Improvement and Change

I learned something from my last few posts: The people who read this blog like to respond by e-mail. OK, maybe I’m generalizing based on just a few events (e-mails in response to posts), but I do get e-mail, and I don’t get many comments.
I didn’t intend to experiment to find out how my “market” [...]

The Visible Experience

Experience counts. I don’t mean work experience, or the kind of wisdom that gives you insight, but the experience your customer (or prospective customer) has interacting with your company. Your customer’s Experience is the heart of your brand, and the heart of your customer’s decision to stay your customer.
Last week, I had two experiences which [...]

Disrupting Because of…

Doc Searls defines what he calls the because effect
This is what you get when your new business isn’t just about inventing and controlling technologies and standards, but about taking advantage of the new opportunities opened up by fresh new technologies and standards. For example, making money because of blogging, or RSS, or desktop Linux, or [...]

Being in the conversation

The phrase I hear in the marketing world almost every day is “the conversation is happening whether or not you are part of it.” This is usually followed by an admonishment to the marketing authority to become part of the conversation in some way, usually by trying to bring it to your own site/territory.
It’s good [...]

Staring at your navel

David Armano, author of Logic+Emotion, gives some highlights of a Bain & Co. study.
Executive anxieties about losing touch with their customers is driving higher and higher usage of customer tools such as CRM and segmentation. These tools have moved from below average use to second and third place, respectively, in the 10 years since Bain [...]

Engaging Conversation

From the Business Week article It’s the Conversation Economy, Stupid
Marketers are finding themselves in an increasingly frantic race to get people talking about their brands. The desire to produce something “viral” is nearly ubiquitous in the marketing world. But it’s unclear who exactly “consumers” are these days. We don’t even know what that word means [...]

Mass collaboration?

From Buzz Marketing for Technology:
Capturing this institutional knowledge and leveraging it across the organization is the power of Enterprise 2.0. Enterprise 2.0 tools are designed for individual contribution and grass roots, bottom-up type development. They must be simple to use in order to draw users to swarm around key pieces of knowledge, tagging and posting [...]

Leaders and Followers

Here’s the assumption: Leaders, generically, are the people who are out in front, who are in some way taking charge, and setting tone, trend and direction. In terms of following trends, they are the people most of us tend to follow. We listen to what they think is cool and interesting, and then go look [...]

The speed of buzz

Earlier this week I watched Robert Scoble on his book tour talk about his ideas on how blogging from within a company changes the nature of the conversation with the customer. He should know - and I agree with most of his premise (I’d disagree that ‘buzz’ is unique to the blogosphere, but it’s certainly [...]

Hugh Macleod

I couldn’t have said it better myself (cartoon by Hugh Macleod):