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August 24, 2007
50% of employees blocked from accessing Facebook at work
According to recent research from Sophos, 50% of employees are blocked from accessing Facebook at work...
I guess most companies do not get it :)
Posted by francois at 10:33 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack | Bookmark This | Linking Posts
Notable and quotable around the blogosphere
Pete Blackshaw has a great post on the value of a FaceBook group which has 53,395 members who are self-proclaimed Starbucks "addicts." Taking into consideration the Word of Mouth effect, he estimates the value of this advocacy group at $100M.
Debi Jones from Mobilejones.com has a great article on attention and the mobile web 2.0. With mobile phone operators knowing exactly who you are, and increasingly knowing where you are, the mobile user click stream is rapidly becoming much more valuable than regular web user click streams. Look for powerful datamining capabilities coming to mobile operators to help marketers take advantage of this goldmine - and for bad marketers to pester you with spam on your mobile phone...
Posted by francois at 9:07 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack | Bookmark This | Linking Posts
August 23, 2007
Advertisers vs. online identity
On NPR last night they were discussing the impact of of the known presence of registered sex offenders on social networking sites like MySpace or FaceBook on how advertisers will make their advertising decisions...concluding at one point with an expert opining "well if I were P&G I would worry"...
Should they really worry? Do they worry now whether sexual predators subscribe to the Wall Street Journal and The New York Times online? Is the importance of identity in marketing really different online then offline?
Posted by francois at 8:23 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack | Bookmark This | Linking Posts
August 21, 2007
Marketing 2.0 - a discussion group on FaceBook
I have created a new discussion group called Marketing 2.0 on FaceBook. 89 people joined the group since I made it public yesterday afternoon - so it has the potential to become a great conversation on the future of marketing.
Join the Marketing 2.0 conversation - and if you want to help organize stuff, drop me a note!
Posted by francois at 7:45 AM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBack | Bookmark This | Linking Posts
August 16, 2007
The CMO role is broadening...
McKinsey Quarterly has an interesting article on the evolving role of the CMO (requires subscription). In it they argue that while most CMO's have their hands full, their role should be further expanded - to represent "the voice of the customer" throughout the organization.
(Yes! finally some common sense on the role of the CMO from an authoritative voice ...)
In the face of a rapidly changing customer - ignoring "push" marketing and making buying decisions based on their own research rather than sales recommendations - and with bloggers and other consumer-generated content now determining corporate reputations, companies need to change the way they meet customer needs, the way they innovate, and the way they behave in the marketplace. That will require change efforts across the entire corporation, and who is better positioned to lead those charge than the CMO?
You don't buy the fact that "push" marketing is dead? Then consider this: in consumer electronics more than half of the buyers buy products based on their own research rather than advice from sales staff. More than 60% of baby boomers use the Internet to supplement their doctor's advice (so pharma marketers have to rethink the pitch to doctors). And by 2010, it is expected that 80% of all insurance purchases will be based on consumer research rather than information supplied by insurance agents.
You are not worried about consumer generated content? McKinsey Quarterly says" "User-generated media account for almost one-third of all the time individuals spend on the 100 most visited US Web sites, up from roughly 3 percent just two years ago."
The change in consumer buying habits is broader than some may expect. It is not just that the number of customer touch points with a company has increased dramatically, there is also a more rapid growth of the low and high ends of the the market at the expense of the middle.
So a marketer does not just need to understand the changing customer need as it relates to their product or service, they also need to understand the changing buying needs of those same customers and adapt the whole company to deal with those changes.
[Tags: CMO marketing corporate reputation buying habits customer needs voice of the customer]
Posted by francois at 8:44 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack | Bookmark This | Linking Posts
August 14, 2007
[too funny] Atheists in Massachusetts can be jailed...
I just ran across this link on Reddit.
"Whoever wilfully blasphemes the holy name of God by denying...his creation...or by cursing or contumeliously reproaching Jesus Christ or the Holy Ghost...shall be punished by imprisonment in jail for not more than one year or by a fine of not more than three hundred dollars, and may also be bound to good behavior. "
Better get rid of "God is not great," "The God Delusion," and "letter to a christian nation."
Posted by francois at 9:57 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack | Bookmark This | Linking Posts
August 13, 2007
Leveraging social media to deal with a corporate public affair's nightmare
Johnson & Johnson is suing the Red Cross and other parties over the use of the Red Cross. Talk about one heck of a juicy story. The reality is that J&J is suing the Red Cross because it is licensing the use of the Red Cross symbol to for-profit organizations, while J&J holds trademarks to the Red Cross symbol since before the Red Cross actually existed.
So what is a VP of corporate communications at J&J to do in response to such a corporate public affair's nightmare? Send out press releases, hold press conferences, use all the traditional tools available to corporate communicators in crisis management mode? Not so for the J&J corporate com VP, Ray Jordan, who took his story to the J&J corporate blog, where he wrote up J&J's point of view in an everyday and personal voice.
The result? A large number of comments and stories generally providing broad support for J&J's point of view. While there are negative comments, the blog achieved what no other crisis communication's vehicle would have delivered.
(via Johnnie Moore)
[Tags: Red Cross Johnson & Johnson J&J corporate communication crisis management]
Posted by francois at 8:10 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack | Bookmark This | Linking Posts
August 1, 2007
US is #15 in broadband subscribers worldwide
According to a new commentary released by the Pew Internet Project, It will be hard to close the broadband divide in the US (pdf here).
We now rank # 15 among countries worldwide in terms of broadband subscribers (19.6 subscribers per 100 inhabitants compared to 31.9 for Denmark and 29.1 for Korea).
Posted by francois at 4:44 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack | Bookmark This | Linking Posts
Overprotecting our youth can be disastrous for their education
It is disturbing to see how technology-phobic parents and teachers can impose restrictions on all of our kids which can result in missed education opportunities, or worse strange behavior towards technology and the Internet.
One such example appeared on the BBC News web site today, where they report that teachers have called for web sites such as YouTube to be shut down as part of efforts to prevent pupils and staff being bullied. Wow - how dangerously stupid! I mean, cannot they just adapt new techniques to avoid bullying online instead of calling for the shutdown of those sites? I bet you the next thing they will do is to prohibit access to YouTube and sites like it for all the kids in the their schools - a really dumb move.
That is exactly what happened to my son. He has been to computer camp over summer for years now. The first year they let them do whatever they wanted on the web. Then they started prohibiting online games during recess times. It got progressively worse to the point that this year they can no longer go on the web. A computer camp without being allowed to surf the web - that is almost as bad as a tennis camp without tennis courts. What are they thinking?
I can just see some worried parents who have no clue what the web is all about, outside of the sensationalized (and disgusting) stories of the pedophiles who find their victims online as promoted by Dateline NBC and other such programs, asking the school to not allow their child to access the web for fear of being stalked or being approached by bad people. This being a very litigious society, the school lawyers are probably choosing to have all access prohibited rather than just limiting access to those kids whose parents are clearly clueless. And the unfortunate result is that kids like my son, who have been online since they were still in diapers, and who have learned how to stay out of trouble online, much like we were brought up to stay out of trouble offline, can no longer enjoy their computer camp and have to give up the learning that they are yearning for.
Sure there are bad people online, and while I am not sure how the online percentage of bad people compares to bad people in the real world, I suspect that the number is actually lower. But it does not matter, even if it is higher we cannot rob our children of the education that will make them competitive to meet the needs of a few Luddites. We have to develop methods to teach them how to stay out of trouble online the same way we thought generations of people to stay out of trouble offline.
[Tags: YouTube BBC online access education predators]
Posted by francois at 10:48 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack | Bookmark This | Linking Posts
