In Focus

Try a new course: 10 ideas for 2008

Drew Neisser
Media Planning & Buying Posted on January 02, 2008

Join the club

Though membership at Augusta may be out of reach, marketers will be wise to join the right clubs in 2008 by capitalizing on the growing appeal of social networks. Besides the Goliaths like MySpace and Facebook, growing social networks exist in just about every niche of life, from teens (Pizco and Tagged) to seniors (Eons) to photographers (Flickr) to young do-gooders (AllDayBuffet) to B2B (LinkedIn and Plaxo) to gamblers (BetsGoWild, a Renegade client) to just about every interest group (MeetUp).

Renegade is in the process of building a virtual Gilda's Club for cancer patients and their loved ones as a means of extending and enhancing Gilda's Club's 20 physical locations. For Chase, creating a partnership with Facebook has helped make its "+1" credit card become the card of choice among college kids.

Other marketers might be smart to create a social network for their target if one doesn't exist or to take an existing virtual social network and make it physical (Second Life had its first offline convention in 2007). So figure out how you can join the club in 2008 or risk being left out of all the fun.

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Comments

Drew Neisser
Drew Neisser January 2, 2008 at 9:42 AM

Richard--I'm not a scientist and I can not offer concrete evidence of man-made global warming. However, it is easy to see man's negative impact on the environment--try taking a deep breath in Beijing or LA without coughing. Even if the cause of global warming is not man-made, why wouldn't we want to reduce carbon emissions, reduce oil consumption, recycle natural resources and reuse whatever we can? The political and economic advantages of reducing oil consumption alone would rationalize an aggressive "green" movement. I'm hard pressed to figure out the harm in promoting greener behavior.

Richard Bramwell
Richard Bramwell January 2, 2008 at 9:08 AM

Judging from the context of your use of the term Luddite, you have inverted its meaning.

Luddites were opposed to technological advances -mainly those associated with the textile industry. They using rationalistic arguments and misleading statistics that would have kept citizens, and especially their children, trapped in impoverished smoky cottages working with hand operated spinning wheels and looms. Children would have had no chance of a better education or of advancing their material lives and happiness.

It is the Greens that that are the Luddites, not those who recognize the falsities that abound in environmentalist arguments. E.g., *anthropogenic Global Warming is a complete Luddite fraud. Tens of thousands of scientists recognize this (http://www.oism.org/pproject/), yet are ignored by the media (and I suppose yourself). Global temperature changes have, again and again, been shown to be driven primarily by such cosmic factors as solar output, cycling orbital and axial shifts in the Earths relationship with the sun, ocean currents and cosmic radiation (which dramatically affects cloud cover). Only 2% of Greenhouse Gases are influenced by human activity, yet the Greens (the true Luddites) would have humanity curtail major aspects of technology and economics to alter a small portion of that 2%. To do so they clamor for a reduction in productive activities that advance human life without meaningful (to mankind) harm to the environment, regardless of the increased cost of living those reductions will cause. Of course, the poor will, yet again, suffer the most..

As a professional biologist, for 30 years, I am embarrassed by the blatant unscientific thinking among so very many of my peers, its support by the media, and the mindless kowtowing of big business --all at the expense of human life and happiness. Even a few hours of due diligence via the Internet would readily demonstrate how unfounded all major environmentalist claims truly are. Few bother. Shame.