The Detroit Free Press features an article highlighting several companies what are engaging customers to create, vote or modify their ads. Examples:

Home Depot enncourages to vote for their favorite commercial on their website.
Mastercard allows visitors to its web site to suggest ending scenes for its commercial.
Chevy asks participants to create an online spot.
Sony, Toyota, [...]

I’m hosting Carnival of the Capitalists on Decker Marketing blog. Since there were some great posts on word of mouth, customer centricity, blogs, eCommerce and change leadership, I’ll paste them here as well:
Customer Centricity
Open Up or Shut Up, Part 1
Always On Network suggests that CEOs, marketing executives, and PR professionals who don’t have the courage [...]

Last week, I participated in a panel discussion at the SXSW Interactive conference held annually here in Austin. The title of the panel was “Convergence in Advertising”, and I was joined by executives from companies in the educational media, advergaming, and social media fields.
In turn, each panelist discussed the growing importance of consumer-created content and [...]

Of course you want your Website, and your company, to be the best it can be. But from whose perspective? Your perspective (internally focused) or your customers’ perspective?
The transformation from corporate-focused to customer-centric is not an easy one. Even the most client-minded individuals have trouble effecting cultural change in a large organization - or a [...]

Glen Urban is an MIT professor focused on understanding, building, and maintaining trust on the Web. In his latest book, Don’t Just Relate - Advocate!, Urban makes a valuable claim about being a responsible advisor to your customers:
“Your company might choose to embrace advocacy by becoming a faithful representative of your customers’ interests. Under [...]

This article by Bambi Francisco reminded me of a keynote presentation by Jeff Bezos that I was fortunate enough to attend last year. Jeff keynoted Shop.org’s first Multichannel Executive Symposium, co-hosted with McKinsey & Company. As a Shop.org Board member, I was proud that Jeff accepted our invitation to present, and this year’s event (being [...]

I was in LA on Tuesday visiting one of our new clients, an online shoe retailer. After meeting their President, COO, and team for the first time in person, this machine caught my eye. So, I asked their COO if I could try it out. This particular foot scanner is made by 3DFoot.com. I [...]

In recent weeks, I’ve been helping my better half, Andrea, wrap up the planning of our May wedding. Before I go any further, I have to thank her for letting me off so easy for so long!
This week, I finally got around to completing a long overdue task. Andrea asked me to order [...]

As you may know, I serve on the Board of Advisors with Jim Sterne and Bryan Eisenberg for the ad:tech 1MPACT single-day Internet marketing conference that just wrapped up its 3rd (of 10) city tour in LA today. I was pleased to see the completeness of Cliff Kurtzman’s notes of my talk in Seattle, [...]

According to a recent survey by MoreVisibility.com, many marketers are less than satisfied with the results of their search marketing programs. A top concern is the lack of consensus on how to measure impact and ROI, and only 46% of those engaged in SEM are happy with their results.
Fortunately, ROI measurement tools and methodologies [...]