This Focused Performance Weblog is a "business management blog" containing links and commentary related primarily to organizational effectiveness with a "Theory of Constraints" perspective. TOC is noted for its applications in Project Management and Multi-Project Management (Critical Chain) and Operations Management (Drum-Buffer-Rope), as well as in Marketing, Strategic Planning and Change Management (TOC Thinking Processes). If you are on an archive page, current postings are found here.
"...this is a moment of decadence in online marketing and the next turn of the screw will root out this baroque, extraneous set of contortions around conversation. Marketing should be dialogic. True dat. But the goal isn’t conversation...
"...what’s so powerful about going online, you can talk back. But it feels like what some marketers are taking away from this is that they should talk to us in conversational tones and should do product placement by getting the video podcasters we listen to to pitch to us in their own voices. It feels like they still want to talk at us and still keep tight control of the message—but just hide that they’re doing it."
[my added links] As in everything new, it's a learning process, and many will take longer to understand and adapt.
Tell Me How You'll Measure My Conversations...and I'll tell you how I'll converse.
From AdWeek, Conversation Quotient talks about the difficulty in measuring the infant social media channel for reaching interacting with your potential customers.
"The very purpose of existence is to reconcile the glowing opinion we have of ourselves with the appalling things that other people think about us." - Quentin Crisp
...there are different types of design. The one, we can call it the cynical design, that means the design invented by Raymond Loewy in the '50s, who said, what is ugly is a bad sale, La Laideur se vend mal, which is terrible. It means the design must be just a weapon for marketing, for producer to make product more sexy, like that, they sell more, it's shit, it's obsolete, it's ridiculous. I call that the cynical design.
After, there is the narcissistic design; it's a fantastic designer who designs only for other fantastic designers. [laughs]
After there is people like me, who try to deserve to exist, and who are ashamed to make this useless job, who try to do it in another way, and they try, I try, to not make the object for the object but for the result, for the profit for the human being, the person who will use it.
It's all about the users' needs. Take care of them, and the marketing almost takes care of itself.
Then, again...isn't marketing merely the process of 1) understanding the needs of potential users of your products/services, 2) making sure those products/services truly meet the important needs they're designed to address (the connection between marketing research and product design), 3) crafting compelling offers around the satisfaction of those needs, and 4) communicating those offers where those potential users might be found (where marketing meets advertising and selling, which are different things).
(Of course, putting it all in perspective, this is from a guy whose own site annoyingly takes over the user's browser window size to land-grab the whole screen.)
Another line that grabbed me from the talk…
Nobody is obliged to be a genius, but everybody is obliged to participate.
Not sure why, but it grabbed me nonetheless.
Whole transcript and video version at http://blog.ted.com/2007/12/starck.php, although be advised he rambles off into a more metaphysical direction about us all being mutants, and designing stories for a future we really can't know, and that the best we can do is leave blank sheets of paper and the "best tools" for those who follow us.
DigitalGrit, where I've been since 2004, has, along with it's sister companies at Adverb Media, been bought and combined with the e-mail house Zustek, to form Zeta Interactive, a really full service interactive marketing agency offering one-stop shopping for a unique set of services.
"The company combines the talents and technologies of five interactive leaders to offer marketers complete solutions across all media and channels-from email and search marketing to creative, web development, business and branding intelligence, and more. Zeta Interactive is comprised of Zustek Corporation, an industry-renowned email communications leader, and Adverb Media, a holding company which includes under its umbrella DigitalGrit, a highly acclaimed direct response and search marketing firm, Temel, an award-winning brand strategy and creative agency, and RelevantNoise™, a ground-breaking technology firm dedicated to mining the social Internet for business intelligence."
Met our new CEO, Al DiGuido, yesterday in a kickoff presentation of his background and plans for Zeta. This is gonna be fun.
Web 2.0 Marketing -- Heard a real good podcast recently – The New Community – from Radio Open Source. It features, during the first half, Larry Weber, author of a new book, Marketing to the Social Web, along with the Daphne Kwan, CEO of Expo TV, a video product review community site. Good discussion on getting companies to "let go of control" to build a brand/conversation.
Weber's book apparently goes into "how companies like GlaxoSmithKline have formed expressive affinity groups around dieting pills; how Stonyfield Yogurt has cultivated environmentalists on its site and added a page called "Ask Our Nutritionist"; how Jones Soda in Seattle has built a community conversation that's much more valuable than any use of mass media."
Sounds interesting. (I guess after 3 years at DigitalGrit, this old operations dog is learning new tricks and turning into a marketer.)
(The podcast is also available on iTunes for a quick grab into your iPod – it's the next to last full show before a summer break for the Open Source series.)
Do they have any more feet to shoot? -- Universal does not renew iTunes contract. The music industry just eludes me. What are they thinking - that some thrashing around like a punch-drunk heavyweight in the 15th round might connect? I doubt it.
, along with the Daphne Kwan, CEO of 
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