QVIews

Over at MarketingProfs, Emanuel Rosen has a nice summary of common misperceptions about buzz marketing. He also attends carefully to definitions. We’re all looking for strategies to stimulate people to talk about our brands, products or services. For this article, let’s define buzz as all the person-to-person communication about a brand, and buzz marketing as…

Tony DiRomualdo, in his email newsletter Next Generation Company, has some very astute things to say about how companies have taken the workers’ desire for more flexibility and turned it against them. Now, I’m exaggerating there–a little. But there’s no doubt that options are hurting the quality of life on several levels. We need to…

Leave it to the guys at Wired to take Clay Christensen’s intellectual theory and fling it over into a pop-culture game, using it to point out a bunch of wild, exciting ideas. I love it, and I’m sure Clay does as well. Wired 13.05: First Aid for Health Care by Bruce Sterling In [Clayton M.…

Thanks to Mark Hurst also for reminding me about this fun, stimulating way to look at yourself…and here’s an Azawakh. Link: Gone to the Dogs : SUKA What dog are you?. WHAT DOG ARE YOU? There’s a dog inside all of us, waiting to be let out. This game is based on a computer called…

I spend an hour a week in a supermarket, and I’m very grateful that it doesn’t take me any longer to find reliably nutrional and good-tasting food for my family. That strange remark was prompted by reading the Good Experience newsletter from Mark Hurst. He makes the sharp remarks below about ‘authenticity.’ Link: Good Experience…

Both Mark Cuban (co-founder of Broadcast.com and current owner of the Dallas Mavericks basketball team) and Richard Branson (founder of Virgin Records, Airline, Cola, etc.) tried and failed to compete with Donald Trump’s Apprentice though they are both more succesful entrepreneurs than Trump. (Yes, I can defend that statement.) Now Branson has done what he…

Harriet Rubin has a keen eye for ambiguity. I’ve recently had the opportunity to observe my own behavior in the presence of a ‘tough boss.’ I think she’s right that people do want to see leaders be tough, but I don’t think it leads to great business results. The parent-child relationship is popular but not…

I apologize to all my readers to whom the excerpt below is gobbledygook, but it is brilliant gobbledygook! I think all web sites should be designed according to this approach. I intend to apply it myself. Bryan Eisenberg in his column at ClickZ: Dissect the buying process into component parts for each persona, then measure…

Steve Case, a co-founder of AOL, has a stirring piece in the Manager’s Journal of the Wall Street Journal about the trend of non-profits establishing a related for-profit business that supports their community service. (He’s for it.) I think there’s two valuable lessons here. One is that people who see a need in the community…

David Sirota, the co-author of What Employees Want does a terrific job of teasing out the complexity of the relationship between employees and their company. He doesn’t focus on the boss relationship as much as I expected. Instead he points to many systemic issues that can undermine morale. This book looks very, very good. Giving…