commbasics

Came out of by antihistamine fog just long enough to see an email from John Donovan at Portable Design.  It's the latest in the casualties of the media world restructuring.  Yep.  Portable Design is gone. The pub was purchased from Pennwell along with a few other properties by the RTC group.  Considering how broad the portable electronics market is, this is a sad state of affairs. John Donovan is on the street looking for work and I recommend considering him for video interviews.  The ones he did on the Portable Design site were quite good.

Today on Bloomberg.com,  Rosabeth Moss Kanter made what might be a revolutionary statement.   Ms. Kanter  holds the Ernest L. Arbuckle Professorship at Harvard Business School, where she specializes in strategy, innovation, and leadership for change.  Her article, entitles " In a Recession, Put Everyone in Marketing "  She says the way out of a recession is marketing.  Specifically, she says, "Start looking for new markets now.  Companies dependent on a few large customers are particularly vulnerable to changes in their customers' fortunes, but all companies need the flexibility to move quickly into promising markets. In uncertain times, managers should increase efforts to identify additional uses for company products and additional sources of customers for the future. "Creative thinking can find opportunities to offset losses from current customers. Starting research now on less-familiar industries or parts of the world ...

Attended a seminar at Stanford University last night and listened to several speakers, one of which is in the market research business.  He quoted statistics from the European Society of Market Research that more than $26 billion is being spent on market research in the world .... and almost nothing on implementing the data gathered. Everyone says they want market data.  They want leads.  They want information.  But no one seems to know what to do with the information once they get it. There are tools and services out there that help interpret and implement programs, but it requires an investment. Like that's going to happen.

Let's say you are one of those people who have never had a cell phone and have decided to check out what all the hoopla is about.   You go down to T-Mobile, pick out a basic phone.   Charge it up and put it on your desk to see what happens.   But you don't let anyone know that you have a cell phone, you don't call anyone, you don't set up your voicemail… you do nothing with it but put it on your desk and wait for something to happen. By the end of a week, would you wonder what all the big deal was about?   Would you cancel your service and toss the phone away?   Probably. That, in a nutshell, is the description of how many marketers view social media.   "That's stupid," you may say.   I say, however, that it's conditioning. There have been some interesting conversations about social media all over social media for the past few months.   One occurred on  Harry Gries'  blog where he posted a ...

Been thinking about lots of stuff this week as I took off three days.  First time off in about 5 years.  Need to do that more.  One of the things that popped up was what to trust in media now that traditional media has shrunk to the point of irrelevance on tech industries.  This is what I came up with: Don't trust anyone with more than 30 percent market share. Yeah, it's a riff off of the hippie adage, "don't trust anyone over 30."  But I think it fits. When the economy is strong, having stable market leaders is a good thing.  Markets grow.  The leaders follow basic competition concepts.  Everyone is happy.  But when things turn bad, leaders hunker down and do whatever they can to kill innovative competition so they can avoid losing market share.  And when those leaders are doing their own thing media-wise (social media, private conferences, etc.) they do everything they can to control market conversation....

Back in the 60's and 70's a lot of young people got around the country by hitchhiking.   For a long time, that was considered a cheap way of getting around the country, but in the mid 70's some people started requiring hitchhikers to pony up some of the expense.   There was a popular bumper sticker that spelled it out. "Gas, grass or ass.   No one rides for free." This week there has been a controversy simmering over Facebook's revision of it terms of use , which essentially states that any content you post on your personal Facebook pages becomes the property of Facebook.   That includes the pictures of your kids and vacations, your essays (notes), and the information you share about yourself.   Lot's of people are pissed off about this and are considering quitting Facebook, but they can no longer pull the content out of the Facebook servers. The concern has to do with not only content ownership, but privacy issues.   Ove...

As I said in the last post, our hope lies in our willingness to move outside our circle of comfort.   What blows me away is that most people are less likely to make that move when their circle is putrefying around them.   The news is filled right now with the hope that whatever the federal government does with the stimulus package will solve the problem.   At the same time, no one believes it will.   So the nation's hope is in an organization no one has any faith in.   I've been peppering these posts on hope with pithy quotes from past presidents and now seems to be a good time to pull out this one.   "Ask not what your country can do for you - ask what you can do for your country." -- John Kennedy In a time when we are invoking the names of people like Kennedy, Lincoln, and Roosevelt, we aren't spending a whole lot of time paying attention to what they actually stood for, and that is the individual responsibility to not give i...

"If Not Us, Who? If Not Now, When?" —Rabbi Hillel (Ronald Reagan only quoted him) Hope requires faith, and as the Bible says, faith is not faith if you can see with your eyes what it is you are hoping for.   But for faith to live, someone's gotta have hope. Hope is not wishful thinking.   That's because most wishful thinking is being wistful to a return to the "good old days" before you lost hope.   Hope is looking forward.   There are some people doing just that and that's what we need right now, real leaders with hope. I've met several over the past few months that are hopeful about the immediate future.   People like former Synopsys exec Sanjiv Kaul,   Morgenthaler's Drew Lanza, and two guys forming a huge fund called NEOS that you will be hearing about over the next year.   Corporations like nVidia , Virgin, Siemens and   SAP are launching major investment funds this year and are looking all ...