The 494th Anniversary of the Birth of Social Media Marketing

Recently, my business partner and I had the good fortune to speak at the National Council for Marketing and Public Relations conference in Baltimore. And between sessions, one of the attendees approached us and asked when we thought social media marketing began. The obvious answers, of course, were (1) social media marketing has been around since the beginning of society, only in different forms than the current digital form; and (2) its current iteration can be traced to 1987, when Rick Adams launched UUNET, the first commercial internet service provider, offering Usenet feeds, email services and public digital bulletin boards. But both of those answers seemed to fall somewhere between disingenuous and hollow.
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You Had to Be There - Rome

Let’s call it the “You had to be there” factor

It should be the difference between attending a live presentation and simply being handed over a document to read.  But, unfortunately, for just about every business presentation, there is no difference.  And that’s a problem.
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Cern Neutrino

Faster than the Speed of Light

Well, this changes everything. The BBC reported, this week, that Scientists have successfully repeated an experiment in which neutrinos have been recorded traveling faster than the speed of light. The full scientific report, submitted to the Journal of High Energy Physics, is currently being reviewed by the scientific community.
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Profit Euros Money

A Business Marketer’s Guide to Profits (or, “How to Satisfy your CEO”)

A few years back, a young Marketing VP confided, “My first year on the job, I lowered our production costs, reduced our dependence on outside services, improved our mail and email response rates, and turned around a departmental morale problem, only to be chided by the CEO, at my year-end review…”
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Kevlar vest

Cover Yourself in KEVLAR

This blog entry is dedicated to Nancy James, who specifically asked us to write a short post, for a change…

I had the good fortune to speak at the National Council for Marketing and Public Relations in Baltimore, this week, and between sessions, one attendee asked if there was a winning formula for writing acceptance speeches for leaders who have just taken over departments or companies. When I got back to the office, I spent several hours searching, and finding none, devised the following:
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brand culture compass

The Role of Culture in Brand

If we have a mantra at MarketPoint, it’s this: In order for a brand to succeed, it has to be authentic, transaction-worthy and sustainable. By “authentic,” we mean the brand must be consistent with the values, the purpose, and actions of the organization. “Transaction-worthy,” of course, implies that the brand must offer genuine value in context of the market’s needs and desires. And “sustainability” requires that the organization is committed to delivering on the brand promise at every touch-point in the customer experience.
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Bite Apple

One Last Bite at the Apple

In 1999, Adam Morgan published Eating the Big Fish: How Challenger Brands Can Compete Against Brand Leaders, a manifesto on winning in the face of superior competition. Big Fish was about taking on the market leader despite limited resources; it was about making your own rules; it was about redefining the terms by which a product category should be judged.

Big Fish offered an alternative path to the top. In every market, Morgan argued, the leader was already entrenched, his inertia impossible to overcome by brute force, and his war chest overflowing with resources. The only path to market share, Morgan warned, was to win the battle for mindshare, and the context of that conflict would be defined in terms of thought leadership – with ideas that truly added value.

Morgan outlined eight “credos” of Challenger Brands. And though he illustrated his work with examples of many companies in many markets, the book was, more than any other, the story of one man – Steve Jobs. Read more

Sample infographic designed by Freepik http://www.freepik.com

Five Tips for Creating Meaningful Infographics – Confessions of an Addict

If you’re reading this article on SocialMediaToday, you probably know far more about the mechanics of creating infographics than I. If you’re reading it on my blog, maybe not. Either way, these tips from an infographics addict could go some distance toward improving the social media landscape. So, without further ado, here are five, by-no-means-exhaustive tips…
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Ending the War over Social Media Marketing Governance

What follows (all in the space of 500 words) are three interesting stories. The first two are closely interwoven; the third seems unrelated. Together, they span thousands of years. And while each is fascinating in its own right, when seen as one, they provide a solution to the war of governance over social media marketing.
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social media give and take

Social Media for Business is about Giving, not Taking

Many organizations – and particularly businesses – still look at social media and wonder, “Where’s the value?” From their perspective, social media fails to deliver the goods. And the bad news is, from their perspective, it probably always will – because the question “What can I get out of social media?” misses the very point of social media.
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