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A Critique of the “Attention Economy”… maybe attention is not finite
As a marketer, I appreciated Tom Davenport and John Beck's The Attention Economy when it was first published in 2001. Recently Matthew Crawford has been writing about the "Attention Commons." Both are focused on how advertisers battle to capture attention. But maybe attention is something we manage ourselves. Here's to the idea that we nurture…
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When Houston is transformed
Houston's continued population growth despite the oil bust is a source of amazement. Transformation happens. We plan, it happens, seldom the way we planned. The changes are hard to follow and comprehend, but the key is to keep trying. If we keep thinking that Houston is the same as it was, or is changing the…
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To lead our teams to greatness, we have to spend more time showing them how to work together
My experience over the years is that when managing a team, selecting the right members is much less important than creating the right conditions so they can work. In volunteer projects, we often have no control over the participants. What a relief to find that how people are allowed to behave matters more than anything they…
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Defy best practice, be unprofessional, and innovate in marketing
Innovation and best practice are the yin and yang of management. Too much of one and you die, too much of the other and you disappear. Loyal behavior is actually the key. If you are committed to your customers' best interest, understand your strengths and values, then you can be wild and crazy without losing…
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Antivirus in social media
The positive connotation of virus in the marketing arena did NOT begin in social media. This Fast Company article describes the birth of "viral marketing" with Hotmail. (Like many stories it may not be entirely true, but it was written in 1999, pretty close to the actual events.) However, I think the social media platforms…
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Search, discovery, curation, and scale
Have we maxed out on search? I'm not sure. I certainly seems as if some important things are not showing up. When I search on Amazon for unusual products I sometimes get very confusing results–suggesting that some suppliers are so good at gaming the results that are pushing our real objectives off the table. I…
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Why employees are always in training
As a company grows, it's nearly impossible to control the quality of the people. If we plan to build a company, we have to plan on constant training. Otherwise, we'll follow Chipotle and General Motors into national scandal. Harvard Business Review: How one fast food chain keeps its turnover rates absurdly low, 2016-Jan-26 by Bill Taylor…
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Remembering Umberto Eco: stories are better than ideas
Having read Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose, and Foucault's Pendulum (seriously), I was trying to decide whether to tackle another one of his books. If you want to understand why he's important, I suggest this lovely long read by Lila Azam Zanganeh in The Paris Review (2008). Favorite quote by Umberto Eco: An idea…
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Is targeted advertising a problem? Is signaling the solution?
I don't have the time to wade through everything Don Marti and others have written about the 'evilness' of targeted online advertising. However, I do think they are correct to worry about it. As a marketer, I'm most concerned with the plausible idea that it causes people to ignore advertising at a higher rate. As a…
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Commit to writing down what you do
As we organize people, we are usually receive pressure to write things down. It's challenging, and you can't just do it once and be done. It needs to be a living document. At Percolate, they try to write everything down and post it on Google Docs. If you are interested in keep a group of…
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