This is John Reinan’s weekly marketing column for MinnPost.com. See also Mike Keliher’s earlier take on the Old Spice campaign. Retailing tycoon John Wanamaker famously said that half the money he spent on advertising was wasted — he just couldn’t tell which half. A century later, a shirtless stud has once again prompted debate on [...]

A pair of recent studies attempt to shine some light into the vast user base of one of the Web’s social networking giants, Twitter. The New York Times has a brief report on a Twitter study that shows: 87 percent of Americans 12 years old and up know what Twitter is 25 percent of Twitter [...]

Editor’s note: This is John Reinan’s weekly marketing column for MinnPost.com. To see the original, go to http://bit.ly/d5Waic. The word cloud you see above shows us how far we still have to go in understanding social media and how to use it. It comes from Rob Key, founder and CEO of Converseon, a New York social [...]

Editor’s note: This is John Reinan’s weekly marketing column for MinnPost.com. To see the original, go to http://bit.ly/aC2QQx. We don’t get any literally seismic events in Minnesota, but the virtual ground shook here and everywhere last month as Facebook overtook Google as the most visited site on the Web. According to Hitwise, a prominent tracking [...]

Editor’s note: Welcome to our guest poster, Arik C. Hanson of ACH Communications. We’ve long admired the utter ferocity with which Arik attacks Twitter. So we asked him to give us some thoughts on what he’s learned as one of the premier practitioners of the Tweet. Gotcha. Yeah, you fell for it. Admit it. The [...]

I remember downloading my first song on Napster in 1999. As I downloaded an Eminem song, I thought to myself, “This is too good to be true.” Not long after I developed quite the electronic library of music, Metallica and Dr. Dre were filing lawsuits against Napster for violations of the DMCA. Napster paved the [...]

Chances are you watched the Oscars Sunday evening. 41.3 million of us did to be exact - a 14 percent increase from the 2009 show and the highest in five years. Was it because the best picture category expanded to 10 nominees to include something for everybody? Was it because one of the night’s key films was the biggest movie ever? [...]

We just bought a couple new laptops, so that must mean we have more job openings, right?  Indeed we do! The first will be issued to an emerging superstar with serious social media chops, strong writing skills and a little gravitas to boot.  Ideally, our new Client Relationship Director would be a highly creative and strategic thinker who [...]

Editor’s note: This is John Reinan’s weekly marketing column for MinnPost.com. To view the original, go to http://bit.ly/deOIrB. We update the Idea Peepshow five days a week. You’d be surprised at how uncommon this is among marketing and advertising agencies. Many Twin Cities agencies don’t blog, and of those that do, infrequent posting is the rule – [...]

Once upon a time, I really didn’t care which local news station I watched. None was particularly bad, but none was particularly compelling, at least not to the point at which I had developed a true connection or a sense of loyalty. Then came Jason DeRusha. A few years ago, I heard the WCCO reporter [...]