Not only is FoE (Friend of Eastwick) Tom Hogan a Silicon Valley star of traditional marketing, he is the founder of the engagement market agency Crowded Ocean and a pioneer of n:1 marketing.

As Tom discusses here, Crowded Ocean is unlike other agencies that use outdated models and legacy thinking. Crowded Ocean is founded on the Japanese principal of “jidoka” that leverages limited overhead, no costly inventory, empowered workers and total customization for the customer.

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A long time Friend of Eastwick and founder of creative engagement/event marketing agency Crowded Ocean, Tom Hogan is one of Silicon Valley’s marketing pioneers.  He recently stopped by the Eastwick Mountain View office to say hi and discuss the current state of marketing.

Here Tom discusses the current hot trends in marketing:

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By Andrea Cousens

Yesterday was National Take our Daughters and Sons to Work Day, and my older two boys got out of school to join my husband at his office for the day. The company planned seven hours worth of activities for the kids – from a field trip and hot dog lunch to a bring-home bag of goodies at the end of the long day. The boys loved getting a glimpse of what ‘work’ really means and were particularly enthralled with meeting my husband’s boss, who I think they believed had four heads, because of his ‘head honcho’ title. I must be letting them watch too much TV.

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In an effort to keep our clients up to date with the ever-changing communications landscape, we’ll be delivering an occasional blog report highlighting the changes in traditional media, social media and other communications channels.

The facts are…where and how influence happens today is very different from how it happened just a year ago. We realize we may be closer to these changes than some of you and thought providing a quick summary once a month would help you manage your marketing priorities.

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The power of social networks. That’s what we’ll be discussing at Duarte Design in Mountain View this evening at 6:30 PM, the site of tonight’s Social Media Club San Francisco Silicon Valley chapter.

The evening will kick off the evening with a half-hour fireside chat with John Hagel, network effects expert and Director at Deloitte Consulting LLP.

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A big shout out to our friends over at Frecklebox… a very cool company dedicated to producing customized children’s products.

They were featured on View from the Bay and interviewed by our friend Spencer Christian yesterday.

Nice job guys!

 By Elyce Ventura, Director

If you’re beginning to feel like there is no good news out there and you’re getting overwhelmed by economic doom and gloom, you may just need a little lesson in cautious optimism.

Time Magazine recently ran an article on how our psychology - namely, personality and outlook on life - can be just as important to well-being as exercising and eating right, especially these days, with economic concerns turning everyone into Debbie Downers.

Science suggests that the greater part of an optimistic outlook can be acquired with the right instruction – so here’s your first lesson: Look for the good news out there, even if it takes some digging.

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Augie Ray

When social media is what you do for a living, it’s not often when you see a blog post that makes you think or explores a converse point-of-view. Augie Ray wrote one this week on Experience: The Blog that made me do just that.

The post is called, Can Influencers be a Bad Influence? and brought up some points salient to our discussions on our weekly podcast, Break through the Noise, including:

The right influencers enlisted for the right reason can yield extraordinary benefits, but influencers can be a bad influence if they are not carefully identified or if their impact is permitted to exceed their knowledge, vision, and capabilities. The world of entertainment provides two cautionary tales about the importance of identifying both who are influencers and what they will be permitted to influence.

And so Augie became our guest on today’s show.

[Listen Here]

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Source: InfluenceRISING.com

PR is all about influence; after all, PR professionals communicate with public sectors to influence their attitudes and opinions in the interest of a client. But where does the influence actually happen? Maybe a better question is: How does it happen?

We asked these questions on LinkedIn Answers and received quite a few interesting responses from the likes of authors, Web marketing experts, clients, VPs of technology companies and even the world’s first marketing sociologist.

As social media takes charge, the general consensus is that influence happens in a different manner than it used to with traditional media.

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Source: San Diego Zoo

I was reminded this week of how important actions are in reinforcing communications.

Like seemingly all of California, I was on Spring break last week with my kids. We did a sweep through Southern California, focusing primarily on San Diego.

We hit all the big attractions, including the fabulous San Diego Zoo. But one thing was very jarring during our visit.

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