Open any industry trade magazine and you’ll see them – the non-customer-facing business to business companies. These are the brands that typical consumers never see and have never heard of, even though they may be giants within their industry. Social marketing whiz Josh McCormack calls them “non-visual brands”; you might call them commercial/industrial brands but [...]
I am the world’s biggest evangelist for my insurance company. Every chance I get, I tell people how great they are. It’s the kind of fantastic word-of-mouth that every company dreams of. So what did they do to deserve it? A couple of years ago a tremendous storm knocked down trees and power lines all [...]
How many times have you heard a client or a colleague say, “No one reads print anymore” or “No one is doing B-to-B business on Twitter” – or in fact anything beginning with the words “No one”? Projection, or assuming that others feel the same way you do, is a totally normal and typical human [...]
If you love social media, you might just be an introvert. Social media is like a big party you can join whenever you want, stay as long as you like, never worry that someone’s getting bored talking to you and disappear without seeming rude. You can jump in and out of conversations, make a joke [...]
Have you noticed that ad headlines have entered an alternate universe of weird tricks and miraculous outcomes? This used to be the stuff of 3 am infomercials. But now, since Netflix, Hulu, YouTube and torrents (which I still don’t really understand; sorry kids) have made 3 am the same as any other hour of the [...]
Doesn’t everyone love Las Vegas? It’s been the subject of countless TV shows, movies, songs and stories. It even has its own mythology – what happens there, stays there, even if the slogan went out of official use years ago. At any given point there are at least a couple of trade shows going on [...]
Who doesn't love the internet? You can be sitting at your desk, thinking about someone you knew in third grade, and fifteen seconds later be looking at a current photo of them. Whether or not stalking old friends is a soul-deadening waste of time is a question for another post. There’s another issue up for [...]
If a five dollar bill flutters out of the pocket of the person walking in front of you on a busy street, do you grab it and hurry ahead to return it to them? Good. Now what if it’s a hundred dollar bill? Okay – and now what if you found that hundred dollar bill [...]
Have you noticed that what’s being served up as basic storytelling these days has traveled very far away from what was once considered entertaining? The same is true, to an even greater degree, in literature. Agents read with an eye to what will be published. Publishers choose manuscripts based on what they think will sell [...]
Everyone’s trying to do it. Create something engaging and compelling, syndicate it across multiple platforms, encourage sharing and watch it go viral. It’s a great strategy – or it would be if every other client in every industry on earth wasn’t doing the exact same thing at the exact same time, with the exact same [...]