November 2009

When you get a social net­work­ing invi­ta­tion from your single-brew cof­fee maker, you know that social media is now main­stream. Today’s email in-box fea­tured this invi­ta­tion from Tas­simo, to fol­low their “taste mas­ter” on Twit­ter or become a fan on Face­book. I was happy to see how well they inter­act with cus­tomers via Face­book and […]

Social media experts like Shiv Singh rec­om­mend that you des­ig­nate one or more peo­ple to serve as your organization’s social media voice.

The chal­lenge with this rec­om­men­da­tion is that such peo­ple are in short sup­ply and high demand. If you’re lucky enough to employ peo­ple with authen­tic SIM voices, you’re vul­ner­a­ble to poach­ing if you can’t moti­vate them to stay with your organization.

Revised on December 17, 2009

One of the best exam­ples of a thriv­ing online com­mu­nity is I Love Typog­ra­phy. Almost 50,000 peo­ple sub­scribe to its RSS feeds. There are many voices: mul­ti­ple authors and lots of peo­ple who care enough to respond. It feels vibrant and live. Peo­ple share expe­ri­ences and point to great exam­ples of typog­ra­phy in use.

But what makes this such a vibrant com­mu­nity? What lessons can we take away from this exam­ple and apply elsewhere?

Revised on November 16, 2009

I love strolling and win­dow shop­ping in Paris. There’s a spe­cial mys­tique that win­dow dressers in Paris employ that brand teams and mar­keters every­where would do well to emu­late. Shop win­dows in Paris do a won­der­ful job of con­vey­ing the idea of what’s being sold — of con­vey­ing the brand essence, help­ing you envi­sion how […]

Revised on November 16, 2009

How will your busi­ness address the enor­mous busi­ness oppor­tu­nity that lies within the so-called “female econ­omy?” Did you know that (accord­ing to the HBR, 9/09):

Women now drive the world economy.

As a mar­ket, women rep­re­sent a big­ger oppor­tu­nity than China and India com­bined — more than twice as big.

Windows 7: Results So Far

November 10, 2009

Yes­ter­day I took the leap and upgraded my pri­mary PC from Vista Ulti­mate to Win­dows 7 Ulti­mate. The upgrade took 3 hours, given the large num­ber of appli­ca­tions and data files on my tower PC. (I also upgraded two Macs to Snow Leop­ard 10.6.2 while wait­ing for the Win­dows 7 upgrade to complete.)

Revised on December 21, 2009

Today I received one of the best-ever com­ments on a blog post­ing; how­ever, the per­son who responded to my post took the time to track down my address and then sent me a very thought­ful mes­sage via email. Given the trou­ble he took to com­mu­ni­cate in this man­ner, I sur­mise that he did not want […]