Awareness needs to be earned
Social network marketing is a fundamentally different beast to "traditional "marketing. When talking to marketers, they usually see social media as being in effect free, the challenge is to get the message spread, often by being outrageous, generating awareness for...
Win Win.
We have all heard the term, anyone who has ever read anything about negotiation will have it burned into their brains, but what does it really mean in this age of digital collaboration?. The rules have changed, the old days when you saw an opportunity as a potential...
Social networking as Knowledge management
Knowledge Management is all about collaboration, making the 3 + 3 equal > 6, but the challenge has always been how do you codify the knowledge for dissemination and re-use, implying the existence of both strategy, and a management mechanism for the knowledge. By...
Manage through people, not contracts.
Contracts are the point of last resort, they define the exit, should it become necessary. Believing a written contract that details how the dynamics of an evolving relationship will be managed is as dumb as believing the lady in the tent can tell the future with any...
Qualifications and experience
The measure of effectiveness is the extent to which you get things done, and how well they turn out, not how well you theorise, discuss, and promise to "move forward". There are lots of highly qualaified, smooth young operators out there who do a great job at the...
The last 10 yards.
Independent produce retailers appear to be resurgent, based on the quality of their offer to consumers. For years anybody who has been involved with FMCG has known about the challenge of the "last 10 yards", the distance between a supermarkets back dock and the...
Afghanistan revealed
I wonder why, when no army since Alexander has managed to retain control over what is now Afghanistan, that the US and it "Allies" including Australia think they can. The leaks over the weekend on...
Having a vision statement make you visionary?
Obviously not, but you would be surprised at how often the obvious is ignored. A carefully crafted vision statement is agreed at an annual senior executive retreat, and out away until the review next year. Nonsense. You need to live it, create alignment, and ensure...
Democratising the net.
Most of us instinctively buy into the notion that the web has a "democratising" impact, it is a way for information to flow, to be disseminated, and this is absolutely true. However, what of the instinct of institutions, public and private to keep things secret? No...
Apple bites it own hand.
It will be fascinating to watch how Apple, the masters of digital marketing, handle the latest hiccup with the antenna problems on the iPhone4. Apple has now stumbled twice in a short time, the first was the furore over the wages paid to employees at Foxconn, one of...