Archive for April, 2010

I glanced at her and took my glasses
off—they were still singing. They buzzed
like a locust on the coffee table and then
ceased. Her voice belled forth, and the
sunlight bent. I felt the ceiling arch, and
knew that nails up there took a new grip
on whatever they touched. "I am your own
way of looking at things," she said. "When
you allow me to live with you, every
glance at the world around you will be
a sort of salvation." And I took her hand.

William Stafford, in honor of National Poetry Month

Great example of how we are driving green at Dell…

I’m not so sure. I’m a true fan of many brands. And man, the temptation is like nothing else when you are one. But normally logic prevails. Most people I know seem to be like that.

So why I buy the idea that building true fans – fans with no likely barriers to purchase – should be a mission for any marketer, I don’t buy they will actually do that. The true metric of a true fan, IMHO, isn’t the propensity to purchase but rather their propensity to promote.

That’s what makes net promoter one of today’s most important business metrics. And yes, they might drive 200 miles to see you sing… they just might not buy the albumn. The goal then is to convert them to buyers, sponsors and supporters.

So, the idea of true fans is a really powerful one. And Tim is right, this is critical reading for any marketer. And, we all ought to strive for 1,000 true fans.

All it takes is a lone nut to create a leader… and for followers to coalesce and create a movement.  Nurture your first followers as equals. Leadership is overvalued when compared to followers. It’s the followers that matter.

Thanks for inspiration Gerry…. Brilliant!

Too often innovation is centered on creating the next new thing rather than innovating around the most commonly used apps and usages. Like accounting. Or spreadsheets. Or calendars. Schmidt gets at this well – and the need to make whatever you do mobile. Killer points.

“Companies are about sharing,” Schmidt said. “One of the new things in the last five years about the web is that it enables sharing-sensitive apps.”

He continued, “I think of calendars as incredibly boring, but I’m wrong, calendars are incredibly interesting because they’re incredibly shared. So from a computer science perspective, all of a sudden we have our top engineers who want to build calendars. I’m going, what’s wrong with you guys? But in fact it’s a very interesting example. Spreadsheets are similar, the most interesting spreadsheets are highly, highly interlinked, something I didn’t know, and was not possible with the previous technology — Microsoft technology made it very difficult because they were not built in that model.”

Schmidt also recommended to the executives present that “You should always put your best team on your mobile app that enables your service. The answer should always be mobile first.”