Archive for the Academic Life Category


    Segment Your Brand Community Participants Part 1

    May 5th, 2010

    If you are a socially savvy brand, most likely you are already engaging your customers in some form of online community, either through your own branded online community such as Kraft Foods’ recipe exchange community, or through a third-party social media platform such as what Starbucks is doing on Twitter. In managing the participants in [...]


    Loyalty Program Design Fundamentals Part II

    March 31st, 2010

    Last week, I wrote about the key loyalty program design factors that a loyalty manager should consider. In the second part of this series, I’d like to review what we know about effective loyalty program design from published academic research. I should start by saying that this area is still pretty new. So we don’t [...]


    Rising to Stardom: What Makes Some User-Generated Content So Popular?

    February 1st, 2010

    What drives the extreme success of selected user-generated content (UGC) while most other content remains forgotten? In this blog post, we report the findings from our research project that aimed to address this question. Within the context of online user-generated video, we traced the pattern of rise to popularity of such content over time and identified the factors that affect the diffusion path of new UGC. In doing so, we provide a mechanism for predicting the success of a UGC at an early stage of the diffusion process. Marketers equipped with such knowledge will then be able to strategically participate in the conversation facilitated through UGC and to better focus their resources on viral content that is likely to affect a larger audience.