LikeBelt. Protobooth. An animated GIF photobooth by Digital Kitchen. House Party > Welcome! SETH GODIN: If You're An Average Worker, You're Going Straight To The Bottom. Apple by the Numbers - Digits. This Is Why Big Box Retailers Are Making Smaller Stores. To Pin or Not to Pin: An in-depth look at Pinterest. Like many, I’m new to the social network Pinterest.
It intrigued me after reading many articles about it being the fastest growing social network, so I set out to uncover the business case for using it. Because I’m a social media marketer, and business owner, it’s important that I squeeze every bit of visibility potential out of the various networks if I’m going to spend any time there. To learn more, I enlisted a friend and pin-wild owner of the boutique Sueb.do Susan Goldberg Zimmerman to give me the guided tour. Susan was a great teacher, showing me all of the beautiful images she collected of places she wished to visit and the products she has in her store.
I asked her what the business use was and she said that she looks at the images as an introduction to the person as to whether or not she wants to follow them or perhaps do business with them. As I mentioned, my mission was to find a business case to use the network so, I had to get back on task. Some of the pointers they gave: Culture Eats Strategy For Lunch. Get on a Southwest flight to anywhere, buy shoes from Zappos.com, pants from Nordstrom, groceries from Whole Foods, anything from Costco, a Starbucks espresso, or a Double-Double from In N' Out, and you'll get a taste of these brands’ vibrant cultures.
Culture is a balanced blend of human psychology, attitudes, actions, and beliefs that combined create either pleasure or pain, serious momentum or miserable stagnation. A strong culture flourishes with a clear set of values and norms that actively guide the way a company operates. Employees are actively and passionately engaged in the business, operating from a sense of confidence and empowerment rather than navigating their days through miserably extensive procedures and mind-numbing bureaucracy.
Performance-oriented cultures possess statistically better financial growth, with high employee involvement, strong internal communication, and an acceptance of a healthy level of risk-taking in order to achieve new levels of innovation. The Five Keys To Great Marketing In 2012. As we enter 2012, here is a perspective on the five key arenas that marketers will grapple with: Marketing as Mobilization: In a world of Twitter, Facebook, Google + and other social platforms, marketing will increasingly resemble political campaigns with Brands mobilizing and incentivizing their advocates to market to their friends and communities.
They will also staff up to quickly address and limit the impact of negative streams of publicity such as complaints before they hurt the brand. The emphasis will be on marketing in real time, providing clear value and recognizing that what people say about a brand is more important than what a brand says about itself. Engaging the “peoples network” will be as, if not more critical than leveraging television, retail and other media networks.
Marketing basics will grow more important: In a fragmenting and fast moving world brands will matter more since brands are the ultimate search engines and navigation lighthouses. So lets get going! As Big Media Goes Digital, Markets Shrink. Lots of debate, lately, about Big Media and their bumpy transitions from analog incumbents to digital providers.
Over the past few weeks we have had debates around the proposed PIPA and SOPA legislation, Rupert Murdoch (that bastion of new media savvy) railing against Google as a “pirate” and @fredwilson chiming in on the predictable monopoly actions of his cable company, Time Warner Cable in their dispute with MSG Networks. Yesterday Fred posted his views on the weaknesses of Big Media extending their scarcity business models to the internet. My long-time opposition to scarcity models for digital media content online is well established on this blog and before that at Apple, N2K and eMusic. One thing Fred mentioned inspired me to revisit this subject, and that is market size. Fred says, [quote]But the studios themselves are likely to do better in a direct distribution model where they reach a broader market at lower effective prices to the end customer.
The Rise of the New Groupthink. Strategy Essentials You Ignore at Your Peril - Joan Magretta. Fashion - Icons of Style.