Author Archives: Mike Mulvihill

Trust Me

 By Mike Mulvihill
 Photo: Exercise in Mistrust from Black wolf
Okay, so the last 18 months have been near cataclysmic for many Americans.  We lost our money in the stock market, our jobs and even our homes. We’re mired in a two-front war. We loaned money to save the very institutions that created the financial collapse of [...]

Rapid Brand Deceleration

 By Mike Mulvihill

Ten days. In today’s social media fueled world, a crisis can begin – and even end – in hours, if not minutes. Ten days. That’s how long it took Toyota to announce a fix to the rapid acceleration (faulty gas pedal) problem that prompted a recall of 4.2 million cars worldwide and 2.3 [...]

Gird Your Loins – The Lawyers Are Coming

By Mike Mulvihill

Photo courtesy of PadiProductions
Yes, prepare to defend yourself.
Social media isn’t exactly the place where people have tended to be careful about what they say. It’s Wild West, say what comes to mind in much of the social media world. But you’d best start being careful what you say lest you get slapped with a [...]

New Year – Same Old Aught Decade Hang Ups

 
By Mike Mulvihill

Photo: Courtesy Optical Illusion 
First the good news – business loves social media.  A January 3 update to the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth Center for Marketing Research annual survey on the adoption and practice of social media by the Inc. 500, a list of the fastest-growing private companies in the U.S., found that more businesses are [...]

Take a Holiday Today

by Mike Mulvihill
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
PHOTO:  Madonna dei Tramonti (a 1330 Madonna fresco by the Italian artist Pietro Lorenzetti located in the Basilica of San Francesco d’Assisi.) 
Today is one of my favorite holidays of the year – the feast of the Immaculate Conception.  Holiday, really?  Sure it is.  But unless you are Catholic (and even if you are), [...]

Social Media: How Much Is A Good Thing?

by Mike Mulvihill

Photo: yospyn.com
A survey from the CMO Club bemoans that four out of five CMOs allocate less that 10 percent of their budgets to “experimenting” through social media and non-traditional communications channels.  This is juxtaposed against the rising use of social media – more than 35 percent of adult Internet users have profiles on [...]

Hold The Line. Energy Changes Are a Long Time Coming

 By Mike Mulvihill
 
 
 Wind Power. Renewable Energy. Green Economy. There is an awesome amount of momentum in the America right now around all of these topics. We’re on the cusp of real change in how we create the gobs of energy we increasingly consume in a manner that is kinder and gentler to Mother Earth.
One problem – [...]

Out Social Media’ing the Democrats

by Mike Mulvihill

Photo: voxefx
 I have lived in several places throughout the east and Midwest, but I spent my formative years (8 to 18) in the garden spot of the Garden State and I have now lived in Richmond, Va., for the past 19 years (my longest stint so far in one city/location). So I have [...]

Lubricating the Wheels of Social Media

by Mike Mulvihill

There is nothing quite like political controversy cooked up in the land of meat pies, pints and the Queen. The latest controversy is full of contradictions. It is a great mile marker for the ever symbiotic connection between traditional media and social media (and vice versa). And, it is significant for reasons more [...]

Facebook’s Five Power Plants

by Mike Mulvihill
Photo by Laban West.  Lightning over Muskogee Power Plant, Muskogee OK.
Last week the number of the week was 30,000  –  that’s how many servers support Facebook’s operations.  (No wonder, Facebook produces 25TB – yep, tera-bytes – of log data per day).  The numbers comes from Jeff Rothschild,  the vice president of technology at Facebook, [...]