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Most Topular Stories
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Why Congress is way richer than you [infographic]
Holy Kaw!8 Feb 2012 | 4:28 pm -
Throw Away the Maps
chrisbrogan.com6 Feb 2012 | 1:30 amPeople judge us by the path they’ve seen us walk before. They can’t anticipate our future steps. We, ourselves, look to how things have been, what seems to be the lay of the land, without realizing that the maps are not the territory. Want to succeed at work? Then don’t try to do your job. Instead, work towards something larger, more meaningful, and something that blends your convictions internally with your best ability to help others externally. Want to create something new? Then throw away the old, or maybe join two disparate old things together into something new. The… -
How do they know you're not a flake?
Seth's Blog8 Feb 2012 | 2:43 amBefore your link gets clicked or your proposal gets read, a busy person is going to triage it to find out if it's even worth glancing at. Since everyone is now connected, the new permeability has created a deluge of noise, and just about everyone worth contacting is taking defensive measures. Do I know this person? Did someone I trust send them over? Where does she work? (Ideo? the FDA? The New York Times?) Has she won an award? Is she famous? Are there typos and is the design sloppy? Are they pestering me? Do I already follow this person online? Does music play when I visit the website? Will… -
How to Succinctly Report a Blog Issue to Tech Support
@ProBlogger8 Feb 2012 | 6:07 amThis guest post is by Matthew Setter of Malt Blue. How often do you find it happening to you? You discover an issue with your site, or one of your community members emails you to tell you about it, and soon you start to see tweets about it too. Maybe it’s as simple as an error message that detracts from the professional appearance of your site. Perhaps the contact form doesn’t send messages to your contact email address. Or is it that the whole site just displays as a blank page, otherwise known as the white page of death? You’re not a programmer, a software engineer or a seasoned… -
The “New” SEO Secret Weapon
Copyblogger8 Feb 2012 | 3:00 amIf you have a web site, you may have noticed one of two things about the traffic you get from search engines. Your search traffic may have dried up overnight, with once-healthy streams turning into a sad little trickle. Or you may have noticed a nice, steady improvement as you’ve climbed higher in the SERPs (search engine results pages), while other sites that used to outrank you suddenly evaporated. There’s a super-secret new ingredient in SEO. It was always a factor, but it’s become even more important recently, as the Google team relentlessly declares war on what they see…
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Holy Kaw!
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Why Congress is way richer than you [infographic]
8 Feb 2012 | 4:28 pmVia Online Schools. Depressing infographics. Permalink | Leave a comment » -
The bookcase that’s always ready for more
8 Feb 2012 | 4:19 pmThe thing about bibliophiles is that, before you know it, the bookcase is full and it’s time to drag in a few more boards and cinder blocks to accommodate the newcomers. With the REK, such worries are a thing of the past, as the system accordions out when more space is needed and collapses into a handy rectangle when it’s time to pack up shop and move on to greener pastures. Unfortunately, the price is listed as “on request” meaning the 99% is out of luck, but perhaps it’ll inspire you to hit the workshop for a little DIY action if you can drag your nose out of… -
How Harvard spends student tuition [infographic]
8 Feb 2012 | 3:24 pmVia Online Universities. (H/T Muhammad Saleem) The scoop on education. Permalink | Leave a comment » -
Lizard shortage offers rare evolution test
8 Feb 2012 | 1:01 pmA devastating 2004 hurricane that wiped out a Caribbean lizard population offered an unprecedented opportunity to put an evolutionary theory known as the “founder effect” to the test. The founder effect describes the loss of genetic variation that occurs when a new population is established by a very small number of individuals from a larger population. “Founder effects are very hard to study,” says Thomas Schoener, a professor of evolution and ecology at University of California, Davis and a co-author of the study. “One must be in exactly the right place at the… -
Petty controversy: The Oscars diss the Muppets
8 Feb 2012 | 12:48 pmAcademy Awards producers outrage Kermit lovers with a proposal to shorten the telecast by scrapping Best Original Song performances It's an odd year for the Oscars' Best Original Song category. Thanks to the Academy's ever-changing and increasingly labyrinthine rules, only two songs earned nominations. At first, critics weren't too troubled by the abbreviated list, since it included the comically existential Muppets ballad "Man or Muppet," written by Flight of the Conchords' Bret McKenzie and performed by Jason Segel and Walter the Muppet. But alas, producers are planning to scrap the Best…
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chrisbrogan.com
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Throw Away the Maps
6 Feb 2012 | 1:30 amPeople judge us by the path they’ve seen us walk before. They can’t anticipate our future steps. We, ourselves, look to how things have been, what seems to be the lay of the land, without realizing that the maps are not the territory. Want to succeed at work? Then don’t try to do your job. Instead, work towards something larger, more meaningful, and something that blends your convictions internally with your best ability to help others externally. Want to create something new? Then throw away the old, or maybe join two disparate old things together into something new. The… -
The Next Social Networks
5 Feb 2012 | 1:30 amThe rage in social networks right now is Pinterest, partly because it’s probably the first social network that has a much higher adoption rate by females than males, and partly because it’s an interesting concept: somewhere between visual social bookmarking and scrapbooking. What also might not be immediately obvious is that it’s just “easier” to interact there. In that way, Pinterest has something in common with Instagram, which is community around photos. What I’m interested in, though, is Gentlemint, which I keep calling “Pinterest for… -
Learn From Adele – Build Your Platform
3 Feb 2012 | 1:30 amJacq and I just watched Adele Live At The Royal Albert Hall (amazon affiliate link), and though every song was just wonderfully done, I found myself fascinated by what Adele was doing in between each song. Because even though most people would be interested in hearing her belt out her amazing repertoire of hits, what I took away from the performance was Adele’s real magical ability: the ability to resonate with her audience. What Adele Could Teach You About Impact I’m writing something about this right now for my upcoming book with Julien Smith, but I had to share some of the… -
Rob Gokee is a Musical Wizard
2 Feb 2012 | 8:05 amI had such a great experience working with award winning musical composer Rob Gokee. We did some musical work together, and the process was so amazing. Rob helped me create my theme song for Shhh! The Secret Show. So anyhow, he and I sat down to do an interview, and it’s a bit long, but it’s totally worth it. We talk about what collaboration feels like at a distance, what it takes to get music like this made for your own show, and a lot more. Rob’s a hero to me, and has been part of the community for a while. I was so fortunate to have worked with him. Can’t see the… -
Build Your Platform – Start
30 Jan 2012 | 1:30 amThe following is part ONE of a series called Build Your Platform. If you find it interesting, please consider subscribing for free to get the rest of the series. This post is long. You might want to bookmark it for later. The age of social media oversaturation is upon us. People are declaring Twitter bankruptcy to go along with their email bankruptcy. They cite not wanting to start on yet another social network as their reason for not getting more involved with Google+. And just as soon as you start getting into Pinterest, you hear about Path, but wait: there’s Gentlemint, which is…
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Seth's Blog
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How do they know you're not a flake?
8 Feb 2012 | 2:43 amBefore your link gets clicked or your proposal gets read, a busy person is going to triage it to find out if it's even worth glancing at. Since everyone is now connected, the new permeability has created a deluge of noise, and just about everyone worth contacting is taking defensive measures. Do I know this person? Did someone I trust send them over? Where does she work? (Ideo? the FDA? The New York Times?) Has she won an award? Is she famous? Are there typos and is the design sloppy? Are they pestering me? Do I already follow this person online? Does music play when I visit the website? Will… -
Horizontal marketing isn't a new idea
7 Feb 2012 | 2:09 amBut it is the new reality for just about every organization. Vertical marketing means the marketer (the one with money) is in charge. Vertical marketing starts at the top and involves running ads, sending out direct mail and pushing hype through the media. Your money, your plans, your control. It might not work, but generally the worst outcome is that you will be ignored and need to spend more money. Horizonal marketing, on the other hand, means creating a remarkable product and story and setting it up to spread from person to person. It's out of your control, because all the interactions are… -
Who is your customer?
6 Feb 2012 | 2:26 amRule one: You can build a business on the foundation of great customer service. Rule two: The only way to do great customer service is to treat different customers differently. The question: Who is your customer? It's not obvious. Zappos is a classic customer service company, and their customer is the person who buys the shoes. Nike, on the other hand, doesn't care very much at all about the people who buy the shoes, or even the retailers. They care about the athletes (often famous) that wear the shoes, sometimes for money. They name buildings after these athletes, court them, erect… -
In search of a timid trapeze artist
5 Feb 2012 | 2:01 amGood luck with that, there aren't any. If you hesitate when leaping from rope to another, you're not going to last very long. And this is at the heart of what makes innovation work in organizations, why industries die, and how painful it is to try to maintain the status quo while also participating in a revolution. Gather up as much speed as you can, find a path and let go. You can't get to the next rope if you're still holding on to this one. -
Will energy consumption stay private?
4 Feb 2012 | 11:45 amIt's clear that the consumption of energy has external effects that impact more than just the person who is paying for it. Geopolitical, health and economic issues come to the neighbors and nearby citizens of entities that are using a lot of power. It was always straightforward to see who was burning a lot of wood or drove a huge car. It's easy to see when a company has a huge smokestake belching carbon. What happens when sensors make it easy to see how efficient a machine is, how much of a resource is being consumed and how much exhaust is being spewed? What happens when Google maps shows…
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@ProBlogger
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How to Succinctly Report a Blog Issue to Tech Support
8 Feb 2012 | 6:07 amThis guest post is by Matthew Setter of Malt Blue. How often do you find it happening to you? You discover an issue with your site, or one of your community members emails you to tell you about it, and soon you start to see tweets about it too. Maybe it’s as simple as an error message that detracts from the professional appearance of your site. Perhaps the contact form doesn’t send messages to your contact email address. Or is it that the whole site just displays as a blank page, otherwise known as the white page of death? You’re not a programmer, a software engineer or a seasoned… -
Make Your Blog Load Faster than ProBlogger: Part 2
7 Feb 2012 | 12:05 pmThis guest post is by Devesh of WP Kube. A few months ago, I wrote a guest post here called How to Make Your Blog Load Faster than ProBlogger. Today, I’ll go into some more detailed advice to help you speed up your site even more. If you’re a blogger, you already know about the importance of blog loading speed, and the role it plays in search engine rank and marketing your blog. But if this is new territory for you, here are three quick reasons why you need to speed up your blog: Google includes website loading speed as an important metric in their ranking algorithm. If you want… -
How I Beat my Best Month Ever by Doing Something Good, Better [Case Study]
7 Feb 2012 | 6:04 amMid-December 2010: on my photography site, we launched a new campaign—our first ever 12 Days of Christmas promotion. The result was my biggest month of earnings ever up to that point. The idea was simple: offer discounts on 12 products over the 12 days leading up to Christmas. I used a mix of my own ebooks and products from other photography sites with affiliate commissions. The result was massive. Not only did we see some great revenue generated, it created some lovely buzz on the site. Due to the success of the 2010 campaign, in mid-December 2011 we launched our second 12 Days of… -
Six Steps to Make Sure Your Site Is Ready to Go Viral
6 Feb 2012 | 6:00 amThis guest post is by Nancy Sathre-Vogel of Family on Bikes. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. Surely Google Analytics was confusing my site with another, way more popular site. There was no way my visitor numbers could be so high! And yet they were. One of my posts had taken off and was spreading like wildfire. Those viral post phenomena that happen to others were now happening to me. The first day, 17,000 visitors came to my website. The next day we topped out at 56,000. Readers were coming in droves. It was exciting. It was exhilarating. My site, viral! Wow! And then I took a… -
How to Handle Criticism: a Practical Guide
5 Feb 2012 | 12:03 pmImage by Stuart RichardsAs bloggers, each of us has to deal with criticism. Blogging is a very public activity—almost all of us has the goal of gaining readers to our blogs—and the more people you reach, the more likely it is that you’ll hear criticisms. “You’re wrong…” “How can you say that? You don’t know what you’re talking about.” “I couldn’t disagree more…” “This is the last time I read this blog!” These are just some of the criticisms bloggers regularly face—I’ve received versions of…
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Copyblogger
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The “New” SEO Secret Weapon
8 Feb 2012 | 3:00 amIf you have a web site, you may have noticed one of two things about the traffic you get from search engines. Your search traffic may have dried up overnight, with once-healthy streams turning into a sad little trickle. Or you may have noticed a nice, steady improvement as you’ve climbed higher in the SERPs (search engine results pages), while other sites that used to outrank you suddenly evaporated. There’s a super-secret new ingredient in SEO. It was always a factor, but it’s become even more important recently, as the Google team relentlessly declares war on what they see… -
8 Quick Tips for Writing Bullet Points People Actually Want to Read
7 Feb 2012 | 3:00 amIt’s a Twitterized world, we’re just living in it. Blog posts, Tweets, quick videos, Google+, the Facebook Timeline, and tens of thousands of images pinned to digital boards are flying past us faster than we can read them. Faster than we can even scan them, depending on the time of day. What does this mean for writers trying to cut through it all? At least two things that I can think of: You’d better know how to write a compelling headline You’d better know how to write bullet points that grab (and keep) your reader We’re not telling you to keep your copy short. -
7 Crucial Tactics for Writing a Wildly Successful Guest Post
6 Feb 2012 | 3:00 amWe all know that guest posts grow blogs. But not many people realize that tactical guest posting grows careers. Most bloggers I see pump out these articles while reciting the mantra “quantity over quality”; there’s no real strategy and there are no real long-term benefits. In this post I am going to show you the seven crucial tactics for writing a radically successful guest post. Done right, these strategies will get you more email subscribers, coveted Google ranking positions, and a big head-start on your content marketing goals. Who am I to teach you about guest blogging? -
7 Smashing Social Media Marketing Links
4 Feb 2012 | 3:00 amThis week on The Lede … What really works on Twitter One thing social media copywriters should never do 9 productive social media hacks A reminder of the power of the original social media If you just can’t wait for The Lede every Saturday, and you want even more practical, useable links than the seven we highlight here every week, follow @copyblogger on Twitter. It’s painless. Really. // 9 Social Media Hacks You Need to Embrace Now Mr. Baer makes a good case that though social media is inexpensive in monetary terms, it can get good and costly when it comes to spending your… -
Whether You Call it Blogging or Not, Online Content Still Rules
3 Feb 2012 | 5:00 amWhat if most of the business world stopped blogging tomorrow? Would you stop as well? No, if that happened, you’d find yourself sitting on the opportunity of a lifetime. Social networking sites would explode with likes and retweets and pins and +1s of your original content all day long. This is why the annual “blogging is dead” claim is so dumb. Even if it were true, your continued content production would dominate the web in every way. So, instead of worrying about the latest claimed trend or alarming decline of the moment, stay the course. Original content creation is the…
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ReadWriteWeb
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Nginx Continues Growth, Adds Commercial Offerings
8 Feb 2012 | 4:30 pmAccording to the Netcraft Web Server Survey for February 2012, Nginx was "the only server to experience a non-negligible market share increase this month" by picking up 0.27 percentage points. Good news for the upstart Web server, just as the brand-new company behind Nginx takes the wraps off its commercial packages. Nginx has had quite the growth spurt over the past year. In February of last year Nginx had 7.57% of the market, or about 21 million domains hosted with Nginx. Microsoft had 20.04%, or about 57 million. Apache was at 60.10%, with more than 171 million domains. Sponsor… -
Do Your Users Get You? Test Them With Solidify
8 Feb 2012 | 3:59 pmZURB launched yet another free and handy design application to help anyone test Web products they're working on. This one is called Solidify. It takes care of one of the most annoying parts of building an interface: testing clickable prototypes. Solidify lets you build a working test of your design and give it to users to see if it makes sense to them. It also gives you analytics on how your testers performed. Along with the new app, ZURB opened a new apps page showcasing all the great Web design helpers it has made, many of which we've covered on ReadWriteWeb. ZURB's tools let you make… -
Google Confirms Motorola Licensees Pay 2.25% Per-Unit Royalties
8 Feb 2012 | 3:45 pmIf all goes according to plan, the same company which last year asserted that patents were essentially legal weapons in an unfair war against the Android operating system, will find itself the owner of one of the largest technology portfolios anywhere in the world. Today, Google took steps to assure many of Motorola Mobility's (MMI) existing licensees that it would adhere to that company's existing reasonable and non-discriminatory (RAND) licensing practices for mobile technologies. This after Apple sent a letter to a European Telecommunications Standards Institute last November 11 - as first… -
Akamai Invests in Obliterating America's Broadband Speed Deficit
8 Feb 2012 | 3:30 pmLast week, my colleague David Strom reported on the latest annual "State of the Internet" report from content delivery network Akamai. The report showed that while Americans are finally experiencing faster average broadband speeds on a quarter-by-quarter basis, those speeds only began eclipsing those of Sweden in the second half of 2010, and still have about 40% of gap to close if it hopes to achieve par with Japan - which, at this rate, it might do in about a decade. If Web connection speeds are, as Google has said so often in touting the performance of its Chrome Web browser, essentially a… -
Add Change Tracking to Online Text Editing with Ice.js
8 Feb 2012 | 3:01 pmIf you're looking to add change tracking to a Web app, you might want to take a look at Ice from the CMS group at the New York Times. Ice (or Ice.js) is an implementation of change tracking for any content-editable element on the Web. It can track changes (inserts, deletes) from multiple users, and has some optional plugins for converting "smart" quotes and creating em-dashes. Sponsor Hands-on experience is probably the best way to get an idea what Ice.js can do. The current demo shows a plain content-editable element with Ice.js as well as a TinyMCE instance using Ice.js as a plugin. The…
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How to Change the World
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Raising Money: What Not to Say and What Not to Believe #OfficeandGuyK
20 Jan 2012 | 10:46 amOver the past two weeks via my partnership with Microsoft and Office Web Apps, I’ve provided templates of models for you to create enchanting PowerPoint pitches, Word business plans, and Excel financial models. They are all available for you to download from my SkyDrive account. I hope these documents and blog posts help you save a boatload of time and increase the quality of your efforts.I leave you with two sets of top ten lies: one of entrepreneurs and one of investors so that you know what not to say and what not to believe. Top Ten Lies of Entrepreneurs “Our projections are… -
Design a Sam Adams beer
20 Jan 2012 | 8:24 amNow this is a fun project. I’m helping Sam Adams “tap” the knowledge of beer drinkers and crowd source its next brew. Join the party by getting the app and designing your beer: The final brew will be released in Austin in the first week of March. #sponsored -
How to Create an Enchanting Financial Forecast #OfficeandGuyK
17 Jan 2012 | 1:52 pmThis is the third post in my Microsoft partnership, and it’s all about numbers. The topic is crafting your financial forecast to include in your pitch. Bill Reichert, my partner at Garage Technology Ventures, created an Excel model and wrote this blog post. There’s a lesson in this too: Get the best person for the job. His grasp of financial models and how to present them exceeds mine by two orders of magnitude. The Purpose of Financial Projections When it comes to financial projections, there are two types of entrepreneurs: first, the “visionary entrepreneur” who… -
How to Create an Enchanting Business Plan #OfficeandGuyK
12 Jan 2012 | 8:16 amHere is the second post in my series about planning, pitching, and launching a new business venture. In partnership with Microsoft and Office Web Apps, I’ve created a Word document that outlines a good business plan. It’s saved to my SkyDrive folder here. Feel free to download it and use it as inspiration. And if you’re working with a partner, you can use the free Word Web App to stay in sync. I provided the PowerPoint document before the Word document because a good business plan is an elaboration of a good pitch as opposed to a good pitch being a distillation of good business plan. -
How to Create an Enchanting Pitch #OfficeandGuyK
9 Jan 2012 | 8:01 amWelcome to the first in a series of blog posts I’ll be doing as part of a partnership with Microsoft and Office Web Apps. Over the next two weeks, I’ll cover everything a budding entrepreneur needs to turn an idea into an enchanting investment opportunity—from the perfect pitch to a killer business plan to financial forecasts. I’m going to start with a little dissertation on creating effective PowerPoint pitches for your company. I embedded the sample deck for you to click through by using the PowerPoint Web App. When you’re ready to get started, you can download the…
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JasonKeath.com
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5 Great Ways to Use Pinterest
26 Jan 2012 | 9:01 amOriginally published at Social Web Daily What do sculptors, jet setters, philosophers, foodies, and collectors have in common? They can all make great use of Pinterest, the pinboard-channeling new social network. With a stream-lined interface, and plenty of opportunity to engage with and get inspiration from other Pinterest users, there are an endless number of creative ways to use the new site. Here are five of our favorites: 1. Collector’s Showcase Hobbyists and special-interest enthusiasts can put Pinterest to good use by uploading pictures from your personal collection, or collecting… -
Checking out the downtown NYC coworking space @Hiveat55 today
10 Jan 2012 | 11:31 amIt is across from the NY stock exchange. Nice quiet space. And I got a free day pass thanks to my Foursquare checkin. -
How to Spot a Yelp User, The Definitive Chart
5 Jan 2012 | 4:36 pmvia flowtown.com -
Pinterest Is Perfect For Your Dear Santa Letter
21 Dec 2011 | 9:55 amSocial image bookmarking site Pinterest is very hot right now, even though the site is still invite only. If you have not tested it out, Pinterest is simply a place to save and share images from around the web. You “pin” images to a “board” and anyone that follows you or that board sees it. Even better, all images on Pinterest are links to whereever you found them, by default. So if you want to buy that cool pair of shoes your friend pinned, click through. If you want to see more info on an inspirational poster or what beach your friend took a photo of, click through. -
How Not To Provide Customer Service, A JCPenney Story
20 Dec 2011 | 5:02 pmSo, maybe I am spoiled by Amazon and Zappos, but the last few days, I have been trying to buy a couch from JCPenney.com and have failed on 3 occasions. The couch in question: Here’s the thing, this is an awesome couch and it was on sale. But we need the chaise portion of the couch to be on the left when you are sitting down. But it was unclear to me how to order it. I either had to order LAF (left facing arm) or RAF (right facing arm). I had no idea what those two terms meant. Did LAF mean the chaise was on the left when facing it or when sitting on the couch? I was also curious about…
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I Believe in Advertising | ONLY SELECTED ADVERTISING | Advertising Blog & Community
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Rialto Channel: The Kings Speech
8 Feb 2012 | 4:43 pm“Independent film for independent ideas.” Advertising Agency: DDB, Auckland, New Zealand Executive Creative Director: Toby Talbot, Andy Fackrell Creative Director: Regan Grafton Art Director: Damian Galvin Copywriter: Rory Mckechnie Head of Art: Dave Brady Planner: David McIndoe Account Director: Danielle Richards Agency Producer: Andy Robilliard Photographer: Lewis Mulatero Retoucher: Gordon Moir Designer: Renee Lam Account Manager: Brad Armstrong, Victoria Meo -
Australia Zoo: Elephants, Croc, Zebra, Rhino, Giraffes, Tiger
8 Feb 2012 | 4:26 pmAdvertising Agency: Direct, Australia Photographer: Erik Williamson Retoucher: Justin Overell Designers: Tim James, Emma Jurss -
Peugeot 308 Touring: Moon, Sun, Cloud
8 Feb 2012 | 4:25 pm“Let the outside world in. 308 Touring with Panoramic Glass Roof.” Advertising Agency: Arnold Furnace, Sydney, Australia Creative Directors: Paul Fenton, Tom Spicer Copywriter / Art Director: Luke Duggan Photographer: Alan McFetridge Retoucher: Cream Studios -
Audi A1: Youhuuu
8 Feb 2012 | 11:44 am“New Audi A1 Sportback. Amusement without breaks.” Advertising Agency: Verba, Milan, Italy Executive Creative Director: Michelangelo Cianciosi, Luca Cortesini Art Director: Daniel Cambò Ilustrator: Mozart -
Mitsubishi: Ride The Storm
8 Feb 2012 | 11:37 amFor five days, six states and a few thousand miles in December, we chased a storm with the expert help of Weather Underground. The film was shot documentary-style with Directors Emmett and Brendan Malloy, two brothers who say chasing unpredictable parts of nature is a big part of their filmmaking process. A member of Mitsubishi’s social media team went along for the ride, tweeting and posting their whereabouts. Advertising Agency: 180, Los Angeles, USA Executive Creative Director: William Gelner Creative Directors: Gavin Milner, Grant Holland Copywriter: Dave Horton Art Director: Matthew…
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Social Media Darwinism
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Gut Feeling or Analytics – which is better?
8 Feb 2012 | 10:00 amSo I was talking with a CMO buddy of mine the other day over dinner and this topic came up. Of course you know as a CMO of a leading Social Media analytics firm – I think you can guess which side of this argument I was on. But seriously, my buddy honestly wanted to know – so what can you do with all this good social media analytics that you talk about? He really didn’t know. So here is what I told him that marketers should be doing with analytics but haven’t truly adopted. I think part of the problem is that some of these tactics haven’t become a standard operating procedure but… -
What Social Data can Teach You about Audiences
1 Feb 2012 | 10:00 amMy son is a senior in high school and I am beginning to help him with his search for the right school. One of the aspects of college life that he is looking forward to is belonging to a university with strong school spirit. So to help with this, I suggested that we use football teams as a proxy to find the right environment. With this in mind, we set out to find a simple list of “2011 NCAA Football Rankings” – an easy Google search is there ever was one. I assumed that the top result, ESPN’s 2011 NCAA Football Rankings, would be the perfect match for our search, until I looked at… -
Trust is hard to come by these days
25 Jan 2012 | 10:00 amFor years I have kept tabs on the Edelman Trust barometer report, which comes out every January in Davos. And this year was no exception. After last year I figured this years report could make an excellent gauge of the economy worldwide! Simply put the report states: Trust is down in every industry and every country across the board by an average of 6%. So what does this mean for marketers and for major brands in an era of social media? Well 2 things … Hidden in the data is the fact that CEOs and Government officials are at the very bottom of the totem pole when it comes to delivering a… -
Brands: It’s not enough to be liked
15 Dec 2011 | 10:00 amImagine a company that has upscale retail locations around the United States receiving tens of thousands of customer visits. Now imagine not having anyone there to greet and interact with those customers. What’s the point of the storefront? Facebook fan pages are much the same thing. But only 0.2 to 2 percent of fans go back to a page. Why? Because there is nothing going on that interests them. Fan pages are a unique marketing canvas to connect with avid consumers. Yet some brands are terribly underutilizing these pages, making them basically brochureware repositories — essentially… -
How important is real-time data? It’s all relative
7 Dec 2011 | 6:35 amThe speed with which social media spreads ideas and information has led many marketers to place a premium on capturing data in real time. But should real-time data be such a priority? Real time means different things to different people when the term is used as a proxy for recency. To an evolutionary biologist, real time could mean thousands of years of species development data. To a 911 dispatcher, real time is a few seconds worth of critical information from a telephone call. What about marketing and advertising? This notion of “relative real time” extends there, too. To a marketing…
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Conversation Agent
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Collaboration? You Must be Joking!
8 Feb 2012 | 3:00 amI read this post by Chris Saad the other morning in response to Robert Scoble 's mention in a recent post and I keep thinking about the applicability of its concepts not just for Silicon Valley and the tech community. It applies to marketers and communicators as well. [Posted originally on Google+]<rant>1. lead not just cheerlead - how many times do we copy the same concept over and over, or look at short term payoffs when the opportunities are on the making better promises side of the conversation?2. add to the business DNA - nothing dies, not media companies, not blogging, not… -
What a Difference Five Years Make
7 Feb 2012 | 3:00 amHere I am. Writing from my heart more than my head where all the good ideas are and I get the zinger -- yeah, a personality would be great. Seriously? Kidding. I'm sure it would. And I have one. I can go from Zero to Italian in no time. When appropriate. Why do you care? Because that's just it -- online content should have a style and point of view, to get more personality it needs to have guts, and it needs to have time. Guts don't come from charts and stats, they come from people. Time as in face time, as in skin in the game, as in relationships. Or you're just making the seagull move --… -
How Would You Redesign the Sears Customer Experience?
6 Feb 2012 | 3:00 amAs a regular at Brand Autopsy, I remember the "would you miss" series of posts about brands John Moore wrote a couple of years back. The brands discussed ranged from Denny's, Costco, Ace Hardware, Dairy Queen, Crate & Barrell, BusinessWeek, UPS, Pizza Hut, to Walgreens, Polaroid Instant Film, Advertising Age, The Cheesecake Factory, Chili's, Wells Fargo, and more. One of the brands was Sears -- if Sears went out of business tomorrow, would any of us care? Does Sears provide such a unique product and customer experience that we would be saddened if it didn’t exist? How did Sears do on… -
... then I Discovered I am Actually Funny
5 Feb 2012 | 4:00 amSo, I've been thinking. What I'm doing here with this blog is not working. It's not you, it's me. Somehow I manage to scare you off to some site with LOL cats whenever you open your feed. I'm not inspiring you. Or maybe I am, and you're not telling me. I've tried a couple of things to justify keeping up with producing researched and useful content. That only makes the scraping and copying and rewriting gremlins happy and me poor. They don't link anymore in the sphere, those bastards. This is a departure from my usual writing style, I know. I've been slaving on figuring out an angle for the… -
The Weeds and Trees Links Edition
4 Feb 2012 | 4:00 amDo you have poor information consumption habits? Here's how you can tell -- if you're constantly looking for the next thing or shiny object, you're addicted to the fast growth and short term life of weeds. Some of them are pretty. All the action is up top, yet they don't grow strong. Small roots. On the other end of the spectrum are trees. All the action is underground, so you don't really see it while it's happening -- and at least for a while. Yet, once they grow, trees could be there for decades, stretching upward and providing a welcome respite for generations. Weeds and trees Is a…
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Stokefire - Branding & Advertising
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An Open Letter to the Stewards of the Progressive & Democratic Brands
27 Jan 2012 | 7:28 amHello Stewards, You may not realize it yet, but you need help. I’ve been told by many in politics that there are no well-known (or even proven-effective) brand strategists focused on helping Progressive causes. (There are an astounding number of political strategists but that’s a different animal.) This may be due to the common belief that Democrats won’t pay for core brands to be developed. Dems spend a fortune on polling, message crafting, and message testing, but when it comes time to actually develop the unchanging core of progressivism or the Democratic party… -
Three Steps to an Irresistible Brand
25 Jan 2012 | 1:25 pmI know you may not think of Gandhi as irresistible, but bear with me. It’ll become clear shortly. Irresistible… It may sound impossible, or at least too good to be true. And you’re not alone in thinking that, but the great brands do achieve the impossible. They get people to change behavior in much the same way that Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Jr. and Abraham Lincoln put themselves on the line to create monumental societal change. If you want to create real change there’s no more consistent way to get there. And here are the basic steps you can follow to get there… -
The Secret to Gaining Approval for Your Designs and Brands
23 Jan 2012 | 9:32 amHow to gain approval for your designs: For Strategically Focused Clients: Craft your story around how the design reflects or amplifies who they are and how they are unique. Strategic clients want to see themselves through their brand elements. For Tactically Focused Clients: Build the case for approval by showing that the brand follows industry best-practices or established design trends and solid techniques. Tactical clients want to know that there’s a long history of success before following a path. The best designers and branders ensure that they’re ready for either… -
Our Favorite Award, Ever
20 Dec 2011 | 7:52 amPosted by: Tate Linden We don’t spend much time pulling together entries for stuff like ADDYs and OBIEs. As a small shop we just don’t have the manpower, and most award programs don’t seem to factor in the impact of the work on the business or industry. We’ve been humbled on more than one occasion (and not in a good way) by having a campaign that earned tens of millions of dollars for our client pushed aside as the award-giving panel instead honored creative use of props and 3D techniques that resulted in… pretty much nothing as far as we could tell. Heck, our… -
Beautiful Design vs. Pretty Design
12 Dec 2011 | 10:17 amPosted by: Tate Linden Pretty Design is timely. Beautiful Design is timeless. Pretty Design is artifice. Beautiful Design is truth. Pretty Design is experienced visually. Beautiful Design is experienced emotionally. And now is the time during the blog post where you all know I’m going to rant about how no one should ever stoop so low as to design anything pretty. But I won’t. Because I will finally acknowledge that there’s some real value in pretty. Sure, beautiful design is what my firm struggles to deliver, and what I know helps to build and support long-term brand equity,…
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MarketingProfs How-To Articles
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Four Keyword Research Mistakes to Avoid at All Costs
6 Feb 2012 | 7:00 amIf you are serious about the words "sales," "profit," and "conversions," you must master keyword research. Learn four common pitfalls marketers make when selecting keywords--and how to avoid them. Read the full article at MarketingProfs -
The Inside Scoop on Using Twitter Lists for Profit and Sanity
3 Feb 2012 | 7:00 amThe dirty secret of Twitter is that as helpful as it can be, it's also a time sink. Learn how properly using and cleaning up your Twitter lists can help you save time--and generate leads for your business. Read the full article at MarketingProfs -
10 Hot Tips (and a Promo Campaign Planner) for Seasonal Sale Success
2 Feb 2012 | 7:00 amCustomers today expect more deals and offers during holiday seasons, so it's important to create seasonal campaigns to increase revenues. Here are 10 tips--and a campaign planner--to help you achieve seasonal sale success. Read the full article at MarketingProfs -
Five Tips for Implementing a Successful QR Code Campaign
1 Feb 2012 | 7:00 amQR codes can be inexpensive to implement and can provide you a measureable return on investment--if you use them correctly. Learn five invaluable tips for implementing an effective QR code campaign. Read the full article at MarketingProfs -
Four Easy Tactics for Becoming a Must-Follow Account on Twitter
31 Jan 2012 | 7:00 amTwitter is a powerful channel that can help you connect with customers, promote products, and create brand awareness. Learn four tactics for making your Twitter account a social media heavyweight in your industry. Read the full article at MarketingProfs
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PSFK
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Is New York A Better Home For European Startups Than The Valley? [Headlines]
8 Feb 2012 | 2:44 pmThe largest city in the United States may be superior destination for entrepreneurs from across the pond. -
Has Pinterest Changed Web Design Forever? [Headlines]
8 Feb 2012 | 2:08 pmPopular sharing website is challenging the aesthetics of the internet. -
Bus Stop Ad Smells Like Baked Potatoes [Headlines]
8 Feb 2012 | 1:57 pmTasty marketing campaign creates street side billboards that give off food scents. -
Toyota Predicts Plug-in Prius Will Be More Efficient Than The Chevy Volt [Headlines]
8 Feb 2012 | 1:44 pmThe latest version of world's best-selling hybrid will top the competition -
Tesco Trials New Packaging To Reduce Food Waste
8 Feb 2012 | 11:45 amSupermarket hopes newly developed containers will keep tomatoes and avocados fresh for longer.
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The Tom Peters Weblog
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Off the Cuff #2
7 Feb 2012 | 8:17 amOur Off the Cuff video series is a direct response from Tom to your questions. This is the second video in the series, which poses the question, "What is the greatest piece of advice you ever received that has made you a better writer or communicator?" It's a terrific question for Tom, and he discusses not only writing influences, but touches on public speaking as well. Don't miss the Dan Pink technique at the end; it may feel excruciating in practice, but there's no denying the improvement gained. -
TLBT Video #73Strategy: Measure Innovation
3 Feb 2012 | 8:46 amWe've posted the latest video in The Little BIG Things series on YouTube. Do you think it's impossible to measure innovation? In this video, Tom offers a brilliantly simple, easy-to-implement method for ensuring that a good portion of your work meets the mark on innovation. You can find the video in the right-hand column of this page or watch it at YouTube (time: 2 minutes 3 seconds). Or, get a PDF transcript of the video's content: Strategy: Measure Innovation. -
MOAP #4
30 Jan 2012 | 7:53 amThe latest installment of Tom's "Mother of All Presentations," or MOAP, is now available at ExcellenceNow.com. You can download the PowerPoint version or a PDF. We'll be releasing a section every other week throughout 2012. Part 4 introduces Tom's conviction that encouraging your people to make friends in other functions of the organization should be a top priority. Tom says you should reward such behavior, make it an agenda item. Download Part 4 of Tom's Mother of All Presentations, and learn how and why cross-functional socialization (read, idea-sharing) is essential to business excellence. -
Race to Nowhere
27 Jan 2012 | 4:51 amTom has said, "We tell our kids to 'be still,' then tell them to 'read history books'—which are replete (100%!) with tales of people ... who never sat still." This is obviously not the ideal way to cultivate a talented workforce. The education system in the United States still seems to be attempting to churn out well-behaved factory workers. With the enormous pressure placed on teachers to produce sufficient test results, the classroom becomes more about test preparation than exploration and discovery. Albert Einstein, long since deceased, had this to say: "It is nothing short of a… -
Advice, For What It's Worth ...
25 Jan 2012 | 7:20 amI was asked to contribute (a very few words) to a family page offering words of wisdom to a graduating high school senior. That's a serious challenge—and I literally spent days on the task. Here, for better or for worse, is the result: Rules For Living Life to the Hilt Nothing will turn out the way you thought it would. There is no bigger waste of time than making plans. Any success you have will be the byproduct of having thrown yourself headlong and without reserve into what you were most passionate about—and then ridden the wave you created wherever and at whatever speed it…
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Drew's Marketing Minute
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The 5 things that will derail your marketing in 2012
8 Feb 2012 | 6:37 amI don’t want to rain on anyone’s parade but the truth is — most organizations’ marketing efforts stink. And they stink for reasons well within the marketing department’s control. If you’re worried that your own efforts might fall short — beware of these five danger zones that can derail you in a blink! Inconsistency: Does your monthly newsletter go out 5 times a year? Does your copy tone/style fluctuate between somber and casual? Are your weekly sales calls happening every week? Inconsistency not only waters down your results but it also… -
Crisis communications – don’t wait to create a plan
6 Feb 2012 | 6:10 amDoes your organization have a crisis communications plan that you could actually put into action at this very moment? All of the hubub surrounding the Susan G. Komen decision to stop funding Planned Parenthood and then their reversal of that decision following a 72+ hour firestorm of public outrage should have scared the bejesus out of you. If an organization as large, powerful and well respected as Komen can get into that much hot water — and is that ill-prepared to handle it then what in the world would happen to you if there was an accident on your job site, if your CFO embezzled… -
Don’t add frill until your core is rock solid
2 Feb 2012 | 6:15 amA couple times a month a cleaning company comes into our house and does a deep clean. Every time I walk into the house after they’ve cleaned… the toilet paper rolls and tissues sticking out of the boxes are folded in some sort of origami art. Sometimes, they leave a truffle on the kitchen counter. I get what they’re trying to do. And it’s a lovely little extra. Unfortunately, I also find things like: Every waste basket in the wrong spot (they’ve been cleaning the house for over a year) The back door unlocked or a window left open A few lights left on… -
What you don’t know about your sales funnel
30 Jan 2012 | 5:56 amWe all think and talk about our sales funnel a lot. We’re always saying things like: We need to keep it full. We need to stay active with the prospects that have been in it for awhile. On average, it takes a prospect X months to move through it. And so on…. But consider the statistic to the right. 60% of your sales efforts are what happens before you have actively put someone into the funnel. In other words — it’s not you who is doing the selling. Who is? Your existing customers The customer who left and is working with your competitors Your vendors Your website… -
What’s your purple goldfish?
11 Jan 2012 | 11:30 amGet your free copy of Stan Phelp’s book! A few years ago, I met Stan Phelps, another marketing guy, online (I think he commented on my blog and we started chatting via email) and before I knew it — we were friends. He was just dipping his toe into the blogging waters and I tried to be helpful along the way. Fast forward to today, January 11, 2012. Stan’s first book, What’s Your Purple Goldfish*, is being released today. I’ve read it and know you’re going to love it. Really love it. I’m also very humbled to say that Stan asked me to write the…
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Brian Solis
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Meet the Mother of All Processes
8 Feb 2012 | 10:32 amGuest post by John M. Bernard, author of the new book, Business at the Speed of Now, and Chairman and Founder of Mass Ingenuity. Imagine going to work in one of Henry Ford’s factories a century ago, proud that management referred to you a “hand” or a “hammer” or maybe even a “wrench.” The labels reflected Ford’s emphasis on automation and management’s view of laborers as mere cogs in the machine. Screw this nut onto that bolt; weld this strap to that frame; do it over and over and over again until your brain froze with boredom. Of course, management needed workers to get the… -
2011 Was the Year of the Mobile Consumer, What’s in Store for 2012? Value.
7 Feb 2012 | 10:10 amChris Silva, my colleague at Altimeter Group, released a useful report today that I wanted to share with you here. Mobile is important and I believe you know this. However, when we consider mobile, we often think about the experience when and where it begins. But, we often miss the opportunity to lead a more meaningful journey as it may travel from small screen to larger screens across laptops, desktops and beyond. And along the way, we must now determine our role in this journey to provide information, shape decisions, and influence behavior. In Chris’ report, he reminds us that 2011… -
Season 2 Finale: How Yamaha invests in new customer experiences
3 Feb 2012 | 10:52 amThis is it…the Season Finale! And, what a way to end Season 2 of (R)evolution…. In this episode, Yamaha shares what is by far the most expansive view of disruptive technology’s impact on business infrastructure and culture on the show to date. What you’ll see is a genuine discussion with Jeff Hawley and Rick Williams of Yamaha explore how an already successful business is exploring new opportunities to better define the customer experience before, during and after transactions. It comes down to workflow. Nowadays, it either works for you or works against you. Here,… -
Smartphones, Tablets, PCs, The Devices People Use to Discover Information in Social Media (and when)
2 Feb 2012 | 3:13 pmMy friends over at bit.ly published an interesting graph that reveals the devices as well as the days/times that people use different devices and how and when they consume information. As you can imagine, it’s across the board, but as you can see, there are waves that every device follows, except the desktop. Desktops are of course the devices that we can assume people use during work hours. As such, they are most heavily used on weekdays before noon. Interestingly enough, phone traffic peaks at about the same times, but not to similar effects. What’s also telling is that tablets… -
What’s Love Got to Do with It? The 3P’s of Identity
2 Feb 2012 | 6:16 amGuest post by Allison Cerra, author of Identity Shift With the 2012 Presidential election looming, there’s no shortage of polls to help narrow the field of candidates. I find a recent one from Fox News to be particularly fascinating. Among other questions, Republican primary voters were asked which Republican presidential candidate is most likeable and which they would most trust with a nuclear weapon. While Newt Gingrich scored at the top of the heap in earning the trust vote, he scored only marginally well on the likeability scale. The topic was discussed on the network’s “Fox &…
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Branding Strategy Insider
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Time For Brand Marketers To Lead A Comeback
7 Feb 2012 | 9:10 pmIt’s a good thing the game between the NFL's New England Patriots and the New York Giants was exciting because this year’s Super Bowl commercials were dull, and what a weird thing to say about the Super Bowl. Generally, it’s the very opposite of that. Perhaps it’s best not to read too much into Super Bowl ads vying for viral buzz (many of which adopted a new pre-game, social media preview approach to generate buzz, albeit some have argued it was poorly done). But there was one thing that stood out. In a noticeable departure from the tradition of Super Bowl Sunday, this year’s crop… -
When To Reposition Your Brand
6 Feb 2012 | 9:10 pmBrand repositioning is necessary when one or more of the following conditions exist: Your brand has a bad, confusing or nonexistent image. The primary benefit your brand "owns" has evolved from a differentiating benefit to a cost-of-entry benefit. Your organization is significantly altering its strategic direction. Your organization is entering new businesses and the current positioning is no longer appropriate. A new competitor with a superior value proposition enters your industry. Competition has usurped your brand's position or rendered it ineffectual. Your organization has acquired a… -
How To Transform An Under-Performing Brand
5 Feb 2012 | 9:10 pmOnce the decision has been made to continue to invest in an under-performing brand, brand owners will be faced with a new set of challenges completely foreign to them. The temptation is always to do more of what got you there. That rarely works when brands face reinvention. By that I mean brand relevance. The main reason brands begin to under perform is that people no longer care. When that happens, like it or not, you’ll be starting over from scratch. This is a hard pill for brand owners to swallow, particularly if the brand was once an iconic leader in its category. For brand owners… -
Logo Design Requirements
4 Feb 2012 | 9:10 pmA brand’s identity is a combination of visual, auditory, and other sensory components that create recognition, aid in memory encoding and decoding, represent the brand promise, provide differentiation, create communications synergy, and are proprietary. The logo is one key component. Here is what we look for when we evaluate logo design: Memorable – highest recognition and recall (both of which can be tested for) Including recognition at maximum distances (can be tested for) Aesthetically pleasing Timeless quality - the logo will not become dated Appropriate for the product/service… -
Brand Tagline Requirements
3 Feb 2012 | 9:10 pmIn definitive global research, The Conference Board has found the development and consistent use of a tagline to be a key factor in brand strategy success. A tagline that succinctly and powerfully communicates the brand’s promise is one of the quickest, easiest and least expensive ways to communicate the brand’s new position to internal and external audiences. It should consistently accompany the brand’s logo in situations outlined by the brand architecture. I believe that developing brand taglines (and elevator speeches) are the most important next steps one can take once a brand has…
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The AdHole
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Calling a Sexist a Sexist
8 Feb 2012 | 8:19 amMy disdain for GoDaddy.com's advertising tactics is no secret to those who know me – either in real life or through this blog. Every year, in my Obligatory Super Hole review of the game's commercials, I automatically give the company's spots F-minuses and forgo linking to the YouTube clips. This year was no exception. Also in this year's sexist crosshairs was Teleflora, which ran an ad to which I gave a one-word review: Telewhora.Thousands, and probably millions, of others feel as I do. But I'm linking to this blog from GSD&M writer Carlotta Stankiewicz because she is, wait for it,… -
Why "1984" Will Always Be the Only "1984"
6 Feb 2012 | 12:59 pmIt’s been the same for almost three decades now. The Super Bowl rolls into view and the world becomes all a-twitter with talk about which television commercials will or will not ascend as the true stars of the game. The general news media always gets into the act, too, inviting folks like the lovely Sally Hogshead or that not-quite-so-lovely Donny guy to comment on which spot will wow the 14 consumers who haven’t already seen every ad on YouTube. Local stations harass local agencies for their opinions. And, more than likely, every single interview, article and blog will make some… -
The Obligatory Super Hole VI
6 Feb 2012 | 7:36 amThe Obligatory Super Hole VI Six years in, I’m still clinging to the “those that don’t get to produce Super Bowl ads get to critique them.” This year, however, I’ve chosen to not offer letter grades for the spots (except GoDaddy.com’s automatic F’s). Because let’s not kid ourselves, anyone who was part of producing one of these bits occupies a more enviable position in the ad cosmos than I do. Even the AEs. I hope you know the rules by now: I only review ads shown during the four quarters of the game, so no pre- or post-game bits. No movie trailers, TV show promos or local… -
State Farm Has a Journey Moment
30 Jan 2012 | 2:12 pmProving yet again that writing, directing, casting and editing are everything (shocking), State Farm rolls out this subtle little gem of a spot. It's not quite a match for Allstate's "Mayhem" campaign, which continues rolling strong, but it certainly is a much more appealing "Journey moment" that Neal Schon is having. Ewwww. Later, Fox -
Priceliiiiiiiiiiiiine!
20 Jan 2012 | 8:43 amLooks like the Priceline Negotiator, aka William Shatner, has met his timely demise in a new spot from Butler, Shine, Stern & Partners. After 14 years of portraying the, what else, over-the-top doyen of travel deals, the 80-year-old Shatner is being shuffled off this particular advertising coil in way befitting both the character and the man who played him. I am, admittedly, a Shatner fan, having devoured his hamminess as a child watching "Star Trek" reruns and that "Twilight Zone" episode in which he spots gremlin eating the wing of the airplane he's on. I'll be sad to to the Negotiator…
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Why Advertising Sucks
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We should do this more often: Say Something Nice!
8 Feb 2012 | 9:10 am -
High Five Escalator RULES
8 Feb 2012 | 8:31 am -
How to advertise diet things correctly. Basically, LIE.
7 Feb 2012 | 1:48 pm -
Five Type of Women that Annoy: Me.
6 Feb 2012 | 5:02 pmThat's it. Ladies, I'm about to betray you. Nah, nah. It's not my fault. It's other bitches out there, real low life scum ovary-carrying humans who give the rest of us normal chicks a real bad name. Today, I'm going to commit the sin of writing a good tell all to the few good men out there. Why? 'Cause I'm tired of seeing great, amazing dudes get fucked over - and not in a wham bam thank you Mam way. I can't see another sad guy who doesn't deserve some shit from a fucked up chick! So listen up, guys out there. I'm going to give you a list of women that YOU NEED TO AVOID. I'll give you as much… -
Shit New Yorkers Say.
6 Feb 2012 | 12:09 pm
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Adrants
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James Franco Films Hot Hipsters For Jeans Campaign
8 Feb 2012 | 11:28 amIn what seems mildly akin to a bunch of 60's hipsters frolicking in LSD-infused splendor while hippy dippy music with shades of The Good, The Bad and the Ugly plays in the background, James Franco films his first ad campaign. -
TV's Greatest Night of Ads Takes a (Weak) Stab at Getting Social
7 Feb 2012 | 10:01 amThe $3.5 million Super Bowl ads have all come and gone, and the conversations - supercharged by social media - are in full swing. Or are they? -
Is Creating Ads For 3D Technology Worth It?
7 Feb 2012 | 9:10 amTo 3D or not to 3D. That is the question. Agencies and brands alike continue to second-guess this ever-growing technology as though it was the new Betamax of the digital age. Is it really worth the production complexity and added expense? -
Minka Kelly, Diet Coke Team For The Heart Truth Campaign
7 Feb 2012 | 8:45 amActress Minka Kelly and fashion designer Diane von Furstenberg have teamed up with Diet Coke and the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute for the organization's The Heart Truth campaign. -
Eight Year Old Critiques Super Bowl Ads
7 Feb 2012 | 8:35 amOh the honesty of children. Here we have eight year old Arturo giving his take on this year's Super Bowl commercials on behalf of Salt Lake City-based Crowell Advertising.
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Ryan Stephens Marketing
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Passion is Constantly in Flux…So Are You!
1 Feb 2012 | 7:23 pmTweet“This book (Incognito) was written over the course of a few years by several different people, all of whom were named David Eagleman, but who were somewhat different with each passing hour.” — David Eagleman Maybe this quote resonates with me because my passions are constantly in flux. In 2009 it was work and Generation Y. In 2010 it was about re-connecting with friends and finding happiness. In 2011 it was education reform and behavioral change. A great professor can make you passionate about a subject. Discovering you’re talented at a work task can make you… -
How to Find Your Passion in the Workplace
29 Jan 2012 | 9:52 pmTweetRamit Sethi is getting ready to launch his dream job course. Ordinarily leading up to their product launches I temporarily unsubscribe from even my favorite bloggers because I get tired of the ‘hard’ sell; HOWEVER, lately Ramit’s free stuff has been superior to most people’s paid products so I’ve consumed and bookmarked as much I could. I wish I could print it out, get it bound and give it to my friends currently job searching or trying to upgrade their current job situation. More importantly, I wish they’d read it and take action. One of the most… -
5 Ways to De-Stress in the Office
19 Jan 2012 | 6:17 amTweetIf you’re doing important work, work that matters, stress is inevitable. No matter how cool, calm and collective you are invariably there will be days where your workload, deadlines, work-life balance, etc. gets all up around you. You can hyperventilate and complain all day or you can take a deep breath and leverage these 5 ways to de-stress in the office. 1.) Attack the Most Impactful Work First Your projects aren’t going to complete themselves. Most of us breathe a sigh of relief when we mark something off of our to-do lists so determine what will add the most value to your… -
“Incognito” Book Review
10 Jan 2012 | 8:57 pmTweetFellow neuroscientists might claim that this book is derivative and vague, but David Eagleman’s “Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain“is not written for them – it’s written for the layman. And while the first few chapters might feel a little dense, the book builds momentum as Eagleman begins to tie the ideas together in later chapters. Here’s some of my highlights from the book. On how your brain interrogates the world: Brains reach out into the world and actively extract the type of information they need. The brain does not need to see everything… -
“Enterprise Social Technology” Book Review
2 Jan 2012 | 1:25 pmTweet“Enterprise Social Technology” is a book that flew under the radar in 2011. The book aims to be “a how-to manual that will teach you a process for implementing social technology in its most powerful form.” It wants to give you and your organization a leg up on leveraging social media, social networking and social relevance to change how your business operates and give you a leg up on the competition. And I genuinely feel like it does just that. There’s 12 steps (chapters) in the book and I’m confident that if you read and take action on each step your…
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Being Peter Kim
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Is social media free?
2 Feb 2012 | 12:22 amIn 2002, I was having a budget conversation with my CFO. I was general manager of the online store and we were discussing my requests for FTEs, technology upgrades, and marketing spend. The CFO asked me, "this is an online store...why do we need to spend any more money...doesn't it run itself?" (I'm 99% sure he wasn't joking.) This week, news has been circulating that FMCG company Procter & Gamble will eliminate 1,600 jobs and shift more budget into digital media. The headline over at Business Insider is a bit more incendiary: "P&G To Lay Off 1,600 After Discovering It's Free To…
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AdWeek: AdFreak
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James Franco Tries Advertising, Directs Spots for Seven Jeans
8 Feb 2012 | 11:21 amOh look, James Franco is doing something new with a camera. The actor, etc., is adding adman to his already-crowded resume by directing a series of 10 spots for designer jeans maker 7 For All Mankind (a brand also known simply as Seven). The brand won't start trickling out the clips on YouTube until Feb. 15. But it's teasing the campaign—in which Franco collaborated with Seven's creative agency, Lipman—with a lengthy breakdown in WWD and the behind-the-scenes video below, starring the back of Franco's head and the army of gyrating, scantily clad girls that's… -
Grainy Footage Reveals Draftfcb's Unorthodox Training Methods
8 Feb 2012 | 11:02 amLong has it been wondered: Where do Draftfcb creatives get their ideas? And how are Draftfcb account people so adept at dealing with clients? Thanks to the two videos below, we have our answers. It seems the creative process involves placing staffers in a "centrifuge for ideas" and extracting their insights in liquid form, before sending the workers back—wobbly but unharmed—to the creative department. The account folks have it even rougher. They're forced to scale and balance a giant, rickety, unstable "testing apparatus that simulates the client-agency… -
Doritos Pays Double to 'Crash the Super Bowl' Winners
8 Feb 2012 | 10:14 amDoritos is getting used to shelling out money to the amateurs in its Crash the Super Bowl contest. Last year, J.R. Burningham won $1 million after his "Pug Attack" topped the USA Today Ad Meter. This year, not one but two Doritos directors will each pocket $1 million—following USA Today's decision to split the Ad Meter into two separate rankings. Jonathan Friedman of Virginia Beach, Va., wins $1 million for his "Man's Best Friend" spot, which was the favorite of the traditional Ad Meter panel of 286 adult volunteers on Sunday night. And Kevin Willson of West… -
Was This the Best Movie Poster of 2011?
8 Feb 2012 | 7:38 amOnline film magazine Notebook's picks for the best movie posters of 2011 make for an interesting list. Most of them are for movies I've never heard of, but that's due to the international focus more than pretentiousness, I think. Chris Ware's poster for Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (full image after the jump) tops the list. Melancholia's poster is boring, but Burning Man is really neat. And Super has a Burnt Face Man feel to it that I like. And while I wasn't a huge fan of the Drive poster, it is refreshing to see a picture of Ryan Gosling without that… -
In Britain, Bus Shelter Ads Smell Like Delicious Baked Potatoes
31 Dec 1969 | 4:00 pmAh, the complex olfactory bouquet of the urban bus shelter. Trying to identify individual odors within such dense scent tapestries can be difficult, and most disturbing. That's not the case, however, at some locations in British cities like London and Manchester, where McCain Foods is installing 3-D ad panels that emit the aroma of freshly baked potatoes at the push of a button. Check out the picture. That "potato" looks like a big buttocks to me, but who am I to argue if those barmy Brits want to cop a feel or smear on some sour cream and chives? (Don't be so provincial,…
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Strategic Public Relations
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Links for 2012-02-06 [del.icio.us]
7 Feb 2012 | 12:00 amSuper Bowl Twitter, Facebook Use Up More Than 6X Over 2011 If you remember that mobile doesn't simply mean outside and that most everyone watching the game probably owned a mobile phone or had access to a laptop, the above is not a surprise. Advertisers had plenty of "conversation starters" -- from hashtags to shazam tags -- in their ads this year too. Balance your Mix of Stock and Flow Content Like A Pro | The Content Strategist The need for a mix of content and the advantages of mixing it. -
Links for 2012-02-05 [del.icio.us]
6 Feb 2012 | 12:00 amNYPL Labs | The New York Public Library New York Public Library is doing some interesting things in their labs. 4 Ways to Tweet as a Visual Brand Some helpful reminders from mashable that apply to more than visual tweets. Not sure I agree about only using Twitter. As a default, it makes sense. But if you're a luxury brand, for example, I'd suggest using instagram. It all depends on audience...per usual. -
Like Angry Birds [Flickr]
1 Feb 2012 | 3:38 pmprblog posted a photo: Great to see folks skipping the F icon and simply using the thumbs up. Makes sense as its a clear call to action. In fact, Facebook changed the Fan action to Like because twice as many people would click Like. And now we will be seeing similar actions offered on Facebook. It's a move to create more "lightweight user actions" on Facebook and create an environment of frictionless sharing. It helps their advertising for one. But it also makes it easier to participate on Facebook. -
Like Orange Tic Tacs [Flickr]
1 Feb 2012 | 3:38 pmprblog posted a photo: Great to see folks skipping the F icon and simply using the thumbs up. Makes sense as its a clear call to action. In fact, Facebook changed the Fan action to Like because twice as many people would click Like. And now we will be seeing similar actions offered on Facebook. It's a move to create more "lightweight user actions" on Facebook and create an environment of frictionless sharing. It helps their advertising for one. But it also makes it easier to participate on Facebook. -
Links for 2012-01-27 [del.icio.us]
28 Jan 2012 | 12:00 amTips for Better Listening based on 7 Types of Listeners | Lead Change Group There's a great stat about how much of communication involves listening. And it's a higher percentage than you think. Yet we're never taught about it in professional development of even college.
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Ogilvy Blog Aggregator
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Pinterest Hits 11 Million UMVs (and 8 Tips for Brands)
8 Feb 2012 | 9:02 amIn case you haven’t heard, last night TechCrunch announced that Pinterest hit 11.7 million UMVs, becoming the fastest standalone site ever to surpass 10 million monthly uniques. This presents a huge opportunity for brands, as you might have already read about here. The #1 driver of consumer purchases is word of mouth recommendations from friends, and Pinterest holds the power to drive authentic “word of eye” recommendations in a way that is changing the landscape of social commerce. How? The landing page for Pinterest is an endless visual stream of subtle product… -
Just another typical creative / strategic review…
8 Feb 2012 | 8:24 amJust another typical creative / strategic review… -
There is only one way to make an infographic about tattoos.
8 Feb 2012 | 8:18 amThere is only one way to make an infographic about tattoos. -
Genius… no really. How do you get into MIT? Here’s...
8 Feb 2012 | 8:15 amGenius… no really. How do you get into MIT? Here’s one way to get on their consideration list. Put your admissions package in a tube, fastens it to a balloon, and sends it 91,000 feet into near-space, of course. -
Captcha – Timeforaneyeexam?
8 Feb 2012 | 4:32 am[There is a video that cannot be displayed in this feed. Visit the blog entry to see the video.] Everybody encounters them from tine to time: Captchas. To detect whether the user is a human or a computer. Captchas are usually difficult to read. But some captchas are really hard to read…
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Web Ink Now
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MYTH: "My buyers are not on the Web"
5 Feb 2012 | 8:20 amI frequently hear from people that their buyers are not on the Web. This myth is used an excuse not to create a valuable Web site and to avoid creating content. Sorry to deliver a reality check, but the truth is that very few people are offline, particularly when you include lower cost mobile technology. In fact, there are more mobile phones in the world than toothbrushes. Of the 6 billion people on the planet, 4.8 billion have access to a mobile phone. I saw this phenomenon in action this week while on a one-week expedition in the Panamanian jungle. Together with seven other international… -
The advertising arms race now going to the edge of space
31 Jan 2012 | 3:17 amPerhaps you've seen the video Lego Man in Space that’s gone around recently. It's an interesting time-lapse sequence of a ride on a weather balloon and has generated two million views in five days. Whenever there is a new technology like this, it is inevitable that somebody will use it as a place to sell ads. Enter JP Aerospace, a company that flies a high altitude balloon, carrying ads, to the edge of space and returns photos for the sponsor to use. The JP Aerospace site says: "Creates impact! Gives customers a lasting impression of your logo or message! Provides a dramatic… -
Thinking Right (and Left) about Content Marketing
27 Jan 2012 | 1:11 pmAs I evaluate Web marketing such as blogs and websites, one thing I look for is evidence of both left-brain and right-brain thinking in the creation of the content. This obsession might seem trivial, but I guess my right-brain outlook on life causes me to take a holistic view of content. The right-/left-brain concept is widely credited to have developed from the thinking of American psychobiologist Roger Sperry in the late 1960s. Sperry's Nobel Prize-winning work opened whole fields of psychological and philosophical debate including the idea that there are two different sides of the… -
Playing for Change
23 Jan 2012 | 7:28 amWhen I first saw the original Playing for Change video Stand By Me on YouTube I was moved and fascinated and jumped for joy. Wow. As a music lover and collector of social media success stories, here was both music and social media triumphantly on display and coming together to support a good cause. I talked up the videos via social and in person to everyone I saw. Stand By Me now has 37 million views on YouTube and has sparked a movement. Now, Playing for Change has 15 videos in the Songs Around the World series with a combined 140 million views. If you haven't seen a Playing for Change video… -
Stop SOPA Silliness
18 Jan 2012 | 3:36 amIt didn't work with music: The music industry killed Napster and sued 16-year-olds to protect their dying business model of selling "albums" via top 40 radio. Instead of understanding the immense power of social media like YouTube as a marketing tool to sell single songs (iTunes) and streaming subscriptions (Spotify), the music industry honchos preferred to destroy in a ridiculous attempt to save the status-quo. Listened to top 40 radio recently? It didn't work with email: I get many times more unsolicited (and illegal) email than I did prior to CAN-SPAM. Tons of it from legitimate companies…
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Marketing & Strategy Innovation Blog
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So You Want To Be Customer-Centric? (video)
7 Feb 2012 | 7:32 amI spend a large part of my professional life telling companies that if they truly take their customer's interests to heart, these customers will reward them with their business, their recommendations and their support. But even though I preach this gospel, I have to admit that I never really understood the impact of super-promoters until I experienced it around my book "So You Want to Be Customer-Centric?". read more -
The Next 80% (manuscript)
7 Feb 2012 | 3:22 amThe following text is the manuscript to my presentation The next 80%. read more -
Research Claims that 25% of Tweets Are Not Worth Reading. So What?
6 Feb 2012 | 2:01 pmAccording to research from a team at Carnegie Mellon University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the Georgia Institute of Technology, we think that 25% of tweets are not worth reading. The study found that, when asked to rate tweets by people they follow, only 36% of tweets were marked favourably, 25% were marked less favourably and the balance (39%) received no strong feeling either way. read more -
Brand Experience Brief: Steak ‘n Shake Signature
6 Feb 2012 | 12:11 pm(Here’s my latest “brand experience brief” — insights and analysis of new and interesting restaurant and retail concepts.) read more -
Why Facebook Will Do Search and Why Google Needs Social
5 Feb 2012 | 10:12 amMark Zuckerberg posted a picture of himself in front of his computer, and an eagle-eyed blogger noticed that his version of Facebook sports a larger-than-usual search box. An unintended leak or not, Facebook competing in search is only a matter of time just as, in retrospect, it was inevitable that Google would integrate social elements deeper into its main product. read more
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PR-Squared - Social Media Marketing and Public Relations
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Open Letter to Havas CEO David Jones
8 Feb 2012 | 8:12 amHi Mr. Jones. I caught your MSNBC interview this morning with Morning Joe co-host Mika Brzezinski re: your new book, Who Cares Wins: Why Good Business is Better Business. You made some excellent points re: how transparency, authenticity and speed will win the day for corporations; about how companies who expect to do well must increasingly expect to do good, as it is becomes ever easier for consumers to suss out egregious behavior and punish bad actors (from un-friending to public humiliation). This is all well-worn territory for Social Media geeks, of course, but it’s always good… -
Facebook IPO is Good for Everybody
6 Feb 2012 | 6:35 amDepending on who you ask, the Facebook IPO will result in boundless glory or is destined to be remembered as the final pinprick in an impending burst of the current tech bubble. For my part, whereas in the past I likened Facebook to previous Walled Garden successes like AOL (the AOL of the early 90′s, not the AOL of today – which is a SHIFT client!), in the past 18 months or so I’ve only been impressed by Facebook’s ability to embed itself across the larger, open expanses of the Web. It “rides alongside” us as we surf, versus dictating how and where we experience the… -
Susan G. Komen PR Disaster: Lessons Learned
3 Feb 2012 | 11:27 amWow. It’s been nearly two weeks since my last blog post. Sorry about that. I was out sick. And wow, what a crazy time to sit on the sidelines… Facebook IPO. Hello! More on that in a future post. Susan G. Komen vs. Planned Parenthood. Sheesh! Let’s talk about that! (Caveat: I am a Blue State progressive; whose mother died of breast cancer; who marched on Washington as a college student in support of women’s rights; and whose dear-departed grandmother spoke with horror of the days prior to Roe v. Wade. Got all that? You’ve been warned.) Just as I started… -
It’s the End of the Web as We Know It … or, Speed Kills
23 Jan 2012 | 9:46 amThose of you who follow me on other social nets like Twitter or Facebook know that I am pretty opinionated when it comes to politics. Suffice to say that I am a card-carrying member of the “Liberal Coastal Elites.” (I try not to over-indulge or bore folks with it; and I certainly can play nice with my right-leaning friends.) I bring it all up only as a segue to the fact that I am a big fan of Andrew Sullivan’s Dish blog. Sullivan’s one of the big dogs in blogging; he’s been freshly-empowered by his move to the Daily Beast to experiment… -
Thoughts on a Twitterversary
19 Jan 2012 | 7:18 amLet’s take a ramble. One of those automated spambots on Twitter informed me that today was my 5–year anniversary of microblogging. Wow. Five years. Really? What was I up to five years ago? I was living in Boston, in-between my family’s quinquennial moves to San Francisco. My brain was on fire, as I’d hit upon a worthy successor to the Social Media News Release concept and was just a couple of weeks away from debuting the Social Media Newsroom template. As I look back, 2007 was a prolific time for the entire Social Media industry. It was not only the year Twitter…
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davefleet.com
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Trust in 2012: 4 Implications for Social Media
2 Feb 2012 | 9:00 amEdelman recently released the results of its 2012 Trust Barometer survey. Given the events of the last year, it’s hardly surprising that trust is decreasing pretty much across the board. That is, except in Canada. Results of the 2012 Canadian Trust Barometer Today we announced the Canadian results of the 2012 Edelman Trust Barometer at an event in Toronto. A few highlights from the Canadian survey: “A person like me” and regular employees both saw the biggest increase in trust in Canadian Barometer history. “A person like me” in particular has re-emerged as one… -
Dx3 Presentation: Blogger Relations – Getting the Insiders Onside
30 Jan 2012 | 3:00 amLast week I had the pleasure of presenting a revised approach to blogger relations, to a packed room at the inaugural Dx3 Canada digital trade show. Following the presentation, several attendees reached out to me asking that I post the presentation online. So, here it is. Getting the Insiders Onside – Communicating with Bloggers and Influencers View more presentations from Dave Fleet. Key points from the presentation: The blogger relations process is broken. It focuses on transactions between bloggers and PR people, and is overly adversarial both due to its nature and the way that… -
Seven Social Media Insights on CES
18 Jan 2012 | 4:00 amBy now you’ve probably had more than your fill of analysis from the many, many products and announcements revealed at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES). Now that I’ve had a few days to decompress, I thought I’d do something slightly different and provide a few insights from a social perspective. CES is not a social media conference (duh) CES is, first and foremost, an electronics show. It attracts a very different audience compared to conferences like SXSW or BlogWorld. While those social-focused conferences are fertile ground when it comes to social media programs, CES is… -
My 2012 Reading Challenge: 36 Books
9 Jan 2012 | 4:00 amFor the last two years I’ve set myself a challenge – one I adopted from Julien Smith - to read at least 26 books per year. That’s one every two weeks. In 2010 I managed 26 books; last year I managed 32. Stand-out books for me last year included: Fiction: The Hound of the Baskervilles A Game of Thrones Series (4-Book Set) The Book of Lost Things The Last Ringbearer Non-Fiction: Workarounds That Work (here’s my review) Game-Based Marketing Manager’s Guide to Crisis Management (review coming soon) Brand Turnaround: How Brands Gone Bad Returned to Glory and the 7… -
Six important shifts for social media in 2012
31 Dec 2011 | 4:00 amIt’s hard to believe we’re about to tick over to another calendar year. So, as usual, I got to thinking about the shifts I think companies need to make in their social media activities in the next year. These aren’t necessarily trends that are already happening (although I’d like to say they are), but they’re certainly where my head is at and hopefully where others are, too. Here are six shifts I hope to see in social media use by business in 2012. Better objective-setting Over the last couple of years, we’ve seen a slow maturation in the way companies…
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Social Media Marketing
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Foursquare in Context
29 Jan 2012 | 8:11 pmIf you're a regular user of services like Twitter or Foursquare, you've undoubtedly been met with skeptics and naysayers who wonder aloud, "Why would I want to tell anyone what I'm having for lunch?" or "Why would I care if someone is having a ham sandwich?"Fair enough, but the inquisitors fail to take into account the all-important factor in any conversation, whether it's in person or online: context.Context is what allows us to make sense of much of the world around us. "He's so bad!" could have two very different meanings, depending on the the rest of the conversation surrounding it. With… -
Social Media and Travel
26 Jan 2012 | 9:37 pmIf you're like me, you spend a good deal of time on the road. Whether it's at an airport, on a train or in a car, you're mobile and your digital life is mobile too.The pervasiveness of tablets and smartphones (in addition to the already ubiquitous laptop) is growing daily. Just this week, Apple announced that it sold 37 million iPhones and 15.4 million iPads in the fourth quarter of 2011 alone. It means that more of us are doing things on the web (or mobile web, as the case may be) while we're on the go, and there are certain things those of us in the digital world look for when we travel -… -
Revealing a New Ford in a New Way
13 Dec 2011 | 6:00 pmFord Motor Company has been at the forefront of social media for some time. The Fiesta Movement, the Explorer reveal on Facebook, Doug the Spokespuppet, Ford Social (formerly known as The Ford Story) and being the first brand on Google+ all stand as examples of Ford's success that spans from clever campaigns to a daily commitment to engage.Ford played a significant part in how the automotive industry thinks about social media (and in some cases how large companies think about social media) and now, as we near the 2012 North American International Auto Show (NAIAS), at Ford we have an… -
Infographic: 5 Companies That Are Rocking Social Media
29 Nov 2011 | 8:47 amThis infographic was created by Voltier Digital, a content marketing agency based in Florida, specializing on the creation and promotion of impactful content marketing campaigns for businesses of all sizes.We all know the usual names of companies that are doing well in social media. I thought it might be interesting to take a look at some of the lesser-knowns and why they've had success, either on an ongoing basis or with some one-off efforts that stood out.And since infographics are all the rage, what better way to look at them? Of course, for SEO purposes, I've listed them here as… -
Twitter Business Guide
7 Oct 2011 | 8:53 pmI was recently introduced to a compact guidebook for businesses trying to get a sense of Twitter. The microblogging site that allows you to update in no more than 140 characters at at time is deceptively complex and nuanced - especially for a newcomer.This short guide, entitled Twitter Business Guide: Communication and Marketing was written by Jean-Christophe Barré and Dr. Andreas Schroeter and in just 32 pages covers some of the things that may be keeping you and your business away from this platform. For someone who is new to Twitter, this e-book will prove a helpful compass as you…
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Six Pixels of Separation - Marketing and Communications Insights - By Mitch Joel at Twist Image
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How To Get Started As A Business Leader
7 Feb 2012 | 1:04 pmYour life and your success is not obvious. It's not a given. It's not a direct path. I often say that the best careers in marketing (specifically the ones that have a digital/new media slant) are very squiggly. They involve everything from stumbling through university and very crappy jobs to bad choices and decisions that were driven by financial debt instead of personal opportunity. Every year, I do my best to attend the TED conference. A couple of years ago, the name Chris Sacca was bandied around as someone who everyone wanted to not only meet, but hang out with. He was (and still is) a… -
Digital Tumbleweeds And Virtual Crickets
7 Feb 2012 | 6:51 amIf you publish online get ready for a lesson in humility. Brands quit publishing content for the exact same reason that many individuals stop publishing content: the brutal reality that nobody cares. As someone who creates and publishes a lot of content online (roughly six Blog posts and one audio Podcast every week), there is both a certain humility and instant humiliation that comes along with the process. The cream rises to the top. Even in a world where two hundred billion videos get viewed every month, the cream still does rise to the top (as the saying goes). It's just that we seem to… -
CTRL AT DEL - The Business Book
5 Feb 2012 | 11:30 amCTRL ALT DEL is the title of my second business book. It will be published in Spring 2013. Following is the official press release and some media mention of the pending project... BUSINESS PLUS To Publish CTRL ALT DEL by Mitch Joel Author of the best-selling business book, Six Pixels of Separation, and President of award-winning Digital Marketing agency, Twist Image, signs with Business Plus for the release of his sophomore book. NEW YORK, February 1, 2012 /PRNewswire/ - Business Plus, an imprint of Grand Central Publishing (Hachette Book Group USA), has announced it will publish CTRL ALT… -
Madison Avenue And Mountain View Collide For The Future Of Marketing
5 Feb 2012 | 10:41 amEpisode #291 of Six Pixels of Separation - The Twist Image Podcast is now live and ready for you to listen to. This is also episode #20.20 of Across The Sound. Joseph Jaffe is widely regarded as one of the top Marketing Bloggers (Jaffe Juice) and Podcasters (both Jaffe Juice in audio and Jaffe Juice TV in video). He is the author of three excellent books (Life After The 30-Second Spot, Join The Conversation and Flip The Funnel). A long-time friend (and one of the main inspirations behind the Six Pixels of Separation Blog and Podcast), we've decided to hold monthly conversations, debates and… -
Six Links Worthy Of Your Attention #85
3 Feb 2012 | 8:40 amIs there one link, story, picture or thought that you saw online this week that you think somebody you know must see? My friends: Alistair Croll (BitCurrent, Year One Labs, GigaOM, Human 2.0, the author of Complete Web Monitoring and Managing Bandwidth: Deploying QOS in Enterprise Networks), Hugh McGuire (The Book Oven, LibriVox, iambik, PressBooks, Media Hacks) and I decided that every week or so the three of us are going to share one link for one another (for a total of six links) that each individual feels the other person "must see". Check out these six links that we're…
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Don't drink the koolaid
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What we’re reading this week: Pinterest
3 Feb 2012 | 9:32 amYou may have heard a thing or two about Pinterest in the last few months. The social bookmarking site that allows brides, party planners, hoarders and marketers alike to collect and share things online is now making its way into the mainstream and causing businesses to pay attention to this oh-so-addicting thing we call pinning. I’ve read a number of blog posts within the past week contributing to my thoughts on why consumer marketers should quickly pay attention to Pinterest. Here are a few of the best reads: Pinterest Drives More Traffic Than Google+, YouTube and LinkedIn Combined Zoe… -
Google – The Thread to Success in Tourism Search
30 Jan 2012 | 9:59 amBrett Barash, VP at Digital Edelman, presented some interesting statistics at the recent ONE Travel Conference in Orlando, Florida. It doesn’t come as much of a surprise that 66% of US leisure travelers use the Internet to research upcoming trips. But if this doesn’t convince every business that relies in any way on tourists for revenue that a relevant and compelling presence on the Internet is important to survival, I don’t know what will. What really caught my attention in his presentation was the life cycle of a travel seeker online. People seeking information about a… -
Coopertition and the State of US Travel Tourism
26 Jan 2012 | 9:26 amLast week I attended the ONE Travel Conference for Shopping, Dining and Cultural Tourism in Orlando. I wasn’t exactly sure what to expect, but the speaker line up looked good and I thought the conference’s focus on shopping, dining and cultural heritage made sense; it certainly hit our agency’s sweet spot in consumer marketing. The women who co-presented the conference Rosemary McCormick, President of Shop America Alliance and Sheila Armstrong, Executive Director of U.S. Cultural & Heritage Tourism Marketing Council are a formidable pair with surprising energy, a… -
Ads from a Consumer’s Perspective
18 Jan 2012 | 10:26 amI recently went to the San Diego Auto Show and it was awesome! I remember my dad dragging me along to the Los Angeles Auto Shows as a kid. Aside from the time I got to spend with him, I never had an interest in any of the cars or what was going on. The San Diego Auto Show changed my mind. My car is 9 years old now and I’m starting to think – maybe I should get a new car? I definitely have a couple of years left on my 2003 eclipse, if I want them. But seeing all the new cars made me seriously think about making a purchase. As a person who has worked in media my entire life, and… -
3 core advertising trends to watch in 2012
12 Jan 2012 | 9:15 amHello 2012. The year flew by fast didn’t it? Do you feel overwhelmed with all the information out there these days? Things are changing so quickly it’s hard to keep up, even for the super techno genius. Even though technology is evolving at light speed, what we really need to pay attention to is how to use these tools to best communicate with our target audiences. As marketers we need to understand the audiences we intend to interact with and how we can best achieve a valuable interaction. Technology will continue to evolve and offer us different avenues to communicate, for commerce, for…
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Michael Durwin
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Product Review: 8x Zoom Lens
6 Feb 2012 | 7:12 amI recently ordered an 8x zoom lens for my iPhone. Digital zoom on an iPhone looks pretty terrible and of course you can’t zoom the video camera at all. This seriously limits potential video shots and needed to be remedied. I already have a 2x zoom which doesn’t do much so a greater zoom was necessary. I happened across a blog post on GeekSugar that reviewed an iPhone lens wallet that showed a telephoto lens. I followed the link and ta da: PhotoJoJo. I placed my order very easily, something most ecommerce stores could learn from. I received my new lens on Friday. Here it is:… -
Product Review: Hague Mini Motion-Cam Stabilizer
25 Jan 2012 | 7:41 pmI did a little research on camera stabilizers because I found any moving footage was every choppy. I’ve known about Steadicam for years, they were used in both the MTV and Pantene commercials I worked on. I needed a Steadicam for my iPhone! I had no idea if such a thing existed but lo and behold it did! Sort of. Most stabilizer manufacturers make a prosumer device for small, light weight consumer cameras, perfect for an iPhone. I checked out reviews, specs and videos for stabilizers from Steadicam, Hague, Lensse and some great DIY stabilizer videos. Seeing as how I don’t have a… -
Review of Splice and SlowMo
23 Jan 2012 | 11:28 amWhile working on my iPhone film, I’ve been testing various editing applications, many of which I’ve mentioned already. I wanted to share more detailed info on a few of them. Tis post covered SlowMo and Splice. The former is strictly for slow motion, the later handles editing and slow motion. I won’t be reviewing Splice as an editing tool, you’ll see why soon. SlowMo SlowMo is pretty basic; shoot or load video, slow it down, purview and export the final footage. Splice Cool opening page and easy interface for an app that handles editing, cropping, slow motion. As you… -
A New England Love Story Documentary Part 5
22 Jan 2012 | 11:07 amI finally got a chance to do some lighting tests using my SIMA (SL-10HD) LED light. It connects via cold shoe to my AR-4i, OWLE, or my iPhone via its connector arm and iPhone tripod adaptor. The SIMA uses 2 AA batteries, has no DC input. It comes with an arm that allows you to attach it to a tripod, or tripod adaptor-equipped iPhone. It provides 600 lumens for 45-60 minutes. Here are some test photos and a test video. Share and Enjoy: -
A New England Love Story Documentary Part 4
16 Jan 2012 | 5:44 pmI spent the day working on my script. I had been using Evernote for writing until it became useless. When typing the app froze, when saving it crashed. Apparently users have been having this problem for months with no resolution. So, I switched to Pages, Apples version of Word. Unfortunately there is no movie script app and formatting in the iPad was seriously slowing me down. I spent some time today checking out script writing apps on the iTunes store. There weren’t many, only 2-3 of the apps below are for film script writing, and I found one other under “script”, but that…
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Ingenioustries
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How to get hired in the communications industry
6 Feb 2012 | 12:47 pmIntroduction I’m writing this post because I’ve had a lot of success getting great jobs in a very competitive industry. And I’ve helped a lot of people get jobs, too. I have chats over coffee or beer every few weeks with people looking for advice. I tell them all essentially the same things, and it’s worked out well for quite a few of them. So I thought I’d write this stuff down and share it with a wider audience. Connections When you’re trying to get a job, you need to think about your odds, and what game you’re playing. If you’re responding… -
Take the No BS Challenge!
31 Jan 2012 | 7:56 amJargon is created when a group of people discuss the same subjects and ideas often, so they require a shorthand to express complicated thoughts quickly. See: scientists. Jargon is also created when a group of insiders want to exclude outsiders from fully understanding what they’re talking about. See: lawyers. And, increasingly, agencies. Before I took a commanding lead. Recently, some coworkers and I took a No BS Challenge. Frightened into action after identifying with too many of these, we tried to avoid saying nonsense words in place of real, understandable phrases. Whoever used the… -
You don’t actually care about Facebook’s design changes
21 Sep 2011 | 12:14 pmYou just like to complain. That’s really my argument, and I could leave it right there. But for fun, let’s proceed down this path for a second. First, the design changes all the time. My feeling is that you’ve complained every other time, but your behavior has not changed at all. Leading me to question immediately how much you actually care. Second, imagine Facebook suddenly turned into a pay service. Because, right now, it’s free. Totally free. Yes, they might be selling your information to other people. Yes, you have to look at ads (oh no!). Yes, they make money off… -
Reading in a blockbuster economy
17 Sep 2011 | 9:25 amThe supposed insight that, “I think ebook readers like the Kindle are neat, but I will always enjoy reading a real book,” is one of the most aggressively pretentious statements that the current generation insists on repeating. Of course you like real books. Don’t we all? The segment of the population that prefers to read long-form prose on a computer screen or even the unfortunately named “e-ink” is vanishingly small. Your artful swoons about liking the feel and smell of paper books are shared and repeated by almost every single one of your peers. But you are… -
If you can talk, you can write.
25 Jul 2011 | 9:00 amTo my writing classes I used later to open by saying that anybody who could talk could also write. Having cheered them up with this easy-to-grasp ladder, I then replaced it with a huge and loathsome snake: “How many people in this class, would you say, can talk? I mean really talk?” That had its duly woeful effect. - Christopher Hitchens I don’t consider myself a great writer, but I typically say writing, if forced to state a strong suit. But perhaps that says more about my other abilities than my way with words. In any case, I find Hitch’s quote above especially interesting.
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Creativity_Unbound
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When did advertising get so small?
7 Feb 2012 | 11:34 amI’ve come around to agreeing that the best Super Bowl spot (above) only ran in Canada. I don’t know about you, but I haven’t run into anyone in the advertising or marketing business who wasn’t hugely disappointed with the commercials that ran last Sunday. It made all of advertising seem tired, old and in need of a serious makeover. Even among the 25 students in the class I teach at Boston University, consensus seemed to be that all we got were recycled ideas (Honda), agencies struggling to extend past successes (VW, Chrysler), and sad attempts to replace humor with something more… -
Seven observations on the 2012 Super Bowl ads
31 Jan 2012 | 9:06 amHonda emailed all of its customers a link to their new spot You’re probably thinking, oh great, another Superbowl blog post. I know that’s what I’m thinking whether I’m reading one or writing one. But there are some interesting developments worth noting. Given the cost of advertising on the game, the pressure to run a memorable spot and the vocal participation of viewers on Twitter, Facebook and online polls, advertisers have to pull out all the stops if they expect to win on both effectiveness and public reaction. Here are some practices, if not possible trends, worth noting. Super… -
A brief history of advertising
24 Jan 2012 | 1:25 pmWelcome to Strategic Creative Development View more presentations from edward boches Thought I’d share a deck I recently used to kick off Strategic Creative Development, a class I’m teaching this semester at Boston University’s College of Communication. The premise behind the syllabus is simple: advertising is no longer about making ads. At least not all of the time. Now it’s as much about digital experiences, gaming dynamics, mobile utility, Facebook apps, and creatively leveraging the interest graph as it is about crafting a message. Of course you know that. Nevertheless, it was fun… -
Brandbowl is back with new features
19 Jan 2012 | 6:15 pmBrandbowl is back with more features than ever It’s that time of year again. The online Superbowl party that Mullen started three years ago to celebrate the age of Twitter is well into development. If you remember, we began our annual project when there weren’t very many ad types on Twitter. In 2009, most of the industry was still like “huh?” A few of us at Mullen, the kind folks at Radian 6, and some friends like Sally Hogshead and Lisa Hickey made the effort to get ad land excited. We launched what was then called Trash Talk from the Twitter Section, shared instructions for how to… -
Can advertising really help Bank of America?
15 Jan 2012 | 12:35 pmThe bank we love to hate is looking for a new advertising agency. While still the second largest bank in America – JP Morgan recently snuck past BofA in assets, $2.289 trillion to $2.219 trillion – Bank of America’s stock – both on Wall Street and on Main Street has plummeted. It’s share price toppled by more than half in 2011 and its public opinion fell even more sharply. In fact it’s hard to find much positive sentiment anywhere. The Occupy Wall Street movement targeted the financial giant at every opportunity. A congressman from the bank’s home state of North Carolina went…
