Tuesday’s here, and I have more to say in each of the stories below than at the top, so without further delay:

After a Sour Start in Social Media, Skittles Gets Sweet Results (ClickZ). Look, I liked the original Skittles play, just thought it didn’t pay off its original promise. But as with many social media “experiments”  the lesson is clear. If things don’t work out, act like a human – a human who wants to win. Keep trying, over and over, and don’t give up. Worked for Skittles – in Facebook anyway. I wonder, however, how many of the Facebook fans came through paid advertising on Facebook?

Toward a New Understanding of Publishing (Part 1) (FM Blog) What, me point you all to something I wrote yesterday? Imagine that. This piece starts to unpack the “brands must be publishers” mantra I’ve been on about for some time. I do find this interesting work and I plan on writing part 2 this week.

Brand Butlers (TrendWatching) A long-ish overview of a thesis that boils down to this: Brands must add service to their products. This fits in very nicely to the idea that all brands are publishers now (there’s me pointing to me again).

Is Google Buzz Dead Already? (SEL) A catchy headline, to be sure, and it caught me, because 1. anything Google does will get a lot of attention and 2. since Buzz’s very buzzworthy launch (I was a bit down on it for various reasons), almost no one I’ve spoken to in the industry has brought it up to me as important. Is this another Knol? I don’t think Google will go away that easily, not on this one. Then again, it may decide it’s time to buy someone instead, as it did with YouTube after Google Video failed to get traction. Trouble is, there’s not much to buy. Unless it makes an offer Twitter simply can’t afford to ignore. My price on that one is pegged at about the same as YouTube – $1.5 billion or more. Yow.

How to Survive Geolocation’s Looming Apocalypse (AdAge) Wow, there’s a headline! But a good overview and some sound advice on the Next Big Thing.

Social Influencers Get Talking (eMarketer) “The report described influencers’ desire to participate in word-of-mouth as “inherent,” and noted that influencers often restricted themselves to talking about only those product categories that were personally important to them.”

After Google’s Move, a Shift in Search Terms (NYT) Interesting to see how search usage shifted in China due to Google’s own changes.

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