Tony Corinda, the famous magician and mentalist, wrote in his classic textbook 13 Steps to Mentalism that there are three general topics which nearly everyone wants psychic predictions on. Knowing these makes the job of a mentalist on stage incredibly easy, as just providing the hook into any of the topics gets people talking about…
I recently had the opportunity to spend a few hours observing (not playing, I know the house odds!) people at a casino during a business conference. What a superb experience – not as a player, but as a marketer, to see how casinos manage the end user experience for maximum profit. Imagine for a minute…
If you’ve ever played any character in World of Warcraft, you know about the diminishing returns of gear. If you’ve never played Warcraft, it works something like this: once you’ve reached the top level of growth for your character (currently level 80, soon to be 85), any gains you get to make your character better…
We hate salesmen trying to sell us stuff but we love going to street fairs with lines of merchants wanting to sell us stuff. Why? We hate high pressure sales but we love going to expos like the Big E where barkers shout out the highest pressure pitches you could possibly ever receive. Why? We…
The passion funnel is much less dirty than it sounds. For every discussion of monetization in new media, there’s an equal discussion about the amateur, the practitioner who does something for the pure love of it and not for money. However, amateurs can still take a great deal of knowledge from the professional world and…
Last night I had the opportunity to attend Radian6’s Rockstars of Social CRM. Interesting event. The panel discussion was mostly on interaction with customers, but all of the side conversations throughout the night made it absolutely epic. Some highlights: Talking with Olivier Blanchard about the ultimate evolution of social media and speculating what true mastery…
I had an epiphany of sorts in the shower. What a lot of new media folks talk about – audience building, impressions, and the dreaded M word, monetization – is not marketing. Marketing is the sharing of ideas. So what is all the stuff we in new media talk about? Sales. Whether it’s pay per…
