Free Flowing Thoughts

Get Noticed: Add Value, Do Something Useful

Great post from Jeremiah Owyang on How To Get Noticed.  All of the advice he has is right on target and it's a great read:

Have a goal
Develop a unique brand
Get personal
Attend local events
Lead events
Be interesting
Archive your achievements

This article comes the closest to making direct call out to what I believe is the most important way to get noticed.  Do Something Useful.  Add Value.  

You can sort out the people who are going to make the leap by the ones who have taken on big projects and can talk about their results.  If you have an obsession with making an impact then getting noticed becomes much easier.

Challenges For New Marketers

This afternoon I spoke to a group of marketing students at St. Edward's University.  Other than being in love with Apple they were a great group of people.

Since they will be preparing a marketing plan for a class product launch I reviewed our launch of the new Dell Latitude which I thought was really well done.

Next I shared what I see as the major marketing challenges these new grads will face.

1) Marketers will increasingly be called on to understand more than one market.  Converging forces of a shrinking developed economy workforce and an increase in the importance of emerging markets will be further complicated by marketing budgets that will not scale with the increased complexity.  For US students it will mean discovering what works in China as well as Europe as well as the United States.  A marketer with a global view is advantaged today in the job market, but before long it will be a ticket to entry rather than a differentiator.

2) Traditional advertising is rapidly losing relevance, and we don't know what to do about it yet.  When I started discussing this the students in the class all smirked and agreed. Research says the younger the consumer the more skeptical they are of advertising.  Most of the class said they not only ignore advertising, they distrust the message.  The challenge for marketers will be chasing attention across multiple channels, learning how to foster authentic conversations about their brands while making the most of the diminishing returns of traditional advertising.  Marketers will need to rely more strongly on the other parts of the marketing mix to deliver results.

3) The emergence of the Connected Era of the Internet changes online marketing dramatically.  Not long ago the best of breed in online marketing was building a great brand site and trying to coax people to visit.  The communication was all one way, the brand trying to influence the visitors.  Today leading brands are engaging in conversations with their customers and not just on their own Web sites.  Optimizing search across multiple countries, languages and devices has moved from a niche specialty to a mainstream core competency.

Why I am Ready to Serve as McCain's VP

After several questions it seemed appropriate to address the rumors.  I cannot confirm or deny that I am being vetted for Vice President.

As several of you pointed out my nomination would be similar to Obama's pick of Biden: it would bring balance to the ticket.  John McCain is old, a Washington insider, and moody.  He is experienced in foreign policy, very rich, and a war hero.  I am none of those things.

For the sake of party unity we should support whatever misguided decision John makes in regards to his running mate and show the maturity and decorum long associated with my supporters.  Unless of course he picks me. Then you should feel free to gloat.

Next to do: Must invent time machine

Today we are celebrating Ainsley's one year birthday.  And I'm not very happy about that. 

 This year has been an amazing journey and I hate that is going so quickly.  It's hard to believe 1 year ago I was sitting in my office downstairs congratulating myself for preparing early for her arrival thoroughly planned...one month away.  In the middle of finishing my list of things to do at work before taking off four weeks later Courtney broke the news things were going off script.

One of the things people keep telling me is how much fun it is going to be as she gets older.  "Her little personality is just going to explode!"  The last thing Ainsley needs is more personality.  She is already very clear on what she likes and does not like, what she wants you to do for her, where she wants to be and does not want to be, she has big laughs, big cries, she is already amazing.

I love being a dad.  Even more than I thought I would. And I can't help but think a big chunk of that time has already passed. 

It has been a great year.

300,000,000 reasons to love Microsoft

Microsoft will finally respond to the very successful Apple campaign sometime later this year.  The total budget of $300M+ will include $10M for Jerry Seinfeld.  Wall Street Journal is talking about the new campaign here, and Thomas Ricker at Engadget sums up:

"Microsoft's new $300 million campaign (one of Redmond's largest ever) is set to launch with a $10 million assist from "key celebrity pitchman" Jerry Seinfeld. Yes, Bill Gates will appear as well -- the once maligned, rich corporate nerd turned adorable, rich humanitarian nerd. The campaign is said to be based on the idea of "Windows, Not Walls," stressing the need to "break down barriers that prevent people and ideas from connecting." Something we think open-sourcers might have a laugh at. Anywho, the immediate goal of the campaign is to reverse the negative public perception of Vista and thus incorporates elements of the Mojave Experiment. While we have doubts about the latter, the combination of Seinfeld's pithy observations with a bit of that Bill Gates, self deprecating humor seen in "Bill's Last Day" could be a winning combination. Whether that turns the slow moving boat of public opinion remains to be seen."

The Mojave Experiment was an interesting idea but did not seem to have the scale to truly change perceptions in mass.  I have Vista installed on my work laptop and had absolutely no issues.  There are some features I like, but it's largely been a non-event for me.   While I was not driven to install Vista at home, Office 2007 was exactly the opposite.  If you have not upgraded you are missing the best version of the Office suite by far.  It puts a great deal of distance between Microsoft and their competitors.  I installed at home and would not go back to the prior version. 

If Only I Had Cloud Computing A Few Years Ago

This is a good analogy from Larry Dignan on how Cloud computing will change the IT landscape. 

"If you woke up in the morning and read in the Wall Street Journal that an eCommerce company like Overstock.com had stopped using the USPS, UPS, FedEx, DHL, etc. to deliver their goods and, instead, leased airport hubs all over the world, bought a fleet of jets and bought thousands of trucks and started delivering the stuff themselves, you’d think they were out of their minds.  So, why is it not equally insane for financial services companies, health care institutions, manufacturing companies, bio-tech companies, pharmaceutical giants, etc. to be spending a billion dollars or much more every year on information technology infrastructure?"

A few years ago I was running an IT department before I remembered I was supposed to be in marketing.  The idea of being able to bring a web based product to market more quickly and not have to buy infrastructure to support short spikes in demand would have made a big impact on our business.  The next few years are going to be very interesting as Cloud becomes standard.

Great Twitter Overview Video

Fake CNN Twitter-er spoils Olympics results?

Very surprised by the catcalls at CNN for "spoiling" the Olympics results.  We no longer live in a world where people wait hours to know what happened in other time zones. 

This comment on TechCruch has it right:

"The news is all over the internet, not just related/specific to CNN. People really should question why are we still watching recorded events during an age of instant information access."

 

High Hopes For New Military Child Program

Today we started recruiting students from military families to share their stories online.  Post is live on our new blog, www.VoiceForTheMilitaryChild.org, Twitter, and posted across several Facebook groups targeted to military families. 

Thinking these stories will be a great way for people outside the military community to better understand the challenges and opportunities of military families.

The magic of the book Made To Stick in 10 easy minutes

The Made To Stick blog is a great companion to their book, which remains my favorite book on communications.  This particular post give you a nutshell version of their approach to taking a key message and making it 'sticky.'  It starts with a bunch of interesting statistics on the mission, then this challenge:

"Give yourself this mission: To boil it all down. No one is going to read all these stats, and even if they do, they won’t remember them. They certainly won’t be moved to action by them. So how can you get people *excited* about “girl investment”? Imagine that you’ve got 2 minutes of the audience’s attention to make your case. How would you translate the data into something simple, emotional, specific? (By the way, just by thinking about this, you’re already ahead of the game — most social enterprises I’ve worked with would have simply published the PDF and declared victory…)"

It's too easy to get lost in the numbers and forget the emotion and the cause that will cause people to act.  This holds true at for companies as much as non-profits.  A brand that engages emotion is infinitely more powerful than a brand that is only rational.