Davis ThinkingRepositioning your company can be an invigorating move — it's exciting to take a fresh approach and go after new opportunities. But change is also risky and over time, the momentum behind it can wane. When that happens, it's not uncommon for individuals, units, or entire organizations to default to the old strategy. If your team relapses, how can you get things back on track and people re-focused on the new direction?
The leader of Britain's Conservative Party says we're entering a new era -- where governments themselves have less power (and less money) and people empowered by technology have more. Tapping into new ideas on behavioral economics, he explores how these trends could be turned into smarter policy.
What Makes Your Advocates Feel Like Rockstars? Lavishing them with freebies? Flying them all over the country? Throwing monthly parties for them? Maybe for a while. But not only is that not sustainable, it’s not good business, either. So here are some simple ways to engage with your fans and make them feel like the rockstars that they are.
The tools we use for social media have empowered us to be steady-flow commentators. Watch Twitter or Facebook during any event, and you’ll see our added commentary rolling along in time with the experience. At times, such as the US Presidential election, it was exciting to feel that experience, of everyone participating all across the world in an event. There are many more times where it feels like that. In blog comments, on Twitter, all over Facebook, Yelp, YouTube, and several other sites, we’ve been groomed to give our opinion. We spit it out everywhere. We share, rate, criticize, deride, praise, and everything in between. Forrester’s Ladder graphic suggests that critics are second on the content ladder, just below creators.
A 20-minute talk by Jeff Veen from Small Batch, Inc., also known from WikiRank, which was originally given at the Web2.0 Expo in San Francisco a couple of weeks ago. During the talk, he focuses on some of the classic examples of information visualization (John Snow pump, Minard's map, the tube map, and so on), the issue of "decorating" data versus making it accessible, and the emerging challenge to empower lay people to participate in visualizing and analyzing their own data.
Levi Strauss & Co. recently announced the hiring of Jaime Cohen Szulc, who is the first in the company's history to take the title of global chief marketing officer. The news is predictable yet intriguing. It is predictable because elevating the marketing discipline to global status under the purview of one executive is a corporate trend that shows no signs of waning.
It's amazing to see and hear a CEO understanding the massive consumer change that's going on and re-orienting his company around this shift. The CEO is Andy Bond of UK grocery store, Asda (owned by Wal-Mart). To bring home his point Asda organized a media event where they invited political strategist, Philip Gould to explain the change.
They do it by talking about and engaging with topics and content that will make their customers smarter. Or they share tidbits that are fun and engaging, and share the love. These are the secrets of successful corporate blogs - and I’ll share then in less than a thousand words.
Although a bit late to the party, CNN has made a decisive entry into the mobile news space with a well-designed iPhone app with that costs $2 to download, nothing to use and makes it easier for citizen journalists to file their own video news reports from the field. And in choosing a middle ground in the free/fee debate CNN is carving out a niche that extends their free online offerings to the fast-growing mobile platform while charging something for the work that goes in to developing for the iPhone platform — and there are ads too.
Every few days, I get an email asking this question: “I have this awesome idea to help X, but I’m not sure what direction to take. Do I open things up to the crowd to collaborate and target a mass audience? Or do I put everything together myself and target a specific group?” This is a question everyone from the biggest brand to the smallest start-up is asking: should you go with the crowd or should you go niche?
Brands have adopted a variety of tactics in response to changing consumer attitudes and behaviors. In the first quarter of 2009, we monitored more than 100 brand responses to the recession. We found that most approaches fit into six buckets: optimism, humor, nationalism, nostalgia, consumer empowerment and value/price.
Marketers today understand that consumers think, feel and react differently than June Cleaver did 50 years ago. We use descriptors like fickle, indecisive and disloyal to describe the modern consumer because consumers have too many choices -- multiple brands, brand extensions and sub-brands -- and too much stimulation, especially online, making it nearly impossible to predict their next move.
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