• ONLINE SPIN
    What Makes A Great Strategy Offsite? Customers
    What makes a great management offsite meeting? Significant and positive impact on your company strategy, of course. And to stop the meeting from becoming a huddle of managers talking strategy amongst themselves, add one important ingredient: customer participation.
  • ONLINE SPIN
    One Small Asterisk, One Leap For Digital Media
    Here's one of those moments when you realize how quickly media is changing: when registering with a content-sharing community, an email address is optional, but a mobile phone number is required. That's what I found when signing up for Zannel. Not long ago, such sites wouldn't even ask for your mobile number, but now it's all they need. All that changed here was the position of an asterisk, but it signified something much bigger. Mobile phones, which a couple years ago seemed ill-suited for anything but talking (and many couldn't do that particularly well), are becoming the default content production …
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    Kids Deliver The Message Effectively
    This past week I put on my "observational glasses." These are the glasses I wear when I'm trying to act like a student of the world and examine what's going on around me in an attempt to spot trends. I observe conversations around me, I observe presentations given in my presence, and I observe what I see on TV and what I read in magazines as well as what I see online. There were two trends which I observed this past week that left me scratching my head because they seemed to contradict one another -- until I remembered the …
  • ONLINE SPIN
    More On: Is Google Making Marketers Stupid?
    Playing off a fantastic piece in The Atlantic, last week I wrote a post entitled "Is Google making Marketers Stupid?" I even posted the question on LinkedIn as well, sharing it specifically with 40 of my contacts that I wanted to get thoughts from. The response and discussion that followed have been interesting.
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    Don't Mess With The MIT
    Greetings  dear readers. I'm not sure if anyone is out there. Seems like most are cramming in their holidays. Those of you in the good ole USA are most likely preparing to work-hard-play-hard so you can get out and enjoy a long Labor Day weekend. I myself have recently had a major life change. I've gone from being self-employed to a full-time employee of Sapient. I'm thrilled to bits, but traveling while writing to you. Other than the close of the Olympics in Beijing last night and the same old political advertising, not much is happening in the …
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    Drivers Of The Digital Habit: Librarian Dreams, Self-Interest Or One-Upmanship?
    During a recent conference, I heard Lee Siegel ruminate on the relationship between humans and the digital world. In a discussion on his book "Against the Machine," he and a moderator covered questions of how and why we engage online and across emergent electronic platforms. The theme of the book, "being human in the age of the electronic mob," plus the topics of the conference -- the onset and optimization of social media, engaging with the blogosphere, reputation management -- kept the conversation on a particular tension.
  • ONLINE SPIN
    Confronting Friction & Risk Head-On
    What keeps promising start-ups from turning into great companies? What keeps them from flopping after a series of otherwise early successes? Having just returned from a company strategy offsite, I've been thinking a lot about those questions. Of course, all companies are different, and there's no universal formula for success. All we know is that most start-ups fail. However, there's one characteristic I've seen present in the companies that made it; and lacking in the promising companies and managers that didn't. It's the instinct and conviction to confront friction and risk head-on. It's to do so with urgency, persistence, precise …
  • ONLINE SPIN
    Girl Power
    Think about consumer decisions for a moment. Who do you think makes the bulk of them? Right, it's women. According to a recent American Marketing Association newsletter, the economic power of women is a whopping $3.7 trillion (USD) representing the greatest economic force the world has seen in the last decade.
  • ONLINE SPIN
    Is Google Making Marketers Stupid?
    Even to people who have not spent a day of their lives as "professional" marketers, it's common sense that purchases don't just happen -- and the purchase process has been refined to a near-science amongst marketers. Depending on what book you read, the purchase process funnel runs from awareness, to perception, to preference, to consideration, to purchase. Yet a disproportionate share of online marketing budget is dedicated only toward bottom-of-the-funnel activities, specifically measuring the click-through to purchase. Why?
  • ONLINE SPIN
    The Most Sarcastic Column You Will Ever Read
    I want to take a moment to write about a topic that gets little to no coverage anymore... I want to write about non-rich media. I want to write a column this week that tells you all how great a campaign can be when you run old-fashioned, three-frame GIF ads and you measure them based on click-through. Why not, right? With all the buzz in our industry about over-the-page ads, in-unit video and Flash vs. Silverlight, is it really possible that we're overlooking the simplistic beauty of an ad that says "click here if you like X product"?
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