Being Disruptive

This is a simple idea: if you want to be disruptive – to create the kind of disruption that will allow you to re-define your market – you have to want to be disruptive.
Do you really want to change your market?
SuccessFactors (blog) has as part of their founding principles:
Increase worldwide productivity by 50%.
They want to [...]

Staying Creative

In order to be disruptive, you have to stay creative – constantly creating new ideas – disruptive ideas. What inspires you is very personal, but for me, there is nothing that inspires that creativity in my work quite like a Tom Peters book (or article or whatever).
So my advice (FWIW): (re-)Read something by Tom Peters [...]

Listen to the candidates debate

Earlier this week I heard a news report about the latest forum for the large and growing field of Democratic presidential hopefuls. The report said “…and as you would expect, the front-runners played it safe while the lesser-known hopefuls took more risks…”
Are you thinking risk doesn’t really work well in politics? Making a bold statement [...]

Are you listening?

I don’t like Don Imus. Never have. And while this post has nothing what-so-ever to do with Don Imus, his horribly offensive comments and subsequent firing got me thinking…
Have you ever had someone in your organization unexpectedly try to tell you that there’s a completely unanticipated and dire threat to your business? What did you [...]

Blocking and Tackling

There’s just no excuse for fumbling the message.
I’m going to go slightly off-topic today with a little rant about what I think is an absolutely embarrassing ad campaign – one that makes me think the creators have simply forgotten some of the basic principles of marketing, and holds a reminder for me (and I think [...]

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 [...]

Tracking Twitter

Twitter is the most popular topic on Twitter. Not much of a surprise for now. But as a marketer, I’d like to know how popular my brand is – or isn’t. Or at least when people start Twittering about it. I think the folks at Twitterverse are on to something.