Andrew Lark

Buzz On Buzz Marketing...

Enjoyed a great panel discussion with Buzz Bruggeman from Activewords on buzz marketing. If you get a chance to hear him speak, listen. And try the product, it is great.

Blinks

On getting things done - the GTD movement

AC leaving IBM: Abby Kohnstamm, IBM's senior vice president of marketing -- in essence, if not title, IBM's "chief marketing officer" -- is leaving Big Blue after a 12-year reign. Nice to see IBMers blogging it.

Classic Drucker

From the WSJ this morning via Reveries:

In "The Five Deadly Business Sins (10/21/93), he wrote: "The first and easily the most common sin is the worship of high profit margins and of 'premium pricing' ... The worship of premium pricing always creates a market for the competitor. And high profit margins do not equal maximum profits. Total profit is profit margin multiplied by turnover. Maximum profit is thus obtained by the profit margin that yields the largest total profit flow, and that is usually the profit margin that produces optimum market standing."

Mr. Drucker cited the U.S. auto industry's "fixation on profit margins" as an example, versus the Volkswagen Beetle, which by 1970 "had taken almost 10 percent of the American market, showing there was U.S. demand for a small and fuel efficient car." In "The Delusion of Profits," (2/5/75), he wrote: "There is no conflict between 'profit and 'social responsibility.' To earn enough to cover the genuine costs which only the so-called 'profit' can cover, is economic and social responsibility -- indeed, it is the specific social and economic responsibility of business. It is not the business that earns a profit adequate to its genuine costs of capital, to the risks of tomorrow and to the needs of tomorrow's worker and pensioner that 'rips off' society. It is the business that fails to do so."

And, in an essay entitled, "Is Executive Pay Excessive?" (5/23/77), Mr. Drucker wrote: "Economically, [the] very few large executive salaries are quite unimportant. Socially, they do enormous damage ... These very few large salaries are being explained by the 'need' to pay the 'market price' for executives. But this is nonsense. Every executive knows perfectly well that it is the internal logic of a hierarchical structure that explains them (i.e., status symbols) ... If and when the attack on the 'excessive compensation of executives' is launched ... business will ... bemoan the public's 'hostility to business.' But business will have only itself to blame. It is a business responsibility, but also a business self-interest, to develop a sensible executive compensation structure that portrays economic reality and asserts and codifies the achievement of U.S. business in this century: the steady narrowing of the income gap between the 'boss man' and the 'working man.'"

Great Read On A Non-Traditional Marketer

Anne Saunders, svp of marketing for Starbucks, says creating customer loyalty starts with just one thing: A really great coffee house. An exclusive HUB interview by Tim Manners.

Corporations Adopting Blogging

From this morning's Holmes Report - corporations are getting into blogging according to a new study by research company Guidewire Group and iUpload, a content management and corporate blogging software company.

89 percent of respondents are either blogging now or are planning to blog. And corporate adoption of blogging is
entering its “hyper-growth” phase: more than 50 percent of respondents have launched one or more blogs in the
last year.

Adoption is being driven by business benefits, including improved internal communications (cited by 77.4 percent
of respondents) and improved brand recognition (78 percent).

Barriers to adoption exist, but they are limited in scope compared to other emerging technologies, and are not
significantly related to technology issues themselves.

Of corporations that do not yet blog, 57 percent say they are unsure of the benefits, whereas 42 percent of those who do blog say that maintaining enthusiasm for the blog deployment is the largest barrier to success.

Transparency In The Participatory Era

One of my new laws for communicators is "the more you participate, the more transparent the dialog becomes". Think of it as an exponential curve with each step driving more transparency. Browsing through Gizmodo I stumbled across this hilarious example.

Here we have a new product - which while I agree is a tad stupid, will probably find a home in plenty of stockings. But the more the company the communicates, the more it lands itself in hot water. Traditional media might have had a hard time reporting this one. But not participatory media, here there is plenty of virtual real estate in which the dialog can unfold for all to see. And the tone of the dialog is laid bare for all to see. The result, transparency at its best.

IBM Developing Communications Measurement Tools...

According to CNET, IBM is describing a service:

...called the Public Image Monitoring Solution, that searches through reams of blogs, news stories and other material to distill useful information for companies.

IBM is testing the application with its partners and the Morgan Stanley financial services firm. The new service would draw on IBM's text analytics and search software, WebSphere Information Integration OmniFind Edition.

IBM originally developed OmniFind to index and search information that resides within corporate networks. But it found that some customers were keen on learning what outsiders were saying on the Web about a given corporation, said Marc Andrews, IBM's director of strategy and business development for unstructured information.

Sounds like what Biz360 has been doing for years.

Tributes to Drucker Pour In.

The sad passing of Peter Drucker is #4 on Technorati. Here is a great quote from Peter that Tom flags:

The effective executive makes strength productive. He knows that one cannot build on weakness. To achieve results, one has to use all the available strengths -- the strengths of associates, the strengths of the superior, and one’s own strengths. These strengths are the true opportunities. To make strength productive is the unique purpose of organization. It cannot, of course, overcome the weaknesses with which each of us is abundantly endowed. But it can make them irrelevant. Its task is to use the strength of each man as a building block for joint performance. - The Effective Executive

Jack Yoest shares a tale of how Peter wrote so brilliantly:

"How does Peter Drucker write so much and write so clearly?"

All writers have that moment of looking at a blank page before words form. But Drucker wrote some 30 books.

Mr. Russell shook his head in disbelief. "Peter would start with a large yellow legal pad and write out page after page after page. His first draft."

"Lots of writers do that," I said. "But maybe on a computer."

"Sure," says Russell leaning forward. "But Drucker then rips it up. Throws it out. He never keeps any first draft."

He went on to explain that Drucker knew his subject with such depth and richness that he would use the draft merely as a warm-up exercise before doing the 'real writing.'

Foldershare Now Free...

In a strange twist, Microsoft buys them and makes it Free! I've been using it for awhile and it works well for syncing folders between my various Macs and PCs.

Some Great Sites...

These are worth a look.