Octavian Mihai

Now that the frenzy has passed. I feel comfortable to publish these thoughts. This is my story and it can as well be yours. It’s been ten years since I am glued to the news. Ten years since I check with religious regularity news websites, aggregators, feeds, alerts. I feel as I am one of [...]

Everybody is bitching about “Not another social network, I already have 5 to update”. Imagine having one social network that combines Twitter, Facebook, Foursquare, Email, Groupon, Pictures, Search, Analytics, Readers, your Entreprise network, blog, and some other cool features. All while being privacy oriented and giving you complete power over your data. Too good to [...]

INTRO Until a couple months ago we (Rock&Social) run a very complex operation into the local small business sector. Our intention was to sign social media accounts for most local business in historically high traffic streets in a city (Montreal). We have set up a simple client acquisition program; build and tested a production process with all [...]

Bringing Smart and Sexy Back: Pay-Per-Success Model in Social Media Advertising View more presentations from Octavian Mihai

This is a small series I prepared for our clients at Rock&Social. It is not necessarily news but it might help you get some insights. Make sure you read Socially Local Series: 1. What Is The Deal With Group-Buying Deals? Here are a couple points to take into account if you are thiking of getting a [...]

This is a small series I prepared for our clients at Rock&Social. It is not necessarily news but it might help you get some insights. WE WANT LOCAL Everybody and their brother wants to go local. Small local businesses are under extreme pressures from various marketing and software companies. WHO IS CALLING YOU? So, you have [...]

CORPORATIONS VS CONSUMERS Corporations are built around consumers. And naturally, consumers expect brands to revolve around them. However, many brands have consistently avoided, or fought hard to minimize, any contact with consumers. Consumer communications channels have always been limited. The few ways consumers could communicate with a brand were at the point-of-sale or though dedicated [...]

    If the nature of your business is changing, your business must change. As I’ve mentioned in Social Media and the Age of Agile Business Modeling, Social media is one of the forces pressuring the classical business concepts. Moreover, these days the nature of the corporation is in question. An agile business model is incomprehensible in [...]

You might think we live in accelerated times. BUSINESS SILOS Traditionally businesses have been organized in silos. Innately there is nothing wrong with the division of labor. Some common issues arising from working in silos are difficult communication between silos power struggles slow decision making even slower execution (when this implies silo-collaboration) Usually, work within [...]

STARTER Last Wednesday, October 6 2010, I gave a conference about Facebook at INIS. A recurrent question was trying to find how Facebook compares with Google. This was driven by some news that Facebook traffic overtakes Google and that Facebook might be worth $33B. Many compare Facebook to Google’s growth. FACEBOOK VS GOOGLE Will Facebook [...]

So, you hire a social media expert who recommends an Enterprise 2.0 software solution and gives a couple of trainings about how important Twitter is, how Facebook will become the biggest country on Earth, why Obama won, and how you have to wake up and understand the fundamental shift civilization is going through: social media is the [...]

A NEW VENTURE Starting a new venture it’s always exciting. This time around, I have decided to invest in social media. Although, I am still passionate about strategy, advertising and business management (and Jaime Candy still provides these services), I became convinced that social media will give birth to the marketing agency of the future. [...]

[this is a cross-post from the Rock&Social blog] There has been some confusion lately regarding Rock&Social’s services. This post is meant to clarify some of the misunderstandings. We are not a marketing company. We completely understand all forms of marketing since in past lives we worked in traditional and digital agencies. However, Rock & Social [...]

The first step towards implementing a social media presence for your business is defining a comprehensive social media policy. Here are a couple obvious points to keep in mind when preparing a social media policy: 1. ENSURE IT REPRESENTS YOUR COMPANY VALUES AND BRAND PROMISE If your brand is about openness and blue sky then [...]

A MISSING LINK & A COMMON MISTAKE We all are part of several communities: family, friends, interest groups, work. All these communities have written and unwritten rules. A very simple unwritten rule is to be respectful and loyal towards your community. Otherwise you’ll very often be excluded from it. The concept of group loyalty is [...]

Clearly social media practices will invariably produce a change of business model in most industries. And still, it is not the time to call for a lexical change. One has to understand that unlike us, those who lived and died by the web for the past 15 years, most businesses are still having trouble grasping all the [...]

We have been talking about Social Media for the past decade and finally the market is ripe enough to bring real value to most players.  This post is intended mainly for those businesses who are considering entering the social media realm. Social Media is an umbrella term that represents the use of web-based technologies in [...]

If you are McDonald’s this 10 hours old Reddit thread is worth millions. Authenticity. Engagement. Brand Positioning. Pure Gold. There are no marketers in Marketer’s Heaven.

I was asked the following question during a seminar I gave a couple days ago. Consider this, a large public company is hurting. The board decides to invest in a marketing campaign. What is the best digital strategy? Strategies of Tactics Just to get this out of the way: there is no such thing as a digital [...]