There are two extremes in thinking that lead to the profitability of a company. One is to focus entirely on the bottom line. The other is to focus on improving the lives of your stakeholders (customers, employees, suppliers and prospects.) When taken to extreme, focusing solely on the bottom line, lives can be ruined and…
5 Reasons To Hate QR Codes
QR Codes are the mostly pointless, too time consuming way that brands get to think they’re doing something futuristic and cool.
Six Reasons Every Business Must Be Serious About Social Media
1. Your customers are your greatest marketing asset. Facilitate their word of mouth by making a place for them to have conversations with and about your brand. 2. Email is the highest revenue generator of all channels. Utilize offers, incentives and contests in social media to acquire email addresses. 3. Customers expect real-time customer service…
Best Practices And Other Innovation Killers
Best practices are tested, well developed guidelines based on experience. In marketing there are best practices around website layout, copywriting, social media marketing—you name it. Know them. They help take the risk out of business. Yet, I bristle at the phrase “best practices” because when I hear it, I know that’s where the process ends….
3 Simple Ways To Be More Creative
One of the reasons that being creative is so challenging is that we naturally drift toward the status quo. Shaking things up makes us uncomfortable and requires risk taking. Here are the 3 simple, non-threatening ways to nurture creativity so you can interfere with that drift. 1. Stop focusing. Make sure you have downtime. This…
Why You Should Not Think Like A Marketer
Every week my marketing team meets to review results, and brainstorm ways to surprise and delight our community. We often bring blog posts or white papers to the group that present inspiration or provoke thoughts about new directions. This week we discussed a post by Chris Brogan called Honey Badger Don’t Care (What You Want…
Stop With the Links! What New Media Writers Can Learn From Print.
Just because you can write a thoughtful article on your blog and throw in links to further reading, doesn’t mean you should. It’s a pet peeve of mine to read a post filled with links referencing more detail if having to read elsewhere to get that detail is necessary or worse—critical to—a better understanding of…
How To Avoid Becoming Obsolete
When you look at the industries that have collapsed, or are in the process of collapsing, you realize that those industries were usually serving consumer needs that have not gone away. People still need to read the news. They still enjoy reading books, watching movies and travelling. What they don’t necessarily need was the same…
What You Need To Succeed In 2013
In 2006 Daniel Pink wrote a prescient book–A Whole New Mind: How Right Brainers Will Rule The Future. Oprah liked it so much, that she gave a copy to every graduating student at Stanford when she gave the graduation speech. The message of the book is that storytellers, artists, inventors and writers are going to…
This Is What The Phrase, “Innovate Or Die” Means
It’s not easy to be innovative. It’s uncomfortable because all innovative ideas sound crazy at first. It’s scary because failure is an integral feature of the process. It takes a great force of will, especially in a large company because the status quo is the governing force. And yet, no matter what business…
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Social media helps you do what you've been doing all along if you care deeply about your customers.
All you need are some guiding principles. -
