms above. If you enter, for example, multiple Blogger blogs, the first one is assigned the Blogger icon, and any others are spelled out in the list, in the order entered. There’s no way, like in Flavors.me, to reorder your items through drag-and-drop.

In Flavors.me, I had some difficulties adding several WordPress blogs. It accepted one WP-hosted blog and one self-hosted WP blog, but for some reason, I couldn’t add another self-hosted WP blog, which happened to be my main blog. Not being able to add that defeats the whole purpose of having the page. Update: Flavors.me contacted me to let me know that the free plan allows up to five services to be added, which wasn’t clear in the documentation. It’s also possible to add a freestanding website using the RSS option under Content>Add.

External links operate differently in the two services. On Flavors.me, links open within the Flavors.me page. On About.me, if you click the icons, they open in a widget on the About.me page. But if you click links in the list, a new window opens.

Other Features

About.me offers a nice “Email Me” button and contact form. A similar feature is available on the paid version of Flavors.me.

You can use your own domain name with the paid version of Flavors.me, but not with About.me. About.me provides a dashboard with stats on visitors, social media reach, and more. Flavors.me makes you pay for stats.

Both platforms were obviously created to showcase individuals rather than to serve small businesses, and neither is perfect. AOL bought About.me just four days after it launched, while Flavors.me still operates independently. It will be interesting to see how both services evolve, and whether they will move to meet the needs of a professional audience.

Whether you run a one-person shop or a small business, either of these sites could turn out to have some practical use. I recommend trying them both. You may also want to consider such alternatives as Retaggr, GizaPage, and Chi.mp, which we’ve written about previously, or even the rudimentary splash pages now available with .tel domain names. I’d love to hear your take on them in the comments, especially if you’ve found creative ways to use them for business!

Do you use About.me or Flavors.me as an online calling card?

Disclosure: Automattic, the maker of WordPress.com, is backed by True Ventures, a venture capital firm that is an investor in the parent company of this blog, Giga Omni Media. Om Malik, founder of Giga Omni Media, is also a venture partner at True.

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Who said that the advertising models of print and yesteryear would be sustainable online? Everyone just hoped they’d translate, because porting old models onto new platforms didn’t require much innovation or effort. I’d argue that any publisher that has their eggs completely in the ad banner basket is missing the boat and is in for a Titanic-sized rude awakening.

The good news is that I’ve seen inklings of integrated campaigns online from some forward-thinking advertisers who are realizing that the old advertising methods don’t work so well online and that ad banner fatigue hit consumers in about, oh, 1999. Kudos to the companies who may not yet be getting it right, but are fighting the good fight to bust out of the old models and create some new ones.

So what are the new options for advertisers to reach potential customers? I don’t have a magic bullet for you, sorry, but I do have some wild and wacky ideas about advertising (hate it) versus social communications (love it).

• integration — think of how you can integrate your brand appropriate into conversations. Hint: Strategic social media marketing.
• placement — find interesting ways to place your brand into someone’s information stream. Hint: Virtual goods and gifts.
• overlay — develop ways to put your content into new places and spaces. Hint: Augmented reality.
• cross-platform — don’t just think Mac/PC or Firefox/Safari/Chrome. Hint: Hybrid online/offline.

I’ll leave you with these final thoughts and then let you ruminate — or argue with me, if you like. Most people do not want to consume ads. Many just barely tolerate them. A growing number of people completely reject them. If you look at the trends in communications over the last two decades, the patterns are clear. Learn from our past mistakes. Don’t be afraid to be different. Just make sure you have a strategy, some patience, and a flexible plan.

And please…don’t be an ostrich.

What is the future of advertising on the social web?

Photos by stock.xcnhg users flaivoloka and josecarli respectively

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