Archive for June, 2008

Enjoyed this story on using social tools to reduce email. I keep failing back into old email habits. Chat, blogs and wikis are not only more effective for communicating, they are also much more productive.

To be honest I actually hadn’t seen these in real life until I turned up at our morning news meeting and the team was doing a show and tell. They look amazing – the colors are gorgeous.

The implementation of the software dock is very cool. At first I viewed it as a knock-off of the Apple dock but it does a few more things by enabling a single icon to act as a navigator to multiple apps.

Great products at affordable prices.

FT features Dell in a piece on Social Media… good read. Folks often ask me about the ROI of social media, this starts to get at it. Bottom-line, making customers happier through better access to information reduces costs and boosts sales.

This is a two-fold opportunity for tech vendors. By adopting a greater quotient of Web 2.0 marketing techniques, marketing executives can rise to the demands of what buyers want for information that adds to their purchase intelligence. At the same time, executives can demonstrate that they can take money off the table, by deploying less expensive marketing techniques. And every marketer’s chief operating officer or chief executive would applaud initiatives to reduce versus expand budget.

One of the biggest trends in marketing is using social media and social networking both to increase customer response time, authenticity, and to leverage communications. Many technology vendors are leading that charge and taking slightly different tacks to do so but all are seeing increases in positive brand association and customer engagement while decreasing both relative and total costs.

Frames are interesting things, and they get really interesting during a presidential election year. So, what to do when others are using language to frame you? One approach, call the frame and invert it. You turn the frame into a positive. It only really works when the original frame so clearly warrants questioning.

Here is a great example – Barack Obama told a group of Florida donors Friday night that Republicans will try to make voters afraid of him, and suggested they would use his race to scare up votes for John McCain,” Fox News reports:

“We know what kind of campaign they’re going to run. They’re going to try to make you afraid,” Obama said at the fundraiser. “They’re going to try to make you afraid of me. He’s young and inexperienced and he’s got a funny name. And did I mention he’s black? He’s got a feisty wife.”

The crowd of supporters cheered, and Obama added: “We know the strategy because they’ve already shown their cards. Ultimately I think the American people recognize that old stuff hasn’t moved us forward. That old stuff just divides us.”

By inverting the frame, he acquires sympathy and defines the opposition as “old stuff” – a nice little play… Messages are funny things. Especially when whacked about like this.