From digital dads to social media mavens, children redefine how parents and kids communicate using traditional and new media. Just ask the eight-year-olds using cell phones—and not for phone calls alone!

Melissa Davies
My colleague Pete Blackshaw recently hosted a conference call through Nielsen Online’s Social Media and Advocacy Round Table, focused on how brands can leverage the power of consumers’ contributions to the online community. In the call, Scott Wilder, Small Business Online Communities manager for software publisher Intuit, described listening to customer feedback through Intuit’s call center and realizing that customers thought their problems were unique, and that they felt alone in trying to deal with these problems. The solution: Intuit created an online community to help users connect to …

Nielsen’s Pete Blackshaw has been following consumer buzz in blogs, Twitter tweets and more surrounding the peanut butter Salmonella scare. In this video, he offers practical defensive branding tips and tactical advice.

Related Post:
Consumers Spread Word Of Peanut Butter Recall Online

Pete Blackshaw, EVP Digital Strategic Services, and Sue MacDonald a Research Manager for Nielsen Online discuss the online buzz (from Live Blogging to how the economy effects technology to the next steps in convergence) around the 2009 International Consumer Electronics Show.

How might the media and marketing landscape change next year?  In his latest Ad Age column, Pete Blackshaw, Nielsen Online Executive Vice President, ventures a few predictions.
1. Consumers Go On Social Media “Diets”
“[In 2008] we impulsively adopted everything from hastily assembled Facebook friends and Twitter followers to groups, apps and widgets, yet rarely revisited them.  In 2009, less may well become the new more,” Blackshaw notes.

2. Marketers Return To Media Basics
“TV will remain a focus because viewership in aggregate is actually going up, so continuing to understand how social media extends and …

Ken Cassar & Pete Blackshaw
A lot of folks have seen the Black Friday and Cyber Monday releases that we’ve put out, but we’ve also been tracking Web traffic on a daily basis – in total, by category, and by retailer since the Monday before Thanksgiving. Let me share a little bit more data:
Traffic was up by 10 percent on both of the high profile days, where consumers expected that they would be able to find deals. This is certainly better than some might have feared given the …

Pete Blackshaw
Is “listening to the unprompted consumer voice” finally going mainstream? Last month, Nielsen co-chaired a sold out Industry Leader Forum delivered by the Advertising Research Foundation (ARF). Among other things, the event focused on how social media is spurring online conversations about brands, companies, products and services. How do we ‘listen’ to these conversations? And how do we utilize these findings? These insights are expanding the role of research beyond measurement and testing, inspiring a new vision for market research. At this exciting event, I gave a presentation …

Kim Eugenio
Nielsen Online’s Pete Blackshaw gave a keynote speech on Friday, November 14th, at the WOMMA Summit in Las Vegas in which he stressed the importance of companies’ staying grounded in the “bread and butter,” the core values and core issues of their businesses, and not just focusing on the hottest CGM buzz words. These core objectives, especially customer service and product experience, play a critical role in motivating consumers to spread positive or negative word of mouth buzz.
One brand working hard to improve its customer service and reverse the …

Companies that harness social media to collect customers’ feedback on products and services aren’t just ahead of the curve — they’re part of the “contribution revolution,” Pete Blackshaw, Nielsen Online Executive Vice President, argues in his latest Ad Age column.
Blackshaw cites a recent Harvard Business Review article by Scott Cook, founder-chairman of software developer Intuit, that credits customer participation with generating “tangible enterprise value.”
Intuit, Blackshaw notes, has created an innovative user-participation model that places “Live Community” user forums on every page of its TurboTax software.
Intuit has also put company resources …

By 2020, one in five U.S. residents will be Hispanic or Latino.  But despite the growing number of American homes with Spanish speakers, most U.S. companies’ customer service and marketing websites remain English-only, Pete Blackshaw, Nielsen Online Executive Vice President, notes in his latest Ad Age column.
That lack of Spanish-language online content has left many Hispanics out of online consumer discussions, Blackshaw argues.
“If you survey the landscape of brand websites, mini-sites and Facebook brand pages, you’ll be struck by the surprising absence or marginalization (intentional or not) of Spanish-language content,” …