Ask Your Customers, The Downside

There are many missed opportunities to engage and communicate with your customer regardless if you are a start-up, hospital, retailer, etcc…  As noted in the previous blog there can be great upside when engaging in brainstorming and improving your product.  But there can be a downside as well in how and what your customers will communicate.

The Billion Dollar Obama Holiday Present?

Listening to NPR the other day there was a passing comment regarding the relationship of the US economy to consumer confidence – about 2/3 of the US economy is directly connected to consumer spending.   Not news in itself but with confidence in Bush at an all time low what could be the potential economic impact of Obama just winning the election.  Some of the data is pretty surprising.

When to Pull the Plug on a Start-Up

As a panelist today at an entrepreneurial forum I was asked a very interesting question by a member of the audience, “how do you know when it is the right time to pull the plug?” Not only a timely question given the current market conditions, but a great question that any entrepreneur should consider fairly early on in the development of a new company.

Future of Media? Not Social Networking.

Well another social networking site bit the dust today as “Tickle” a site owned by Monster.com is shutting down. Tickle was a social networking and advice site that offered free tests to users – sort of a permission marketing concept. The news follows other recent failed attempts by Conde Nast and Verizon as reported in a recent article in Silicon Alley Insider.

Start with the End in Mind

 There was a great article a few weeks ago in the Harvard Business Review by David I. Collis, Michael G. Rukstad titled (Can You Say What Your Strategy Is? ).  The article highlights that “most executives cannot articulate the objective, scope, and advantage to their business in a simple statement.  If they can’t, neither can anyone else.”

So how does an organization develop a successful and clear strategy?  With the end in mind.  Not a literal end but a place in the future no less than three years and no more than five years away.  Anything less than three years does not provide enough time to deal with the real challenges and changes that will be needed to be successful.  Anything more than five becomes un-grounded in reality because there is so much evolution in the marketplace driven by the advance of technology.

Everyone is part of the marketing team

It is interesting to gauge the response from people when asked what type of media company they are – most respond they are in some other business, some give a confused answer and some just stare blankly thinking it is a trick question.

Every organization is (or will be) a media company.  Thinking you are not is similar to people in the 1990s who did not embrace technology and dismissed the Internet as something that is not part of their business.  Do you know anyone who would say that now?

The Myth of the Overnight Success

I was catching up with Greg Falco yesterday about a project I am working on for a client.  For those not familiar with Greg, he is a brilliant, web savvy designer and author of They Should Do That.  A portion of his email in response to our discussion:

Entrepreneurship: US dependence on Foreign Minds

By Chris Dornfeld for Biotrends, Nov./Dec. 2005

A recent report by the Kauffman Foundation highlights the “substantially higher rates of entrepreneurship among immigrants as compared to U.S.-born individuals.” (1). This should come as no surprise if we think about what type of person would be willing to uproot and travel to a new country in pursuit of a better life. But what is interesting is how little attention is given to the recent contributions that foreign-born nationals make to the U.S. economy.