When I travel on business, I occasionally do pick up things from my travels, such as interesting trade show giveaways, the random souvenir, client materials, etc. After a few trips, you learn to minimize what you pack and travel with. Going on the road is easy – you have total control over what you pack.…
I’ve had the pleasure and privilege of speaking at the Hawai‘i Tourism Association’s annual conference in Honolulu, a gorgeous city. I’d not been to Honolulu before, so it was fascinating to walk around a city in which Japanese is more or less the de facto second language. Signs, menus, directions – all have Japanese versions…
One of the real world marketing questions I’m asked often is whether events and conferences matter, from a marketing point of view. Do they help to generate business? The answer is a qualified yes – as long as you do it right. First, if you don’t know why you’re going, don’t go. “Because our competitors…
One of the questions marketers have struggled with in recent days is how to make all these new video services work to drive business. How do you make Periscope, Blab, Meerkat, etc. generate some actual results? How can we measure the effectiveness of our online video efforts? First, let’s establish what we want to accomplish…
Back in May, Facebook announced Instant publishing for certain publishers as a way of increasing the prominence of their content in the News Feed. Publishers push their content directly into Facebook, rather than linking out to their sites. Since then, there’s been a recurring mantra among marketers that long-form content directly on social networks must…
Data is neutral. It’s amoral. Data doesn’t speak for itself, despite what many marketers say. Data by itself is just a thing. What you do with the data is what gives it value. How you interpret it gives it value. I wrote about this at length in Marketing Blue Belt, but I thought it worth…
My teacher Stephen Hayes pointed out recently that conformity seems to be on the rise again. As someone who grew up during the 1950s, he’d certainly have the perspective and experience to know this, but we can see it for ourselves. Despite tools and technologies being more freeing than ever in our communications capabilities, our…
One of the most important tasks you will ever face as a manager in marketing (or manager of anything) is developing your second-in-command. With a strong second-in-command, you can do things like travel to speak at events, do advanced research and development, focus only on your top priorities for maximum productivity, or even go on…
Chris Brogan recently asked, after attending PodCamp Pittsburgh, whether it makes sense for unconferences to bundle together with similar events. The answer to this question depends on goals and strategy. Traditional conferences have very different business imperatives than unconferences like PodCamp. PodCamp is more of a movement, a decentralized idea that isn’t a sustainable business…
Mark Schaefer recently posed the interesting question, “Is this the most difficult time to be in marketing?” Maybe. To be certain, many of the factors Mark listed, such as overwhelming amounts of information and rapidly shifting change are valid and true. That said, what really makes marketing either difficult or not today is dependent on…
