Wow. Shocking.

As it turns out, Linkedin has sneakily changed it’s members account settings, so that their name and face can be used in advertsing messages on the Linkedin platform.

Ehrm… What?!

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Kill Trust & scare off your clientsI recently received a lot of emails from my Linkedin connections, inviting me for a new kind of professional social network. I thought it was a network visualisation tool.

Curious as I am, I click, signed-in with my Linkedin account, and take a look.

15 minutes later I deleted my account.

Why?

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As a marketer, I thought the era of putting asterixes behind special offers to your customers was sort of over.

I thought web 2.0, consumer power and customer advocacy kinda put an end to that.

But it seems that Linkedin, a web 2.0 company worth $9 Billion is still in the business of making misleading offers to their own customers.

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Once a year Edelman, the worlds largest independent Public Relations firm, publishes their global Trust Barometer. This global survey gauges attitudes on the state of Trust in business, government, NGO’s and media across 23 countries.

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To vaccinate or not to vaccinate?

Way back in early July the Dutch Ministry of Health started their campaign to inform the general public of the vaccination on the Mexican flu. It’s now November and the outbreak is classified as mild. But in the meantime, on the internet, the virus is even more potent than ever.

When the government announced their campaign, they didn’t properly anticipate, or cater for, the amount of questions people would have. And so, as you would expect, with no offical help coming forward, people flocked online to find out whether or not they should get themselves, or their children, vaccinated.

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How to pro-actively manage your online reputation…

Recently I was talking to a rather large brand who had just been sold on an Online Reputation monitoring system. They were looking for a solution to start responding to people’s questions online.

The first word that came up in the conversation was ‘web-rep’. These are folks who go online and respond to comments on behalf of the company. But as you get more visibility, more market share of voice, it’s not economical to keep scaling up the number of web reps.

Plus, this is reactive rather than proactive. Instead of passively responding, you need to proactively manage your online reputation. This goes beyond a one-off response from a web rep.

So how can you do that?

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The fundamentals of B2B Marketing…

I’m often being asked by friends why I dedicate so much time to writing my blog, maintaining my Linkedin profile, getting Twitter contacts, crafting presentations to publish on the web, commenting on people’s blogs et al.

This video answers all these questions:

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Or why brand building beats crisis communications…

Now here’s a company that learned about engaging in online communications the hard way. This is a classic case study that dates back to 2005/2006.

What started with a blog post of one person, caught fire on the Internet and ended up with ‘Dell Hell’ as the most highly ranked Google search term associated with Dell for some time.

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