Author Archives: winterSmith

The looming macro-succession crisis

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I was reading a Seattle Times story earlier today on how men in their 30s are earning less than their fathers did. An interesting story top to bottom, but the concluding section drew me back around to something that I really haven’t talked about enough lately – the looming generational macro-succession nightmare facing corporate America.

Diehard careerist baby boomers also might partly explain the inability of 30-something men to move up the income ladder as quickly as their fathers. From the moment Generation Xers entered the workplace, boomers have been the “ceiling” blocking their way up the income ladder, said Peter Rose, a partner with marketing-research company Yankelovich in Los Angeles.”The boomers stand out in defining themselves in terms of their work and have shown a disinclination to get out of the way,” he said.

It’s hard to blame the Boomers for not getting the heck out of the way, although I’ve certainly been one of those Xers stacked up beneath that in-no-hurry-to-leave Boomer leadership dynamic. But there’s a basic numbers crunch that’s about to hit, and it’s going to throw a lot of companies into leadership transition crisis. Consider: Continue reading →

Gronstedt Group “fika” offers a chance to explore Second Life

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If you haven’t started investigating Second Life yet, you might want to look into it. The sheer neatness of the environment notwithstanding, it’s starting to emerge as a viable business platform and it looks like the tipping point may be just around the corner (full Voice Over Internet Protocol integration is set to roll out in the coming weeks, and the guess here is that VOIP is going to blow the lid off the joint). Lots of companies and entrepreneurs are already using the 3D virtual environment for commerce (using it to buy and sell in-world goods and services and developing storefronts that allow you to buy “First Life” goods and services, as well).

In addition, 2L is gaining traction as an internal comm app and shows tremendous potential as a corporate training platform. One firm that’s early-in on the training front is e-learning and consulting shop Gronstedt Group. Continue reading →

QR codes: the next big thing?

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Odds are you’ve never heard of QR codes, but they may revolutionize how you interact with businesses, brands, even your own communities and social networks. Alan Schulman’s piece in iMedia Connection today does a great job of explaining what it is and how it works, and I can’t recommend the read highly enough.

Here’s a couple examples. Continue reading →

Customer service: the “desk jockey” past vs. the “service ranger” future

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I’m reading Ben McConnell and Jackie Huba’s Citizen Marketers on a friend’s recommendation. A lot of folks in his agency are starting to tweak on social media and this highly regarded (and extremely readable) examination of viral and customer-generated marketing activity is guiding a good bit of their thinking and questioning. Good on ’em – a lot more companies need to be exploring these issues, as well.

My only complaint so far really isn’t about the book, which is a very worthwhile read, so much as it is a general idea that all this online activity, and corresponding company attention to it, is a very new thing. To some extent this is true, of course – as I note above, it’s not like engaging the blogosphere and the “citizen marketer” is something that a lot of companies are doing, and even fewer are doing it effectively. I guess I’m frustrated because I’ve been carping on this for years and haven’t seen the kinds of uptake and results that I know are possible.

Here’s an example. Continue reading →

Talk about thinking outside the box…

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Well, we are all about innovation in marketing. And hats off to these folks, who are breaking serious new ground on the biz dev front.

Apple and friends hit with C&D for “actively avoiding” use of DRM tech
Posted May 11th 2007 4:22PM by Paul Miller

Here’s a new one on us. Instead of suing companies for infringing on its patents, like all the cool kids are doing, Media Rights Technologies has sent cease and desist letters to Apple, Microsoft, RealNetworks and Adobe for “actively avoiding” the use of its technology. Continue reading →

Show, don’t tell: of blogs and splash pages

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You may have noticed something a little different about the Black Dog page. It’s the landing spot for my business, but it’s also a blog. The blog isn’t hanging off a link – it’s the center of attention.

I’m not the first person to do this, but it’s extremely rare. I heard some reservations from people I asked to advise me, too. Landing pages are supposed to tell the visitor right away what you do. Landing pages can’t be cluttered. Never put your opinions up front. All sound advice from a traditional perspective. And it may turn out that this is a bad idea.

However, if the Black Dog brand is about innovation and unconventional, and if it’s going to have things like online PR and social media marketing as a centerpiece, it makes sense that I should show, not tell. Continue reading →

Redfin – a case study in the value of openness

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In my last post I talked about how the Internet can be your online PR friend if you understand how it works and let go of the fallacious idea that you can control it. Now Shelley Jack at Ripple Effects Interactive in Pittsburgh forwards along a Wired story I had missed about how one company turned near-catastrophe into what looks like a major success.

Last year, [Glenn] Kelman was the newly hired CEO of Redfin, an online brokerage firm that was, as he puts it, “the ugly red-haired child” in the real estate world. Continue reading →

The death of message “control”

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For years I’ve been talking to anybody who would listen about the basic principles that make online communication efforts work – and the ways in which the Internet has completely altered the rules for successful PR in all arenas. When I talk about openness and transparency, though, the train often jumps the tracks because corp comm pros who have been around since the pre-Net days are obsessed with message control.

What they don’t always grasp is that everybody who encounters a corporate message today – be it advertising, marketing collateral, PR, whatever – instinctively smells the topspin. Continue reading →

Text is king, and it’s going to stay that way for awhile

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Recently I was sort of explaining the business to a friend whose knowledge and perceptions about the mobility market were probably pretty common. Like a lot of people I’ve talked to, she sort of looked suspiciously at my suggestion that any effective marketing, advocacy or content play was going to need to be based in SMS (text messaging).

But what about Blackberries and all the phones that stream higher-order content, she wondered. She was under the fairly common misperception that penetration of these technologies is a lot greater than it actually is. For example, what do you think the penetration of WAP-addressable handsets is? Continue reading →