Stereo Vision

The blog of Michael Hugos at CIO.com is a favorite of mine, because I seem to tune in easily to the concepts he holds dear. He had this bit of food for thought the other day (the emphasis is mine):

I’ve got a pretty good grasp on the broad outlines of world history for the last 5,000 years or so; and there are two totally new things happening right now that have never happened before. I believe these two things are the foundations of 21st Century innovation and agility.

The first new thing is global delivery of real-time feedback via rich media like streaming video and moving 3D graphics. The second new thing is full and equal participation of women in politics and business.

…It’s not that women are any smarter than men (although they might be); it’s that they see the world from a different perspective and we need both the female perspective and the male perspective to see the world clearly; just as we need two eyes to see the world in three dimensions. It’s not that one eye is better than the other, but you can’t have true depth perception without the stereo vision that comes from two eyes – from two separate views.

I found this a perceptive way to describe the crucial roles of both genders in business (even if I don’t agree yet that women are “fully and equally” participating in politics).

What I’m “About” These Days

When I launched this blog in December 2006, I said the following in my “About” page.

I handle the marketing and communications for a tech company…

My areas of interest are integrated marketing, customized multi-touch, branding, experiential marketing, internal marketing, new media and how traditional businesses are actually using it (as opposed to how the early adopters and buzz builders allege they are using it), marketing v. Web 2.0, marketing v. sales v. business development, the new values of web analytics, marketing that falls outside the disciplines of B2C or B2B, and how to make a company marketing-friendly from the top down.

My market is a niche and my sales cycle is long, which means lots of trial-and-error can get costly, and there is little or no successful precedent. My job means conjuring creative workarounds to combat situations where traditional outreach isn’t an option.

So much has changed in just a few months! I have picked up a bigger piece now, and I still manage the marcom but as just one part of an integrated business development strategy. (I had actually begun absorbing a lot of the bus-dev in the spring anyway, hence the lack of posting… but now it’s officially under my purview.)

My areas of interest now are:

• Still branding, experiential marketing, anything being successfully executed outside B2B and B2C, and how to make a company marketing-friendly from the top down
• But, I have given away the internal marketing and web analytics, for the time being. There isn’t enough time in the day for me to consider those and also the higher priorities on my plate, so I’ve let other people pick that up. I still think internal marketing is incredibly valuable, though, and I could see myself getting involved one day in the HR department of a forward-thinking organization that was ready to use marketing techniques to support retention and recruiting.
• I’m still very interested in the concept of customized multi-touch — but after three quarters of increasingly positive execution (in fact, it has been a core development technique for TechSoft this year; I credit a heavy multi-touch strategy with the bulk of my company’s current pipeline in the US market), I feel that I’m more a teacher than a student on this subject. I’d love to prepare a solid case study on our multi-touch marketing in 2007.
• I no longer care much about the notion of marketing vs. Web 2.0. One year ago, it seemed that O’Reilly’s Magic Show was going to significantly change the way we reached out to customers and prospects, but I haven’t seen that borne out for me or my industry, and I think we’ve all just rolled forward. You either were already someone who cared about the philosophies that supported user-generated content, user experience, stripped-down messaging and community interaction… or you weren’t and you had to change. I was the former.
• New care-abouts are: learning how companies successfully integrate product and project management with business development… discovering ways that a technology company can survive a sudden critical loss of domain knowledge… what successful strategic partnerships will look like in 2008 and 2009… and how to function with agility within an organization that doesn’t prioritize agility.

And of course, I’m still focused on performing with karma and compassion, which has required an amount of sustained zen of which I wouldn’t have thought myself capable. But despite the challenge, it has to help make me a better person on the other side, I figure. I think of it as a kind of spiritual maintenance, which even the Decidedly Secular need on occasion. Use the muscles or lose them, right?

Dear Alice Rawsthorn: Get a New Story

Because, your Saks bit in the NYT is a pretty clear re-hashing of the one discussed here.

Is “Snack Culture” a Myth?

At Wired, Steven Johnson rebuts the idea that we are truly living in a snack culture, with “Snacklash: In Praise of the Full Meal“:

Snack culture is an illusion. We have more of everything now, both shorter and longer: one-minute movies and 12-hour epics; instant-gratification Web games and Sid Meiers Civilization IV. Freed from the time restrictions of traditional media, we’re developing a more nuanced awareness of the right length for different kinds of cultural experiences. You don’t need an hour and a half of Saturday Night Live when you can get two minutes of “Lazy Sunday” or “Dick in a Box.” For that kind of humor, the older, extended format turns out to be excessive. On the other hand, if you’re craving a really satisfying, complex crime narrative, two hours is too short. Yes, it sometimes seems as if we’re living off a cultural diet of blog posts and instant messages – until we find ourselves losing an entire weekend watching season three of The Wire. The truth is, we have more snacks now only because the menu itself has gotten longer.

The bold emphasis is mine, as its the clear takeaway for me: Find the right length and medium for the message… and don’t assume it’s always the shortest.

Dynamic Logos: All the Rage?

In an article called “The new corporate logo: dynamic and changeable are all the rage,” Alice Rawsthorn of the International Herald Tribune discusses dynamic logos and the move away from rigid usage policy.

Google’s constantly changing logo is part of a broader trend toward what are called dynamic identities: corporate symbols that adopt different guises at different times or in different contexts, so you’re never sure exactly how they’ll look.

The latest is the new identity of Saks Fifth Avenue, the American department store chain. A 1973 Saks signature logo was revived — and refined — by the Pentagram design group, then sliced into 64 components that are arranged in different configurations on bags and boxes. “Fragmenting the logo gave it energy and bravura,” said Michael Bierut, the Pentagram partner who led the Saks project. “And now we can create numerous permutations of the logo.”

Dynamic identities fly in the face of the conventional wisdom that consistency is essential to an effective corporate identity. The more we see the same corporate symbol — or so the consistency camp argues — the more likely we’ll be to recognize and remember it. Companies adhered to this throughout the 20th century; and the designers of some of the most successful identities, such as Jan Tschichold at Penguin Books in the late 1940s, and Paul Rand as a consultant to IBM from the 1950s to the early 1990s, were renowned for their rigor.

It’s a quick, interesting piece about logo evolution, and worth reading if you have anything invested in your company’s visual identity, but I’ll save you the effort and tell you how it ends:

It’s easy to see why dynamic identities should strike a chord with today’s spoiled, impatient and — to give us some credit — visually savvy consumers, but there are instances where the old-fashioned approach works best. “MTV has a dynamic identity because they are dynamic, and I want them to be,” [graphic designer Bruce] Mau said. “But I don’t want my bank to be dynamic. I want them to be conservative and radically stable.”

In other words, nothing groundbreaking here after all. Companies like Google and MTV who strive for “hipness” can afford to change their logo daily if they like; those of us in companies with personas focused on stability, consistency, quality, industry anchoring… we can’t exactly go about putting holiday motifs on or cutting the thing up into jigsaw puzzle pieces.

No One Wants to Be Sold

A blog post at the Fast Company Experts site has lots worth pondering:

“People are always looking for specialists to solve their problems. Being recognized as an expert makes your marketing efforts a lot easier. No one wants to be sold, but everyone likes to buy. Being seen as a specialist creates a buying environment, not a sales situation.”

Blogging Another Blog’s Blogging

But, all worth it for the following quote:

[The relationship between knowledge workers and their superiors] is far more like that between the conducter of an orchestra and the instrumentalist than it is like the traditional superior/subordinate relationship. The superior in an organization employing knowledge workers cannot, as a rule, do the work of the supposed subordinate any more than the conductor of an orchestra can play the tuba. In turn, the knowledge work is dependent on the superior to give direction and, above all, to define what the “score” is for the entire organization, that is, what are its standards and values, performance and results. And just as an orchestra can sabotage even the ablest conductor — and certainly even the most autocratic one — a knowledge organization can easily sabotage even the ablest, let alone the most autocratic superior.

You know who you are, when I say directly to you: How can we convince our conductors to conduct, and quit trying to play the effing tuba?

Okay, time for the mother of a cite: the quotation is from Peter Drucker’s book The Essential Drucker. The blog at which I found the quotation was Nivi’s, and I found Nivi via Signal vs. Noise, the blog effort from the 37signals folks.

(Ironically, I find their signal-to-noise ratio about 1:1.)

Bob’s Auto Body Repair and Affordable Public Relations

There’s a running joke in my house about small mom-n-pop outfits that offer the most bizarre combination of services out of the back of a garage. You know the type: the bait shop that will also fix your carburetor and sell you a dozen tamales. Or, the handpainted yard sign advertising “AKC PUPS!!!!” right above “Resume Consulting” and “In Home Child Care.”

So if someone mentions a random service performed by a cottage operation, it becomes “Bob’s Auto Body and [X].”

” — and Livestock Husbandry”

” — and Tech Support”

” — and Collagen Injections”

(really, the comedic possibilities are endless)

What’s funny is the blithe juxtaposition of totally disparate business models — that, yes, of course the same guy who fixes your air conditioner can give you a French pedicure. Of course the lady who’s running a puppy mill out of her back 40 can also give safe care to your toddler.

And this is equally funny.

Of course your domain registrar can also teach you how to run a good media tour. Of course the company that provides B2C website hosting packages can also assist with crisis communications.

(I poke good-natured fun, because I’ve been a loyal user of Dotster’s registrar services for five years, and think they do a fine job.)

I totally appreciate taking a niche brand and expanding it to a master brand, in order to offer relevant products in a vertical market. Hosting, registration, web design… it’s not a huge stretch from providing those, to moving into offering web analytics, podcast development, blog building, email marketing, even live tech support.

And, I totally appreciate strategic partnerships, where a company with a client base for one type of product realizes value in introducing their customers to an affiliated business that isn’t a competitor.

But to go from domain registration to general public relations consulting under the same brand? With nary an ironic wink or explanation?

That’s neither a partnership nor a smart vertical expansion. It’s a marketing non sequitur and a brand dilution.

Dotster got suckered into a partnership with a PR firm, is my guess; both sides likely bartered services with little hard cost, and there won’t be much fallout if everyone takes a look at the numbers somewhere around Q3, and realizes that “MyPR” isn’t performing quite as expected, and then it silently disappears. (psst, Dotster, if you’d like to know why it will fail, give me a call, I’ll tell you for free! Or maybe… a coupon for a free domain!)

Still, fair play to the gang that talked Dotster into it. If you poke around at their site, it’s no surprise that they pushed this: clearly One-Stop Shopping is their business model.

And, at a weird time too, since conventional wisdom is changing and corporate customers are starting to move away from huge PR agencies that provide bundled services — and instead toward more focused operations, with dedicated specialists who have deep domain experience. (And I don’t mean www.thatkindofdomain.com, either.)

In other words, why pay $X000 for Big Shiny New York Mega Firm… where your $X000 only gets you some junior-level account exec… when, at a smaller shop with the right portfolio and lower overhead, the same $X000 gets you a VP or even principal, with a stronger skill set and more investment in the account’s success. Probably even with Big Shiny New York experience on the CV somewhere.

Anyway, call me newfangled but I like my specialists to be specialists. I think I’ll keep getting my puppies and child care and media relations consulting and carburetors and tamales and press releases all from different providers.

Paradox of the Active User

Interesting post at Signal vs. Noise, bringing together some ideas about how people use technology… versus how they perceive they will use technology.

I am the active user, all the way. The one manual I usually sit down and read through end to end is always my cell phone manual — yet, I could not be arsed to do so with my Blackberry. Or my iPod, which I’ve had for years and only just learned how to charge last week (previous charging technique involved handing it to husband with helpless “I’m just a girl” eyes).

I feel a tiny twinge of guilt every time I sit down at a computer, knowing that there are tools and features inside that will make my life better and my work more productive… but I can’t be arsed to find them.

Just today, I opened Photoshop, and the starter tutorial window popped up. It’s been popping up since I installed CS, you see… and it looks really cool and like something I should take the time to sit through. Just don’t have the time right now… but I don’t want to forget it forever, either. So instead of toggling “Do Not Show This Message Again,” I allow it to pop up every time I open Photoshop, and then I feel the guilt, close the window and move on.

This can sometimes be an hourly ritual.

I want to be the ideal user. But I simply never will be.

What’s helpful for me personally is, not to think about manuals and documentation again (no offense, Jette! I love documentation! I do! But it’s not my piece.), but to realize that here in this old IBM study is a notion that is helpful to anyone who needs to know how customers think.

There’s the way people behave, and the way people aspire to behave; the twain might never meet and we need to be ever-cognizant and respond accordingly.

Dear Clyde Smith, I’ll Call It a Comeback!

Dear Clyde:
I know I was kind of harsh on you a couple of weeks ago. And, I’m sorry if I seemed unreasonable.

But! Clyde! I saw your latest post, and I am super-excited:

Way back last year I introduced myself as the new Experiential Marketing blogger at Fast Company. Though I’m fascinated by the topic, I also found this approach taking me in an overly academic direction as I attempted follow-up posts. Great concept, wrong blog topic.

So I’m relaunching my presence at Fast Company with The Show Must Be Marketed focused on Entertainment Marketing.

I’ve poked around on your own site, and entertainment marketing really does seem to be your forte. Write what you know! I think not only will your FC editors and readers get more out of the new approach, I really think you will too.

And, you’ve clearly stepped up your editing as well. The writing in this new post overall is tight, digestible and a marked improvement.

I’m sure you’re not actually reading this, and I don’t presume to have been the impetus for the new editorial direction. But, obviously I was not the only one who sampled the maiden offering and thought, “meh.” So, kudos to you for taking the criticism constructively. I look forward to future posts.

p.s. stop capitalizing Entertainment Marketing.