Uncovering possibilities, purpose, passion for leadership, marketing, sales
I hate to say I told you so, but Conde Nast this morning announced that it is closing Portfolio Magazine. Back in September 2007 I wrote a post, “Portfolio Magazine: Slick but will it stick,” examining why I didn’t think this business publication would make it.
The real reason wasn’t the economy or advertising decline. Read the post for details, but in summary the magazine had too much high anxiety, too few trend, how-to, and apsirational stories.
It was pretty, though.
Last year shipments of Macs were up a whopping 32.7 percent, according to Gartner. Today’s San Francisco Chronicle has an article, "Apple edges into the mainstream." So why would a company like Intuit ignore this growing market — and, worse, torture Mac users?
My firm switched over to Macs during the holidays without much of a hiccup. That is until we turned to our financials, which we run on QuickBooks.
With still no luck in downloading and importing transaction data from my bank into QB after many service calls and work-arounds, I decided to join the QuickBooks Mac online community
I didn’t find answers in the community, but I did experience just how frustrated and downright angry people are with Intuit about the difficulty of making QB work for the Mac. Holy Moly! Talk about an unintentional way to ruin a brand’s reputation among a large and growing segment of consumers.
I don’t know at this point if I’ll shop around for a bank that can connect with QB for Macs,run our financials on my old PC., or install Windows on our Macs. But I do know that I’ll follow Intuit’s actions to see how closely they’re paying attention the growing Mac market trend, how seriously they’re listening to their Mac customers, and how skillfully they use their online community to turnaround angry consumers. (Or not.)
If you’re interested in social media trends, tools and advice, you might want to come to the Boston Social Media Club/PRSA event this Thursday, Jan. 1o at Bentley College at 6 p.m.: “Beyond Blogging: PR and Today’s Social Media Revolution.”
The session will be moderated by C.C. Chapman, co-founder and principal of The Advance Guard; panelists include:
Every once and a while you see a TV ad that is so good you want to share it. Here’s one for Jeep Liberty that makes me smile every time I see it.
At last! A simple, intuitive ways to edit videos. And it’s free. Check out VideoThang, digital editing software so easy that even adults can use it.
While the Mac crowd has had iMovie, VideoThang provides something even better for the PC crowd. For years I’ve tried to make Adobe Premiere do its thing but it was too much work. Now I can look slick — dissolves, music, video and pics. In an age where we need to be as proficient using video to tell stories as words, this tool makes it easier to do the production so we can spend more time telling the story.
Many thanks to my friend Scott MacIver over WalkSign for the tip. (Scott always has the best new tech suggestions — cool things that solve real problems.)
Innovation and entrepreneurism is thriving — and developing more and more new Web 2.0 tools and applications will just keep changing how we live, work, market and play. Check out highlights from this week’s TechCrunch40 Conference over at Don Dodge’s Next Big Thing and Frank Gruber’s Being Frank. The ideas are so much more interesting than the 1990s dot com era.
I use to go to TED in Monterey in Feb. But I’m liking the BIF Collaborative Innovation Summit in Providence in October as much — maybe more. This year’s program, moderated by Walter Mossberg of The Wall St. Journal and Mavericks at Work author Bill Taylor, will feature more approximately 30 fascinating people sharing 15 minute stories about how they catalyzed change or created innovation. Some I’m especially looking forward to:
There are only 80 tickets left for the conference, to be held Oct. 10 – 11 in Providence, one of the coolest, creative cities in the U.S. If you click here to register – or use my name when registering – the price is $800. (I’ve been involved with the Business Innovation Factory since this non-profit launched a few years ago and will be blogging from the conference.)
On a side note the conference will be held at Trinity Rep Theater, one of the best regional theaters in the country. (Full disclosure: I’m a theater geek and on the board of Trinity.) All The Kings Men will be playing on Oct. 10 and 11. This production is not to be missed. See it while you’re in town. Joe Wilson, Jr., an amazingly talented young African American actor ,will be playing the role of Willie Stark.. Talk about changing the conversation.
I find that my marketing and communications friends are voracious readers. So here’s a list of some non-business books that I had the pleasure of reading on vacation. Great stories, wonderful characters, and fascinating insights into parts of the world we Westerners tend to know little about. (And, yes, there’s plenty to talk about after reading them!)
Infidel by Ayaan Hirsi Ali. A remarkably frank and insightful look into Islam in Somalia and Holland, particularly its implications on women.
Half of a Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. Set in Eastern Nigeria during during crippling three-year civil war in effort to form the independent nation of Biafra.
The Hungry Tide by Amitav Ghosh. Set in Sundarbans, a vast archipelago in the Bay of Bengal, this page turner is rich in history, culture, marine science and rich characters.
Divisadero by Michael Ondaatje. Such a beautifully written novel that I am lost for words to how to even big to describe this riveting story, set in Northern California and Southern France. (A line from the book that I keep thinking about: "We have art," Nietzsche says, "so that we shall not be destroyed by the truth." His previous novel, Anil’s Ghost, set in Sri Lanka during tits civil war in 19080s and 90s, is also an amazing read.
Eat. Pray. Love: One Woman’s Search for Everything Across Italy, India and Indonesia by Elizabeth Gilbert. Eating her way through Italy, praying on an ashram in India, and finding love in Indonesia. My kind of woman! The writing is hilarious, reflective, honest and irrisistable. The line I can’t get our of my head, "I realized that praying is talking to God, and meditating is listening to God."
What’s your visual DNA? Imagini, a new social networking site dedicated to creating a new language of visual communication, helps you determine your visual personality profile. It works by asking you to reply to a series of statements by clicking on a photo that best represents your response. (“The ideal vacation…” That’s my response at left.) It then gives you profile, kind of like a Briggs-Meyers, and connects you with people who have similar profiles. (I’m closely matched with men about my age in the Netherlands and younger women in Asia.)
The personality categories (and my DNA in parentheses):
So what does this have to do with marketing?
1. It’s a new way to do research. Rather than categorizing people by traditional segments, this type of approach “is going to enable finding things according to your Visual DNA code,” says Imagini CEO Alex Willcock.
2. New commerce opportunities. Imagini has a beta Gift Finder service that let’s you profile the person you want to buy for, and then gives you gift recommendations based on the person;s Visual DNA. With my wedding anniversary coming up, I profiled my husband and the Imagini database presented some great idea. I was surprised at some interesting ideas that I would never have thought of, but know would work. (And this is a hard guy to buy for.)
The site also provides travel service recommendations based on your profile. Again, I was pleasantly surprised at how relevant the recommendations were to my interests.
We rely so much on words and talk in marketing, but keep an eye on how visual communication will open up interesting new opportunities.
PS — Thanks to Colin Beasty at CRM Magazine for his nice article last Friday on Beyond Buzz.
TouchGraph offers a free visualization tool that helps you see connections and relationships among books, music or movies on Amazon, or among search words on Google. Really interesting. It helps you quickly “see” and make sense of information in new ways.
Some people have asked whether they’d find my new book Beyond Buzz interesting. My new way to reply is to show them this TouchGraph map that shows other books that people who have bought Beyond Buzz have bought.
How to measure marketing communications (beyond lead gen) or PR (beyond "hits") seems like a question that’s never really answered in a way that executives or marketing and PR professionals feel good about. I’d like to propose an alternative.
Empirical evidence shows that two questions on teacher evaluations correlate with independent measures of student learning, according to Ken Bain, author of "What the Best College Teachers Do."
Now apply this to marketing or corporate communications:
Understanding and interest have to be in place before people make a decision to act, whether that action is calling to set up a meeting with a sales rep or buying the product.
These seem like more informative measures than web hits, clips, white paper downloads…and much less expensive than some of the complex measurement approaches that companies often put in place to measure marcom and PR.
Too simple? Maybe. But when I think of my favorite professors and my best experiences buying from B2B and B2C companies, they would all score off the chart on those two questions.
Don Murray, a Pulitzer-Prize winning journalism professor at my alma mater, University of New Hampshire, recently died but left so many of us with a lasting message: “There’s no magic in writing. It’s a discipline and a process.”
The hardest part of that discipline for me — and many others in marketing — is saying less, stripping out the adjectives, not over-explaining. Using fewer useless words makes for better stories. The other upside to being brief, according to Creative Think’s Roger Van Oech, is that limitations can “be powerful creative stimuIants.”
In the spirit of brevity and creativity, Robert Hruzek of Middle Zone Musings has created a contest challenging people to tell a story in just six words. similar to Wired’s November 2006 feature, “Very Short Stories”
My six word story contributions:
I've been tagged by Francois Gossieaux in the new blog tag game and am suppose to reveal five things about me that you don't know yet.
Now I get to tag five others:
As interest in social media heats up, check out what J. Bruce Martin at Sales Driven Marketing calls the top 2006 social media sites:
