My longtime friend and colleague John Cavanaugh, who is truly one of the sharpest business guys I know, has launched a new blog. It’s called The Tap Tap Tap! (great name, and a great explanation of where it comes from at the site), and the latest post provides some solid insight into what Toyota is up against (from a guy who grew up around the car business).
I’ve added him to the blogroll, and encourage the rest of you to add him to your reading lists.
On April 16 some colleagues and I launched Scholars & Rogues, a team blog covering politics, media, art and literature, culture, sports – really, we wanted to cut a pretty broad swath through our readers’ lives, and whether you agreed or disagreed (heck, we don’t even agree with each other all the time), we wanted to encourage thinking and intelligent discussion. Continue reading
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
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
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
wordSmith | Writing / Content Marketing 