Last week there was widespread (and agency-fuelled) speculation about the meaning of the mysterious “230″ campaign. AdAge managed to uncover that the source was General Motors, but not much beyond that. Well, this morning Twitter is abuzz with the answer: 230 is the EPA-verified mileage per gallon for the new Chevy Volt. (Translation for the [...]

Last Saturday, my brother Brent and I ran and rode OC Transpo buses all over Ottawa. Along the way, we (over) acted in soap opera, skateboarded, played croquet, danced around stripper poles (no nudity involved – this year), and ate really, really gross stuff. Not a normal Saturday for us or the more than 900 other [...]

So as I write this, the newly re-christened SciFi Channel is ringing the bell at the NASDAQ to celebrate their name change to “Syfy” (Siffy?)  and the Twitter hash tag #syfy is alive with unanimous pans of the new name: “Worst. Re-branding. Ever.”  That might be a stretch, but so is the new name. Wired magazine [...]

Okay, confession time. As an emerging Twitter devotee, (@denvan) I’ve been “drinking the Kool-Aid” of the Twitter brand for too long to really be objective about their brand strategy. I’m a tribe member now, and I’ve learned the buzzwords, tools, and idiosyncrasies of this social media monster. But as a brand strategy geek, I also [...]

Maybe I’m a bit slow, but I just came across the term “crowdsourcing” – the process of solving business problems using social media (not to be confused with another term I recently picked up: “FLASHMOB” – the process of creating absurd but strangely compelling YouTube videos with your friends). The image above is from my experiment [...]