Jeff Pulver, co-founder of the Vonage Internet phone company and creator of the VON and 140 conferences, has an expression that you absolutely must take to heart: “We live or die on our database.” In the age of social networking and social media, it’s easy to get lost in the clouds. It’s easy to believe…
Plenty has been written about the pros and cons of employees engaging in social media at work, officially or unofficially. Plenty of people have gained and lost jobs through the judicious or indiscrete usage of social media and new media, but by and large, most corporations haven’t truly accepted full employee participation in new media.…
Marketing pet peeve of mine: someone who has to append the word cool (or its variants) to any marketing effort. Share this cool video! Tell your friends about this cool product! Try our fun new service! Cool, in the sense of being popular, is a rigidly one-way label. Nothing you ever do is cool. Nothing…
One of the enduring misconceptions in marketing is that it takes a long time, a lot of work, and a lot of resources to truly empower a brand, to make it stick in your head, and to eventually be a part of your mental calculus when you go to buy something later on. That misconception…
Over the weekend, my Warcraft guild managed to down 4 bosses (really big bad guys) in Ulduar. Two of the bosses posed two separate challenges for healers. One boss, a giant robot named XT-002, hands out lots of damage over a relatively long time to your entire team. Your healers must continuously refill the team’s…
Here’s a quick test to determine if your marketing sucks or not. Scrape off the labels, names, and brands in your marketing collateral and see if you can tell if the company/product/service is still unquestionably you, or if it could be anyone at all – maybe not even in your industry. Try it with a…
One of the “secrets” that one of my teachers, Ken Savage of the Winchendon Martial Arts Center, says is that if a technique is not working, something in the previous step went wrong. If a throw isn’t working, perhaps your footwork or positioning in the entry was wrong. If a kata (pre-arranged routine) isn’t working…
Here’s a question for all the folks who say that brand and reputation are important. How do you value brand? How do you value reputation? How do you know when your efforts at branding and reputation are paying off? This is something that folks who are community managers like Amber Naslund and DJ Waldow struggle…
Take a look at this photo of the coffee stand here at the office: It’s bland. It’s boring. It tries to cram everything relevant into one picture so that customers don’t miss anything. It’s taken by someone who knows little to nothing about photographic composition, so it’s shot square on with no sense of depth,…
It’s Friday. Let’s have a little bit of fun. One of the things that makes me productive during the workday? The right audio. Sometimes the audio is training, most of the time it’s good tunes. Here’s some of what’s on my iPod while the day is flying by. You’ll notice that for the most part,…
