Emergence Marketing

Posted by francois at 7:45 AM

Ridiculous Business Jargon Dictionary to the rescue of non corporate jargon users

The Ridiculous Business Jargon Dictionary has some interesting definitions for those of us who are not all that familiar with corporate speak (via lifehack.org). Here are some favorites:

Assmosis [v.] The apparent absorption of success that comes from sucking up.

Blamestorming [v.] Meeting to discuss a failure and find a scapegoat.

Bouncebackability [adj.] The ability to reverse a losing situation and then succeed.

Head shunting [v.] The secret hiring of a head hunter to persuade an ineffectual employee to take a position at another firm. Nicely eliminates the mess of having to fire someone.

Prairie dogging [v.] The simultaneous pop-up of several heads when something interesting is happening around cubicles.

Presenteeism [n.] The practice of working ridiculously long hours.

Zerotasking [v.] Doing nothing.

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January 30, 2007

links for 2007-01-30

• The HBR List: Breakthrough Ideas for 2007
  Great list of ideas by leading thinkers - open till the end of February
  (tags: idea)
• eBay Australia: New Life for Sale!! (item 110078904033, end time 23-Jan-07 15:11:00 AEDST)
  Buying someone's "life" on eBay
  (tags: identity ebay)

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January 29, 2007

Breakthrough ideas for 2007

The Harvard Business Review just released their annual survey of emerging ideas (free until Feb 26th). It is a great read with some real cool nuggets of ideas (via O'Reilly Radar).

Some of my favorites include:

• "...influentials have far less impact on social epidemics than is generally supposed. In fact, they don't seem to be required at all." - Duncan Watts, reporting on recent research he conducted on the role of influentials in trends and other social epidemics.


• "Today, customers aren’t just voicing their needs to companies that are willing to listen; they’re inventing and often building what they want." - Eric Von Hippel, reporting on research that shows that the 70% to 80% of new product development that fails does so not for lack of advanced technology but because of a failure to understand users’ needs.


• "As businesses respond to this backlash—as they consider management styles and marketing messages that effectively meet people’s needs for relief from continuous partial attention and the sensory overload it creates—they can differentiate themselves by offering what their employees and customers increasingly crave: discriminating choices and quality of life." - Linda Stone, reporting on living with continuous partial attention.


• "By almost any measure, the larger a city’s population, the greater the innovation and wealth creation per person." - Geoffrey West, reporting on recent research that found a general mathematical relationships between population size, innovation, and wealth creation.


• "People who are social, religious, or political conservatives tend to have more children...In the United States, for example, fertility rates are 12% higher in states that voted for George W. Bush in the most recent presidential election than in the more liberal and secular states that supported his opponent." - Philip Longman, reporting on research that shows that we are headed for a more conservative period worldwide (YIKES!)


• "...the key to getting payback on investment in a network is to think hard about exactly what kind of value you want the network to create. In other words, you must put the work in “network” first." - Chris Meyers arguing that "work" needs to be at the center of collaborative environments to predictably succeed (something we clearly found when studying successful collaboration teams & projects amongst eRoom customers.)

[Tags: influentials conservatism consumer generated innovation woinnovation attention work]

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January 28, 2007

links for 2007-01-28

• Exploring Life Extension - Google Video
  Interesting documentary about life extension
  (tags: immortality)

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January 27, 2007

links for 2007-01-27

• New ROI of blogging report from Forrester
  Great way to develop an ROI for externally facing blogs
  (tags: blogs roi)

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January 25, 2007

Skypecast - How Edmunds Leverages Wisdom of Crowds

Tomorrow, Friday (1/26) at 2pm ET, we will be holding our first Skypecast conversation leading up to the Community 2.0 conference. This one will be with Sylvia Marino, the Executive Director for CarSpace at Edmunds. Sylvia is responsible for all consumer-generated content and interaction on three web sites that make up the Edmunds Automotive Network: Edmunds.com, Inside Line and CarSpace. Additionally, Sylvia oversees all aspects of design, features, business operations and strategy for CarSpace, the online automotive social network for car and truck enthusiasts.

This discussion will center around how Edmunds is leveraging the wisdom of crowds in their business.

The Skypecast will be recorded and posted on the future of communities blog. During the Skypecast we will open up the mic for questions from the audience, but if you have any questions and will not be able to attend, or would prefer us to ask the questions, please put them in the comment section of this post.

[Tags: communities community management wisdom of crowds community 2.0]

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January 23, 2007

Here is a community I would like to join!

I do have a 2nd Life account, but this seems so much better!

http://www.getafirstlife.com/

(via Fletchspace)

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January 10, 2007

Interesting discussion on neuro-economic

HBS Prof. James Heskett is having an interesting discussion on the age of neuro-everything. Are new neuroscience-based findings going to topple long lasting theories or confirm them?

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January 9, 2007

Interesting new research from Pew on Teens and Social Networks

According to a new Pew Internet Report on Teens and Social Networks, 55% of online teens (12-17) use social networks and 55% have created online profiles.

Interestingly enough, the survey found that "...older teens, particularly girls, are more likely to use these sites. For girls, social networking sites are primarily places to reinforce pre-existing friendships; for boys, the networks also provide opportunities for flirting and making new friends." For the older girls (15-17), the percentage is 70% who have used an online social network.

[Tags: social networks online profiles teens ]

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December 3, 2006

A great way to deal with telemarketers

You have to listen to this short audio clip, this is a very funny and effective way to deal with unwanted telemarketers :)

[Tags: telemarketing telesales humor]

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November 28, 2006

Moderating a Community 2.0 Webinar on Wednesday

Join me for an interesting conversation on the business of communities this Wednesday with Barry Libert, CEO and founder for Shared Insight (disclosure - Shared Insights is paying me to do this webinar as well as for chairing the upcoming community 2.0 conference), Ed Moran, Director of Product Innovation at Deloitte, and Robert Dell'Immagine, Director of Community at VMware .

You can sign up for the webinar - which is free - at the Shared Insights' web site.

At this point the plan is to talk about why business communities are hot now, what tool-set is available to companies deploying business communities, and what business process and social infrastructure considerations need to be made to ensure success. We will also review and discuss a business community case study.

Hopefully we'll see you there!

[Tags: communities community 2.0 community management business of communities]

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November 24, 2006

Upcoming Community 2.0 Conference

As mentioned before, I have agreed to chair an upcoming conference on the business of communities - Community 2.0, which will happen on March 12-14 in Las Vegas.

Communities are hot – every company thinks that they need one, but no one is too sure how to set them up or how to leverage them. As with most new buzzword-compliant memes many will approach the opportunity by throwing technology at it and fail miserably. Others will inevitably trespass ethical boundaries and muddy the waters for those who follow.

But some will take the lead of the existing pioneers and integrate the lessons learned into their approach to the business of communities. Those companies will succeed and derive returns that will shame their competitors.

Community 2.0 is for those people who are interested in networking with other community professionals to develop a deep understanding of what works and does not in this new world. The conference will provide a snapshot of the current conversations and body of knowledge related to the business of communities. For those who are interested in helping to shape the market, there will also be opportunities to join groups of likeminded people into ongoing community council conversations.

The discussions, presentations, interviews, stories and case studies at the Community 2.0 conference will be organized in three themes:

• Strategy and theory - what are the underlying forces that make communities tick? How does social networking theory impact communities? Can you leverage crowd sourcing?


• Applications and best practices - where can communities help? Have you thought of communities to bring the voice of the customer into your new product development process? Or to involve employees, partners and customers into improving innovation?


• The technology and social infrastructure - what are the technology building blocks beyond the discussion thread that make for successful communities? What rules of engagement do you need to set up to avoid your community to become toxic?

At this stage the program includes leading luminaries from well known academic institutions, professional services firms, solution providers as well as private and public community managers. We can already count on case studies ranging from the world of high tech to financial services to teenage-based communities. The Conference will also include a targeted technology expo where you will be able to talk with product and service providers in this space. The program is continuously expanding, so make sure to periodically check the conference web site for latest additions to the program.

If you think you have something to contribute - please give me a shout (francois AT emergencemarketing DOT com or on my SKYPE which is fgossieaux).!

[Tags: communities community 2.0 community management business of communities]

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November 22, 2006

Funny searches that lead to unrelated sites

Every now and again I look at the searches that led people to this site (I use my own stats and also 103Bees.com). Every time I do it I am amused at what people look for. Here are a few recent ones:

• Was God Wrong? (would you ask Google that question?)
• Does sex sell?
• Sex does not sell (this one is trying to make a point in a speech or presentation)
• golden egg (good luck with that :)

Ok...time to get back to something useful...

Have a great Thanksgiving!

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November 16, 2006

links for 2006-11-16

• MarketingNPV - Is There a Reliable Way to Measure Word-of-Mouth Marketing?
  Great article on word of mouth marketing and the different ways to measure it. The only missing part is the role of ethics in protecting this marketing tool
  (tags: wom word-of-mouth viralmarketing)

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November 13, 2006

Cool Wrigley ad

These ought to raise some eyebrows when people take a full sip of their Starbucks coffee...(via the cool hunter)

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November 12, 2006

funny new videoshow

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November 10, 2006

links for 2006-11-10

• tompeters! management consulting leadership training development project management
  Tom Peters gets mad at the media for equating San Francisco with "liberal" as if it were a disease...thankfully the nightmare is almost over!
  (tags: politics)

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November 9, 2006

[off topic] The system works!

While the vast majority of the news deals with the shift in control for the senate and the house, an equally important story developed at the local level - which may in fact have a dramatic impact on the 2008 Presidential elections.

When looking at the election result graphic from the NYT this morning, you will see that where the republicans controlled both chambers in 20 states, they now only control both chambers in 10 states, while the democrats control both chambers in 23 states. 16 states instead of 10 now have mixed control...

Favorite quote: " To our friends overseas, stay tuned - the nightmare is almost over!" (person interviewed on NPR)

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November 6, 2006

Market research at its best

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November 3, 2006

links for 2006-11-03

• Michael Porter Asks, and Answers: Why Do Good Managers Set Bad Strategies? - Knowledge@Wharton
  great articleon how strategic mistakes happen inside companies
  (tags: strategy)

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November 1, 2006

Community-based agency creates Hubbub in the PR community

A new agency - Hubbub - founded by Giovanni Rodriguez and Rebekah Mitchell, launched last night (disclosure: I am an advisor to the company).

One of the truly interesting aspects of this new agency is that they will attempt to create a community-based PR agency - meaning that they are creating a global and "open" community of communications professionals to assemble in teams for customer projects.

The company seems to be off to a good start and already has a nice roster of clients.

Good luck Hubbub PR!

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October 31, 2006

links for 2006-10-31

• Edge Perspectives with John Hagel: Social Networks and Urbanization
  Great article on the typology of social networks - connection, creation, and collaboration
  (tags: socialnetwork socialnetworking collaboration)
• Ageless Marketing: On Metaphors and Mirror Neurons
  Fascinating post on the use of mirror neurons to gain access to a person's analytical brain...
  (tags: brain science marketing)

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October 30, 2006

The new GuruBBQ show

If you have not seen Tom Asacker's new weekly video show you have to check it out. It is a fun and witty show covering business news, marketing trends and other things that you absolutely don't need to know.

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October 26, 2006

links for 2006-10-26

• Ideas at Work : Magazine Feature : When giving is cheap
  Interesting research on how people decide to become altruistic in making economic decisions
  (tags: sharing charity)

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October 20, 2006

links for 2006-10-20

• To Blog or Not to Blog: Report from the Front - Knowledge@Wharton
  Report on wharton professors who embrace blogging and bloggers and those that do not - often times for very scary reasons...no wonder many people complain that the academic world is out of synch with industry needs
  (tags: blog blogging)

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October 19, 2006

links for 2006-10-19

• SEOmoz | Articles >> Website Analytics vs. Competitive Intelligence Metrics
  Interesting study on web analytics and accuracy of various services
  (tags: metrics analytics)
• Inside Bay Area - Corporate America embraces social networking
  Enterprise based social networking solutions
  (tags: socialnetwork socialnetworking)
• O'Reilly Radar > Homophily in Social Software
  Homophily - the phenomenon that you hang out with people that think like you - a feature or a bug in social software?
  (tags: socialnetwork socialsoftware)

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October 18, 2006

Confidential ethnographic research on YouTube

Here is a confidential video prepared for Google Internal Use only...fascinating research!

(via Grant McCracken)

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Online communities - the future has been here for 20 years

Imagine a community built "on top of an ordinary commercial online service and uses an inexpensive -- some would say "toy" -- home computer to support user interaction," and which can support "a population of thousands of users in a single shared cyberspace," and which "presents its users with a real-time animated view into an online simulated world in which users can communicate, play games, go on adventures, fall in love, get married, get divorced, start businesses, found religions, wage wars, protest against them, and experiment with self-government."

Well such a world was around 20 years ago - brought to you by the same people who built Pixar in the late 80's - LucasArts Entertainment. Check out this paper describing LucasFilm's Habitat back in 1990 at the First International Conference on Cyberspace - it is fascinating!

Like Larry Keeley said two weeks ago at the BIF conference, we always overestimate the amount of change in the short term and underestimate the amount of change in the long term!

(via wikisquared)

[Tags: innovation virtual communities virtual world habitat]

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October 16, 2006

Another interesting conference - Blog Business Summit

While on a business trip to Seattle next week I will also be attending the Blog Business Summit - which has a great line-up of speakers as well as attendees. Should be great fun!

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October 14, 2006

links for 2006-10-14

• The Human Capital Institute - Home
  great example of a for profit association
  (tags: association)

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October 13, 2006

Science: new research shows US still in the lead - with Asian countries on exponential growth curves

New research from the Amsterdam School of Communications Research shows the US still in the lead with regards to scientific research. It also shows many Asian countries on exponential growth curves - which if continued will result in severely diminished competitive advantages for the US in the future.

Surprising? Not really. With this country's lack on focus on education, we have to rely on private citizens and entrepreneurs like Dean Kamen to make up the difference. And the fact that we are losing ground has been widely reported in the mainstream press...

If you missed it, you are not paying attention!

I can just see the headlines in the press 50 years from now - "US life expectancy now half the life expectancy of Chinese - new research links the differences in life expectancy to politically motivated ban on stem cell research and lack of educational funding in the US at the turn of the century..."

[Tags: innovation education science science research]

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links for 2006-10-13

• IdeaFlow: Discussion about innovation and creativity -- new products, strategy, open innovation, commercialization of technologies, patents, idea generation, customer input in the NPD process, more.
  Great wrap-up post for last week's Business Innovation Factory Conference
  (tags: innovation)

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October 9, 2006

links for 2006-10-09

• BibSonomy::tag::community
  Interesting set of bookmarks related to communities
  (tags: community socialnetwork)
• BibSonomy::tag::communities
  more interesting links of communities
  (tags: community socialnetwork)

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October 1, 2006

Dressed to kill

Wallis has a pretty interesting advertising campaign...called "Dress to Kill"

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September 28, 2006

Applying the WTF filter to tech prose...

Mike Manuel has a best-of-breed, feature-rich and truly robust post on the (ab)use of buzzwords in high tech client-speak and pr-speak. In the spirit of adding value to this highly innovative, distributed conversation on the topic of marketing 2.0 in this new scalable social web 2.0 environment I thought it would be good to increase the high availability and disaster recovery capabilities of the consolidated global virtual repository of knowledge on this topic by posting a dynamic link to his streaming enterprise-class embedded post here.

Enjoy! And while you're at it you might also enjoy Mary's truly thought-provoking method to create corporate mission statements!

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September 26, 2006

Another Virgin Mobile Ad...

These are hilarious...

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Virgin Mobile Customer Service ads

I guess we won't be seeing these Virgin Mobile customer service ads anytime soon :)

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The future of the Internet

The Pew Internet & American life Project just released a new report on the Internet Evolution - The Future of the Internet II (download full pdf here)..

Major predictions by 2020 include:

• A low-cost global network will be thriving and creating new opportunities in a “flattening” world.


• Humans will remain in charge of technology, even as more activity is automated and “smart agents” proliferate. However, a significant 42% of survey respondents were pessimistic about humans’ ability to control the technology in the future. This significant majority agreed that dangers and dependencies will grow beyond our ability to stay in charge of technology. This was one of the major surprises in the survey.


• Virtual reality will be compelling enough to enhance worker productivity and also spawn new addiction problems.


• Tech “refuseniks” will emerge as a cultural group characterized by their choice to live off the network. Some will do this as a benign way to limit information overload, while others will commit acts of violence and terror against technology-inspired change.


• People will wittingly and unwittingly disclose more about themselves, gaining some benefits in the process even as they lose some privacy.


• English will be a universal language of global communications, but other languages will not be displaced. Indeed, many felt other languages such as Mandarin, would grow in prominence.

Some of those predictions seem like they are already upon us and not 14 years out into the future.

It is especially great to see that 56% of the people who were surveyed believed in this scenario: "By 2020, this free flow of information will completely blur current national boundaries as they are replaced by city-states, corporation-based cultural groupings and/or other geographically diverse and reconfigured human organizations
tied together by global networks."

Unfortunately, many still believe that "governments and corporations will not necessarily embrace policies that will allow the network to spread to under-served populations; that serious social inequalities will persist." And according to the report "The experts and analysts also split evenly on a central question of whether the world will be a better place in 2020 due to the greater transparency of people and institutions afforded by the internet: 46% agreed that the benefits of greater transparency of organizations and individuals would outweigh the privacy costs and 49% disagreed.The experts and analysts also split evenly on a central question of whether the world will be a better place in 2020 due to the greater transparency of people and institutions afforded by the internet: 46% agreed that the benefits of greater transparency of organizations and individuals would outweigh the privacy costs and 49% disagreed."

[Tags: pew future of internet predictions privacy]

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A few interesting upcoming events

I will be attending a few interesting events on innovation. The first is the Business Innovation Factory's second Collaborative Innovation Summit, which will be hosted by Richard Saul Wurman and Walt Mossberg. The second is the Babson University Center for Innovation & Corporate Entrepreneurship's Idea-to-profit summit, where they will be looking at the role of marketing on innovation.

Hopefully we will see you there!

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September 20, 2006

The lowest bidder wins...

Limbo is an online auction system - except that the lowest UNIQUE bidder wins (via Business 2.0 - not online yet). Apparently someone walked off with a Mini Cooper for $50.43, while another person got a plasma TV for $8.85.

So say you are bidding for the Sony Cybershot which ends Saturday, you text your bid in via phone. The system then responds via SMS and tells you whether there are other bids like yours or if yours is unique, whether there are people who have unique bids lower than yours. As you keep bidding, the system also gives you hints - so as of this minute there are 2 unique bids under $2.07.

Another interesting business model...

Warning - this site is very addictive!

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Blogging the coup in Thailand

While many of the traditional media outlets may be limited in what they can do, you can follow the coup in Thailand from one person's perspective on this blog (via Infoworld).

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September 13, 2006

Most important trends for global business in the next 5 years

McKinsey quarterly just reported (requires subscription) on a survey which they conducted with executives from around the world. In it they asked those executives to identify the top three trends that would affect global business and how those trends would impact their company's profitability.

The top three trends to affect global business over the next five years are:

• the growing number of consumers in emerging economies
• the shift of economic activity between and within regions
• the greater ease of obtaining information and developing knowledge

Other noteworthy trends from the top 10 include: the increasing communication/interaction in business and social realms as a result of technological innovation (#6), shifting structures/emerging forms of corporate organization (#7), and more social backlash against business (#9).

Interestingly enough, the survey found that executives perceived the potential impact of those trends to be significantly larger on global business than on their own company's profitability - perhaps signaling a weakness in their ability to translate global trends into corporate strategy.

Another finding - perhaps predictable considering who was surveyed - is that 85% of the executives describe their business environment as more competitive than it was 5 years ago.

When asked what single factor contributes most to the accelerating pace of change in the global business environment today they identified the main reason as innovation in products, services and business models. Other interesting reasons were greater ease of obtaining information, developing knowledge (#2), and rising consumer awareness and activism (#8).

[Tags: macroeconomic trends business trends product innovation consumer knowledge rate of change mckinsey]

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September 5, 2006

If we cannot predict hurricanes - how are we to predict buying behavior?

David Wolfe over at Ageless Marketing has a great post on the difficulties associated with predicting consumer behavior. Comparing the process to our inability to predict hurricane paths with the help of supercomputers he says: "I have to believe that human behavior reflects more variables and is significantly more complex than weather behavior."

The good news according to David is that customers will tell you what they want - but in order to get that information, you need to get it in "real life context" - as opposed to research environments where customers tend to behave differently than in real life.

[Tags: market research customer research ]

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August 30, 2006

Another interesting use of YouTube - whistleblowing

Here is a whistle-blower describing serious safety and security problems with coast guard ships...

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It really sucks...

Funny advertising clip using a suicide scene to advertise powerful sucking power :)

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August 27, 2006

Check out what you can do with 101 bottles of diet coke and 500+ mentos

This is a really cool video with two guys putting on a fantastic show with only Mentos and Diet Coke.

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August 21, 2006

BlogBridge Library - a cool way to manage libaries of important content

As part of a potential client project, I finally got a chance to take a real close look at the BlogBridge Library (disclosure - I am an advisor to this open source project).

It is a very cool and powerful application, which enables you to create and manage a central library of feeds, blogs, reading lists, podcasts and more. Different sub-sections of the library can be managed by different people, and with full opml support, it is really easy for you to share the library or parts of the library with other people in your team or company.

The BlogBridge Library can be installed behind your firewall and while it will work with any RSS reader, there are additional features within BlogBridge (my favorite) that will enable you to manage your library straight from within the reader instead of having to go through the web UI.

One obvious application is for Marketing teams and their PR agencies to coordinate rapidly changing lists of social media movers and shakers in their space.

[Tags: blogbridge opml support library rss reader ]

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August 19, 2006

Prevent further "participation gap" between have's and have not's

DOPA, or the "Deleting Online Predators Act of 2006", would limit access from public places to all sorts of social networking and social media sites by minors, including libraries and schools. If you have not heard of DOPA - check out this excellent article about this horrible piece of legislation at the MIT Technology Review.

Once you've read it, you will probably want to sign this petition to stop those morons from continuing to screw with this new digital medium which many legislators do not understand and most likely fear.

If you are interested in more reading on this - check out MIT Henry Jenkins post on "What DOPA Means for Education", as well as social network guru danah boyd's writings on the subject.

[Tags: DOPA Deleting Online Predators Act teens myspace ]

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August 18, 2006

Is there no arbitrage in online retail?

When Ritz Camera told me it would cost a flat $250 to fix my Canon 10D digital camera without even looking at it, it caused me to pause and look at what my options might be.

Since I bought the camera a few years back Canon came out with new models that seem to deal with the issues I was having with my early digital SLR - especially those related to focus and sharpness. Switching brands isn't really an option, as I have generally been happy with my EOS cameras and assembled 4 different lenses for it so far.

Instead of fixing my existing camera (which one day started to develop a dark band on the bottom of my pictures - indicating some sort of miss-alignment of the mirror system as far as I can tell) - I decided to look at the alternative of buying the new 30D.

My surprise came when I started looking for the best price for the 30D. If you look around you can see prices as low as $639 for the body without shipping charges. When you look at 3rd party sellers on Amazon.com or if you check eBay, prices do not seem to go below $1,000 for a new Canon 30D body.

Is there no arbitrage in online retail? Or am I missing something? Could someone actually make $500 per camera by buying and reselling online?

It is not a business I want to get in, but unless I am missing something (which I often do), then the theory that online retail, with all of its online-transaction "data exhaust," would "even out" the power balance between buyers and sellers does not hold true...

What is it that I am overlooking??

[Tags: arbitrage buyer power ads online commerce ]

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August 17, 2006

77% of online shoppers read consumer reviews...

According to a new studies released by Jupiter Research, "77 percent of online shoppers use consumer generated product reviews/ratings and those who find them useful are more loyal to stores with reviews/ratings featured." Other research reveals that "consumers who post feedback on forums, positive or negative, spend 22 percent more online than do consumers who have not posted on forums." And somewhat surprisingly, "90 percent of large companies believe that consumer recommendations are important in influencing other consumers' purchase decisions."

The issue for many companies is how to consistently track consumer generated reviews and incorporate that voice of the customer component into their product innovation processes. There are literally hundreds of sites where people leave their feedback. Amazon provides product-specific searchable consumer generated reviews, but many other popular online stores, like NewEgg do not enable that level of searchability.

(Via Customer Listening Blog)

[Tags: online marketing voice of the customer consumer reviews cgm ]

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August 16, 2006

Emergence Marketing's Official Sauce...

Thanks to "My Heinz" create-a-label option, we were finally able to launch our very own "official sauce" ! (via MIT Advertising Lab)

Order while quantities last!

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August 10, 2006

An interesting corporate blogging case study

Marketing Sherpa has an interesting corporate blog case study - showing that launching corporate blogs and the like may not always be the right thing to do...

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August 9, 2006

The revenge of the longtail...

This is a great video from YouTube explaining what happened to popular media and marketing...(via Chris Baggot)

[Tags: marketing advertising long tail media]

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August 6, 2006

Cool Sunday paper ad insert

OfficeMax had an eye-catching ad insert in the Sunday paper today. It consists of a big brown bag that says "15% off You Can Fit in this Bag!"

...off course, some restrictions apply...

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[shameless self-promotion] Emergence Marketing part of best marketing and best word of mouth marketing blogs!

Besides our continued presence in the The Viral Garden's Top 25 Marketing Blogs for 15 weeks in row, Emergence Marketing has now also been included in Buzz Canuck's Top 11 word of mouth marketing blogs.

Thank you Mack from Viral Garden, and thank you Sean from Buzz Canuck - it's an honor to be included in both your lists!

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July 29, 2006

[off topic] Is this a case of collective insanity?

Check this out over at Salon.com (via Joho):

According to a new Harris Poll, 50 percent of Americans now believe that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction at the time of the U.S. invasion. That's a sharp and rather inexplicable increase from February 2005, when just 36 percent of the public held on to that belief. Ready for more? Sixty-four percent of the public still thinks that Saddam Hussein had strong links to al-Qaida.

[Tags: iraq politcs ]

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July 26, 2006

Marine Corps attracts 12,000 friends on MySpace

According to the seattle Post-Intelligencer (via corporate engagements), the Marine Corp has set up a profile on MySpace - complete with videos about drills and boot camps.

12,000 people signed up as friends and 430 already requested to be contacted by a recruiter.

Although this particular example is a little unsettling, using MySpace as a recruiting tool sounds like a logical thing to do.

[Tags: myspace Marines social networking hr]

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Half life of news online is 36 hours

A report from physicsweb found that the half life of online news is 36 hours. Apparently the common belief was that the number of people who read news stories decay exponentially, not in a power law as this new research found.

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July 20, 2006

Bloggers - the new storytellers

The Pew Internet & American Life Project has come out with a new report "Bloggers - a portrait of the internet's new storytellers. (here for report PDF)"

Some interesting findings include:

• 54% of bloggers say that they have never published their writing or media creations anywhere else
• 44% say they have published elsewhere
• Eight percent of Internet users, or about 12 million American adults, keep a blog.
• Thirty-nine percent of Internet users, or about 57 million American adults, read blogs
• 37% of bloggers cite “my life and experiences” as a primary topic of their blog
• 11% write about politics and government
• 7% of bloggers write about entertainment
• Only 5% write about business
• 54% of bloggers are under the age of 30
• 55% of bloggers blog under a pseudonym

So all in all, the majority of the blogging population consists of a new set of young, mostly anonymous writers who write primarily about personal stuff...

Interesting!

[Tags: pew bloggers social media]

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July 17, 2006

India closes access to Blogger, Typepad, and Geocities in the name of "fight against terrorism"

It is a slippery slope when democracies close down information sources in the name of blocking content that is "'anti-national’ and ‘against public interest’." But apparently that is exactly what happened in India, with the government blocking access to Blogger, Typepad, Geocities and a list of other sites 21 pages long.

Well known blogger Gautam Ghosh blogs the story on his personal blog, which is hosted on wordpress and which so far seems to have escaped the ban order.

History is fraught with bad examples of governments trading "freedom of speech" for increased government control to achieve the (supposed) protection of "other freedoms."

This is bad news all along...

[Tags: democracy india terrorism freedom of speech]

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July 12, 2006

MySpace moves up to #1 US Internet property on the web

According to HitWise (via Jeff Clavier), MySpace recently surpassed Yahoo! Mail as the most visited domain on the Internet for US Internet Users.

To put this in perspective, this means that 4.5% off all US Internet traffic visits MySpace! It also means that their traffic increased 4,300% in two years and 132% over the last year. The chart below shows the traffic growth of MySpace over that of Google.

Another interesting statistic is that besides being the top search term, myspace-related search terms like myspace.com, my space, etc., take up 5 of the top 10 search terms!

Related article:
Fear of social networking sites like MySpace may be overblown...

[UPDATE] Later this afternoon I got an email from Yahoo!'s PR company - trying to clear up some confusion around the numbers. Their point is that the HitWise stats are really comparing apples and oranges - and to a certain large extend I have to agree with that. Here is the statement from Yahoo!

Yahoo! Statement:

The report that Hitwise released today with the headline “MySpace Moves Into #1 Position for all Internet Sites” is misleading. The Yahoo! network is made up of many domains and it is not accurate to compare MySpace.com to just Yahoo!’s mail.yahoo.com domain. When taking into account all of Yahoo!’s domains together as an entire network, Yahoo! clearly remains the number one property in terms of audience share, duration share, page view share and days visited per month.

In the U.S. alone, Yahoo! attracts 129 million unique visitors per month, which represents 74 percent of the online population; in comparison, MySpace reaches only 30 percent of the online population with an audience of 52 million unique visitors. In addition, Yahoo! has the largest share of online time spent than any other property: Yahoo! accounts for 13 percent of users’ online time, while MySpace has only 3.2 percent share in users’ online time.

Yahoo! maintains its leadership position as the world’s most trafficked Internet destination online, with a community of more than 500 million unique monthly visitors from around the globe.

(These statistics are according to comScore Media Metrix, June 2006)

Also check out Jeremy Zawodny's entry on the subject

[Tags: myspace Yahoo! social networking web 2.0]

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June 27, 2006

What happens when GoogleCorp acquires AmazonBay

The following is a great fictional and speculative look at the possible future of the Global Financial Markets - according to Sean Park (it is a big download - but totally worth it!).

[Tags: financial services prediction future ]

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June 26, 2006

Science Study: (Intercessory) Prayer Power is of little use

According to the latest issue of Seed Magazine, a recent study found that "praying for someone who is ill won't help them recover." The study tracked 1,800 patients who were undergoing heart surgery and looked for links between intercessory prayer and complication-free recovery.

Not only did the study find that there is no effect of prayers on post-surgery complications, it found that patients who were certain to receive intercessory prayer had higher rates of complications!

Another Seed Magazine article on Science & Religion is here.

[Tags: praying healing science ]

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June 14, 2006

Expectations shape reality

Another interesting finding from recent neuroscience research is that "expectations shape reality."

The Booz Allen & Hamilton article mentioned yesterday says: "Cognitive scientists have found that people's mental maps, their theories, expectations and attitudes play more central role in human perceptions than we previously thought." Tell people that they have been administered a pain killer, even though they got a placebo (a sugar pill), and 28.4% of the people will feel a decrease in pain - rivaling the effect of an analgesic dose of morphine!

So what exactly happens? People repeatedly "focus" on the experience of pain relief, thus activating/creating new brain pain relief circuits/pathways - and decreasing the pain...

The fact that expectations shape reality and drive behavior can have far reaching implications. The article mentions the example of two customer service reps - one with a mental map of customers as troubled children would hear only complaints that needed to be allayed; another with seeing them as busy but intelligent professionals, would hear valuable suggestions for improving the product and service.

Since change is so hard, maybe employers should try discovering potential employees' mental maps during the interview process...

[Tags: neuroscience change change management hr leadership]

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June 13, 2006

Webcast from "Beyond Blogging 2006" is up

If you are interested in the replay webcast from the "Beyond Blogging 2006" event that I participated in - it is now online here....

Enjoy!

[Technorati Tags: beyondblogging blogging communications marketing corante]

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June 12, 2006

Coverage from the 2006 Innovative marketing Conference

While wearing the many different hats of MC, coordinator, wifi guy, podcast traffic cop, and many others at the 2006 Innovative Marketing Conference, I was not able to take good notes of the great discussions that took place at the conference. Thankfully, many others did, and I will try to capture most of them here. I will also elaborate on specific sessions/discussions in future posts.

Overall I believe that we delivered against the promises that were made ahead of the Innovative Marketing Conference. We promised that it would be a conversation about the new marketing foundations that need to be built in the face of the ongoing breakdown of the old rules, and we delivered just that - few slides and one way presentations and many deeply insightful discussions. We also promised that this conference would be a conference about marketing as a whole – as one of the main premises for the event was that unless all aspects of marketing are tied together, marketers will fail! Here too, I believe we delivered against that promise - with many sessions focused on tying all the conversations together.

But enough bragging - here goes the summary and associated links to interesting posts from across the blogosphere.

Day 1 - CMO Summit

We started both days with a CMO telling us what it is like to be in the trenches. The first day's keynote, delivered by Russ Klein, CMO at Burger King, was insightful and surprising for its degree of innovation. He spoke of how they started looking at Burger King as a "social brand" in order to revive it, introduced their social currency strategy and much more. You can listen to a podcast interview with Russ here, and you can find some good summaries of the speech at:

• Chris Carfi's blog - the Social Customer Manifesto


• The product review site, which also has a good summary of the session - capturing a few of the "a-ha" moments
  

Next up was a discussion about the creation process of products and services, and the role of innovation, co-creation and many other new factors on that process. The discussion was led by David Sutherland and you can find some good summaries at:

• The Fast Company Blogjam, which has a number of entries on this session including this entry on co-creation, this one on the challenges of co-creation within and outside organizations, and this one reflecting one of the live discussion groups led by John Winsor
• Johnnie Moore's blog, where he has a great entry on the co-creation discussion
• David Weinberger's blog, Joho, where he has a good write-up on this session

John Hagel's fabulous session on attention scarcity and what that means to brands, marketing and metrics is summarized at:

• The Fast Company marketing BlogJam, which has a number of entries on this session, including the following summary posts this one, this one and this one, this one on choosing what business you are in, this one on what it is we can learn from evangelists, and this one on how companies have to change their marketing from the 3I's to the 3A's
• David Weinberger's blog, Joho, where he has an excellent write-up on the session
• Johnnie Moore's blog, where he has a great entry on moving from the 3I's to the 3 A's
• Mario Sundar's Marketing Nirvana, where he also has a good summary of John's session.
• Chris Carfi's Social Customer Manifesto, where he has a good summary of the session as well
• Jason Chen's Blog

Next came David Weinberger, who led a discussion on the future marketing department. Good summaries for that session can be found at:

• The Fast Company marketing BlogJam, which has a number of entries on it, including this summary, this post on whether the CEO should be the CMO, this one on the repair tools to fix the marketing department, and this one on whether a marketing department should manufacture demand
• Johnnie Moore's blog, where he summarizes one important point of David's session, how blogs are complexifying messages

Prof Bernd Schmitt wrapped up the day by summarizing what we discussed that day and by attempting to tie it all back together. We have recorded this session and will post the audio transcript online shortly. For now you can listen to a podcast interview with Bernd Schmitt here..

Day 2 - Marketer's Forum

The CMO who kicked off the second day was Deepak Advani, CMO at Lenovo. He spoke of the challenges to build a new brand across national and cultural barriers and also touched on what it means when your brand comes under attack by xenophobes. You can listen to a podcast interview with Deepak here, and you can find summaries of his speech at:

• The Fast Company Marketing BlogJam, which has a number of posts on it Including this summary of the session, this entry on innovation, and this post on where design should reside in a company


• Heath Row's Squidoo lens on a new marketing foundation


• Judy Breck's Golden Swam, where she has a good summary of that part of the speech where he talked about sponsoring a non-profit to help students with used computers


• Bill Tancer's blog at Hitwise, where he reports on the session and ads some Hitwise stats in the process
  

Next up was a panel discussion on models for innovation, where David Sutherland from the Launch Institute, Gwen Ishmael from Decision Analysts, Tony Ullwyck from Strategyn and Paul Zarookian from AIG debated all the different angles of innovation. You can find summaries of this discussion at:

• Joseph Jaffe's Jaffejuice, where he talks about the importance of the 1 percenters...
• Heath Row's Squidoo lens on models for innovation
• The Fast Company Marketing Blogjam, which has a post on this session here on innovation = creating things your customers will value

After that we had a great session on the new marketing tools that are available to marketers, which was ably moderated by Johnnie Moore, and included Kevin Lee from Did-it.com, Heidi Lehman from Third Screen Media, Max Lenderman from GMR Marketing, Bill Tancer from Hitwise and Diane Hessson from Communispace. You can find some summaries at:

• Joseph Jaffe's Jaffe Juice, which has some interesting snippets from the session here
• Heath Row's Squidoo lens on the new toolbox
• The fast Company Marketing BlogJam, which has multiple entries on it - here and here, here for an interesting quote from Dianne Hessan, and here on the role of trust.

A particularly hot topic - the pros and cons of online marketing in the context of consumer generated content - was debated in the next session. The session was moderated by David Rogers from the Center on Global Brand Leadership, and included John Hiler from Xanga, Craig Newmark from Craigslist.org, and Chris Tolles from Topix.net. Good summaries of that session can be found at:

• The Fast Company Marketing Blogjam
• Heath Row's Squidoo lens on CGM
• ClickZ News, which has a great entry on the discussion about where the money is in CGM, as well as an entry on Craig Newmark's plea on net neutrality

You can also listen to a Skypecast we did on the subject ahead of the conference

I was told that you could not have a marketing conference without a session on metrics and measurement, and so we put a great session together with Max Kalehoff from BuzzMetrics, Bryan Eisenberg of Future Now, and Ruth Stevens from eMarketing Strategy. Summaries of the session can be found here:

• Joseph Jaffe's JaffeJuice, where he has a summary of the session.
• Heath Row's Squidoo lens on what's working
• The Fast Company Marketing BlogJam

Kicking off the afternoon sessions were Larry Weber from the W2 Group and Lois Kelly from Foghound, talking about the future marketing department - a lively and provocative session to say the least - and which is summarized at:

• The Fast Company Marketing Blogjam, where there are a few articles on this session (here on compensation for spreading wom, here on contributing to communities, here and here from some great quotes from the conversationhere for the answers to the 10 questions that Lois asked him, and finally here for a rough transcript of the whole session)
• Heath Row's Squidoo lens on the changing face of marketing

You can also find a podcast interview with Larry here and listen to a Skypecast that he and Lois did ahead of the conference here.

After that we had a session on the future of advertising - led by Joseph Jaffe from Jaffejuice and including Chris Hoyt from 141 Marketing, Lee Johnson from McCann, Rick Klau from Feedburner and Len Ellis, most recently with Wonderman. A set of summaries for this session can be found at:

• The Fast Company BlogJam
• Heath Row's Squidoo lens on the changing face of advertising
• Johnnie Moore's blog, where he comments on the mood and energy level of the session.

The last session before the wrap-up was a discussion on the future of PR - which consisted of a lively panel with Neville Hobson from Nevon, Lois Kelly from FogHound, Shel Holtz from Holtz Communication + Technology, and John Moore from Brand Autopsy. A good summary for this session can be found at:

• The Fast Company BlogJam

Professor Bernd Schmitt then closed it all up and you can find the summary of his closing remarks at:

• The Fast Company Marketing Blogjam site

Other, overall conference commentary can be found at

• John Moore's Brand Autopsy
• Max Kalehoff's blog - AttentionMax on how you can have great conversations without PowerPoint presentations.
• John Winsor's "under the radar" has some good things to say about the event in which he participated
• Max Lenderman's blog, where he talks about blogging for the sake of blogging
• Lois Kelly's blog, where she has a great post on the takeaways from the conference

A photo stream of the event can be found on Flickr.

You can also listen to tens of podcast interviews which Shel Holtz and Neville Hobson did during the event - including interviews with Craig Newmark from Criagslist.org, Dianne Hessan from Communispace, Max Lenderman from Axe fame, Johnnie Moore and John Winsor on co-creation, David Sutherland from the Launch Institute, Eric Mankin from the Center on Enterpreneurship at the Babson University, in addition to the ones listed above with Russ Klein, Deepak Advani, Bernd Schmitt and Larry Weber.

Keep checking the site as we will be adding additional edited audio versions of the sessions in the next few of days.

[Tags: marketing event marketing conference innovation marketing conference imc corante]

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June 8, 2006

Conference feedback on many sites at this point

Unfortunately I have not have much time to report back from the first day of the 2006 Innovative Marketing Conference. The conversations so far have been unbelievable rich and at times intense. Fortunately you can read or listen to some of the things that happened here today on the Fast Company blog, David Weinberger's blog, Johnnie Moore's weblog, the social customer manifesto, and of course on the For Immediate Release report.

[Tags: imc2006 center on global brands innovation marketing corante]

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May 30, 2006

[self promotion] # 11 on list of top marketing blogs - 6 weeks in a row!

This blog has now been on the top 25 list of marketing blogs maintained by the Viral Garden for 6 weeks in a row (standing at #11 for the last two weeks). The list is based on traffic as gathered from Alexa.

Thank you all!

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May 25, 2006

Participated on another cool podcast - For Immediate Release

David Rogers, the composer and Associate Director for the Center on Global Brand Leadership at the Columbia Business School, and I were interviewed by Shel Holtz and guest co-host Dan York this morning for their For Immediate Release podcast. It was an interesting discussion on how we are trying to start the conversation leading up to the 2006 Innovative Marketing Conference through Skypecasts and how we are also attempting to have the conversation continue after the event.

[Tags: skypecast for immediate release marketing innovation conference imc marketing corante]

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Let employees search the web for personal reasons!

A new CNN study finds that people would rather give up their morning coffee than the ability to surf the web at work (via Gartner's high performance workplace)

Letting people do personal stuff at work most likely increases their productivity! Sure, the study says that they spend a little over 3 hours on personal stuff - but whoever still measures productivity in terms of hours is solidly grounded in the Industrial revolution age and doomed for extinction...

[Tags: workplace organizational behavior work]

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May 24, 2006

Join us for a lively Skypecast @ 4pm EST tomorrow!

What are the risks and opportunities of marketing your brand in the context of consumer generated content - think Xanga, Myspace, Topix, or Google News & Yahoo! News.

As you may know by now, and in the weeks leading up to the Innovative Marketing Conference - June 8-9 in NYC - we will be hosting a series of provocative Skypecasts in which we will chat with conference participants as well as allow our audience to shape the conversation at the physical event. In this Skypecast we will sit down with Chris Tolles, Pete Blackshaw & Max Kalehoff for a discussion on the pros and cons of online marketing in the context of consumer generated content. (more info at: skype.corante.com)

[Tags: skypecast craig newmark bernd schmitt marketing corante]

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May 21, 2006

Threats and opportunities of online marketing in the context of consumer generated content

Join us this coming Thursday at 4pm EST for a SKYPEcast discussion on the threats and opportunities of online marketing in the context of consumer generated content to your brand. We will be joined by three great people who will debate this issue prior to our upcoming Marketing Innovation conference in NYC on June 8-9. The participants for this week's discussion include Pete Blackshaw, CMO at Nielsen BuzzMetrics, Max Kalehoff, VP of Marketing at Nielsen BuzzMetrics, and Chris Tolles, CMO at Topix.net.

If you cannot attend, we will be recording the event and posting the discussion replay on the event's home page!

[Tags: skypecast cgm consumer generated content imc online marketing corante]

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May 17, 2006

Beyond blogging 2006

I am honored to have been invited to participate in the "Beyond Blogging 2006 - The Future of Communications" breakfast round table produced by Fleishman Hillard in DC this upcoming Friday morning. The organizers are really to be commended for how they are using the event blog as a way to initiate the conversation with potential attendees ahead of the actual event and for organizing some activities such as a webcast after the event for people who cannot not make it. So far they have over 600 registrations!

If you can, make sure to stop by - knowing many of the other participants it promises to be an interesting conversation!

[Technorati Tags: beyondblogging blogging communications marketing corante]

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May 8, 2006

Series of Skypecasts leading up to the marketing conference

In the weeks leading up to the 2006 Innovative Marketing Conference - June 8-9 in NYC - we will be hosting a series of provocative Skypecasts in which we will chat with conference participants as well as allow our audience to help shape the conversation at the physical event.

The first one will be a chat with Columbia Business School Marketing Prof. Bern Schmitt, while the second one will be with craigslist.org founder Craig Newmark.

These should be fun...make sure you attend! We will announce more of them in the near future.

[Technorati Tags: skypecast craig newmark bernd schmitt marketing corante]

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May 5, 2006

Social networking sites draw tremendous traffic

According to Comscore, and as of March 2006, 23% of US Internet traffic visit Myspace...(see earlier post for some more stats on MySpace)

(via software only)

[Technorati Tags: myspace social networking online advertising stats social media]

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May 2, 2006

NY ad agency files suit against blogger for pointing out problems...

[UPDATE 05/05: The case was dismissed - see Unconditional Surrender by NY Ad Adency on the Media Blogger Association Web site]

After critiquing and pointing out that new ads from the Tourism Department for the State of Maine had a phone-sex number listed on them instead of the actual tourism office number, Lance Dutson from the Maine Web Report, found himself sued for millions of dollars by the ad agency who created the ads in the first place - Warren Kremer Paino Advertising .

The story was picked up by the Boston Globe and a variety of other traditional media outlets as well as many blogs. Thankfully, many sharp legal minds with great track records in defending similar cases have come to Lance's help.

As for the Ad Agency - they are getting some interesting Google search results at this point - which will likely not improve in the next few years!

(via Jaffe Juice)

[Technorati Tags: Warren Kremer Paino Advertising maine tourism Lance Dutson freedom of speech]

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May 1, 2006

Corante Marketing Innovation Event off to a great start!

Awhile back I mentioned our upcoming Marketing Innovation Event which will be held on June 8-9th in NYC, and which is produced in partnership with the Center on Global Brand Leadership and the Columbia Business School.

The first day - our CMO Summit - is reserved for CMOs and VPs of Marketing only - and will consist of a series of highly interactive discussions around the some of the fundamentals of marketing. The second day - our Marketer's Forum - which is open to the public will feature cutting edge thinkers and business leaders who will present new models for innovative marketing and lessons from companies that are leading the way towards a new marketing foundation.

So far we have assembled a really nice lineup of both attendees as well as speakers. One of the nice achievements so far has been our ability to assemble marketers from a wide variety of industries - including representatives from consumer packaged goods, high tech, automotive, travel, financial services, and the pharmaceutical industry. Combine that with a few international registrations and you end up with a mix that should really lead to innovative discussions.

There are a few great partnerships that we are about to announce, which would give the conference a dimensions that would go beyond the physical event - stay tuned for that! And if you'd like to register, visit our registration by clicking on the registration button in the sidebar!

We also launched a new weekly Marketing & Innovation Digest. I have added a subscription box for the email digest to the sidebar of this site, as I believe that the content will interest people that read this blog. It is also an easy way to stay up to speed on the latest developments of the upcoming conference.

[Technorati Tags: marketing event marketing conference innovation marketing conference imc corante]

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April 30, 2006

Foresight 2020 - likely changes to the global economy in the next 15 years

Foresight 2020 - a new research study from the Economist Intelligence Unit (download pdf here) looks at the likely changes in the global economy over the next 15 years (via Accelerating Innovation).

While reminding us that 15 years ago the Soviet Union still existed and that China was still largely a planned economy - making a 15 year global economic outlook look like hubris to some - the Economist lists 5 trends that will bring massive changes to the global economy between now and 2020. They include:

• Globalization - there will be a redistribution of economic power - with China and India taking a much larger slice of the world economy, and with labor-intensive production processes continuing to shift to lower cost economies.


• Demographics - populations shifts will impact economies significantly. Some economies with favorable demographics will enjoy continued growth, while others with ageing populations will see their growth stunned.


• Atomization - with increased globalization and continued improvements in networking technologies, firms will be able to use the world as their supply base for talent and materials. The boundaries between different functions, organizations and even industries will be increasingly blurred - finally delivering the atomic enterprise that some have been predicting for awhile.


• Personalization - while price and quality will continue to matter, personalization will increasingly play a role in how people buy products and services.


• Knowledge Management - focus of management attention will shift to innovation and customer service, where personal chemistry or creative insight matter more than rules and processes. Improving the productivity of knowledge workers through technology, training and organizational change will be top of mind in most boardrooms during the next 15 years

Of the 1,650 executives that were interviewed, 45% think that knowledge management will offer the greatest potential for productivity gains in the next 15 years. 35% believe that customer service and support will offer the greatest potential, while 29% think that strategy and business development will be the key. And 28% think that marketing and sales activity will offer that potential. A majority of the respondents think that "knowledge workers will be their most valuable source of competitive advantage!"

Another promising foresight is that "executives expect organizations to become flatter and employees to have more autonomy to make substantive decisions." That should make for a much happier workforce! The report has a whole chapter dedicated to the future of the company over the next 15 years.

Besides providing overall global economic predictions and the outlook for companies, the report also takes a closer look at specific changes that might occur in eight specific industries.

Surprisingly the study does not deal with the radicalization of religion (i.e., the religious right standing in the way of stem cell research in the US, or the radicalization of Islam - and its impact on innovation), nor does it really deal with education as a major driver of future economic activity (i.e., the impact of the number of graduating science PhD's on those economies).

[Technorati Tags: economic forecast future of company customer support knowledge management atomic corporation]

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April 27, 2006

Groups perform better than individuals in solving complex problems

According to a recent study by the American Psychological Association, "collective efforts of groups may be useful in boosting problem-solving skills." (via business pundit).

Apparently "groups of three, four, or five perform better on complex problem solving than the best of an equivalent number of individuals". The study also found that "groups of two performed at the same level as the best of two individuals."

One of the apparent limitations of the study is that it analyzed only "logical conceptual systems" - or the solution to "letters-to-numbers coding problem" - prompting Rob over at BusinessPundit to question whether "individual cryptographers would outperform these groups."

[Technorati Tags: group intelligence problem solving]

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April 14, 2006

Enterpreneurial aspirations

A new Yahoo survey (via Just an Online Minute) finds that two thirds (66%) of American adults say they've considered starting their own business. That was down from 72% in a similar survey conducted last year.

It would be interesting to see how that compares to other countries or world regions.

Other interesting tidbits include - 70% of respondents who were between 45 and 54 and 72% of respondents that were 55 and older said that "I will never be too old to start my own business," which is an increase from last year when the numbers were 54% and 58% respectively.

One has to wonder what the underlying reasons for these shifts are.

[Technorati Tags: entrepreneurship startup]

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April 10, 2006

Founder CEO's drive higher returns than "professional" managers

Fortune Magazine's latest issue has an article on how Fortune 500 companies that are still run by the founders are tearing up the market.

While the Fortune 500 sample is small, there is other evidence based on research of an Ohio State University finance professor named Radiger Fahlenbrach that companies run by founder-CEOs outperform the broader stock market by 8 %. One of the reasons being put forth for this finding is that founders care more. The study further uncovered other interesting facts - namely that "founder-run companies have bigger capital budgets and invest considerably more in research and development than nonfounder-run firms."

Unfortunately, this is not a widely held belief amongst typical startup backers, who are too often rushing towards pushing founders to the side and replacing them with "professional management"- types to "babysit" their investment. There is no question that some founders are not CEO material, but before taking out founders from the executive team line-up, investors and board members should really look at complementing the weaknesses of the founders in other ways.

[Technorati Tags: startups founder VC]

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April 3, 2006

Avoid having your workers become dumb and fat

Quoting the National Sleep Foundation, the Boston Sunday Globe yesterday reported that people who do not sleep enough have a chance to become fat and dumb.

"Those who get fewer than six hours of sleep a night might as well be drunk," says the reporter, citing that people who stay up for 18 hours straight function in similar ways to those people with an 0.08 percent blood alcohol level - the state's legal limit. And according to a researcher at the University of Chicago, not getting enough sleep results in the brain starting to think that it needs to store food.

So companies should make sure that their workers are not up all night from work-related stress, as they could end up with a dumb and fat workforce :)

[Technorati Tags: hr sleep disorder]

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March 10, 2006

[shameless self-promotion] Podcast interview on marketing, Corante and a few other things

Eric Schwartzman from Spinfluencer was kind enough to interview me for a his podcast show when I was out in California last week.

It was a fun experience and the questions he hit me with were quite varied - ranging from Corante to BlogBridge to marketing, religion and self-organization. You can download the MP3 here.

[Technorati Tags: marketing self-organization corante blogbridge]

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February 20, 2006

Is this transparency?

Besides the bad pitch blog, which highlights poor PR behavior, we now also have the bad hack blog, which highlights the bad behaviors of journalists.

Is this really adding to transparency in the industry? How about adding a blog exposing some of the industry analyst behaviors? That should make for some juicy stories.

[Technorati Tags: transparency industry analyst]

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February 14, 2006

The effects of blogging and email on a marriage...

In yesterday's All Things Considered on NPR, Julie Zickefoose had an interesting commentary on the effects of blogging and email on marriage.

Both she and her husband maintain a blog and the way she describes the obsessive quests that come with that is just hilarious. Maybe they should try using Autoblogger.

[Technorati Tags: humor blogging]

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February 13, 2006

Automatic Valentine letter generator

For those of you who are trying to minimize the amount of work required to survive valentine's day without too much hassle - here is another great tool: the automated valentine letter generator (via coolz0r)

A word of advice - don't go for the overly passionate version. When I tried it, it started my letter with: "A fire inside me burns with fiery passion to unleash what I am about to say to you! And only the sweet nectar from your lips may vanquish this fiery inferno." Then went on with: "I wish you a happy Valentines Day with every burning spark of lust, fired by flames of passion from my tender bleeding heart."

:)

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February 8, 2006

Interesting marketing project at Bentley College

Bentley College marketing honors looks like an interesting college project - with the following mission:

"The students in the honors seminar in marketing at Bentley College have created a multiple author blog in order to complete a class assignment as well as to introduce other marketing students to cutting-edge ideas and principles by monitoring and commenting on some of the best marketing blogs in the blogosphere.

So, each student will monitor a particular blog and post a commentary on a particular blog posting every week. A few of the Corante Marketing Hub contributors got adopted as blogs to follow, and there are already interesting commentaries on posts from those blogs - including the brandbuilder, marketing to women, diva marketing, and brand autopsy.

When Melissa reviewed a post on Word of Mouth Marketing (WOM)from this blog she raised some interesting questions. Why is that when people disclose that they work for a company for which they are recommending products, the rate at which the message gets passed along is 70% higher than when the relationship is not disclosed? This is a very counter-intuitive result after all. She also says: "Francois does not offer any insight into the real significance of this finding. Rather, it just states the results of the study. It would have been helpful to see what he saw as implications from this study." - good point!

Walter Carl, the author of the original research paper, offers some possible explanations for the results of the survey. One is that the average length of time that the agent and their conversation partner knew one another in the study was 6 years. That is a long enough period to build a lot of trust so that the conversation partner feels that the agent has his or her best interest at heart - no matter what the commercial relationship is between the agent and the company for which products are being recommended. His second reason is that credibility is either unaffected or increased by the disclosure.

While these are plausible explanations for why a commercial message would get passed along after disclosure, they are not really reasons for why the pass-along rate would increase with disclosure. If the average length of time that people knew one another was indeed six years, then perhaps one reason might be the motivation of the conversation partner to help the agent out. Just like with some of the better referral incentive programs, which work on the premise that is better to give an incentive to the person who is being referred, rather than the person who is making the referral - it plays off a basic human need to "give." Another possible explanation, which Melissa alludes to in her post as well, is that the conversation partner sees the fact the the agent is willing to associate with the product/company as an extra endorsement for that product. If the agent is willing to get into a commercial relationship with the company that makes the product that is being endorsed, and is willing to disclose that relationship, that means that the agent must feel really good about himself or herself in the presence of that brand - and that is maybe what adds to the contagiousness.

While I am not so sure that there any major implications coming out of this study, I am concerned that marketers will screw up WOM marketing by trying to optimize it and by looking for measurable ROI's. It is and will remain hard to measure, and just like physicist learned a long time ago - you can dramatically disrupt the environment by measuring it.

[Technorati Tags: word of mouth wom]

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January 19, 2006

Ten Trends to watch in 2006 according to McKinsey

McKinsey Quarterly's Ian Davis and Elizabeth Stephenson just released a web exclusive trend article with macroeconomic factors, environmental and social issues, and business and industry developments that will shape the corporate landscape in the coming years (may require subscription).

Apparently success is not always about execution - but more about being in the right markets and geographies with the right technology. So it's more about being in the flow rather of going upstream. The key of course is to find the right currents. And, according to the authors, to predict the right currents you need to look far out into the future instead of focusing on short term changes.

The three macroeconomic trends are:

• Centers of economic activity will shift profoundly, not just globally, but also regionally.
• With a rapidly aging population in the West, public-sector activities will balloon, making productivity gains essential.
• The consumer landscape will change and expand significantly - with 1B new consumers entering the marketplace

They also list 4 Social and environmental trends:

• Technological connectivity will transform the way people live and interact - some of that is already visible
• The battlefield for talent will shift - with a big shift towards knowledge-intensive industries
• The role and behavior of big business will come under increasingly sharp scrutiny - about time
• Demand for natural resources will grow, as will the strain on the environment - think about this (heard on NPR this weekend) 1/3 of the world copper inventory is in the ground, 1/3 in use and 1/3 in landfills

And then they list 3 business and industry trends:

• New global industry structures are emerging
• Management will go from art to science
• Ubiquitous access to information is changing the economics of knowledge

Perhaps the most significant trend is the one related to shortages in natural resources and the increasing strain on the environment. Sure people will behave differently because of technology and come up with new management structures, and the worker profile will change. And while it will be fun to be an active participant in these changes, in the grand scheme of things, those changes will be incremental.

When it comes down to the environment, however, incremental changes will not be enough to result in a sustainable world for the future. What we need is the end of a "human-centric-we-are-the-end-of-evolution-and-everything-in-this-world-is-ours" attitude in exchange for a more symbiotic "world-nature-human-technology" balanced worldview. And that will not happen incrementally - it will require radical new ways of world governance and fundamental changes in people's beliefs about their place and role in nature's evolution.

[Technorati Tags: trends globalization environment]

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January 17, 2006

Top 10 things reasons why nobody reads your blog

Hugh MacLeod has a great post on the top 10 reasons why nobody reads your blog.

Some of them are very true - like #9 "there is nothing in it for them (the readers)", or #5 "you have nothing to say", or #8 "the very fact that you're whining about traffic makes people not want to read your blog"...(so true!) Others are very funny - like #4 "a secret cabal of A-Listers got together and decided that you should be excluded from the conversation".

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January 13, 2006

Please vote for the "Best Idea Since Sliced Bread"

A good friend of mine just told me that her idea had been chosen as one of 21 finalists out of 22,000 submissions in the national "Best Idea Since Sliced Bread" contest – which challenged people to submit ideas on how to improve the US economy. After two rounds of Internet voting, the judges will pick the winner from the top three. Best idea wins $100,000 but what’s really fantastic is a panel of experts and policy makers will work to turn the winning idea into law.

It's not just because she is my friend, but also because I kind of like the idea that I wanted to alert you to this one and ask you to go vote for the idea if you like it as well. Her idea is called "ProdiMae Efficient Access to Capital" and involves a method where small business owners get similar level of straightforward and efficient access to capital that homeowners get to mortgages. You can cast your vote here.

[Technorati Tags: best idea since sliced bread economy entrepreneurship]

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January 5, 2006

Barbie part of transgender movement??

According to a recent ABC News report, some other extremist religious group now thinks that Barbie is being influenced by the "transgender movement", and that this "bisexuality gender confusion is very dangerous" (via Agenda Inc.)

Now give me a break - as of Christmas when I last saw Barbie's in toy stores, there was no confusion to me.

What I really wonder is how people can give money to organizations that then spend it on chasing transgender doll manufacturers (Mattel), gay loving car manufacturers (Ford) and holiday embracing retailers (Target). Aren't those donors expecting other things from their charities, like maybe helping those in need? I wonder how the accountability works in those organizations?

[Technorati Tags: Mattel boycott transgender religious extremists]

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December 21, 2005

Another win for "the voice of reason"...

Nature Magazine reports - Evolution wins in Pennsylvania trial (ok, that was yesterday - I never claimed this was a news site!)...

I especially like the fact that the judge not only dismissed the case - but that he called the efforts to promote Intelligent Design "breathtaking inanity" and that he "went on to state that intelligent design was clearly religious and indubitably not science." (from the Science article) He also concluded that the religious nature of ID would be readily apparent to a child!

Dead on!

Now let's see what pat robertson has to say about this one...(remember when the voters tossed out the school board that approved this nonsense in the first place he said "I'd like to say to the good citizens of Dover: If there is a disaster in your area, don’t turn to God, you just rejected Him from your city. And don’t wonder why He hasn’t helped you when problems begin..." - I still cannot believe that one...)

All that being said - I wish someone would publish a research paper analyzing how this pile of nonsense ever made it to the forefront of public debate so quickly. In my opinion this is another great example of how marketers might have a few things to learn from the world of politics.

[Technorati Tags: science intelligent design education]

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December 19, 2005

Trust is eroding everywhere...

So it's not just in the US that we have eroding trust in all our institutions - big business, courts, government, etc. According to a newly released study by the World Economic Forum the problem is worldwide - except for Russia (via: Marketing Technology). Some of the main findings from the study include:

• Public trust levels in national governments, the United Nations and global companies are now at their lowest since tracking began in January 2001


• Since 2004, trust in government has declined by statistically significant margins in 12 of the 16 countries for which tracking is available. The Russian government is the only exception, enjoying continuously increasing trust from its citizens since 2001


• The United Nations, while continuing to receive higher trust levels than other institutions, has experienced a significant decline in trust from 2004 levels in 12 of 17 tracking countries, suggesting an impact from the scandal over the Oil for Food Program


• Public trust in companies has also eroded over the last two years. After recovering trust in 2004 to pre-Enron levels, trust has since declined for both large national companies and for global companies. Trust in global companies is now at its lowest level since tracking began


• NGOs remain the leaders in trust, but they also have to contend with decline. In 10 of 17 countries for which data is available, trust in NGOs has fallen since 2004, in some cases sharply (e.g., Brazil, India and South Korea)

"Trust in government has fallen the most in Brazil, South Korea, Mexico, Canada and Spain, followed closely by Argentina and the United States. The case of Nigeria is also noteworthy, where trust in the national government fell by thirteen points while trust in all other institutions rose. Even in countries such as Great Britain and India, where trust remains positive, it has suffered its biggest fall since tracking began in 2001. Only in Italy, Indonesia and France has trust in the national government held steady, although polling was completed prior to the recent riots across France."

[Technorati Tags: trust world economic forum]

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December 6, 2005

Going public in virtual world...

Mark Wallace talks about an interesting emergent economic behavior on the Massively Multiplayer Online Game EVE (via Terra Nova) - where an entity went public and raised $8,100 on eBay. Mark does a great job at explaining what the environmental conditions were to make that happen.

[Technorati Tags: mmo virtual worlds eve]

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November 23, 2005

RSS users visit 3 times more news sites as non-users

According to a recent Nielsen report:

"RSS users are significantly more engaged in online news than non-users, visiting an average of 10.6 news sites compared with 3.4 news sites for non-users...Not only do RSS users visit more news Web sites than non-users, they also visit those sites more frequently. RSS users visited the top 20 news Web sites nearly three times as often as non-users and all other news Web sites four times as often. This means that sites outside of the top 20 properties may be among the greatest beneficiaries of RSS. "

[Technorati Tags: rss news rss+reader]

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November 9, 2005

Deciders suffer alone; nondeciders make everyone else suffer

The Wall Street Journal yesterday had a great column by Jared Sandberg on the impact of people who cannot decide in the workplace (looks like access is free this week).

It goes without saying that the impact of indecision is bad - but what surprised me a little (ah...maybe not) is that it gets more frequently rewarded than decisions. How can that be? It is much harder to spot bad decisions than indecisions...

This problem is truly a bad one. In most surveys, indecision is listed as the top workplace tormentor. A recent survey mentioned in the article found that 3 out of the 6 obstacles to performing their job mentioned by employees were related to decision-making.

[Technorati Tags: decision-making decision workplace]

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November 1, 2005

Maybe you too can help

Evelyn Rodriguez, a Tsunami survivor herself, is going back to Thailand to capture some more oral history as part of her artisan journalism project - one year after the Tsunami disaster. She is raising money and also looking for other ways that people could help her - like helping her find leads for by-lined article opportunities, loaning equipment, etc. You can find all the ways in which you can help her here.

In her latest posts she also takes apart the different ways in which one can create buzz as an individual - quite interesting.

So here is to helping a good cause and increasing the surrounding buzz a little. If you blog, consider doing the same.

[Technorati Tags: tsunami evelyn rodriguez oral history]

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October 28, 2005

Human's don't change

Tom Asacker has a great post on the changing nature of humans...

So true...we don't change...all changes are less than skin deep.

[Technorati Tags: change human nature]

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October 13, 2005

Talk about a marketing challenge - VoIP vs. traditional Telco's

According to Telephai - more than half of high-tech households subscribing to an Internet-based phone service have disconnected their traditional landline phone (here - via Center for Media Research) . In fact the study shows that the number is almost 60%!

Talk about a tectonic shift in a traditionally slow-moving industry! It must be interesting to work for a traditional telephone company at this point...there is virtually no escape for them in the dial tone business - they cannot fight the battle on features, nor on price, nor on cost - so they have to morph into something else.

[Technorati Tags: voip innovator's dilemma competition]

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October 12, 2005

Thoughts about being acquired by Microsoft...

Don Dodge, from Microsoft's Emerging Business Team, has a post on what Microsoft looks for when acquiring companies (via R/W Web).

Not surprisingly, two of the main drivers are people and the ability to enter new markets.

[Technorati Tags: startup acquisition microsoft]

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September 30, 2005

Too funny - (d)evolution...

via Simpy Chichimichi

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September 29, 2005

Symposium on Social Architecture

Corante is producing a real cool Symposium on Social Architecture in partnership with the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at the Harvard Law School (note: I am a partner at Corante). The event is scheduled to take place at various venues at Harvard University on November 14-15.

We promise to produce an event free of boring, over-debated agenda items. Instead we plan to move the debate a few steps beyond where it is now - and considering the importance of everything "social" in people's daily life and work, we thought it was an oportune time to get the leading thinkers together to debate the driving forces and the future of the underlying infrastructure of the emerging social web.

Attendance will be limited to ensure a high level of attendee interaction - so sign up quickly. If you click on the event banner in my site bar, you will be getting a discount when registering. If you are interested in extending a similar offer to your audiences, or if you'd like to sponsor parts of the events, let me know and we'll set you up.

PS - if writing about the event - please use the tag "ssa" - thanks!

[Technorati Tags: ssa social web social architecture social computing]

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September 28, 2005

Interesting move at Nickelodeon

My son told me that Nickelodeon will not play any programs on Saturday afternoon. Instead they want kids to go out and play!

...cool.

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September 27, 2005

In the year 2014

I haven't posted for a while, and this will be very brief but I think you'll thank me for it. I really can't remember how I found this site, but if you check it out here, I think you will find the presentation thought provoking to say the least. What's it about? It is about emergence. Be adventuresome. Go see it now. What do you think?

[Technorati Tags: emergence future]

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CMO Magazine Special Report on Innovation

WARNING: this is a shameless self-promotion post.

It is flattering, however, when a respectable magazine like CMO magazine lists your blog as one of the "10 Blogs that can jump start your creative spirit".

Here is the list:

• Idea Flow: Creativity and Innovation (disclosure: this is a Corante Blog - where I am partner/exec/investor)


• Good Morning Thinkers


• Creativity and Innovation Blog


• Michael Osofsky on Innovation


• Innovation Weblog


• The FastCompany Weblog (Multiple posters)


• Emergence Marketing (yours truly)


• Ideas@Aside


• Innovation Blog


• Innovators' Hub

Ok - and now we'll return to our regular programming...

[Technorati Tags: innovation cmo]

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August 26, 2005

Chinese Government to get involved with online gaming

In a move that seems motivated by addiction concerns, the Chinese Government is planning to introduce "fatigue regulations" on October 1st (here at Terra Nova)

[Technorati Tags: online gaming]

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August 25, 2005

Interesting - consumer generated Intelligence

Jigsaw provides sales people with intelligence information about executives in companies. You either pay $25/mo for the service or you upload 25 names with contact information (via Business 2.0).

I wonder how nobody thought of this before. This is a cool service, although it does bring up the issue of privacy...

What else could be consumer generated? Market intelligence?

[Technorati Tags: market intelligence contact database sales leads]

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August 23, 2005

Interesting "story" marketplace

This morning I came across this interesting open source PR project - called StoryAngle - via prSPEAK.com (disclosure - I consulted with those guys on their new media strategy).

It looks like a marketplace that attempts to bring together PR professionals and journalists. They are looking for input before formally launching the site.

[Technorati Tags: marketplace public relations pr]

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August 13, 2005

Organizational innovation

Karim Lakhani has a great post on open source community-based organizations and their ability to force dramatic changes in the commercial world.

[Technorati Tags: open source innovation]

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August 9, 2005

Fraudulent store-returns - a $16B market - and growing!

This week's issue of Business Week has an interesting article on fraud in store-returns (here - requires subscription).

They say that the fraud in 2003 amounted to $16B - up 23% from 2002 - talk about a growth market!

Stories range from people returning bricks instead of a DVD player, others buying your unexpired receipts for $10, and then shoplifting the goods prior to return - a practice called "shoplisting".

I thought RFID was going to solve all those problems - but there was no mention of RFID in the article...

[Technorati Tags: shoplifting shoplisting rfid]

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July 24, 2005

Not sure if funny or scary...

I am reading freakonomics - a fantastic book btw - and as part of that I also subscribe to Steven Levitt's blog by the same name.

Last week I read his almost-got-sent-to-guantanamo story and literally laughed out loud - only to be troubled later as I thought about the implications that such a scenario might have on a real good friend of mine.

Two weeks ago, as Steven was trying to get back to Chicago from Florida - his flight got delayed. He went and bought a one way ticket from another airline and off course, as those of you that travel know - that means an automatic in-depth search. Well as it turns out, Steven is currently studying terrorism, so his bag was filled with his research papers - including detailed profiles of the 9/11 activities etc. Suddenly he found himself surrounded by 4 TSA employees and when the boss arrived one of the screeners said ""He claims to be an economics professor who studies terrorism." He details the whole story in more detail - which is hilarious. At the end, they let him go and he breathes a sigh of relief for not being sent to Cuba.

But then I got thinking about a real good friend of mine who is not yet an American, but a permanent resident, and who is married to a middle eastern women. What if he were interested in studying the same topic (which would be good right - the more people studying this the better) and have his research papers surface in a similar search? Do you think he would get off the hook in 30 minutes, or whatever time it took Steven? Thinking about that scenario turned this whole story from a hilarious one to me to a rather scary one...

...but I hope I am wrong and that he would get off in 30 minutes as well. That would make for another funny story!

[Technorati Tags: freakonomics]

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July 23, 2005

Too funny - Ohio man arrested for inhaling paint

The problem is the he "spilled" a little gold paint before going for a refill (here - via boing boing)

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July 22, 2005

$1 to get removed from telemarketers' list...after you're dead!

Can you believe it? According to Agenda Inc. in their recent post "Marketers may stop calling the dead" - "one of the leading telemarketing firms in the US set up a registry to remove dead people from its telemarketing, e-mail and direct mail list for $1."

A Deceased Do-Not-Contact list for a fee - give me a break!

[Technorati Tags: do-not-call direct marketing telemarketing]

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July 17, 2005

Worldwide competitive power-shift

A fascinating (MUST READ) article (requires subscription for full article) in Fortune Magazine talks about the "innovation" power-shift happening between the US and China/India.

Some interesting stats from the article:

• China produces 600,000 engineers/year
• India produces 350,000 engineers yearly
• US - 70,000
• 76% of jobs in US are service jobs (most easily outsourced)

The article briefly touches on the potential impact of this power-shift in the following paragraph:

"The stakes are mammoth: Respectable analysts believe it’s possible—not certain, but possible—that the U.S. standard of living, after decades of steady ascent, could stall or even begin to decline. More worrisome is the chance that if the world’s most powerful nation finds itself getting poorer rather than richer, some kind of domestic or even global political crisis could follow."

I wish the article would have mentioned Dean Kamen's work - who's been harping on this issue and trying to make a difference through his FIRST program for years. Some of you may have seen the TV program showing the Arizona kids beating the MIT kids in a robot competition - that's his work - oh, and most of you probably missed the fact that all the kids on the team were illegal immigrants...

[Technorati Tags: powershift fortune dean kamen first]

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July 7, 2005

links for 2005-07-07

• Francis Shanahan[.com][TagLines]
  Interesting tagclustering app for rss feeds
  (tags: tagcluster tag tools)
• SEM and the Corporate Blog
  Interesting article on the use of blogs in corporations
  (tags: blogging marketing corporateblog)
• Outfoxed | Personalize your internet.
  Cool social-networking tool to help people find trusted sites and information
  (tags: socialsoftware tag socialnetwork rating)

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July 6, 2005

links for 2005-07-06

• Review: A Possible Declining Trend for Worldwide Innovation, Heubner, 2005
  Could we really have a decreasing rate of innovation? I am not buying it.
  (tags: innovation technology)
• Marketing Roadmaps: Public relations - measuring results, managing media. Plus a word on corporate blogging
  Measuring PR results
  (tags: PR metrics)
• B.L. Ochman's weblog - Internet strategy, marketing, public relations, politics with news and commentary: Ex CNN Reporter Rebecca MacKinnon: English Language Blogs Have Narrow World View
  Harvard's Rebecca MacKinnon on English/US blogs vs. WW blogs
  (tags: blogs international)

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July 4, 2005

Worst labor shortage only 5 years away?

Jeff Wacker on the EDS blog quotes Jeff Taylor (founder of Monster.com) predicting that the worst labor shortage is only 5 years away (here)- with 75M boomers retiring and only 35M new workers taking their place. He also ponders whether "off-peopling" (moving tasks from humans to machines) and "off-shoring" will be able to pick up the slack.

[Technorati Tags: labor shortage off-shoring off people]

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July 3, 2005

Flickr on Tivo

Very cool...now you can watch Flickr on Tivo (here - via social software).

[Technorati Tags: flickr tivo]

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I want this price

Check this out...

E85 is a blend with 85% ethanol. I am told that many cars can use it without modifications. I want a pump like that next door!

[Technorati Tags: e85 ethanol]

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July 1, 2005

[Off topic - but so important!] Supreme Court Justice O'Connor retiring

The Supreme Court Justice O'Connor is retiring (see announcement here). Also check out Daily Kos for a great list of what you should do (here). And let's wish ourselves good luck!

[Technorati Tags: supreme court]

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June 30, 2005

great conversation on blogs and politics on the connection

Rebecca MacKinnon from the Berkman Center is chatting with Dick Gordon on blogs in China (here), Iran and other places - very cool!

[Technorati Tags: blogs politics]

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June 1, 2005

Competent Jerks and Lovable Fools

The latest issue of the Harvard Business Review has a great article titled "Competent Jerks, Lovable Fools, and the Formation of Social Networks". They categorize the different types of employees into a 2X2 matrix with competence as one of the axis and likability as the other (so they end up with four profiles - (going clockwise starting from the bottom left)the incompetent jerk, the competent jerk, the lovable star and the lovable fool). Boy, does this bring back memories...

Interestingly enough - but perhaps not so surprising - likability is the stronger factor in the development of social networks within companies. The lovable fool is mildly wanted while the competent jerk is mostly avoided (with the incompetent jerk is desperately avoided)! That means that competent jerks are a total missed opportunity for companies unless they can "correct" their behavior...

[Technorati Tags: competence employees social networks]

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May 30, 2005

David Koch missing on Grouse mountain

Shel Israel over at naked conversations (here) is relaying a message from Garry Bolles about his friend, David Koch, missing since last week on a mountain near Vancouver. They are concerned about the lack of ongoing interest in finding him and are hoping that the blogosphere might help raise awareness for the situation. Here is a news article about the story.

I happen to be very familiar with the area - good luck David!

[Technorati Tags: david koch vancouver]

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May 26, 2005

Readers' Choice Blog Awards

Marketingsherpa is holding an online survey on the quality marketing blogs (here). I wonder how they finalized those lists. As far as I am concerned, there are major marketing blogs which I visit every day that are missing (and I was not talking about mine ).

I will soon start a list of my favorite marketing and PR blogs at BlogBridge (over there - on the new site). If anyone is interested in becoming an expert there - let me know - I do have some good connections over there...

[Technorati Tags: marketing blog blogbridge]

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May 15, 2005

[interesting link] Blogging is hot!

Jon Stewart on blogging - funny hilarious (here - via the bach door)

[Technorati Tags: jon stewart humor blogging]

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[interesting] IBM to launch largest corporate blog initiative

Silicon Valley Watcher announced (here) Friday that "Early next week IBM will introduce the largest ever corporate blogging initiative in a bid to encourage any of its 130,000 staff to become online evangelists for the company." (via mediations).

Wow...this will be fascinating to watch. Another interesting tidbit from the article is that this initiative will also include the rollout of a wiki. I wonder if and how that will integrate with their Notes collaboration platform.

[Technorati Tags: ibm corporate blog blogging]

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May 8, 2005

New Digital Divide - a choice

Seth Godin blogged another great posting (here). A new Digital Divide is emerging between the Digirati (those that write blogs, use Firefox, read Boing Boing, use rss aggregators, etc.) vs. the "left behind" (who use IE, get their news from traditional media, don't know what rss means, etc.)

Seth argues that you should care about those nerds because

"your most-connected, most influential customers are part of the digerati. They can make or break your product, your service or even your religion's new policies."

They are the new "hubs", the new "connectors"...and their influence is growing! You can chose to be one or not, but you can no longer ignore them - they have to be an integral part of all your communications strategies...

[Technorati Tags: digirati godin pr]

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May 6, 2005

Teaching 4th graders business ethics

This is the third year that I volunteer for Junior Achievement - a program to inspire kids to value free enterprise, business and economics as a way to improve the quality of their lives.

After having done second and third grade I am teaching fourth grade this year. I was pleasantly surprised that this year's curriculum includes business ethics (starting with 4th graders). I tell you - those kids just loved talking about the balance between profits and doing what's right for a specific situation (i.e., environmental, etc.).

Kudos to the organizers of Junior Achievement!

[Technorati Tags: junior achievement ethics volunteer]

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May 3, 2005

[Interesting] PR lessons we should all follow!

NevOn has a great entry on Jeremy Pepper's interview with Dan Gillmor along with a first hand account of what it's like to be on the receiving end of "blind" pitches from people you do not know (here).

Dan Gillmor - "If your mailing list is larger than 2 people, put it in an rss feed...email is broken..."
Neville - "DON'T send attachments...and please format for European paper..."

[Technorati Tags: PR rss]

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April 29, 2005

Interesting link - Trustrank helps reputation

According to Robin Good, Google may be working on a ranking system that gets rid of all the spam - thus bringing back a true sense of reputation and trust into the ranking system (article here). The funny thing is that one of the paper's co-authors is from Yahoo.

[Technorati Tags: reputation google]

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April 24, 2005

Steve Johnson in Boston next Thursday

One of my favorite writers/presenters (author of emergence) will be in Boston next Thursday (Harvard Berkman Center)talking about his new book. Make sure to see Steve - it's free!

[Technorati Tags: steve johnson emergence]

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April 19, 2005

Clueless train...

POP!'s Jeremy Pepper is starting a new weekly feature on his blog - the cluelesstrain...

While I would not have been as harsh as he is on BL Ochman's posting on the lag between the blogosphere and the traditional media (I was somewhat surprised by the lag myself), it could be a promising column.

[Technorati Tags: pop blogosphere news]

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April 8, 2005

DRM vs. social media?

Barb Dybwad at the social software blog writes a great post on Are DRM and social media inherently at odds?
Besides the question posed in the title she also asks "Going further: does a social component have the potential to add value to all media? What’s your take?"

I am not totally convinced that they are at odds. That being said, I do believe that in some (if not most) cases a social component can add value to media. But it can do that without infringing on DRM...

...no?

[Categories: dmr social media]

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